Thanks to some year-long mentoring by Paul Allison and Susan Ettenheim, I am now fully on board with students having their own blogs. I logged off Wednesday night’s Teachers Teaching Teachers Skypecast with some concrete ideas for providing students with the scaffolding to incorporate and share research in their blog posts. Paul has set up a wiki with the instructions for getting Youth Voices 2007 students up and running with Google Reader. I can see how this common thread will help connect readers and writers within the elgg setup and community and stretch their thinking/reading/writing skills as they post and respond.

I am also remembering an NECC conversation with Mark Wagner, who mentioned a student blog he added to his reader: My Year 8 English Blog. After reading Casper’s piece on plastic bags, I sincerely hope this young writer will continue posting when he enters his 9th year.

And thanks to Karl Fisch’s recent post, I discovered 7-year old Abby’s blog. I’m looking forward to following her through the school year. Abby’s will be a great site to share with teachers. This is definitely not MySpace! And check out her ClustrMap!

Hence a new category in my Blogroll: Student Blogs.

Technorati Tags: student_blogs, readwriteweb, web20

Just finished a wonderful week at the Area 3 Writing Project’s summer tech institute Telling Stories in a Digital Age. We started the week with a look at digital story telling as a genre, using Movie Maker 2 as the video editing tool. Throughout the week, we introduced blogging using Edublogs. Unlike the Blogging 101 and Blogging 102 two-hour workshops I do for my district, having a week to consider the possibilities of professional and classroom blogging and to explore all the bell ‘n whistles James has added to Edublogs made a huge difference in what the teachers walked away with at the end of the week!

Thanks to powerful examples I was able to share from other teachers’ blogs, I think every teacher in the group saw new possibilities for teaching and learning. During the course of the week, the two most revisited teacher blogs, I am sure, were my Sacramento neighbor Alice Mercer’s classroom blog and my NWP colleague Kevin Hodgson’s blog. So Alice and Kevin, if you’re reading this post, thank you for providing effective models for this dedicated, reflective group of teachers.

If you head over to the A3WP Blogsite’s Blogroll, you will see clear evidence of blogging teachers helping blogging teachers, both in form and content.

One of my mentor teachers told me that a good workshop always starts on time and ends early. I made sure we followed her suggestion each of the five days of the workshop. But I also ended the week with another guideline for a good workshop: Allow enough time and flexibility in a workshop for the participants to go beyond your agenda – and everyone will benefit! By Friday, I was definitely as much a learner as a presenter. Lot 49 and Hungry Heads, for instance became the video widget experts; Mrs. Duenas showed me it was worth adding a little html code in widget textboxes, and Pat Davis’s tutorial on designing a header for your blog went to a new dimension in Miss Dhanda’s blog.

A great week of blogging teachers helping new blogging teachers!

I’m sitting in an A3WP tech workshop brainstorming with our summer institute teachers about what makes a PowerPoint presentation ineffective, boring, confusing and/or painful to sit through.

Here are some of our thoughts:

• Too much writing on a slide
• Horrid color combinations
• Background sounds
• Spelling and grammar errors
• Too many objects or words flying in

Don McMillan’s MySpace video does a great job of summing up bad PowerPoints –

Check back soon for a link to Bee Foster’s handout of PowerPoint do’s and dont’s.

Because I am still very much a learner in understanding all the tools available to teachers in Edublogs.org, one blog I’ve added to my reader is Mike Temple’s Edublogs Tutorials. For anyone seeking advanced sessions on Edublogs, Mike’s site will most likely meet that need. So I loved this week’s post with an embedded video on a rationale for blogging in the elementary classroom, along with instructions on how to embed a video. Thanks, Mike, for a helping hand and for great resources! And, James, that’s pretty impressive to see the Edublogs/WordPress embeddable thingie in Teacher Tube

Download Video: Posted by rachelboyd at TeacherTube.com.

To pass the time on my flights to and from NECC, I grabbed – and dusted off – a few magazines from my nightstand. The first article to catch my eye was from the April/May 2007 edition of George Luca’s edutopia: Overcoming Underachievement – How a simple writing exercise dismantled negative racial preconceptions. I’ve since reread this short (2 pages) piece several times. The article describes a study run by researchers from Yale, Stanford, and the University of Colorado, with many quotes from lead researcher Geoffrey Cohen. The researchers had a theory that “the disparity in academic performance between white and African American students is partly fueled by a psychological effect called stereotype threat.” To narrow the achievement gap, they proposed using “a simple fifteen-minute writing exercise.”

What really grabbed my attention about the experiment is that the setting could easily have been a middle school from my district: “… a middle school attended by about even numbers of African American and white students, mostly from middle or lower middle class families… this school already had positive forces in play – sufficient resources, devoted staff, academically prepared students…” Nevertheless, an “invisible obstacle” was blocking African American students from “fully exploiting those benefits.”

The 15-minute assignment (randomly assigned with a control group given a different set of choices) was “to choose from a list of attributes the ones they value, such as relationships with friends or being good at art, and write about them.” The researchers believed that allowing students to write about things they cared about would “counter the fear of being stereotyped long enough to boost their grades on the next assignment.” And it did. Grades improved not only on the next assignment, but on their final grades too.

It’s a no-brainer that letting students write on topics that are important to them fosters improved writing. But what jumps out to me is that the significant achievement gains were attributed to a single assignment. Teachers are under tremendous pressure right now “to fit it all in,” but I think they can always squeeze one more thing in if they see the value. I’m going to pass the article on!

Of course, I couldn’t keep from thinking what if… the students were invited to go “live” with their essays in a Web 2.0 environment?!?

Technorati Tags: NECC07 achievement_gap edutopia writing

Time to reflect on some favorites from NECC 2007

• Favorite toy: Flip video camera – Priced at 75$ at Costco for the model that offers up to 30 minutes of video, this pocket-sized camera has a popout USB plug in. So no more hunting for cables. And at that price, I think teachers will feel more comfortable checking out the camera to students. (Thank you Scott Merrick)
• Favorite RSS News Aggregator: Pageflake.com – This reader is more like a customizable newspaper format, and, unlike Bloglines or Google Reader, you can share your reader. (Thanks David Warlick)
• Favorite URL: Tiny URL – For all the times I haven’t cited where I found an image included on this blog, for instance, because the address went on forever and every, here’s a nifty way to provide readers with a greatly shortened version of the URL. (Thanks Will Richardson)
• Favorite Web 2.0 Projects: Read Around the Planet – a great way to involve primary students in literary virtual community (Thanks Janine Lim) and Flat World Project – connecting Georgia to Bangladesh (Thanks Vicki Davis).
• Favorite Session: Using Wikis in the Classroom – I already had a inkling of the collaborative power of wikis – but I did not realize the huge, huge amount of upload space included with WikiSpace.com. (Thanks Adam Frey)

Off to play in the foothills