Yarn. Again.

    Thanks for those of you who made suggestions, both on and offline about how I should handle Saturday’s blogging workshop.
    Turns out, I ended up using the yarn again. What is it about yarn and blogs? 
     Let me explain. 
    After a quick introduction, I asked all of the participants to raise their hands if they had done something interesting in their classrooms in the last 30 days.  Not surprisingly, every hand went up.  I then asked someone to briefly tell us what they did.  After my volunteer went, I handed her the end of a skein of yarn and asked anyone who was interesting in learning more about what she had to say to raise their hands.  I then instructed the volunteer to hang on to one end of yarn and to toss the skein to someone with their hand up.   That new "volunteer" then shared, and we repeated the process, grabbing the yarn and tossing it along to others who were interested in what was going on in our respective classrooms. 
    It didn’t take long for us to notice two things (as I expected):
1.  Pretty much everybody in the room was doing something pretty darn interesting.
2.  We were all invested/interested in/curious to know more about each others’ classrooms.

    The reason for the yarn?  I wanted people to see the connections that they have to their colleagues — connections of interest, of investment, concern and curiosity.  The yarn was a tangled mess of connection that was a strong visual suggestion of the network that forms when teachers begin to blog and to share their work online.
    Participants wanted me to show then how to blog and podcast with their students — I rejected that idea.  The best only way to learn how to create learning networks with students is to create a personal learning network yourself.  Once that happens, let’s work together to create experiences for students.  (In fact, there was talk of doing some long-term training around technology, but that’s a story for later.)
    As we worked for the rest of the afternoon, reading about learning (good timing, Will!), creating blogs via Blogger and subscribing to each other via Bloglines, the yarn network was there, and we all felt gentle tugs as we typed or when we tried to cross the room to ask a question.  (Actually, I tripped over the network at one point, and just about hurt myself.)  At the end of the day, I asked every participant to share one goal that they had for their blog over the next several months.  Many said that they’d be blogging and reading blogs in their aggregator once a week for the next few months.  I thought that was a reasonable goal.
    It sounds hokey, but the heart of the matter is that, with blogs and feeds and the connections we’re making, we’re really connecting with other people (and their ideas and experiences) in ways that just weren’t as easy, or as possible, a few short years ago.  Adding pictures, video, and audio boost the connection.   
    That’s why the Read/Write Web is important, because of how it allows us to build relationships and share ideas and solve problems.  And that’s why we should be teaching (in/through) it.
    If you’d like to meet our new bloggers, head over to the CSUWP blog and check out the links to Active CSUWP Teacher Blogs.  Some are new — some have been blogging for a little while now.