Jack McLeod is more than “moving molecules” as a friend of mine used to say. He’s moving mountains. Check out this post where he talks about how he’s hoping to implement blogs at his school.
Jeff [his principal] is ready to get the kids blogging. The global audience did it. Authentic publishing. Now that’s why we have the Internet. It’s not for surfing or replacing the library, it’s for sharing with the world. The upshot is that I’m going to apply for a leave to get the ball rolling…Jeff is a great leader that gets stuck dealing with discipline and attendance. Today was a chance to talk. I mentioned my rant about throwing away all of our current curriculum and starting to teach kids how to manage information. He’s there. That’s the read-write web isn’t it?
He’s adding Bloglines and Furl and Firefox to all of the classroom computers as well. How cool is that?
Thanks for the kind words, Will. I’ve got some of the kids
furling already. Bloglines is yet to come. I saw some of
the “academic” kids eyes light up when I told them about exporting a
furl archive in bibliographic format. I know that’s doing
something old in an easier way but it’s a start. As I heard you
speak in July, I was mentally going through what we’d need to do to
give every kid a blog. The gear was a minor consideration – the
major one was the staff. So far, I’ve heard “How do we control
what they write?” I’m thinking good teaching/education backed up
by policy. It always amazes me how scared teachers are to let
kids have control of their learning.
Anyhow, again thanks for the comments. I’m going to drop you an
e-mail sometime about coming to Nova Scotia for some blogvangelism.