Bud the Teacher

This shouldn’t scare me.  But it does. 

    Today, Discovery launched successfully.  Here’s wishing all aboard a safe adventure.

    Over the weekend, I read about a site that I think is an interesting tool for looking at the big news of the web world.  Ten by Ten is worth a look if you’re interested in news and language and pictures.  The site scans the web every hour, compiling one hundred pictures and words that are big in the news.   I think I’ll be sharing it with my students when I begin my journalism course in the fall.
    While I don’t think the site is as useful as it will be (they’re only scanning three news sources right now), I suspect by the fall it will be a fairly useful visual peek at the news.

    I’m back from my vacation — a week of technology free days.  Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful. 
    I returned to an e-mail from a colleague in Florida looking to experiment with some technology.  As I was talking to him and sharing some of what I’ve done with technology, I realized that it’s time for me to learn more.   He wants to connect his classroom to another one and to incorporate blogs into his classroom teaching to some degree.  I showed him two different web applications that I’ve used before.   As we talked, I realized that my ideas about classroom technology and how it should be reasonably easy to use weren’t reflected in my explanations to him.  I was showing him one tool for one job and another tool for the second.  Why use multiple tools when one will do the job of both?  I think they’re out there.  Maybe. 
    I think I need to learn how to install and use Wordpress and/or Moodle. 
    Soon.
    Seems to me that I’m looking for a content management system that integrates blogs and discussion boards, is easy to use, and is highly customizable.   I think, too, that my own professional developemtn requires that I learn more about these tools. 
    I know that many of you use these tools, and that you’re quite adept at working with them.  Some of you have given me the opportunity to play around with them (Thanks, John!).  Perhaps you have extensive knowledge and experience with coding and servers and whatnot.  You probably even know what PHP stands for. 
    I don’t.  Yet. 
    But I hope to.  Please be patient as I share what I discover.  And as I ask questions.  Lots of them. 
    Am I a geek yet?

    I’ve been keeping quiet mostly lately, as has much of the edublogosphere, what with summer and breaks and vacations and other projects taking up lots of time.  I thought I would be staying quiet, too, as I didn’t have too much to say.  But then I caught David Warlick’s most recent podcast, and I mostly want to say "right on!"

   His podcast concludes with a cautionary word about how blogging and podcasting have become buzzworthy, perhaps the "next big thing" in terms of education and technology.  That’s scary, he says, because the "next big things" often don’t change much about education as they fade into the sunset to sit alongside past edufads.  Todd Oppenheimer’s book focuses on the fads — not on the good stuff of technology in the classroom.

   I’m headed off for a computer-free week in the Four Corners Area.  We leave tomorrow.  When I return, it will be time to get serious about planning my journalism class as well as a writing course that I’ve taught before but want to modify (It seems like the more I learn, the less I feel comfortable with my teaching.  Is that just me?).

   I hope to use blogging quite heavily in some of my courses (and I’m even finding ways to get others in my school on board), and I’ll be encouraging many of my students to get into podcasting on their own.  Might even podcast a few classroom conversations. 

  I’m glad to have David’s reminder to stew over for the next week.  We’ve all got to be sure that the technologies that we’re bringing into our classrooms are there not because they’re cool or new or hip or whatever, but because they’re making our teaching and our students’ learning better; tech needs to be engaging students (and their teachers) in new and exciting ways. 
   Enough lecturing.  I’m on vacation, doggonit.

    Anne points to a really interesting collection of stuff on wikis on college campuses.  Follow her links for some interesting reads about colleges and wikis.

    I don’t have a lot of sports success stories.  That’s just not my bag.  But here’s one:

•   This morning, on the number eight par three at Ute Creek Golf Course, I shot a hole-in-one.

    That’s it.  That’s the story.  Pretty cool, huh?

Will’s also talking about the AP article.  So’s John.

ok.com
    I read a story in my local paper Sunday morning that gave me pause.  By noon, though, I’d forgotten about it — until Dave Winer linked
to the same story.  The story is about blogging and young people, and
how what they say as a teen can come back to haunt them later.  A good
reminder, actually, but that’s not what caught my eye.  The bolded red
text below did:

"I would bet that in the 2016 election,
somebody’s Facebook entry will come back to bite them," Steve Jones,
head of the communications department at the University of Illinois at
Chicago, says, referring to thefacebook.com, a networking site for
college students and alumni that is something of a cross between a
yearbook and a blog.

More traditional blog
sites — which allow easy creation of a Web site with text, photos and
often music — include Xanga, LiveJournal and MySpace. And they’ve
gotten more popular in recent years, especially among the younger set.

    In my paper’s version of the story, the section on Facebook didn’t appear, which made the adjective "traditional" seem really weird.
    Since when were blogs traditional?  When will they become so?

Today’s podcast is a short request for help in sustaining an online writing podcast.  That’s pretty much it.  I’m looking forward to hearing your ideas and suggestions.