New Languages for Digital Natives

Yesterday I wrote about the students’ first comments on each others’ blogs. What I didn’t mention was that many of the comments were written following the conventions commonly used in chat rooms, text messages and instant messages, full of abbreviations and slang.

My first reaction was a desire to stamp it out. One of our […]

Answers from Experts

Will Richardson responded to my RSS reader woes and suggested I check out Bloglines. I’d visited it before when following links at his Weblogg-ed site but hadn’t spent time figuring out how it works. It is a great tool for teachers who need to track student blogs. What I like most about it is…

I […]

Comments on Comments

The students began commenting on each other’s blogs today, and it was a joyful experience.

They poured over them and our usually quiet blog session was suddenly punctuated with shouts of, “Hey! I’m reading your blog right now,” or “This is so cool!” Their comments spilled out into the pages.

We’d set the guidelines that […]

RSS Feed Frustrations

I’m struggling to find the best solution for reading and keeping track of student blog posts. What are other teachers using? Are they using an RSS reader? Which one?

I wrote earlier about my research and test runs of different RSS readers for Mac OS 10.3. I had settled on Ensemble, but then it quit […]

The Students Find Their Groove– and the teachers lose theirs

Friday was a day of intense blog activity. As is typical with any class, the longer an activity runs, the more spread out the students become in terms of project completion. We now have some students publishing their third post and some students who are not yet done with their first. They all want to […]

We’re Baaaack!

What bad timing! We invite two classrooms and 50 teachers to view and comment on our blogs, and then, at least from here in S.E. Asia, Blogger and Google were unreachable all weekend. Maybe our guests from other countries weren’t experiencing those problems. We can only hope…