Bud the Teacher

    Got principal approval today to run with the idea of an online school newspaper.  That site is, I think, going to be the basis for a community hyperlocal site.  Eventually.
   The principal ’s very supportive of what we do, and I’m grateful.  Had a great conversation with him about my plans.  As a bonus, I discovered that my principal’s son is a blogger.
    I knew I liked him.

    I’ve got eight students in my Journalism course.  They seem receptive to the idea that we can cover Longmont better than any other news source.  On Monday, they return with their first story ideas.  We spent today examining some hyperlocal sites out there that we might model ours after.  If we create our own, that is.  At first, I didn’t want to create a website — I wanted to use someone else’s.  But then I started fiddling around with some tools and realized how easy it can be.
    Of course, there are advantages to participating in larger community projects.  Could we submit original work to our site and to another one, though?  Could we still participate in sharing news with others in other venues?  Would there be copyright problems?   Does being a school change the rules at all? 
    Just thinking my way into the weekend.  If you know the answers, or have hunches, feel free to share them.

    Megan Freeman was one of the teachers in this summer’s CSUWP group.  She’s become a blogger since then, posting regularly to her poetry blog.  Yesterday, she posted this poem on the CSUWP group blog.  It made my day.  Heck, probably my week.  Read and enjoy.  I think this one should probably be a podcast.

Infection

I am going to breathe verbs
all over your chair
and pour beakers of adjectives
on all the desktops.

I am going to rub the pencil sharpener
with nouns no paper can resist
and hang contagious phrases from the ceiling.
 
Your notebooks will run a fever
and your pens will bleed dry
in an effort to keep up with your
Brilliant Ideas. 

Don’t bother washing your hands.

Antibiotics and tincture of echinacea
will only encourage me while
lowering your resistance.

This epidemic is airborne
spit-borne
piss-and-vinegar borne
and it doesn’t matter
what kind of immunity
you’ve built up
over years and years of
swimming around in
educational Petri dishes

because we are quarantined
and this condition is permanent
and the date to drop the class
was yesterday.

    It’s been a while since a podcast.  Today’s offering is a little bit about Moodle, a little bit more about hyperjournalism in my classroom, and a thank you to David Warlick for something that I’m not even sure he meant to do.  Oh — and my daughter has a brief speaking part.  Enjoy.
       The links I promised in the podcast:

• Moodle
• YourHub.com
• Mr. Sizer’s blog
• David Warlick’s Connect Learning (The particular episode I’m talking about is here.  For some reason, my iPodder only caught it a few days ago, but it was published in late July.)

    I don’t know yet if I like Doug’s model for teaching transparently, but I like the philosophy.  I just don’t know if publishing my lesson plans is a useful way to be transparent.  (His handouts section is a winner, though.)
    Steve Burt also mentions transparency (and administrative nervousness about it) in a recent Ed Tech Insider post.  Lots of good questions about podcasting and its future in the classroom.  Anybody got answers yet?

    Ask and ye shall receive:

A reader from Longmont asked whether there’s an RSS feed for my
blog. Frankly, I didn’t know. Now there is, thanks to the question from
Bud Hunt. Thank you Bud.

There’s a link at the bottom of the page now that says add this blog
to your RSS reader. Hope others find this helpful. We’ll do the same
for all blogs.

    Thanks, Mr. Temple.

    Today was the first official day back at school for me.  We had some major renovation work done over the summer, and there was a possibility that we might not be ready in time for the school year to start (students report on Wednesday). 
    Unfortunately, it looks like we both won’t be ready, and we won’t be delaying the start of the school year.  There’s nothing I like more than being unprepared AND required to move forward anyway.  It was nice, though, to enter my own classroom for the first time.  (One of the big additions in this renovation was a classroom for me.)  Pretty cool.
    One of the courses that I’ll be team teaching this quarter is a literature and composition course.  We’ll be studying literature of and from the Vietnam War. (If you have suggestions for must reads, please share them.)  I’ve convinced my partner teacher to use Moodle for the course.  We were going to have students respond to some prompts on a class blog — but a discussion board seems a more appropriate tool for that task.  We’ll still be using the blog for course news and other stuff.  I think.
    The solution I’m referencing in the title of this prompt is a potential one based on my limited experience with Moodle that seems to make a lot of sense . . . in theory.  First — the problem.
    I teach at an alternative high school for at-risk students.  (Yes — most if not all students fall into this category at one point in their lives — but we still use the label.)  The students frequently complete assignments but never turn them in.  I believe most of them when they say they worked on a piece of writing — but we have no proof to verify their stories and, more importantly, none of their writing to use to help them improve. 
    I think Moodle can solve this problem.  You Moodlers out there tell me if I’m right. 
    Suppose you’re a teacher and you put all of your large writing assignments into a Moodle course as prompts.  Then you require your students to work in Moodle to complete the assignment.  The assignment would be editable until the due date, the work is all saved to the server, and I’d have a record of every single time a student worked (or didn’t work) on a piece.
    Cool.  Big problem potentially solved.  Pretty simply, too. 
    Now on to the second problem referenced in the title of this post.  The mobile computer lab that we requested for our school was approved in June.  As of today, it’s still not ordered.  The district computer folks are so backed up with work (there are too few of them and far too much to go around) that I shouldn’t expect the lab until much later in the year.  Maybe by Christmas.
    We’ve got one lab in our school.  Twenty computers.  120 students.  And, thanks to the training that we did last year, more teachers want the lab to get their kids doing online or computer-based projects.  I want kids on computers twice a week.  Minimum. 
    So I don’t think I can push Moodle too much, because I don’t think I’ll get computer time — and many of my students don’t have access at home.  Problem.
    So much for clever ideas. 

    Today was move-in day for students living in the residence halls at my local university.  Thanks to a fender bender, I had the opportunity to take a long look at students and parents moving in.  Hit me hard — I was one of those students nine years ago.  It doesn’t seem that long ago –  until I say the "nine years" part.
    Since I started college, I’ve gotten my degree; produced, written and performed my way through a CD; met the right woman, gotten married, bought two houses (sold one), had a baby, and begun a career.  That’s a lot in nine years.  But it all began on that campus with one scary weekend.  Scary and exciting and wonderful and outstanding and all that and a whole bunch more.  All Much of what I did in my time in college got me to where I am today.   
    As I watched folks move about and get excited, I remembered a news story I read a couple of days ago. 
    Based on recent trends, odds are that at least one of those students won’t be alive at the end of the school year.  And that’s a lifetime of excitement and fear and hope and dreams that is far too important to lose.
    Be careful, everybody.  Teach people first, students and lessons second.

    Via TechLEARNing News:

Each teacher received a CD-ROM with all the essential information, including the "acceptable use policy" for city schools’ computers, a technology section that tells teachers how to set up an e-mail account and how to use voice mail, and a section that tells them how to use the online program to input student grades, among other information.

What else could and should be digital AND searchable?  Why isn’t it?

    I’ve just installed Blogger for Word, a plug-in that allows me to use Word as a text editor for any of my Blogger blogs. 
    It’s handy, useful and cool.  And free.  That passes all of my tests for new stuff.
    Thanks, Dave, for the link.