Happy Birthday to Blogs

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What has blogging meant for you as a teacher and writer?
Wikipedia marks December 17 as the official Birthday of the Weblog and some folks — including Steve, the creator of Classroom 2.0 — have created a site (via a blog, of course) to celebrate its impact. The site is called Celebrating Educational Blogging and the VoiceThread above is from that blog and it asks you to post some reflections on what impact blogging has had for you. (You can also leave comments right at the celebration blog site).

I love this intro from the site:

Some of us believe that blogging, as one of the great entry points into the “read/write” web (or “Web 2.0”), is having a transformative impact on education and learning, and that we are at the start of a new renaissance that will be defined by the participatory, contributive, and collaborative nature of the Web.

What? You haven’t tried VoiceThread yet? Here is a wonderful chance. Just sign up and click your microphone and start threading your thoughts.

Peace (in blogs),
Kevin

Go Elf Yourself: viral marketing

Even though I know this is nothing more than a marketing ploy to get the words “OfficeMax” situated in my brain this holiday season, I could not resist using something called ElfYourself, which adds any headshot you feed it to an elf body and gets those bodies jiggying to some music. This is clearly a viral campaign by the company and, you know, it works. I am seeing references to ElfYourself all over my Bloglines. Our family was laughing and giggling as we watched our dog, Bella, and cat, Coltrane, dancing away.

I wanted to try to catch it as a video file but had little luck. I did use my new screencapture program — Camstasia (which is now a free download) — and it is really jerky. But I did make this photo as a screenshot from the site, and now it is our desktop photo. (Notice I removed the OfficeMax from the shot).

Peace (in Elfworld),

Kevin

Claymation Magic/Understanding Disabilities

Some of you know I adore claymation — as a viewer, as a creator and as a teacher — and I just stumbled on a PR campaign by Aardman Animation (of Wallace and Gromit fame) to bring light to the difficulties facing disabled people in the UK.

The campaign — known as Creature Discomforts — uses animation to get the point across that people may be disabled, but they are people, first, and they need support, encouragement, love and acceptance (most of all).

At their website, they say:

Leonard Cheshire Disability campaigns to change the way people think about, and respond to, disability. Creature Discomforts is one way we hope to do that. It’s a series of animations based on the experiences of real disabled people. They’re lovely characters and this is where you can find out all about them.

Here is one of their spots:

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But just as neat and important are these “behind the scenes” look at the creation of the advertising campaign. I had trouble embedding them because, I think, they are part of UK.Youtube, so here are the links:

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and

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Peace (in understanding and acceptance),
Kevin

Take a look at Lookybooks

My friend, Susan, showcased this very cool site for picture books called Lookybook and I realized that you can embed the books as a flash file in the blog itself. I love picture books and use them all the time in my classrooms so this site is very much welcome (thanks, Susan!).
I liked this one in particular. It is called Jazz by Christopher and Walter Dean Meyers. I know it is impossible to read here so feel free to go to the site and take a look at the book directly.

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Peace (in picture books),
Kevin

The Great Pumpkin Contest — 2007

My neighborhood is a tight community, with all sorts of unofficial events meant to draw us together. Each year, one man — you can see him here the video dressed up like a clown — organizes a pumpkin contest, and more than 100 pumpkins are often put on display.

Here is a tour of this year’s crop of strange pumpkins:

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Peace (in pumpkins),
Kevin

Week in a Sentence: The Reflective Dogtrax

As promised, I am sitting in for The Reflective Teacher (who may be off reflecting or something — not sure) and hosting his Week in a Sentence feature, which I have really come to love for narrowing my own week down and for reading the week of others. What a fantastic idea.

Anyway, I will start off with a podcast. This comes from a workshop I gave at the Western Massachusetts Writing Project this weekend on podcasting, and as a hands-on activity, we created a podcast version of their own Week in a Sentence — with great results.

Listen to the WMWP teachers

Next up is Karen, who is off to see the Red Sox play (did I mention I am a Yankees’ fan in a house full of Red Sox fans — doh), who writes:

Tickets to a Red Sox playoff game in my pocket – I SO did not want to teach this week anticipating my trip to Boston and my first playoff game ever! Go Red Sox!

Matt, who just interviewed me for a project he is doing on claymation and moviemaking in the classroom, writes about the act of teaching:

I modeled a writing lesson today where I tried to come up with writing ideas live in front of a audience of squirrelly second graders and it did effectively hold their interest.

My friend, Bonnie, is up in Vermont, enjoying the foliage season, and she writes:

What’s a week without Boil Down…Today it’ all about Al for me…BRAVO, the Nobel Peace Prize…how will this event impact on our political landscape…I’m hoping for an Al Gore for President….I know, pie in the sky…that’s okay…off to Vermont to take some photos…
Bonnie

Nancy has a wedding to get to! (open bar? I bet teaching is far from her mind right now)

So thankful for the 4-day week; and now it’s wedding time–see you in two weeks!

My colleague from the WMWP, Susan, writes about her travels in her role as a leader and inspiration in the writing project:

The power of and learning from collaboration has pulled me from Amherst, to Berkeley, to Billings and home again this week guiding my work forward.

