So this 7th grade “Exploring Our Dynamic Earth” blog (with the very appropriate tag line of “Using blogs to learn”) is an interesting example of how RSS can be woven into the work. The front matter is all done by placing feeds from a host of class blogs and a few science news feeds (including a latest earthquake feed) for pretty easy viewing. Click on one of the headline links and it will take you to a specific blog where teachers are posting some pretty thought-provoking assignments and students are engaging in some pretty impressive conversation through the comments.

For example, we’ve got 58 responses to the question “What’s the most dangerous place on Earth?” and if you read through them, you’ll see some real give and take going on. And the writing is pretty audience-centric, as in this snip:

Imagine this: it�s a perfectly normal day, nothing particularly unusual has happened. Everything is going fine until� BAM! OH DEAR LORD, A VOLCANO IS ERUPTING!! EVERYBODY RUN FOR YOUR LIVES!! This is what could happen if you lived in Chile…

Or this gentle push back:

johanna, I know 143,000 people died in that Yokohama earthquake. But that�s not because the earthquake was more dangerous. It�s because the CIRCUMSTANCES were different. Maybe there just happened to be a lot of people in Yokohama walking around, underneath buildings! Maybe they didn�t have very much advance notice. THAT DOESN�T MEAN THE EARTHQUAKE WAS MORE DANGEROUS. A 9.5 EARTHQUAKE IS MORE DANGEROUS THAN A 8.3 EARTHQUAKE. Also, earthquakes in Japan do occur pretty often� but they�re usually of small magnitude, and so not a lot happens. I�ve done research, and it turns out that BIG earthquakes only occur in Japan every 70 years. The other earthquakes aren�t very dangerous at all. So I would have to disagree with you.

Oh, by the way, the blog is courtesy of teachers and students at the Shanghai American School, Jeff Utecht’s hangout…
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The latest issue of Education Update from ASCD has the above titled article as a feature. It takes somewhat of a different tact in that it presents blogs as a teacher support tool, which, of course, it can be.

Blogs, or Web logs, are increasingly popular among teachers seeking support and advice on managing their classrooms more effectively. Topics discussed in blogs range from perspectives on education policy and curriculum issues to effective classroom management tips and personal survival strategies.

Here’s the shocker, though…at least to me:

Of the 10 million to 15 million people who blog daily, technical experts estimate that only a few hundred thousand are educators. “Most [of them] are younger teachers coming out of teacher-ed programs,” says Nussbaum-Beach. “They’re the ones who are comfortable with virtual-type tools.”

A few hundred thousand edu-bloggers!?! OMG! My 150 (now 167) feed limit is about to get blown out of the water…

No disrespect, but there’s no way there are that many teachers out there “blogging daily.” I’m guessing a thousand, maybe, and that’s given a lot of leash to the “daily” part. Using blogs? Maybe four or five times that many. It’s hard to tell.

But if we get to the day that a few hundred thousand educators are blogging daily, I will GUARANTEE you schools as we know them will be long, long gone.

In today’s Wall Street Journal, reporter Kevin Delaney asks the question and answers it with blogs, wikis, RSS and the like.

Pioneering teachers are getting their classes to post writing assignments online so other students can easily read and critique them. They’re letting kids practice foreign languages in electronic forums instead of pen-and-paper journals. They’re passing out PDAs to use in scientific experiments and infrared gadgets that let students answer questions in class with the touch of a button. And in the process, the educators are beginning to interact with students, parents and each other in ways they never have before.

Very cool, especially since many in our community including Tim Wilson, Tim Lauer and yours truly are featured, as well as a nice mix of other teachers using other interesting technologies. Wish I could post the whole thing here, but you know how copyright is. Time to fire up the ProQuest account, if you have access to one.

A few other excerpts of note:

Lewis Elementary School in Portland, Ore., also uses Web-based publishing technology to open up new possibilities in communication. Fifth-graders send classwork, and essays and articles for their monthly newspaper, to a wiki over the school’s network. Teacher Kathy Gould goes to the Web page and writes corrections and comments directly into the text — instead of posting a note in a separate “comments” section, as with a blog. Students can then access the wiki to read and respond to her comments.

