Bud the Teacher

    Need to talk to a parent about what their child is up to online?  Wired’s got a great starting point in this cheat sheet to Myspace.  It’s a sidebar to what looks like, at first glance, a well-reasoned look at all of the hubbub surrounding the site. 

    Had a great first day with other NWP teachers from other parts of the country.  We got right to work, though, in true Writing Project fashion — and I expect I’ll be quite tired by the end of the weekend. 
    Regular readers of this blog probably know that one of the major ideas behind the NWP is that the best teachers of writing are those that are writers themselves.  This teacher writing takes a number of forms, this blog being my primary writing environment.  Others write poetry, professional articles, keep journals, write fiction, etc.  But one end goal of writing is getting that work read, or published.  (I’ve been having some interesting conversations lately about whether or not publishing via blogs is really publishing.  What do you think?)
    Megan, one of the CSUWP’s group of pretty amazing teacher consultants, has put together a really handy resource to help folks who are looking for places to publish.  Here’s a link to her three-page spreadsheet of literary journals that accept either poetry, or fiction, or both. 
    What other handy "Where do I get published?" resources do you know about?

    I’m writing tonight from the Warwick Hotel in Denver, Colorado, where I am preparing to begin a three day National Writing Project event tomorrow.  We’ll be looking at information from other NWP sites and coding them to help get a fix on what’s going on around the country.  (At least, that’s how I understand the process right now — I’ll understand it better tomorrow.)  In the evenings in between work sessions, I’ll be planning a conference presentation on blogging and checking in with a teacher that I am working with on a pen pal project with our students.   
    Busy weekend, but it’s that good, "good things are happening in our classrooms, let’s share them" type of busy.  I’m really looking forward to it.  I hope I can record some audio and pass along our conversations.
    One note — we’ll probably be giving that conference presentation on blogging in a room without Internet access or computers.   We’re thinking that we might use sticky notes as a metaphor for blogging. 
    How many of you are conferencing in areas without reliable Internet access?

Nancy’s using this list as a writing prompt.  Good idea.

    Lots to pass along the grapevine.  Here, in no particular order, are all of the items that I can remember that I wanted to share, and share quickly:

• Chris is looking for the teachers that will help him to build a new school.  If you’re in the Philadelphia area, or you might like to be, you should consider a career shift.
• Jeff and Dave are going to be webcasting some wiki training in conjunction with their EducationBridges wiki textbook project.  If you’d like to learn how to wiki, might be good to stay tuned in to these guys. 
• Dave, by the way, is also at work on what the new media curriculum for teaching teachers might look like.  He wants your help, and he’s already got some pretty heavy hitters interested in the project.  Check out his proposal and the curriculum wiki.  (I’d have already signed up, but I’m hearing the voice, you know the one, telling me, "Your plate is full.  Your plate is full."  If I can silence that voice for long enough, I’ll be posting some ideas to the wiki.)
• Everyone has some interesting stories to tell.  Dean’s post (thanks to an assist by Clarence) gives some examples of ways to tell them that might get students to start thinking about their own lives and stories in different ways.  Then the storytelling can begin. 
• Adam at WikiSpaces is helping teachers to host wikis via their service. For free.  Without ads.   If you’re getting your feet wet, and need a place to experiment, give them a try. 

Doug, as usual, is exactly right:

I think that as a profession, and as a nation, we are being driven in
(at least) two directions simultaneously. It’s a conflict between
conformity and creativity; between accommodation and rigor; between
convergence and divergence; between authority and autonomy; between
performance and understanding; between doubt and trust. It’s making me
crazy, but I can’t quit because I sense that I’m sitting on top of a
huge pile of junk that’s almost ready to implode. I want to be here
when it happens.

Me, too.  The question for me lately, though, is where exactly should I be standing when the fireworks start?

    It turns out that Google Earth-Fever is contagious. 
    After the  success of yesterday’s explorations, my students in my science fiction class were suddenly very curious to know more about the software.  Lots of great questions — but the most common was simply, "Can you show me my house?"
    And I could, so I did.  Took up a little all of our time, but two by two students came up to my desk and took a look at whatever they wanted to see in the world.  Some went foreign — most wanted a close up look at their homes.  (I learned a great deal about where my students live — and the condition of their homes.  Priceless information that will never appear on a Scantron or in a student file.  Yeah — I know their addresses are all in there — but I’ve now seen all of their homes.  Pretty weird.)
    While I was taking students on a tour of our world, the other students were supposed to be reading a story that I assigned.  But they weren’t.  Some were discussing the events of the day, others talking about places they had traveled.  One of those days where conversation was good and important and had nothing to do with the content of my course.
    It was wonderful.  I hope every teacher has had a day or two like today.
    The best part of the day was when one student wanted to know if they had a Google Space.  He’s interested in astronomy, and is quite bright, although perhaps a little unfocused (he’d agree with that term).  I was so glad that I had a copy of Stellarium on my laptop so that I could show him that program. 
    If you don’t know Stellarium, it’s an Open Source astronomy program — pretty much your own personal planetarium.  I quickly loaded it up and blew his mind.  We looked at the stars and the planets.  We made time move forward weeks, years, and centuries at a time, and looked as the stars whizzed by.  We traveled to the other side of the world and saw the sky that we can’t see because the planet is in the way.  We saw the night sky as it will look in the year 9703.
    I’m pretty sure he’ll be downloading that program, and that he’ll look up at night with a bit of authority.  Maybe he’ll look down on the Earth someday, and I can see the reflection of his space ship as it heads off to places unknown.  I sure hope so.  Today was one hell of a day.  Dreams to reach and places to explore. 
    Measure that on a test.

Gmail is my all-time favorite e-mail program.  I love it.  I was surprised when I saw that they were adding chat directly into the application — and I still have concerns that chat in my e-mail might be problematic.
    But it really became a problem today when my school district’s filtering company blocked access to Gmail because it is now a "chat" application, and those are blocked.  That crippled me.  My school district’s mail application is nowhere near as useful, as versatile, or downright as user friendly as Gmail.  I have three different accounts that I use at school — one for listservs, one for collecting student work, and then my general account. 
    Fortunately, as soon as I requested that the site be unblocked, my request was granted.  But I still was crippled for a good chunk of the day.  Should I be upset about that — or happy that I was able to get the site unblocked?
    And why are schools so filter-happy?  We know they don’t solve anything.

    Okay, I know that Google Earth has been out for a while, and I got my geography fix even before that with NASA’s Worldwind, but I really figured that the tool was a novelty at best.
    Boy, how stupid I can be sometimes.
    I had the opportunity this afternoon to play with Google Earth with a few of my students today, and I am now convinced that it is a necessary utility on any school computer.  In fifteen minutes or so (okay –  maybe an hour — we did lose some time this afternoon), we scanned Mount St. Helens, took a peek at the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, looked in on one student’s home in Denmark, and checked out the beaches where the Allied troops landed during the invasion of Normandy in 1944.   Oh — we also took a peek at the bird’s eye view of our school.  A few minutes after my students left, a couple of staff members came in and we started all over again.
    Pretty much everyone said, "Wow."  A lot. 
    One student turned to me at the end of his study hall and asked if it was okay that we were doing what we were doing.  "I guess this is learning," he said.
    Yeah it is.  (This was the same bright young man who asked to take a look at Normandy, as he’s reading some Stephen Ambrose right now. 
    What a great tool.  Don’t you hate it when you miss the significance of something?  And aren’t you glad when you discover it, even if it’s late?  What did you miss the first time around?

Steve Lazar is back — and with a flurry of interesting posts about his thinking and work in graduate school.  Well worth an extended glance.