Link: The Good Habits Blog.
The Good Habits Blog corresponds to Erik MacNight's Book, "Good Habits, Good Students: A Complete Guide for Students Who Want to Succeed"
His latest post is on "Four Ways Teachers Can Inspire Students"
Answer's.Com Teacher Toolkit web space will have a Teacher Blog Directory.
"Qualifying blogs are linked in Answers.com's upcoming Blog Directory for Teachers, located in the Teacher’s Toolkit, a resource..."
Link: Answers.com - Teachers.
Answer's.Com Teacher Toolkit web space will have a Teacher Blog Directory.
"Qualifying blogs are linked in Answers.com's upcoming Blog Directory for Teachers, located in the Teacher’s Toolkit, a resource..."
Link: Answers.com - Teachers.
Some of my colleagues are starting weblogs. Last week we had a walk-through TypePad session. I consider it to be the easiest weblog tool and I was surprised how difficult it was. It's not much about usability, it's about learning the whole new domain: posts, permalinks, trackbacks, pinging... It's could be so confusing...
Today we had a Bloglines intro. I'm alway talking about RSS and news aggregators and I guess that my colleagues know the mantra "do not start a weblog without RSS feed", but still... reading and hearing about it is one thing and watching one click subscribe and one page picture of who is updating is different.
Jill is right, you need to walk this country to see it. If you want to help someone starting blogging, do not spend time talking. Sit next to them when they register and make their first post. Be a guide - experience better than words...
[Mathemagenic]Comment: A lot of wisdom here. It also may mean more than one meeting to get the ball rolling for a person. Follow up meetings are important!
Content Delivery in the 'Blogosphere'
In the February edition of The Journal, the authors makes the case for using blogs with students.
Blogs are useful teaching and learning tools because they provide a space for students to reflect and publish their thoughts and understandings. And because blogs can be commented on, they provide opportunities for feedback and potential scaffolding of new ideas. Blogs also feature hyperlinks, which help students begin to understand the relational and contextual basis of knowledge, knowledge construction and meaning making.
Besides making the connection to social learning theory and stating the advantages of using blogs over simple forums, the authors describe ways blogs can be introduced into the classroom.
Check it out!
I've just taken a brief look at PubSub following some mentions at the RSS Winterfest. This service takes a different angle on aggregating feeds, almost "Downse-ian" like EduRSS in that you can track among thousands (they say) of RSS feeds for particular keyword searches. And the results are presented to you via RSS!
PubSub lets you filter over one million weblogs and information streams to find the content you're looking for, in real time. It's like searching the future.
"Searching the future" is a stretch (maybe it is "RSS is here just not evenly distributed"??) but it does some to be looking at RSS sideways- rather than tracking down the sites for the sources of RSS feeds, you end of setting up custom feeds for keyword searches (curious to know if it picks up things not found in Feedster).
For example, I created an account to track the matches on "maricopa learning exchange" and the results are fed back to me via:
http://rss.pubsub.com/06/c8/139cd2cf6609931c66e8de0910.xml
I can imagine teaching a class where students need to conduct research, and it is upon them to develop the best keywords (perhaps by testing results first in Feedster, and then monitoring these dynamic PubSub feeds via an RSS reader.
They already offer a few example Feeds to watch via PubSub:
RSS, RDF and ATOM (sounds like a bad law firm)
Microsoft Longhorn (sounds like Foghorn's brother, "I say, I say, I say, son, that's no way to code an OS")
Mars Global Surveyor (longer lines than Disney Land for that ride)
Comment: Alan shares his tinkering with PubSub, which seems to have come out of the gate running.
Liz Lawly and Dana Boyd are beginning to set up their research project the definition of weblogs. Sounds exciting. Read Liz's account on how they are thinking about the problem and challenges. They will be accepting feedback from the blog community.
I created three example blogs (or more correctly, three blog templates) to show teachers how they could use blogs in their courses. I have setup numerous blogs for teachers and have been thinkning about blogging in the classroom for the past several months. All of this time and energy has come to this, where I have (I hope...) created a template that teachers can freely use, and these examples showing how they could be used. There are three examples. One, where there would be one author (the teacher) and the students would reply to the teachers posts via "comments." Another example where each student would be given an author account, and a final example where the students would share a "student author" account. Each configuration has it's pluses and minuses, which I hope to display in these three example blogs. Blog Example #1 - One Author (teacher) Blog Example #2... [edtech.teacherhosting.com]
Comment: Looks like Paul Bradley has been digging into movable type to provide some blog design templates that may move you to use them in your MT blog. Paul is also open to your suggestions. Teacher feedback is key!
