Tech Ed-dy

The Holidays have left me with about four half thought out blog posts and I can’t seem to get myself into the right headspace to finish them off.  I think maybe I’m taking them too seriously, so instead I think it’s time for more of a stream of consciousness post.

I just finished reading Will Richardson’s heads up regarding his Educon 2.1 presentation (oh, how I wish I could go) entitled “What will classroom learning look like?”.  He has collected some great resources on this topic in a google notebook page and asks for the participants in his discussion to peruse them beforehand.  His actual presentation is going to be more of a facilitated group discussion.  What a great idea.  With google notebook it is easy to collect a series of clippings and links on any topic and publish them immediately.  Why aren’t we using this more in the classroom as a way to front load student knowledge before they come to class?

Will’s notebook page led me to a blog post by Mark Pesce called Fluid Learning.  It is a long post and I can’t claim to have read the entire piece but what I came away with was that sites like  ratemyprofessors.com are putting more and more control in the hands of students and leaving less control in the hands of the institutions.  The quotable piece that stuck with me was:

The lesson is simple: control is over. This is not about control
anymore. This is about finding a way to survive and thrive in chaos.

I believe this.  But I’m not sure this is the best message to use to try and empower overworked and unconvinced teachers to try using more technology in their classrooms.

The post below is copied from the one I posted to our school intranet to try and give our teachers some ideas for their new blogs.

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I wanted my first post on this particular Blog to be as helpful as possible to all the teachers who have suddenly found themselves with an online workspace, but who don’t really know where to start.

There are a lot of really amazing teachers around the world using Blogs in really innovative ways in their classrooms and sharing their experiences. In a way this is a really neat virtual way to step into someone else’s classroom and see how they are managing all the different challenges that come with classroom teaching.

So, here they are, hopefully you will find one that makes you think ‘Hey that’s what I would like to do!’.

Teacher Teaching Blogs: For these blogs I have tried to find blogs where the teacher is either using the Blog as a communication tool, or as a platform for the students to write and express themselves.

Class Blogmeister – this is a blogging platform that allows teachers the same level of security we have with our Wordpress Intranet. Click on recent posts for links to different teacher blogs.

Room 208 – this is an older blog by a teacher called Bob Sprankle. He has his elementary age student post podcasts to the blog.

Smith’s Class Blog – this is a teacher using Blogmeister. You can see her student blogs in the right sidebar of her blog.

Extreme Biology – this is a teacher’s biology blog, but all the posts are by her students. If you read the comments you can see that students are commenting on each other’s posts.

ADV Biology – a more traditional teacher blog in which assignments are posted.

Math 247 – this is an amazing Math blog in which students use an application called Voicethread to make animated Math movies. We can do this!

Fun Math Blog – this teacher uses his Blog as a place to post the Math Problem of the Week.

Teacher Reflection Blogs: These teachers are using their blogs as a place to reflect on their daily practice. We often get our students to reflect, and we understand the importance for their learning, but we sometimes forget that we are also learners and reflection is an important part of that process.

dy/dan – this is the blog of a Math teacher who explores some really interesting questions in his blog.

Don’s Learning Log

Remote Access – this is written by a gr 7/8 (I think) teacher in Manitoba called Clarence Fisher.

View From Room 125

The Teacher’s View

Hopefully one of these blogs will strike a cord and resonate. Happy Blogging!