I’ve been at district inservices and am feeling lucky that our Staff development people are so skilled. However, skilled or not, I’m a bit overwhelmed as I walk into so many curriculums that are new to me. Part of the overwhelmed feeling comes from seeing so little space for children’s voice and choice within these mandated, packaged programs. Every moment of the day is involved in preselected activities. No chance to choose their own books or discuss what interested them; there’s only time for what the publishers say they should be discussing to ensure they develop the six comprehension strategies and 500 skills assigned to grade five).
In any case, student blogs are feeling all the more essential to me, and all the more out of reach. I’m a strong proponent of Anything worth doing, is worth doing poorly (rather than not at all). So this waiting until I have it all figured out, all presented to district admin, and all approved, is frustrating. I’d so much rather be working on that than figuring out how to use the 18 different manuals and worksheet books that go with the new language arts series.
I’m wishing for an in-between solution. I want a secure way to correspond with my students, hear their thoughts and ideas. I don’t want to be slogging around notebooks and hand writing responses. I don’t want them to need to make it perfectly edited because there is an outside audience. I do want a real reason for them to be writing, forming their ideas, expressing their thoughts. I think that at least initially, getting to know the new teacher would be motivation enough.
Email would be a good solution if students had accounts, but in our district, they do not.
One option might be Moodle. They have a large web site with lots of information, but none of it makes clear if it would work well for this and if I truly could get it to work on my .Mac space or my TIES web space (TIES is my ISP). I contacted the TIES helpfulness with the info from Moodle, but TIES has not yet replied, and I’m not sure they will. In any case, this fall is NOT a good time for me to dive into my first SQL experiences.
I could use Nicenet, but they could reach each other’s posts, which might get in the way of students speaking their minds. I seem to remember we could send private notes within Nicenet. I’ll check that out.
In the mean time, I’d love to hear of other ways to fill this gap. Please share them with me.
Clarence Fisher over at Remote Access is gearing up for his new year and pushing himself to pursue new goals, one of which involves getting started with student blogging right from the start of the year. I was interest to see he is in the process of deciding whether to use Blogger, Blogmeister or Edublogs.org; I am trying to make that very decision. I finally was able to turn on my classroom computer, a Mac cube. I discovered it is running OS 9.2. I’m hoping that alone doesn’t limit my choices. I am eager to read what Clarence chooses.
As far as I can tell, no one was blogging with students at the elementary level in my district last year, so there is no precedent for me to follow. I want to do this right so that blogging can flourish and enrich the curriculum. My fear is that I won’t present it well enough, or parents will be too worried or a bad comment will cause the district to possibly ban all blogging. Not sure I feel worthy of this charge.
As mentioned before, I plan to start with a class blog, but I don’t know if I get to start it day one. I discovered all the classrooms have a T.V. with a VCR and a DVD player attached to the wall. The classroom computer has the driver to run a device that should let me connect the Mac to the TV, which would be great for getting the class blog started. I’ve added questions about that to the long list of questions I have for our school media specialist when I meet her.
I tried to contact Ms. Sanborn, a grade 5 teacher at Willowdale Elementary because she has just the type of blog I am hoping to create. Unfortunately, the email address on her site did not work. Just as at the start of this very blog, I feel in the need of mentors.
I hope that later in the year, students will have their own blogs. I am chaffing at the bit to start them, but I am too new to this curriculum and this team to dive in with that right off the bat. As mentioned above, I need to do this right.
Finally sort of settled despite the mounds of unpacked boxes. We have a broadband connection and access to a computer, so naturally my thoughts are turning to blogging.
In the forefront is whether or not I will be able to blog with my students this year. I’ve had tantalizing invitations from teachers in Canada, Malaysia and Singapore to connect into their student blogging projects. I want to leap in and say, “Yes!” to all of them, but first I need to find out what this district’s policy is on student blogs– and I need to figure out how to ask in a way that doesn’t create roadblocks.
