EduBlog Insights

I really like the K-12 Webquest Blog. It highlights webquests based around material from Bernie Dodge’s Questgarden. One that caught my eye was The 21^st Century Classroom: Using Wikis: Introduction. Here’s another one on Social Networking that I plan to dig into to see how they are approaching this issue.This blog is associated with the main project, K12 Station. It has a free library featuring over 20,000 web-based resources for K-12 students, teachers and families. Just click on a grade level and topic to view dozens of tutorials, games, movies, simulations, primary source documents, and more. Chris, the web developer and content manager for the site, also has a Site of the Day Blog.

The student blogs have been created. You can link to them from the class blog, Blogical Minds! It feels good to be back in the classroom blogging again!

I have not been blogging a lot lately. I have a reason for that. I am embarking on a new blogging project with elementary students. I am so excited because I have the opportunity to be part of a year long research project that involves blogging. I have been working, literally night and day on this project.I couldn’t be more thrilled. However, I find myself in a totally new arena and it’s an arena that has parameters and issues that I have not previously had to consider. My dilemma has been what can I say, what can’t I say? Not being sure, I just said nothing but I have missed the blogging. I have so many thoughts but have been totally unable to share and get input back from our “great” edublogging community. To make this project authentic I have to blog about it. That’s a big part of what makes blogging work for us and the kids. The blogging keeps me going, keeps me learning and is part of the process I need to do a good job. This give and take helps the students. Some things I will be able to post about, some things will have to wait until later. I am in a learning mode and ask for your understanding as I proceed.
I can point you to the class blog. It’s called Blogical Minds. Student blogs will be up in a couple of weeks. They are on the class blog now but not active yet as we are laying some groundwork first. The blogicians will be entering our wonderful community. Psedonyms will be used by the students and the teachers. The school will not be named. Part of making the project truly authentic is for me to be myself and proceed with the discussions so that those of you who wish to comment can do so, both on the class blogs and the student blogs. I hope many of you will comment to the students and have your students enter the discussions.I need your help in one very important area and that is in the privacy part. If you comment and or refer to the students or me about anything on the blogs please refer to me as Teacher C. Do not use my name. Some things I will be able to blog freely about, others I need to wait and at this point I am not really sure just what those things will be.
What is really of interest here is how things are changing and how we have to change as a result. This covers many more areas than just our classrooms. I’ll post more about that later. I just wanted to invite your participation. Please remember not to use my real name on those blogs and know I will be looking forward to your input. Feel free to email me if you are unsure about anything that would involve your participation. (adavis(AT)gsu(dot)com)

I have just finished a webquest on blogging. I decided to try out Bernie Dodge’s Quest Garden. Thanks Bernie for providing such an incredible resource! I plan to introduce blogging to my elementary students with Blogging: It’s Elementary! I welcome any input about the webquest.

Great news! Our research piece on blogging has been approved. I can’t and won’t be using real student names, teacher names, or the school name. This process has taken awhile but I am so excited to be a part of this. I have learned so much in the last couple of months. So very soon I will be back in a school with a classroom teacher and an instructional technology specialist blogging with the elementary students! My focus now is to move forward with the blogging and the learning!

I got a response from Senator Johnny Isakson in reference to the letter I had sent about DOPA. While I appreciate that he did respond (I only got an automated response so far from my other Senator, Saxby Chambliss), I wish he had responded to some of my concerns. The gist of his letter:

I am pleased that this bill has passed the House of Representatives and look forward to supporting it on the Senate floor. 

Depressing…. So I am once again back at the drawing board. I plan to write many more Senators. I hope you will do the same. Contact Senators by Sept. 5th. Check out YALSA president Judy Nelson ’s reminder of what we can continue to do to help let Senators “get educated” about the troublings parts of DOPA.

I just finished a Skype call with Lani Ritter Hall where I had the privilege to talk to a wonderful group of educators in Ohio. Lani is teaching them about blogs. Check out her Blogging Ballet updates. It is excellent. The participant blogs are listed on the first page so if you have a moment, welcome them to the world of blogging. I shared some of my blogging experiences with the group. They asked great questions. I can’t wait to read more from this emerging blogging community.
This is especially for the group:

There is great potential in the power of blogging and commenting. Blogs can be short, quick writes that give students the practice they need to learn from putting their thoughts down and then engaging in the dialogue about the process, both online and in the classroom. It’s about the process and improvement and giving ownership to students of their work. It’s about having an audience that reaches far outside the walls of our classrooms. Good teachers stand by their students during this process. They encourage, guide and help students discover and learn right along with them as they blog. Good teachers model responsible blogging.  Students begin to develop their voices and get the practice needed to be better writers and thinkers. Caring readers recognize and respect that the more students blog the more they will improve their writing and thinking skills.. The process involves learning, the shaping and reshaping of ideas, and the think-rethink process that blogs can encourage. The goal is to give students a rich and diverse array of writing experience that will inspire them to want to write in their blogs and improve that writing themselves. In the process they will be encountering many perspectives that can help them become better thinkers.  You will be fostering potential and leading them to becoming life-long learners themselves! Enjoy the journey!

I’ve been working on My Weblog Projects Page for a while.  My goal was to finish it before I head off on vacation! I almost made it! I have one more blog to convert but it can be done later. Basically I’m done! Hooray!
I really like the page feature on WordPress. I’ve put links there to all of my weblog projects. I’m really looking forward to this year’s project but first things first! Vacation calls! I’ll be back at work July 26th!