How neat is that?

Some school administrators caution that much of the new technologies’ educational value has yet to be proved by any academic research. Some schools have slowed teachers’ efforts to introduce blogging in particular because of concern about what students might write, and be exposed to, online.

Technology presents other problems. Teachers have to learn it themselves and then figure out how it can serve the ultimate goal of teaching the curriculum. And, of course, students sometimes use computers to cheat, harass other kids or just waste time.

But grass-roots tech advocates say that they see improved learning already, even if formal studies to support that don’t yet exist. And others say that as kids get more tech-sophisticated, they have no choice but to experiment with new ways of teaching their curriculum.

Ok, have I broken the law yet?

I hate that word, but be that as it may, Weblogs are now certified wonders of technology by the Times. We’ve finally reached the plateau where there are enough stories about blogging to create a separate page devoted to the topic.

And, as a special treat, the Times just introduced a new Dining and Wine RSS feed! Yippee!

Can world domination be far behind?
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The “official” launch isn’t until Monday, but the new eSchool News “Ed Tech Insider” Weblog is up and running, featuring the blogging insights of yours truly, Tim, Tom, Anne, Steve and a few other edbloggers. I think it’s a great opportunity for all of us to reach a much, much wider audience of teachers and administrators not only about the Internet technologies (blogs, wikis, rss, etc.) that we normally write about but about other ed tech issues as well. I’m pretty psyched to have the opportunity. Thanks to Clarity Innovations for the initiative. Here’s the RSS feed.
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I’m not sure why, but Anne‘s feed in my Bloglines account never seems to update, so every now and then I have to remind myself to check her site. (RSS has really spoiled me.) As usual, I’ve been missing some good stuff. For instance, the Internet Public Library is categorizing blogs and it looks like a good starting point for anyone just trying to get the feel for this. (In other words, it’s still a manageable list.) One pretty interesting find from that list is the list of History News Network blogs, a list I’m going to share with the Social Studies teachers.

And just as a side note, this is what I miss most when I don’t read Anne’s blog…her enthusiasm:

Let’s get our students writing – and what better avenue than weblogs! Let’s hear it for a weblog writing revolution!

I’ll second that.
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Paperbark looks to be a new Weblog about how blogs are being used in the classroom. Some pretty interesting initial links and posts from some West Australian educators. And check out Mrs. Dudiak’s blog where her kids went comment crazy. Interesting to see how many of the comments were really questions intended to get the students to focus on detail and specificity in their writing. Great example of classroom Weblogging.
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One of the things I just didn’t get a chance to write about was Anne‘s presentation at NECC which was well attended and well worth it despite some technical difficulties. She is our best cheerleader for blogs in the classroom, no doubt. Whenever she speaks about her experiences, her passion just floods through, and you can’t help but be inspired. And her blogging from NECC offered up some great links to her own resources, and those of some digital portfolios a la Weblogs by Julie Lindsay of the International School Dhaka, Bangladesh.

I’ve been Furling like crazy this week it seems. I almost can’t wait to get back home to get some semblance of routine again so I can keep track of all of this more effectively. I’ve had to punt on a lot of my Bloglines stuff just because I know I’ll never get to it. I hate that vague feeling that something really quality is slipping through…the curse of aggregation…
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(via Stephen Krause)

This online, edited collection explores discursive, visual, social, and other communicative features of weblogs. Essays analyze and critique situated cases and examples drawn from weblogs and weblog communities. Such a project requires a multidisciplinary approach, and contributions represent perspectives from Rhetoric, Communication, Sociology, Cultural Studies, Linguistics, and Education, among others.