A Directory of Blog Resources , as well as invitation to their writers to set up blog down in Soutnern Florida University. Joe Moxley is the Pied Piper.
A lot of disruptive technology is going on over at SFU.
They use a .NET based blog called .Text.
Weblogg-ed Vol.2: Using Weblogs in Education
Excellent summary of blogging trends in education and the challenges to make blogging a more personal option for students. Can we call it "Personal free range blogging" that is organic and authentic? Would we need a tool that provides both private and public blogging spaces? Just like a journal, we can keep writing private or private to a group of invited friends or mentors. Yet, students will need and want to publish on a public space. I wonder if Manila or other blogware can be modified to offer this from one weblog, and not two or more. I think Drupal does something like this. Radio offers the flexiblity to post on the public space as well as for one's own eyes. Plone as a cms offers this but is not easy on the eyes and and still needs weblog integration. I am also thinking of Mario Asselin of Canada, who has his students blogging in both private and public spaces.
Also read Tom McKenna's comments.
All in all rich stuff to take time to read and think about.
This consortium from Wisconsin looks like they are revving up as well to use blogs in the K12 arena.
Eighteen school districts of CESA #12 have joined forces to increase the number of teachers integrating technology. The TEACH Technical Assistance and Training Grant program has provided us with funding to build a staff development program based on modeling best practices in technology integration.
Wishing the best on this journey.
Carlos Santos, from Universidade De Santiago de Compostela's School of Education, has started to post blogging resources on his Zope site on blogs. We hopefully will see weblogs in Catalan soon. BTW, finally a decent looking zope site.
Harald at Daihatsu Graceland recently suggested discussing blogging's impact on our personal lives.
It's pretty easy to see ways in which blogging affects our society at large. The furor over Trent Lott, the success of Howard Dean's presidential campaign to date are just a couple examples of blogging in action.
But how has it impacted your life?
Harald says he's watching a lot less television now that he's reading blogs and posting in his own; it sounds like no great loss on his part. Heck, it sounds like television is just as dreadful in the Netherlands as it is here in the U.S. More importantly, he's making discoveries, exploring the arts because of new interactions and relationships with others he's met through blogging.
My own blogging experience has been far more rewarding than I expected. It was originally intended as a means to discuss obscure and arcane topics of personal interest, keeping me amused while drifting my way through more than a year of isolating unemployment. Unexpectedly, I've rediscovered the joy of writing, made many new friends, become politically active for the first time in my life. There's much more, but I run the risk of making blogging sound like a Ron Popeil-o-matic product...
Let's add this group blog opportunity at RFB to that list as well. How can collaborating and having an open dialogue with other intelligent people not do great things? It boggles my mind what blogging has done for me. Bloggles me.
Are positive experiences like Harald's and mine oddball outliers in the spectrum of blogging? How has blogging - reading or writing - affected your life?
Comment:The first quarter of the school year is over and this post is a good piece to launch into some reflection. It is a time so far, to be inspired by the veteran bloggers pushing the envelope with reflective postings, RSS experiments and collaborative blogs to hearing the voices of new bloggers. The new preservice teacher bloggers help remind us that being simply jaded is not an option. The lack of Bush economic trickle down and NCLB are bringing even veteran teachers to tears. In our school, we have lost a total of 4 positions. These new voices remind us of why we entered the profession and how we thought we would be pro-active to better education. We either band together or fall. Visit Rethinking Schools In addition, it is important to network with other professional educator groups or organizations that can help one to grow professionally and keep our heads above water. Oh.. yeah, remember to vote Bush out of office. Using higher order thinking skills will give one that conclusion, I believe.
Mathemagenic: learning and KM insights - 15 October 2003
Comment: Lilia shares the results of her study on Blogs. Her paper, Blogs, the stickeness factor can be found here
This paper focuses on finding out how weblogs "stickiness factor" (likelihood of adoption) can be improved. To answer this question we analyse responses of 62 bloggers and 20 would be bloggers along four dimensions: motivation, context, technology and personal characteristics. Our results suggest that weblogs are still at an early adoption stage, that they are not as easy to use as it is claimed and that there is a need for more studies of weblogs emergent uses before blogging will look convincing enough for a majority of users.
Comment: I agree that we are still in the early adoption phase of weblogs, which means we have a lot of pioneers!
Tuesday was a day of three important milestones.
The most important milestone reached was Will Richardson making his 1000th post on his Weblogg-Ed blog. Will continues to post his rich reflections not only what hes is doing but on the how weblogs are and can be utilized better in the learning community by students, educators and wider community. Congratulations!
