Classroom blogging

After-school meetings are usually the last thing on my mind following a long day in the classroom. This last meeting, however, left me encouraged to keep on keepin' on. Just the other day we had scheduled a "tech fair" at our school, which is probably simpler than it sounds. It was really four teachers who had attended the IL-TCE conference back in February presenting some of what they learned to the rest of the faculty. Myself and one other faculty member presented Blogs & Wikis... and received some very positive feedback.

I've been working with our district's tech department to look into school-wide blogging for next year, and the response from this tech fair told me that a good deal of teachers would be willing to try blogging and are actually excited about the idea. I think the key is to get teachers to believe that blogging will, if not revolutionize, then streamline their ability to get and give feedback from students and parents. It has certainly saved a lot of extra paper in my classroom; I carry my laptop home some nights and that's it.

With Spring Break over and the kids already talking Summer, it's been a busy and tiring two weeks. The feedback from our teachers on this presentation, though, has me reinvigorated. I'm excited about getting this set up for next year and anxious to see how each classroom teacher will take this idea of classroom blogging and make it uniquely their own.

(I think I'll go order David Warlick's book now.)

Just got blog-blocked...

I'm wondering how many other teachers/students out there have the problem of their district blocking web sites at the first sign of student mis-use. Last year we were able to use some YouTube videos to complement our lessons. This year they blocked it. I helped a Special Ed. teacher find a site that allowed students to "create their own superhero," which tied into a lesson she was doing in Language Arts. That site is blocked too. After attending the ICE conference in St. Charles, Illinois, in February I was introduced to Netvibes as a way of keeping track of blogs or podcasts that I might want to follow as a means of building a Personal Learning Community. This morning, I try to open my Netvibes page... I'll give you three guesses. You'll only need one.

I'm on the tech committee for our building and I'm a contributor to some of our district tech meetings, and we've even discussed the problem of blocking sites purely for the sake of keeping kids away. We came to the conclusion that instead of blocking everything, we should be educating the students on how to use the Internet appropriately. This is beginning to remind me of 2-3 weeks ago when China started blocking YouTube for the videos related to Tibet. There's great information out there, but if we just block it instead of exploring it as an educational opportunity, we're losing a great tool.

Perhaps my question should be this... are there districts that have come up with a good way of teaching their students appropriate uses of the technology? I'm finding that's not happening here, as far as I can tell from my Language Arts classroom in this little corner of the building, and instead we're opting for the quick fix.

This is a quick post, but I want to make sure to publish it before they start blocking my blog!