Bud the Teacher

    I’m tickled to be invited to spend some time with the gang at Teachersteachingteachers.org tomorrow night.  Join in on the webcast via Skype Wednesday, 9pm EST.  Here’s what we/they/you will be tackling:

When setting up group blogs or wikis in schools, one of the first set of questions has to do with the focus of the blog or wiki.

• Is the site about the content of a particular course which a new group of students joins each semester?
• Or is the blog/wiki for the particular group of students in a class, and therefore it closes at the end of a class?

Other questions quickly follow:

• Is the blog/wiki going to be public or private? Will readers be
  limited to those who we register or will registration be open? Who will
  have permission to write responses or new posts to the blog/wiki? Will
  there be a review process before something gets posted?
• Would it be best if we could give students their own blogs/wikis, and aggregate these into one class-wide or school-wide blog?
• Or is there something more useful about having a group class-wide
  blog/wiki? How can we set up blogs/wikis that have multiple classes and
  schools using them, yet make it possible for individual students and
  classes to see their work separately?

By now some of us have tried any number of these possibilities.
Let’s get together and talk about what has gone well and what hasn’t in
designing blogs and wikis for our classrooms and schools. Let’s tell
our stories with an eye to the future of what we might do next year.

    Teachersteachingteachers.org is a project out of the Worldbridges Webcast Academy, which means it’ll be live and exciting.  I’m looking forward to the conversation.  I hope you’ll join us.

    What happens when your game is more than a game?  How about Othello, World of Warcraft style?  One of my students produced this video as his final project for my Shakespeare course this year.  He chose to involve his family in the project (they help with the voice work) and to shoot the abridged performance via a network of computers in his home. 

    How cool is this?

     If it’s the case that O’Reilly owns the name "Web 2.0," and it seems that they just might, then what shall we call this strange network of people and tools? 
    And how much are we going to owe the O’Reilly people for infringement if we’ve been misusing the term?
    Let’s have some fun with this one — what’s your cute and/or clever name for the sphere of tools and people and network-ability that is formerly known as "Web 2.0"?
    (Thanks to Dave Winer for the tip.)

    Here’s a good question, and some good conversation, particularly as graduation looms:

So, as high schools across America struggle to meet Annual Yearly
Progress in graduation rates, I wonder if we need to reconsider how we
approach credits. If a student shows up every day, and on the work he
or she turns in demonstrates basic understanding, can we really deny
that individual credit?

    Read the rest of Mr. McNamar’s post and weigh in.  Perhaps it’s just the end of year blues, but I’m a bit divided on this one right now.  It used to seem so much clearer.

Momentum is a funny thing. Once you lose it, it’s hard to get rolling again.

We will celebrate the graduation of 28 seniors on
Friday. That’s always a special time,
but the hecticness of the week preceeding graduation always seems to take over
just about ever other aspect of life. 

  Thanks to those of you who’ve posted
suggestions about how you do your daily reading and writing school-wide. I was never looking for a “program,” as I
think nothing sucks the goodness out of reading like Accelerated Reader and its
derivatives. But I do see lots of good
ideas buried in the comments – as I find time over the next week, I’ll return
to those and comment on the good, bad and ugly of what I see.

 Speaking of
ugly, I am reminded of my statement that we should be publishing the failures
as well as the success stories of working with these technologies in
schools. I owe you a bit of a failure
story, as my blogging project with my speech class didn’t work quite as I had
hoped – although I do see some small successes buried in the not-so-super
results. We learned a great deal this
quarter. Now I’ve got to make sure I record what we learned so that I don’t
forget the lessons over the summer.

 But first,
graduation.

    I have learned that, thanks to a grant, I will be attending the Colorado TIE Conference in Copper Mountain in June.  Karl and Todd both suggested a blogger meet-up at the conference.  Sounded like a great idea to me. 
    If you’re going to be at TIE, and would like to have a meetup, please leave a comment.  If you’re wise to the ways of TIE and can suggest the best place and time for such a meetup, please share that, too.

    We’re looking at how we do things at my school right now, for a bunch of reasons.  For one thing, it’s always a good thing to be looking at how you operate to make sure that you’re doing the best that you can.  For another, we’ve got some concerns about how our students perform in some situations.  Yes, test scores are one of those areas, but, more importantly, we’re concerned about whether or not we’re meeting our students’ needs and preparing them for the world after high school.
    We’re an alternative public high school, which means lots of things to lots of people.  (If you’ve got a take on what "alternative" means, please share your perspective in the comments.)  But I’m beginning to believe that, too often, we focus on the alternative in our name, and not the "school."  Thankfully, I believe that my colleagues agree and we’re making some changed to improve achievement. 

    My personal favorite is that we’re going to institute some sort of SSR (sustained silent reading) and SSW (sustained silent writing) into most every morning.  I think such a start will go along way towards creating the kind of academic community that I’d like to see fostered here at my school.

    We’re still in the planning stages, though, and I’m curious to get some information from you.  If you have either sustained reading or sustained writing programs, how do you conduct them?  What secrets to success have you found?  What problems should we look out for?

    Thanks in advance for your thoughts.

    About a month ago, I pretty much quit blogging.  I needed to take a deep breath and do a self-check.  I’m glad that I did. 
    Right about the time I published my last podcast, a post I made a while back received some extra local attention.  The post, along with some commentary about how my school district spends its money,  was featured in a letter to the editor that ran in my local newspaper last Friday. 
    All that attention made me nervous and had me reconsidering being a teacher who writes openly about his school and work — good, bad and ugly.  Quite honestly, it IS easier to keep  my head down and my mouth shut.  But is it necessarily better for anyone that I do so?  I don’t believe that it is.
    While I never wrote anything that I regret, and I still believe that openness is a good way to go, I think I was right to confirm that my administrators supported how I conduct myself both in the classroom and via the blog — and that I’m successfully and appropriately navigating the grey spaces of blogging responsibly about education and my work.   
    After the cold sweats and a few days off, I’m ready to play again. 
   

    The gang at Worldbridges will be celebrating their one-year anniversary of live webcasting this weekend with a slew of events.  If you can, stop by and say hello and congratulate them on their first year of providing help to teachers seeking to meaningfully integrate technology into their instruction.

   Jeff and Dave — thanks for a great year of reflection and conversation.  I’m looking forward to year two.

I am very pleased to present to you the first in a series of short, educational "filmstrips" produced by the staff of OldeSchoolNews.com.  We’re calling them "Awareness Films."  The first, produced by Zach, is called "Infection & You."  Enjoy.