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Here’s the most comprehensive list of libraries using Weblogs that I’ve found yet, and the best part is that each section comes with its own RSS feed. Glad to see that Pat’s library and mine made the list.
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(via Jeremy) I’m happy to see Helen Barrett has started a Weblog. She is one of the best resources for e-portfolios out there, and I’m hoping her interest in blogs might lead her to explore how the two might work together.

Welcome to my first entry into the world of blogging. I’m not sure I can get into the habit of posting to a web log on a regular basis, but I want to give it a try, since this looks like a technology that is being used in reflective portfolios.

I had a sabbatical leave a few years ago to study electronic student portfolios and she was very helpful in my research. I’m going to have to add her to my Bloglines list, which by the way, has been growing much too quickly lately…I’m up to 80 edubloggers. May need to do some paring down at some point…
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One of the Weblogs I first started reading was Dennis Jerz’s Literacy Weblog. A professor at Seton Hill Univeristy, he writes about writing, journalism and a variety of education related technologies that I’ve always found pretty interesting. (His colleague Mike Arnzen is also a valuable read.) Problem was, once I discovered syndication and aggregation, I stopped reading since there was no RSS feed. Well, Dr. Jerz has finally relented and created a feed, and I’m happy to say he’s the latest addition to my blogroll.

The latest WWW Tools for Education takes and in depth look at Weblogs in the classroom and collects a huge number of links, some of which haven’t popped up on my radar. Definitely a great starting point for anyone looking to get an overview of the trends in this arena.

When we looked at Edublogs in 2002, blogging technology was sufficiently advanced for common use, and general uptake was enthusiastic as people discovered this new, easy and inexpensive means of Web-based self-expression. However, many of these early adopters soon discovered that Weblogging, like any journal-keeping activity, can become a time-consuming chore – a good idea at the time, but soon outranked by other priorities; many bloggers said what they had to say, then moved on, abandoning their Weblogs to the cul-de-sacs of Cyberspace. On the other hand, while perceptions of the churn rate for blogs may vary , the figures seem to indicate an overall steady increase in the number of viable blogs of all sorts. In educational implementations in particular, adoption has been explosive as educators continue to seize upon the genre to support learning in many different ways.

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Just finished my presentation at the Internet @ Schools East conference and a number of people asked me to put the slides up for viewing so here they are. Be warned that it’s a 4MB file, so it may take some time to load up.

All in all I think it went pretty well. I’m guessing there were about a 100 people in the room, about three had their own sites, and it seemed like most understood both blogs and RSS well enough at the end. It is, however, a lot to throw at people in just an hour. (If you were in the audience and want to leave a comment, just click here to join the site and then come back and click comment under this post. All feedback welcomed!)

I got a chance to meet with David Carter-Tod who was a real help to me when I first started poking around with blogs and such, and I’m hoping to meet up with him and some other bloggers later tonight. That’s always the best part of these conferences anyway. And I’m about to take in a series of Weblog and RSS presentations including Jenny‘s dedicated to RSS alone. Should be pretty interesting.

Just one story: I was sitting in the lobby after my presentation listening (ok…eavesdropping) to a conversation one of the other conference speakers was having about a panel he was on, and he started mentioning RSS. I guess at one point, his panel had been talking about RSS for about 20 minutes when someone in the audience asked “Can someone please tell me just what that is?” A number of people applauded. This still must seem like Greek to most…

Note: Comments to this post are being displayed here. I’m working on it…

Came across a couple more examples of teachers blogging with their students that look pretty interesting. First is this e-book of a Tapped-in presentation by Barbara Dieu who is a teacher in Sao Paulo, Brazil. I like how she introduces her project on her own site:

So as many of you are about to embark on the adventure of creating a web page or using a blog…here are some questions for you to consider: Does the architecture of the environement online (blog, web page, wiki, message board) affect your stds’ motivation and the way they learn, communicate, interact? Will a page with text only make students read more and pay more attention to the text ? What kind of balance should there be between design/layout and content online?

