Back from a couple of days in Nature…highlight was the way my kids played with our neighbor campers and the magnificent Bald Eagle that soared across Promised Land Lake. I wish Tess was old enough to understand the rarity of what she had witnessed. It was very cool to see one out East for once.

Lots more links to add to the mix (many of which I organized on the site today), and I know that I’m going to have to get a couple of days free here pretty soon to get this coallated. I really want to read from Day 1 and just collect all the links and highlights into a documnet and go from there.

First, via Sarah, Sebastian Fiedler has some interesting things to say about weblogs in education, and he seems to have a similar model of how they can be used. “Will is again very close to my own thinking. A ‘metacognitive thought log’ is an excellent description of what can also be achieved with a personal Webpublishing tool in an educational context (and no, I am not only talking about the institutionalized forms of education here). I believe, we could and should also talk about potentials for alternative assessment approaches in this area.” I know I’m strange, but the thought of using a four-year weblog/portfolio as an exit requirement where kids not only chronicle their own work but their own thinking and then are asked to write about their experiences makes the hair on my neck stand up. That would be so cool! Not graded, per se, but just presented. Ah, to dream!

Sarah and her colleagues are also very generous to share their thoughts on using weblogs in the Creative Writing classroom, and I have to say again how impressed I was and am by what Barbara Ganley did in her classroom…amazing stuff, and definitely a best practice model.

Also, an interesting idea for shared reading between high schoolers and younger kids from, where else, Middlebury.