It is March 29, 2012, and I'm revisiting my blog from years ago that I have let lapse. I am so glad it has not disappeared. It is like a trip down memory lane. Even if no one else ever reads it, I have captured events and memories here that are important to me.
Tomorrow, I am to deliver a workshop on blogging.
I really have only done a blog authored by me and not a class blog. However, I want to introduce participants tomorrow to different options for blogging.
I have another blog on Posterous.com - carolteach4.posterous.com
That blog was an experiment I started last fall after attending a workshop with Meg Wilson. Posterous blogging is also available as an app on the iPad. I really liked the possibilities of opening the blog to student posts through emailing the blog. However, posterous.com has been purchased by Twitter, and many are uncertain as to its availability in the future.
I pray the workshop goes well tomorrow. I have so much to share, but I don't want to overwhelm.

By the way, this blogging interface looks different from my current blog interface. I see a note in the upper corner about trying the updated Blogger interface. Perhaps I'll try it live tomorrow.
Also, I got another message from Google that there is to be still another makeover. I hope I like the changes.

I recently participated in a webinar hosted by EdTech. Tim Chase presented on the topic "XTreme Teamwork - Communication and Collaboration in Your Classroom and Mine."
He reviewed a number of Web 2.0 collaborative tools - Blogger was one of them. He said that the "next blog" feature of Blogger could be troublesome for blog sites set up for students. He offered directions on how to remove the "next blog". Here is the link to this post on his blog:

http://blog.edtech2020.com/2008/01/removing-next-blog-element-in-blogger.html


I will see if I can follow the directions and remove the "next blog" from this older blog of mine.

Well, I pasted the .html, and it worked. Unfortunately, what I recorded is not audible. I must have done something wrong. Back to the drawing board.

(***NewNote - The audio DOES work; it just takes a few seconds for it to load and play. ) If you click on the link in the upper right hand corner of the voice thread window, it will take you to the "voice threads" site where you can sign in and experiment for yourselves. This would be a nice tool to use to share pictures with family all over the country. I chose to make my voicethread public so everyone could view it on my blog. However, you have the option of keeping it private, so only invited members can see what you have posted and add comments of their own.

What works amazingly well is the zoom feature! If you click into the picture, it will zoom in, and you can mouse around and look at the exquisite detail. When you click again, the picture zooms back out.

I have been experimenting with another web2.0 application called "voicethread." Thayer and Brian attended a workshop on it at the CECA conference, and Thayer brought his classes in this morning to try and get them signed up for his blog and this application. Unfortunately, we ran into a glitch in trying to get the kids set up with a gmail address which Thayer would have access to. (He made sure to get parental permission before having the kids attempt this.) Anyway, for some reason, only the first kids that set up the gmail account had any success. Something wrote to the link to set up the account, and gmail would not allow any new users to sign up. You know what they say about "the best laid plans of mice and men gang aft agley."

I am going to paste a link to the voicethread I set up into my blog. It's .html all set up on the site. I don't embed .html very often, so I'm not sure this will work.
(***It did work, but I have embedded a smaller version that the previous one. I also made it public, so no one has to sign in to view the voice thread.)

I got an email response from Alice Barr, an educator at University of Southern Maine who taught a class this summer on Web 2.0 tools. I had happened upon a wiki she set up for her class and found it most interesting. I have no idea how I got there because I was not using Google Notebook to track my cyberjourneys at the time. Anyway, she was very pleased I'd contacted her, and she sent me to this site for more professional development opportunities.

http://k12onlineconference.org/

From this link, I found out about the Fireside Chat with David Warlick, which was part of an Elluminate Live online conference. I also downloaded a movie made by Clarence Fisher, a Canadian educator, who is trying to educate us about the changing face of the classroom and where it needs to go if we are to prepare our kids to function in a global economy.

Talk about establishing connections. This is what it is all about. The only drawback is finding the time. I'm up way too late again this evening.

I also need to figure out how some of what I'm learning can be incorporated into our school procedures.

Well, it's Sunday night, and Monday morning will be here all too soon.
I just read that tomorrow, October 15, is Blog Action Day, and the theme is "environment."
We have dedicated recycling bins in all of our classrooms, but as far as I know, everything is being thrown into the general waste stream. I've been taking home my plastic #1 and #2 containers and recycling them in my community. We all need to push for the recycling effort to start in earnest at Amity. Just think of all those newspapers being thrown away when they could be recycled.

On another note, David Warlick will be our keynote speaker on November 6, 2007 for our Professional Development Day. I hope he gets a lot of folks excited about using Web 2.0 collaborative tools with their students to enrich the kids interaction with the curriculum.

It is Thursday night. This has been a long week.

Today in school we had a two-hour assembly on the topic of preventing bullying.

The storyteller that Mrs. Gamble invited to speak with our students, Len Cabral, delivered two great presentations. Kids got to ask him questions after he told his stories. He was asked about when he knew he wanted to be a story teller, and he said it was an English teacher who inspired him. Then he went on to tell the students, "Learn as much as you can - About - as much as you can, because you'll never know when you'll need it." That is a good answer for students when they ask teachers, "Why do we have to study ......?"

After the assembly and the activities, students signed an anti-bullying pledge and received a "Stand Strong - Amity" bracelet.

It was a good day.

It is hard to believe that I last posted in July, and now we are starting our 4th week of the 2007-2008 school year.
I spent a lot of my summer-time hours researching other educators' blogs and websites and pondering on how we can bring more 21st Century Learning tools to our middle school. We are involved in a big campaign to infuse reading and writing literacy strategies into all disciplines in our curriculum. We are also looking at digital literacy. Kids spend so much time on the web connecting with others through reading, posting, writing in blogs and IM's, watching videos, uploading videos. We need to harness those energies, and help kids to use those vehicles of communication to increase their ability to communicate in a clear, logical, rich and ethical way.

Toby invited me to give Google Notebook a try. It is a tool available at all times no matter where you are or what computer you are on to take notes on whatever you are researching. I wish I had used a tool like this this summer when I was researching. I didn't always track where I'd been or take notes, so consequently, a lot of what I learned didn't cement in my brain.
What's neat about the notebook is you can share it with one or more colleagues who can comment on topics you've introduced and add topics. I'm anxious to get a pilot test going with a group of kids collaborating on a school project and see what they think of it.

I just found out that David Warlick is going to be speaking at our Staff Development Day on November 6, 2007. He's an expert on integrating Web 2.0 tools into the schools. Hopefully, he'll generate enthusiasm for many more teachers to use these tools with the kids and teach kids how to use them in an ethical manner. In case anyone would like to familiarize him or herself with Mr. Warlick's style, you can check out his blog at:

http://davidwarlick.com/2cents/