On blogs and bloggers

Nov24

Although the assignment was to create a blog using Blogger, I am hoping that this will serve the purpose as I began this blog back in the summer as I was exploring what it was like to be a blogger before I asked my students to do the same.

I spent much time coming up with a title. I tried to be clever, but everything I thought of had already been taken by another more clever person. The title of my blog relates to a place near and dear to my heart, the little alley behind the home where I grew up. I would leave my back door each morning and head down that little alley to my grade school about 1 block away. Even that close to school I was often late! Some things never change.

In the course of learning about Web 2.o over the past 2 years, I realized that I would be a student until the end of my days. I don’t think a day goes by that there is not an opportunity for a new learning experience. Teachers know they must prepare the material, know it inside-out, if they are to teach the material to students. How can I expect students to be bloggers if I have not traveled the road first?

Well I have to admit that, although my intentions were good, I failed in my first attempt, because I allowed myself to be intimidated. What I mean is, I had been reading other blogs for some time, some people with very good ideas, innovators, movers and shakers, people with a very large following. Occasionally I would come out of the shadows and change from a “lurker” to a “commenter” but I never provided a link back to my little blog because I convinced myself that I really didn’t have anything of interest for anyone else to read. It was more or less an outlet for my own reflection. As anyone can tell from the date on the earlier posts, this little blog has been dormant for some time.

I then turned my attention to classblogmeister as a tool for student blogs. My goal was to establish the blogging routine, the parameters and guidelines, and then have other teachers begin to use the tool in their classes. Well so far, the only topics have been tech related and I have not managed to hand the baton. But that’s okay because the students have taken to it, and we are working on “continuing the conversation” rather than just commenting “Hey, I love your blog!” Of course, we may need some meatier topics, but …baby steps, baby steps. I have also posted on our tech class blog as the “writing prompter”. It has been somewhat overwhelming to have a class full of blogs coming in for approval at one time. My biggest concern is the difficulty in accessing the site during the school day when we need it most, but many students blog out of school hours. In fact, some have started to go to their blog and post their thoughts on any even that happens. In only 2 cases have I asked a student to re-do because of inappropriateness, and it wasn’t anything really bad. I do plan to check out the other site mentioned for student blogging, though I wouldn’t change until a new school year. Students have network passwords, wiki passwords, blogmeister passwords, and some grades have others as well. I can’t throw anything more out there at this point. I also deal with the issue of the quality of the writing and spelling…how much editing to do before allowing a post to be published? How to maintain standards without sacrificing creativity?

A very valuable resource I would like to share is a post by Vicki Davis who writes the coolcatteacher blog. It is Ten Habits of Bloggers that Win and it provides very good tips to those starting on the blogging road. She is in the trenches every day teaching her students and still finds time to share so much with educators everywhere. I truly admire her. In fact there is a great group of women who are encouraging teachers in their use of Web 2.0 tools and that is the WOW group (Women of Web2.0)

So I finally wrote a post that other people (the online class) may read. Let me cut the eye holes out of my brown paper bag.

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Second Life Experience

Nov24

I have been involved with Second Life since the beginning of August. Due to the frequent chatter about it among Discovery Educators and the fact that they were planning to have meetings there, I finally dusted off the old avatar I tried to get going in February and finally got her through orientation. There was a bit of a learning curve, but once I put my mind to it, it was not so bad after all. ( How I started out as a fox I do not know. I look much better now.)

It has been great fun to meet with other DEN members at DEN Headquarters. The members of the leadership council have worked very hard to organize informative sessions such as getting around in Second Life, podcasting, and digital storytelling, as well as fun events such as a Halloween party and walking tours of the island. I think by far the most awesome experience I have had, however, has been the opportunity to meet and become friends with people from all over the world. Chance encounters shopping for shoes or striking up conversations with someone you land next to after a teleport can open a world of opportunity in communication. It does help that I can speak Spanish of course, and most of Latin America is in a reasonable time zone for communication. But I have friends on my “friend list” from England, Ireland, Spain, France, Israel, Germany, Denmark, Brazil, Mexico, Venezuela, and USA. Some of them have become very good friends. It is also humbling to see how many of these people around the globe speak excellent English. I actually have only 2 friends with whom I can only communicate in Spanish. I am embarrassed at my limited language skills in comparison.

It can become somewhat addictive at times. I actually wonder what my friends are doing and what I am missing when I am not “inworld” but all in all it has been a most educational experience. And the shopping and dancing are not bad either!

Congrats, Alabama!

Jul28

I found the Alabama Best Practices Center site after reading a post on The 21st Century Learning Project by Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach. I have only gone into a few of the resources there and I plan to go back and discover more. Sheryl and her colleagues in the project were seeking an answer to the question:

How do education leaders effectively promote the knowledge, skills and sense of urgency for 21st Century teaching and learning among all the teachers in their schools?