I’ve got a years worth of lesson plans and the curriculum map for the fifth grade class I will be working with this coming school year on my flash drive. Whew! Just plowing through it makes me think “What are we thinking?” The phrase cover and smother keeps running through my head. I plan to use the curriculum guides as the base to show other ways to teach the material rather than strictly by basal and textbook. My goal is to get the kids blogging their ideas thoughts so we can add that to the pool of knowledge.
I met with the instructional technology specialist at J.H. House today to share my ideas with her for this project. Hillary is great! She did a great job with her Blog Write group this year and plans to do another group in addition to working with me on this project.

The ideas are just swimming in my head. I’ll be working with the whole class. That is so exciting. It’s amazing all the things you have to work out to make this happen. Flexibility is hard to grab hold of in our current classrooms due to the scheduling “tigers” that have to be wrestled to make the whole process work and make sure the kids get all that is required and expected.

I’m also trying to work out a research piece with a professor at Georgia State. Many hoops have to be jumped through to make that happen so wish me well. This has always been the area where I wish I knew more about and how to conduct it correctly. I’m learning a lot from this professor in that area. She happened across some of my blog work with students and was impressed and invited me to her class last semester. We’ve been networking ever since and plan some collaboration between her classes this year and the fifth graders. She wants her students to get first hand experience. So wish me luck on the research piece. I really hope that can happen!
I am also in the process of transferring all my past school projects to TypePad so they can be shared with others. The transfer from Manila won’t be seamless but you will be able to see the actual student work. And you won’t get the constant message that the site is down. That site was the first one that Tim, my coworker, set up, back in 2002 when we were just beginning to blog. I really liked the features of Manila but it is not the most user friendly software around.
This year, the plan is to model the use of blogs and other web tools for the classroom teacher to demonstate the possiblilities for learning when these are put in the hands of students. The goal is to learn from each other - students, teachers, parents, and others who comment or add to our conversations. I plan to blog the journey and share all I can. I am hoping the classroom teacher will blog along with me so that piece will be available, too. We need more records like that to help us see through the eyes of others. discover what works and what doesn’t.

Also, a couple of students from Georgia State will be doing some student teaching at the school and I will be working again with Lynne Jordan. She’s the one I did the Literature Circles project with. I have transferred those blogs and here is the link. I was going to wait until I got my write-ups done about each project but some of you might like to see those. Check it out here.

Of course today when I was showing Hillary, or should I say, trying I could not get to Flickr or Furl. What blew my mind was what popped up on the screen. I can’t remember exactly but Furl had a message that went something like a social dating ….. and Flickr was something equally crazy. Who blocks these things and how do they make such calls for what they are? I don’t think it will be a problem to get it unblocked, we just have to make a call but it makes me realize how much we have to do to educate others. Sigh…

Anyway, I can’t wait! I still have lots to do to make it all happen but next week I am taking off for a week long vacation at DisneyWorld. We are taking both daughters and their families - five grandchildren in all! We are so pleased that we could get our whole family together for this. We’ll be staying on site and making some memories!!! If I blog at all it will be a photo blog of the vacation!

I came across this article, Weblogs or ‘Blogs’ging gives the voice to the younger generation’ in the Louisville, Kentucky courier -journal. That led me to this article from Betty Baye who is on the staff and will be the moderator for the blogs. The paper will soon have a blog dubbed “The Hot Spot” featuring 17 Kentucky and Indiana high school and college students. Here’s a quote from her as she embarks on this project:

But new technology rules. Although newpapers have been lumbering along for a century or more by doing some tweaking, it’s been nothing on the order of the revolution that’s happening today.

And so, like everybody else, we must embrace a lot of new ideas about news and the platforms from which it’s to be delivered.

It is about embracing a lot of new ideas and the platforms from which it’s to be delivered. She continues:

Though we may sometimes ask our bloggers to share their views on certain issues, they’ll mostly choose their own subjects. All we ask is that when you disagree, you do so agreeably. 

I look forward to following these blogs when the project is up and going. Wouldn’t it be cool if schools provided the same for our students. Hear! Hear!

Meridian Middle School computer Technologies Journal in its current issue asks this question:

Do the teaching-centered blogs of middle grades educators support
reflective practice? That’s the research question examined in this article, Reflection and the Middle School Blogger: Do Blogs Support Reflective Practices?

They examined 12 randomly selected blogs from a pool of 38 teacher-created, teaching-centered blogs. The goal was to determine whether they were useful reflective devices for practicing middle school teachers.

This is interesting to follow how they did this study. They developed a rubric to assess the quantity and quality of reflection displayed in each subject’s writing sample. Examples are included.
I don’t have enough background in this area to really know what I think yet but I plan to study it some more. I’ve only done a quick read but it appears to go in depth about the process. It should give us all “food for thought.”

The last paragraphs states:

The results of this study give insight into the efficacy of blogs when used by middle school educators. These results demonstrate the potential usefulness of blogs in promoting reflective practice with practicing teachers. However, results do not demonstrate that blogs are being utilized effectively for reflective purposes. This conclusion suggests multiple avenues for future research. For example, research examining exemplary middle school teacher bloggers who do engage in frequent and deep reflection would be useful. Understanding the process in which these bloggers employ and why they use their blogs to support reflective practice would be illuminating. Research to support Bolton ’s (1999) contention that reflective teaching practitioners are leaders and trendsetters would be beneficial as well.