Good stuff. One quick thing I realized in going through her workshop site was that Blogger now has a notification piece built in. Did it always have that? Seems like a lifetime ago…

Also got an e-mail from Scott Rogers who is blogging with his Freshman Composition students at Weber State in Michigan. The posts on his own site relating to his teaching are great, including this set of questions he’s looking at in his use of Weblogs:

Can technology solve some problem in a better or more meaningful way than another, non-techie way?

In this case, I’m concerned with the following issues:

1) We spend most of our time in the classroom off in the ether of rhetorical analysis or argument structure or whatever, and there are no real outlets for them to discuss the connections between what we’re reading and what they see going on in the “real world.”

2) I want students to evaluate sources from day one–and not wait until the major research essay at the end of the semester.

3) I want to give students a little more room to roam around in their responses to the texts.

4) I want students to see themselves as taking part in a larger set of discussions, and really, in the end, to see the way that technology like Blogger goes a long way toward democratizing the publishing of what Scott Russell Sanders calls “the individual mind at work and play.”

I think it’s so cool to see more and more educators pushing their thinking and sharing the struggle. It always makes me push my own thinking on what I’m doing.
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From Dave:

The tentative date for the next BloggerCon is April 10, 2004 in Cambridge on the campus of Harvard Law School. The cost to attend is $0, but we will solicit contributions and sponsorships. It’s a one-day conference, following the pattern of Day 2 of the first Con, several concurrent tracks, 1.5 hour discussions led by an expert, lots of interesting people, and conversation, networking opportunities. Focus on what we’ve learned from the first half of the 2004 Presidential campaign (presumably the Democratic nominee will be chosen by then). How has journalism changed? What blogging projects are you starting? Who would you like to work with?

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I think it’s very cool that the New York Times is starting to embrace the Weblog concept. See ombudsman Daniel Okrent’s space and the pretty tame “On the Trail” political blog they’ve started. To get the thinking behind it, this interview with NYT Web editor Len Apcar is pretty insightful. I sat next to him at BloggerCon at one point, and I asked him when the Times was going to start blogging. He said something along the lines of “I don’t know, but this is all very interesting.” He was obviously surveying the landscape. In that interview, he says:

…to be quite candid about this, I’ve looked at this kind of page as a possible template for other areas of common interest. In other words, you could take this page and build a page for Opera buffs. You could do it for theater. You could do it for any number of special interests. I wanted to learn how to do this first with political reporting. I thought it made a lot of sense. It played to The Times strengths. We have just scores, dozens, of reporters covering the campaigns. I was hoping we’d have a good lively debate, which we’ve got. So I want to learn by doing this first, with politics. And then from there I’ll step back and say, what do we think? what kind of tool is this? How do we learn from this?

Now to me, that’s a pretty provocative statement, and it says that at least he grasps the concept. He’s sticking to basically factual reporting and using the Weblog as a place where reporters can add context to the stories they write, not opinion like most blogging is. But it still takes a small step toward doing what blogs do best, and that’s getting behind a story and, hopefully, engaging readers in the conversation.

Add to that the extremely educational personal travel blog of former president Jimmy Carter who recounts his visit to Africa. Again, I know this isn’t a true “blog” in the strictest sense (more edited journal.) But the personal publishing meme is no doubt expanding.
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(via Kairosnews) Ok…it’s official. I’m quitting my high school job and gonna snag some part-time professorship at a local community college where I can do this: give everyone on campus a Weblog and just sit back and watch my aggregator get filled up with all sorts of wild writing from students who write cool stuff without having administrative and board fears (I was going to say paranoia but changed it…hmmmm…) make me sweat over how things will be monitored and approved so as not to tick anyone off. I want so badly to put

We do not take responsibility for any of the writing on this site.

on my homepage and let all heck break loose. (Pitiful isn’t it?)

Joe Moxley, the professor who is doing this, is also into Wikis and all sorts of other cool things dealing with writing with tech. He says the site “Writing Blog is intended to be a creative community for people who write and for writing instructors.” Word has it he’s requiring first year composition students at the University of South Florida to have a blog. Could be an interesting development. Still, Terry asks “Still…where’s the proof (other than anecdotal) that blogging actually helps students write better than in a ‘traditional’ non-blogging class?” Good question. Terry’s starting to dive into this question, and I’m waiting to get a link to his research site so I can follow along.