I also need to find out much more about my team’s curriculum. From what my new team mate sent to me via e-mail, my almost entire day is spent teaming, and none of the groups are the same kids. That means my math group is a different collection of kids from my language arts group, and then the science group is probably in home rooms. Possibly I can tie it in with one of the departmentalized classes I will be teaching if there is access to the computer lab during that time slot. With the NCLB testing now being computerized, I’ve heard that there will be less access to the labs this year.
At this point, since I hate the thought of no blogging at all, and realistically individual student blogs probably couldn’t take place until much later in the year, I may try to have a daily class blog much like Ms. Sanborn’s class blog at Willowdale Elementary. The purposes would include the following
- to introduce the students (and the building?) to blogging
- to build in a reflective component into each day
- to provide timely information to families
- to help us to document our year together
- to inform absent students about what they missed
I need to start thinking about what this would entail. I’d love to hear words of advice from other bloggers who’ve done this type of blogging with elementary students. I dearly wish I could buy a digital camera for class use with the blog. Maybe someday my money from Malaysia will finally arrive so I can do that!
Just a quick note to explain a further absence.
I’m back in the USA, but the computer a friend was going to lend me died.
More distressing, the Malaysian government and my bank in Malaysia are still trying to figure out where all my savings went, since the government says they wired it into my bank account and the bank says they never saw it. Until THAT is resolved, I won’t be buying a new computer or a new anything else, for that matter.
Therefore, this blog will remain inactive for a while longer. I’m hoping for a speedy and positive resolution to all the aforementioned problems.
So many ideas of what I want to blog, such as what the students had to say about blogging in their final posts, suggestions for next year, connections we are making with other teachers for blogging projects next year, etc.
However, I’m packing for my move to the other side of the planet, and have guests visiting for the next two weeks. We are taking them to Bali and Cambodia. When they leave, I have four days to pack out and leave, so this blog is probably off line until early July, unless I get stalled at an airport with free internet on my 34 hour journey.
After half a month of periodic putzing, I have finally figured out the correct way to export someone’s shared subscriptions from Bloglines and import them into my desktop RSS reader.
The quest began when I wanted to grab Will Richard’s Blogline of Edublog subscriptions. I was having fun exploring them through Will’s shared Blogline, but since it wasn’t my Blogline, I couldn’t easily tell what I had and had not read.
The first problem arose when I clicked the Export Subscriptions at the end of the list of blogs. A bunch of source code appeared in the right frame on the screen. It was impressive to look at, and with my limited HTML coding background I could read it, see the subscription in the code, but I couldn’t get it into my RSS reader.
I eventually figured I needed to use my browser’s Save Page command to grab the file. However, I couldn’t tell which file format to use, Web Page Complete, Web Page HTML file only, or text file. It began to feel like those tedious permutations problems from high school. “If there are three possible saving formats and four possible suffixes to end them with, how many different files is it possible to save? Will any of them actually be readable by NetNewsWire Lite?”
I tried lots of combinations of save options and suffixes, but never managed to find one that didn’t produce a parse error having to do with the XML flat file. Go figure.
Today I finally got it right. I discovered that you save the subscriptions as Web Page Complete. That downloads a folder containing the following three objects:
- public_display.xml
- a folder titled public_subs_data
- public_subs.html
Next from inside my RSS reader, I imported the public_display.xml file. That did the trick. However, I was surprised to discover that not all of the blogs listed on Will’s Blogline were in the list of imported subscriptions. A bit of list comparing lead me to understand that the RSS reader was smart enough to not re-import blogs to which I already subscribed. Very handy.
Soon I’ll be switching from my school laptop to a laptop generously loaned to me by a friend until I can get back to the US and buy a computer of my own. I appreciate how easy it is to export my RSS subscriptions from NetNewsWire and import them onto a different machine. Now that I have this blog-reading habit, I don’t want to go without my daily blogfix.
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