It was interesting to read Kristi Stacks’ Letter to Parents about using email in the classroom and the obstacles that surfaced. There are so many fabulous resources and ideas at the site. But the area I most want to investigate is the professional development/teacher training techniques. Obviously in our little school of 9 classrooms and 12 full-time teachers (including myself) we cannot hope to set up the kind of “team” structure as in the ABPC. This weighs most heavily on my mind as the new school year looms ever closer. I feel the “urgency” but most of our faculty does not.

This year I hope to be able to spend more time with classroom teachers as a coach and also as a co-teacher to help with technology integration. (That is, if there is a Spanish teacher other than myself for the next school year!) If there is no support structure in place, teachers will not want to take risks. When the wireless laptops aren’t connecting, or the United Streaming video won’t play and the “tech person” is teaching a class, there is not much to encourage them to keep trying. So I will delve further into what worked for Alabama teachers and see if I can glean some strategies that I can adapt for our situation. There are also many success stories on that site that can be shared during our afterschool weekly tech sessions. Professional development and teacher support are critical. I really would welcome any advice or resources that can help with teacher training when the “human” resources are so limited in the school. (I feel like Bartholomew Cubbins!) I can’t entice them into the boat and then leave them without oars.

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Digital Grandparents

Jul27

I recently came across a link at Mashable that is advertising the upcoming launch of grandparents.com, which is promising to be

…a meeting ground for “modern-day grandparents” and their grandchildren, and will feature information about activities to do with the youngsters, some travel and gift ideas, connect with grandchildren with the site’s interactive tools.

What jumped out at me is the “gift ideas” and that this is a site trying to make the most of grandparents’ spending power. But it also occurs to me that there could be something valuable here, depending on exactly what kind of interactivity is offered. I am thinking along the lines of digital storytelling. How wonderful if grandparents, especially those who live a distance from their grandkids, could upload photos from earlier years of their lives and record a message about them for their grandchildren. How important it is that those stories be preserved! It always seems to be something that we intend to do, but today gets in the way, and we have little time to retell “yesterday” for our kids and grandkids.

I must admit that I am guilty of this myself. I know full well how to record someone’s story digitally, and I really would like to pass on stories that my mother told to my children and their children. Have I recorded her voice or scanned her pictures? No, I am sorry to say I have not. When we introduce the personal narrative project for our eighth grade students, grandparents are always suggested, encouraged, as a story to be told, and yet few students have ever told their grandparents’ stories or shared their own memories with them. It is not something that I feel I can mandate, so I think I need to work more on my motivational skills.
Other info shared on the site: (no source given for these statistics or size of survey)

  • Among grandparents who are online, 91% e-mail, 70% shop and over 40% book travel. More than 80% do these activities via broadband connections. (How many grandparents are online? Any statistics on that?)
  • 87% of grandparents report that passing family values and history to grandkids are among their top priorities. (How can we help children who do not have “digital grandparents” and may be separated by distance or for other reasons? And who are the grandparents who don’t feel passing on family values to grandchildren is important?)

There is the possibility of Bubbleshare, but I believe the audio clip per picture can be only 30 seconds. Maybe that is enough. Photostory seems like a better option, but we need to get the senior citizens connected with the students. I think I really want to look into this for this coming school year’s digital story projects. I am sure that by going back to the edtech community I will find many who have already done this successfully and I will attempt to learn from their efforts.

We have to do our best to prepare students for the future, but they also need to be grounded with a sense of who they are and where they come from, and treasure their connection to the past as well. It’s the circle of life.

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Testing the waters!

Jul26

I almost hear a melody in the background:

She was afraid to come out of the locker
She was as nervous as she could be
She was afraid to come out of the locker
She was afraid that somebody would see

Those who would admit knowing those lyrics would be dating themselves. They do, however, sum up my trepidation at entering the “blogosphere”. I have been reading blogs for some time, and the conversations have been swirling in my head, causing me to occasionally comment, but more often, lurk, learn, practice, and then try to share with someone else the particular resource or skill. The conversations have opened up new worlds for me. I now feel like I have some very supportive “friends” out there who are willing to share what they know. Instead of the old days of covering your paper so the student next to you doesn’t see your answers, we “students” are now saying, “Look at my paper! This is what I wrote down. What do you think about it? What did you write?” and then, “Are you stuck on that problem? Here’s how I worked it out.” I like learning this way. Does that tell me something about how my own students might want to be learning?

So even though I may not have any great pearls of wisdom to share with the world, and the rest of the blogosphere will not be all a-twitter over my ideas or ruminations, it just may help me to understand better what I read and hear, and so I will write. Through this process I hope to grow and learn, hopefully become a better person, a better teacher who has come a long way from the my first trek down Blackberry Alley. I will do my best to make better use of the vast and ever-growing number of resources at hand,  and by doing so, I hope to enrich the learning experiences of my students.  It’s exciting to be a “life-long learner” !