Blogging Bits – June

I reach a point where I have so many things I want to share that I need to do a dump of information. So once in a while I’ll be sharing blogging bits. Little things that cross my mind, that I’m thinking about or have seen or have been apart of to share with the community.

I’m pretty proud of this….and at the same time it freaks me out. This book Wired for Learning: An Educators Guide to Web 2.0 was just released and I was fortunate enough to be asked to write a chapter for it. So chapter 19 Planning for 21st Century Technologies is written by me. Crazy to think that I’m actually published in a book. I’m not a writer, I’ve never claimed to be one and I continue to read this post that I wrote when this blog turned one…what an adventure this has all been.

I’m not a writer I’m a composer and I wonder if I’ll ever be a writer. But in the mean time I continue to compose. You the community helped to write the chapter over 5 separate blog posts and a PDF that you can download. The chapter of course is a little more thought out but know that this was written by you…and for that I thank you.

Carol Jordan, an IB Science teacher who I worked with in Shanghai, has once again finished a year of blogging with IB students. The student group blog Chemical Paradigms is an amazing piece of student learning. She ended the year with having students reflect on their year of learning and blogging by replying to this post. Take some time to read what the students had to say about there learning journy and please share this with other teachers. It’s powerful words coming from students. My favorite quote:

To blog is not to simply relay facts, nor is it to blab personal
gossip. A blog is not someone’s personal diary of critiques and
cynicisms. It is not an encyclopedia of intangible knowledge. A blog is
a no-loitering zone. Now that it is clear what a blog is not, I will
tell you what it is. A good blog is an interesting discussion of a
complex topic. It is on the continuum somewhere between fact and
opinion.

I couldn’t have explained blogging better myself.

I wrote about the student e-portfolios that our first graders were working on. Yesterday parents came in to watch as the students talked about their learning journey this year. It was great to watch parents ask questions about the pictures and have the first graders pause the slide show and then talk about what they were learning at that point in the school year. It worked great and each student will take home their movie on a CD.

There has already been a lot of conversations from teachers about using e-portfolios next year from all grade levels. I have to admit that I’m excited as we continue to create systems at our school that will allow both students and teachers to easily use the tools they need when they need them. As this year comes to a close I’m already getting excited for some of the projects that I’ll be a part of next year.

We change education, one year at a time.