An article from the University of California probing the use of Weblogs in education. Not much new here, but it is interesting how many of these there seem to be lately…

In education, weblogs are being used in a variety of ways, including providing students an avenue for expressing themselves and for reflecting on what they have learned. They are also used to create collaborative communities for students and instructors as they progress through a course or work on shared projects. They act as a kind of knowledge management system that keeps track of who’s doing what as well as tasks yet to be accomplished. In addition, several faculty publish weblogs to provide commentary and links to resources in their areas of expertise. The UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism is using weblogs extensively, not only to facilitate courses and provide students a publishing medium, but also as a subject of scholarly inquiry.

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Another blog story link:

“Welcome to Weblogs at Harvard Law, an experimental community where more than 350 students, faculty and staff members, and alumni have signed up to publicly express their thoughts about everything from social issues to software, from literature to love. Based at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, the initiative is free and available to anyone with a Harvard.edu e-mail address. And except for a few private blogs limited to specific classes, all Harvard-hosted blogs can be read by anybody on the Web.”

And from the education corner:

“Some educators use blogs as teaching tools. John Palfrey, a lecturer at both HLS and the Extension School, posts syllabi, reading materials, and lectures on class blogs; he encourages, but doesn’t require, students to use them. He views the technology as a way to extend the classroom experience, and to provide a new forum for people who might be too shy to speak up in person. “This helps us explore how people express themselves,” says Palfrey, who also maintains an HLS blog on legal issues.”

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Kathy Schrock, who was one of the first classroom teachers to really mine the potential of the Internet and who has now teamed with the Discovery Channel to keep one of the most extensive education sites on the Net, has started blogging with a moTime site about handhelds in the classroom. If high profile educators like Kathy get on board with blogging, there could be a real groundswell of interest. Here’s hoping her efforts continue to be successful.

“Commons-blog is an American Library Association-sponsored site collecting news, discussion, and commentary related to the information commons in theory and practice.” At first blush, this looks like a great resource for media literacy and information type issues. This post on the revisionist history of the White House Website is definitely a jumping off point for a discussion of the impermanence of information on the Internet. Lots of other good links to libraries that I’m going to be checking out as I build my school’s library site, too. Add another to my Bloglines account…
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Ran across this site and it’s offshoots from my referer logs, and there looks to be some very nice uses of Web logs in classrooms popping up all over the place. Crawford Kilian who teaches at Capilano College in Vancouver (and has written over 20 books) is reflecting on his efforts with blogs in his Legal Techand Outdoor Rec classes. He says:

As the fall semester winds up, I’m feeling a little more encouraged about education blogging. The two course blogs seem to have been useful to the students even though they didn’t often post to them…

He keeps a number of Web logs on different subjects, all of which look pretty interesting.

He’s also got a link to a Brit Lit Web log by Beth Fullerton. She says:

It is my hope that I will be assigning students to write three articles a nine weeks to be published on this site. I will let them write over topics that we are studying in class. I will also use this site to publish discussion questions over our class work. Students will be required to check the site and comment on the questions. I also will link from this site to the blogs of my students that they will be required to keep for the class. If a student doesn’t have internet access, I will allow them to use this site to post their own blog. I hope this site will stimulate discussion and writing in my classes. Communication should also improve. Parents, students, principals, and the community will be welcome to visit and comment on our site.

And a couple of more finds…Ben Harris’s “American Literature and its Discontents” looks to be a blog on the study of Gatsby. The post about F. Scott & Paris Hilton; Living The American Dream? is especially interesting. I met Ben at NECC this year and he’s another one of those “I wish he’d do more blogging” types (a la Terry.)

Also, here’s the Western Nebraska Community College site that’s using a Web log…

More and more and more interesting examples of classroom sites every day…