Back to School Blogging

Even though I haven’t had time to sit down and write too often the last couple of weeks (which are, thankfully, over,) I have been doing a pretty good job of keeping up with my reading over at Bloglines. And while in past years following the opening day exploits of teacher bloggers wouldn’t have been that difficult to do, this year is definitely different. It sure feels like there’s a lot more going on this year…more teachers blogging, more interesting ideas and ways to use them, and more cool uses of RSS and other tools as well. Lots and lots to write about, and I hope to catch up on many of those themes over the next few days.

Here, I’ve been reasonably happy with the direction this is taking. Looks like I’ll be creating about a dozen teacher sites and around 75-85 student sites next week. Couple that with the 40 or so sites that we’re running for the school Website and another dozen teachers who are picking up with their old sites, I’d say we’re off to a pretty good start. One interesting thing was that one of my teachers said in his class of 22 kids only five hadn’t had a blog before. That’s progress.

Of course just using blogs is just the first step. Goal number one this year is to get some teachers to have their students do some real blogging in class. Along those lines, Dennis Jerz has a great post on blog assessment that he’s using with his college kids. I especially like his emphasis on interaction, discussion, and “xenoblogging” which he describes as the work that helps other people’s Weblogs. The whole thing gets to the heart of what real blogging entails. Definitely something to add to my workshop resources.

So anyway, the kids are back, there’s energy in the hallways, the first football game (against our archrival, no less) starts in about an hour, and the big projects have all been put to bed. Big, big sigh…