Bud the Teacher

        I don’t
know if I’ve just entered the blogging community at the right time or what, but
I sure am seeing lots of convergence between my ideas and what I’m reading
right now. Tom Hoffman is talking about a
school-wide blogging system – and that’s what I am looking for. Unfortunately, he says such a system really
isn’t in place – and might not be for quite some time.
        That’s a
real bummer, because I was hoping to find just such a system when I began this
little odyssey of mine. What I’ve found is slightly different.   
        The tools
are out there – those for creating easy, ad-free blogs, that is – as are free
content enhancement tools (sites like Furl
for storing and showing reading, Flickr for photos), but
I don’t know if there are tools that exist that are a total package – instead
of the piecemeal system that one could create if one wants to (and I do, which
is why I am here).   
        I don’t want
blogging to become an exercise in technology training. That’s why I was excited when I realized that
I didn’t need any HTML background to get a blog up and running. I don’t have any experience coding, and I
don’t have the time to learn right now – my job is to teach language arts, not
computers. Even though my students need those skills, my primary interest is in helping students work with information.  But if my students have to
take a large percentage of their blogging time to find ways to shoehorn these
various content management tools together, is that useful or will that be a
hurdle?  Or a roadblock?  (The optimist in me screams "Opportunity!" but he’s being beaten down today by reminders of past classroom failure.)
        I think
about students that don’t have computers at home, and don’t have hours upon
hours of time to devote to learning how they work. They need to be blogging, not setting up a blog (two very different
skills, I realize, thanks to Will’s gentle reminder).    

        I mentioned that I spent the weekend at a writing retreat.  At the retreat, a couple of my colleagues were curious about blogs and blogging, so I sent them here to take a look around.  I also mentioned that they could get up and blogging very easily by hitting sites like Blogger or Blog-City or LiveJournal.  I should have mentioned sites like this.  But I didn’t. 
        "Go to my blog," I told one colleague, "And I’ll post the links there for you." 
        So, Stan, there you are. 
       Now, I could have sent these links to Stan in an e-mail, but then I couldn’t have told you about the neat-o idea that Stan has (Only one of many neat-o ideas I’ve heard from the guy, which might be why he’s the co-director of the CSUWP.).  Stan is Stan McReynolds,  media specialist at Lincoln Junior High School in Fort Collins, Colorado.  He’s got some students traveling to Europe later this year.  He’s also got some iTalk microphones.  Stan put the two together and is now going to have his students record audio snippets of their trip on their iPods. 
        When he told me about his idea, I suggested that he should have the students blog from Europe to share their experiences as well as some of the audio they collect.  We talked, too about soundseeing tours, popularized by Adam Curry, and how his junior high students could record a tour or two, if they wished.  Flickr, the photo site that I am still experimenting with also came up.    These students, from an Internet cafe, can very quickly and easily update their families and other interested folks as they have their adventure.  Pretty cool travel journal, huh?

        I did a little recording of my own on the retreat.  Do you think there’s an audience for teachers reading their own written work?  That seems like a good educational podcast application if you ask me. 

        I spent my weekend with some of the fine folks from the Colorado State University Writing Project, affectionately known as the CSUWP.  We went up into the mountains on a writing retreat to enjoy some time together spent socializing and writing.  I took the opportunity to begin drafting  some of my thoughts about a blogging policy for my school district.  I also took some time to do some personal writing which had absolutely nothing to do with teaching.  That was a nice break.
        I also managed to develop a full blown cold.  Yuck.  Thankfully, I have Monday off so that I can recover and dig into some of the thinking that I read just before the weekend.