Just inside the front doors of Meriwether Lewis Elementary, a wall-sized mural offers a clue: This is a school that celebrates creativity. The same message echoes from the music room where students learn to play recorders and band instruments. When Principal Tim Lauer shows a visitor around, he makes note of the colorful banners, totem pole, mosaic bird bath, and other art installations that students have made since the school was built half a century ago in this southeast Portland neighborhood.

“I’d like to have students use digital cameras to catalog this artwork,” Lauer says, “and research some of the history behind it.” Then, he envisions sharing historical information with the school community via the new school weblog.

Boy, Tim sure has gotten that mean principal pose down pretty fast, huh?
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Jay Cross who got way too close with his camera; Nancy Peralta, who gets my vote for “EdBlogger Rookie of the Year,” and Dan Mitchell, who has probably had the most success getting a school set up with Manila.
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It’s been a bit more difficult than I thought it would be to get my students up to speed on the blogging thing. As is often the case when I teach from experience, I tend to assume he same level of enthusiasm and understanding from my kids, and that’s just not the case. Today, though, I think I have some bloggers being born. I’ve had to give them a pretty well-defined form to start, but the plan is to help them evolve out of it into more of a style of their own. And, now, the big hurdle is getting them an audience. I’m going to try to encourage them to post on each other’s sites, and maybe I’ll implement TrackBack. But sometime after the holiday, they’re going to start doing some marketing of some type. I want them to reach beyond the classroom.

Also kind of slow has been their understanding of the aggregator. A few of them are having “oh wow” moments, and they are getting it. But it’s proving more difficult than I thought for them to find feeds for their topics. I think next time I need to set aside a block to get them started with that. It’s more the concept of actually reading from a variety of sources that’s holding them back more than anything else, I think.

What’s cool, despite these humps, is that they’re in the act of reporting. Doing research, finding news, synthesizing the information, interpreting it, and publishing it. Now I know it’s not the traditional form…we’re getting to that. But it’s active engagement in the process on some level. And it’s going to help them when they do get to their “real” stories by providing some background.

Siri Anderson is a junior high social studies teacher in Minnesota that is really the first that I’ve seen to do what we’ve been doing here with posting questions to a class Web log and getting students to answer via comments. It was really cool to find this and see that someone else is trying it this way too. Found it via Tim Wilson’s “The Savvy Technologist” which obviously has become the newest addition to my Bloglines aggregator.
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Hmmm…I wonder how many people have “taught” Bloglines. I did today, showing my students the wonders of aggregation and setting them all up with accounts. They all subscribed to the New York Times front page, and I’m going to be feeding them some feeds on a pretty regular basis. The important thing at this stage is that they get the concept. One of my students asked how he could subscribe to Yahoo Sports and I told him to search Google for Yahoo Sports RSS. Wouldn’t you know the first result led him right to the XML. “Hey, that’s pretty cool!” he says and of course I hold him up as the day’s poster child for syndication. A few other heads seem to shake in agreement. (It also led me to this cool MyRSS site that I think I may have known about but added to my class page for further reference. It’s cool that there are more and more feeds to “good” journalism sites out there.) So anyway, now that Bloglines is a part of the curriculum, can WikiTravel be far behind??? (I really have to get a life…)