From the “Courses I Would Love to Teach” Department comes CommWeb Daily, a blog for a class being taught by Chris Lott at University of Alaska Fairbanks. This class materials page has me, well, dreaming. And check out the grading policy:
# Student Blog Writing (500 pts)
# Class Blog Contributions (450 pts)
# Wiki Writing (400 pts)
# Homework/Class Projects (500 pts)
# Participation/Attendance (350 pts)
# Final Project (800 pts)
Seems like it’s working for at least one student, Doug Noon, who has been writing about implementing blogs into his 4th grade classroom. He’s looking at b2evolution, and it sounds like it has some really interesting capabilities.
The best part – and the reason I want to use this with elementary kids – the blog admin can view, edit, and comment on all of the posts before they are viewable to unregistered users. And…that can happen in the aggregator blog so that the teacher doesn’t have to search through all of the blogs to see who has written something. I know that rss feeds can do the same thing, but with this setup I can edit, and comment right from the aggregator. Students can also see the unapproved posts of their classmates, but those posts are protected from public view until the admin clicks on the publish button.
Very cool.
It has been a fun class so far and I feel fortunate I have a chance at it. My not-so-secret reason for creating the class and pushing for a chance to teach it is because of my feelings about how important these tools are (should be) within our curriculum as a whole, rather than as an occasional hobby-horse of an interested instructor– and certainly not just in a class about them!
I’m currently in Ketchikan lobbying for wholesale, programmatic integration of these technologies across entire an entire program– I know people are interested, but the step towards real experimentation– much less adoption– remains a large one.
The wide range of student interests is challenging, though I remain cautiously optimistic that out of the wide range of tools and ideas we are covering there is a bit of something for everyone, even the most skeptical, and that these students will be primed and ready to take advantage of the kinds of interactions weblogs/wikis/rss/aggregators provide when they come across them elsewhere.
Or in Doug’s case, when he infects the school district with read/write/social web fever 🙂
Hey Will,
I’ve been following your blog for a while now, and have been directed to some useful resources. I’ve enjoyed Chis’ class for the same reasons. There are a lot of challenges ahead in the near future for teachers who want to integrate social technology into their practice. I think it’s important for those of us who see the constructive possibilities to set up exemplary projects that will demonstrate their viability – for administrators, and their usefulness – for teachers and students.
I don’t have the blog project up and running quite yet. One of the big problems, especially for teachers of young students, is the lack of secure and accessable infrastructure. When I requested server access to run a MySQL/PHP application at the school district last semester, there was a bit of a fuss. I was told that it wasn’t necessarily a big deal, but that it was a NEW deal. I was the first person to make such a request.
Right now I am using my limited Unix talents to set up my classroom blogs on a development server that is used by the tech students in our voc/ed program. The server doesn’t support FTP because they want to limit what the students can do on it. I’m waiting right now for the admin to get back to me about whether they’ll let me use it. The last message I got was, “Consider this an exercise.” I don’t quite know what that meant. But it suggests that I should not let students near it yet. I believe that the system admin feels the server I’m using is not adequately secure, and I appreciate his concern. But as I say, this isn’t easy for someone like me, with more drive than skill.
I have other options. Stay tuned.