2,000 teenagers in one room, screaming and shouting! Sounds fun! It was for our friend, Graycie in this extended-sentence entry (which is perfectly fine by me):

Fearing the worst, I was part of the faculty keep-them-from-fighting/escaping team during the very first pep rally in our new gym which meant that for the first time all 2,000 teenagers would be in a confined space being mightily pumped up by loud music, louder cheering, scantily-clad cheerleaders, popular sports dudes and a very loud microphone. I was wrong; they cheered and yelled and danced in the bleachers and sang and hollered for the teams and the cheerleaders weren’t raunchy and it was just: So. Much. Fun.

Jody was thinking of chickens this week. That’s right — chickens.

So … our school wide topic is ‘Things with Wings’ which brings me to having made endless phone calls (which led to other possible leads and yet more phone calls) in hope of finding some fertilized chicken eggs to hatch in class. I have the incubator, not eggs yet. Teaching – always taking me on a weird tangent or three throughout the week!

If you missed the opportunity, be sure to go to The Reflective Teacher next week and add your thoughts. We’d love to read (and hear!) you.

Peace (in connections),
Kevin

What Students Say

The folks over at the Digital Ethnography site (who do some fascinating work) created this video about what college students are really saying and experiencing in their lives in this digital age. They used a Google Docs to have more than 200 students edit a document and create surveys of each other.

Interesting.

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Peace (with information),
Kevin

Your Day/Week in a Sentence

Since my good friend, The Reflective Teacher, is taking a break this week from his wonderful Boil Your Day Down Into One Sentence feature, I told him I would be glad to host this week’s edition.

So, if you want to participate, use the comment feature here on this post, write and submit your sentence  (and even better, write your sentence and also provide me with a podcast version — you can even email me the audio file at dogtrax(at)gmail(dot)com and I will host it for you), and I will collate it all before the end of the weekend.

Peace (in community),
Kevin

Way to Go, Edublogs!

James Farmer sent out an email this morning, proudly announcing that the Edublogs network now has 100,000 edublogs. That is an incredible number, I think, and I hope that more and more teachers are finding their way to free Edublogs and its network (did mention it is free?).

I also noticed a link there, explaining 10 ways to use Edublogs in the classroom:

1. Post materials and resources

The web is a fantastic tool when it comes to distributing resources – all you have to do on your edublog is upload, or copy and paste, your materials to your blog and they’ll be instantly accessible by your student from school and from home. What’s more, you can easily manage who gets to access them through password and plugin safety measures.

2. Host online discussions

If you’ve ever struggled to create an online discussion space – you’re going to love what edublogs will do for you. Students can simply respond to blog posts and discuss topics you’ve set them without the added complexity of using a bulletin board – commentators can sign up to receive emails when their comments are replied to and you can easily manage and edit all responses through your blog’s administrative panel.

3. Create a class publication

Do you remember the good old days of class newspapers? Well, they just got a lot easier with your edublog – you can add students as contributors, authors and even editors in order to produce a custom designed, finely tuned and engaging collaborative online publication by your class.

4. Replace your newsletter

Always enjoyed photocopying and stapling pages and pages of newsletters on a Friday afternoon? Though not! It’s ridiculously simple to post class information, news, events and more on your edublog

5. Get your students blogging

It’s all very good sending your students off to blog sites, or even creating them for them, but you need to operate as a hub for their work and a place where they can easily visit each others blogs from. Your edublog can be used to glue together your students blogs, and besides which, if you’re asking your students to blog… you should certainly be doing it yourself.

6. Share your lesson plans

We all love planning and admin, right? Well, using an edublog can turn planning and reflection on classes into a genuinely productive – and even collaborative – experience. Sharing your plans, your reflections, your ideas and your fears with other educators both at your school and around the world using an edublog is a great way to develop as a teacher, and a brilliant use of a blog.

7. Integrate multimedia of all descriptions

With a couple of clicks you can embed online video, multimedia presentations, slideshows and more into your edublog and mix it up with your text and static resources. No cds required, no coding necessary – just select the video, podcasts or slidecast you’d like to use and whack it in your blog to illustrate, engage and improve your teaching toolbox.

8. Organise, organise, organise

You don’t only have to use your edublog as a pedagogue… you can equally easily use the tools to organise everything from sports teams in your school, to rehearsals for the upcoming production. You can set up as many edublogs as you like, so don’t be afraid to use a dedicated one for a dedicated event – your can even use it as a record to look back on down the line.

9. Get feedback

There’s nothing that says you can’t allow anonymous commenting on a blog (although you’re also entirely within your rights to put all comments through moderation!) but why not think about using a blog as a place for students – and even parents, to air issues, leave feedback or generally tell you how great you are.

10. Create a fully functional website

One of the great things about edublogs are that they are much, much more than just blogging tools. In fact, you can use your edublog to create a multi-layered, in-depth, multimedia rich website – that hardly looks like a blog at all. So, if you’d rather create a set of static content, archive of important information or even index for your library – you can bend an edublog to suit your needs.

Peace (with edublogs),
Kevin