Technorati now tracks One Million blogs It is calculated that there is a new blog started every 12 seconds. Whew!
Bloglines reports that "Sometime yesterday afternoon, the 4 millionth blog entry was added to the Bloglines database. " from Bloglines email to members.
UPDATE Jana comments, "
The Daily Kos (political/news Blog) is now tracking more than 1 million unique visitors for the month of September - numbers that most media outlets would kill for"
I frequently assign small group work in my classes; in lit courses the groups often focus on a particular reading and report back to the class. In my surfing of edublogs, I've routinely bumped into references to "literature circles": small groups that not only read a text, but have each... [PEDABLOGUE]
Prof. Arnzen also uses literature circles in his classroom. He refers to the work of the Team at GSU School of Education weblog on Literature Circles.
This example shows us how we learn from each other and help each other.
Teacher Magazine has an article entitled "This Time, It's Personal" in it's latest issue (Oct. 2003) about teachers with personal blogs. Highlighted in the story is Jeanne Thelwell's Teacher: Year One (2002), my own site: What in Tarnation?!?!?, the somewhat dubious TardBlog, Pam Pritchard's First Year Teacher Blog, and it also mentions EduBlog and the Educational Blogger's Network.
Free registration required to read the article.
Michael Feldman requests feedback on his outline for the Weblog For Beginners sessions on Day 2 at BloggerCon. I asked him to grab the ball not just because he's a newbie, but also because he's a teacher, and he groks blogs, and is passionate about it. And he's also a really nice guy and I could imagine liking learning from him, so it's easy for me to imagine that others would too. [Scripting News]
Well EdBloggers, you are in the trenches with newbies or are a newbie, Michael Feldman is requesting feedback on his "Weblog for Beginners". I know quite a few of you can give him some pointers!
Olaf Brugman on downside of blogging...skimming through blogs for gems is laborious, timeconsuming and ineffective. [Mathemagenic]
Another good post to ponder for today. Lilia Efimova offers a way to look for the gems in weblogs. She writes," I have three main goals when reading other weblogs: staying updated, following a conversation and problem-solving. " Then she moves on to describe how she works each point As educators, we need to learn how to become info savvy with the tools we use. Time is soooooooo precious. In addition, the more savvy we are, we can model that for our students, so they also become the beneficiaries of our of learning efforts. What do you think?
GOOD WEBLOG DESIGN AND LAYOUT A lot has been written about how to write good blog content, and about what's wrong with and missing from current weblog tools. But here are some things you can do to make the most of the existing tools, and... [
Here are the 9 tips given.
1. Use Titles:
2. Abstract Long Posts
3. Use a Teaser Paragraph for Long Posts:
4. Select a Readable Font, Size & Column Width
5. If You're a 'Linker', Add Something of Value
6. Give Readers Someplace to Go for More:
7. Use Graphics If They Add Something
8. Use Categories Only If They Help Your Readers:
9. Use Outlining 'Twisties' Cautiously:
Excellent article to ponder and thing about how to make your blog more readable. As one new edblogger wrote me, Maybe one of the first things to do is try to finds one's voice using this new medium. Finding that voice, center, and real motivation helps one move forward using this medium. In addition, making a site friendly for the reader ( I am over 40, so my eyes are not what they were.) and trying to help folks get to information with a minimum number of clicks is important. What do you think?
Comments are welcome.
I work in the Instructional Technology Center at Georgia State University. I am an Instructional Technology Specialist and work with students, faculty, and staff. I have been here about two years. Formerly, I worked in an elementary school - my heart is still in the classroom but here I have the opportunity to still do that and expand my horizons to other learners. The best part is how much time I get to spend on learning myself. That's how I ended up getting involved in weblogs. Tim Merritt, my colleague, at the Instructional Technology Center introduced me to weblogs. I began thinking about ways to use this technology for students, especially as a way to improve students’ writing skills. It's an exciting journey! Last year I piloted a weblog project, NewsQuest, with a group of 4th and 5th graders. Later in the year I ended up collaborating with Will Richardson's journalism class. See The Georgia/NJ Connection. His students mentored mine. It was a great experience for both groups - the students soared. It was a good learning experience for the students and the teachers. This year I am working on a Literature Circles Edublog with pre-service teachers. I'll keep you posted about that. Other projects are in the works!
I am excited about so many other educators are entering the world of weblogs. Just as Will's class and mine were mixed and like magic… the dialogue began. Place weblogs in the hands of educators and like magic… the possibilities are limitless.
educators, students and organizations on your own domain. Unlimited space and bandwith is a serious perk. Visit his site at http://edublogs.org/services/
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