NWP colleague Kevin Hodgson is a guiding light in many ways. For several years now, he has sponsored the Youth Radio project, a podcasting project connecting classrooms across the nation and world as students share topics and projects from their own classrooms, neighborhoods, and regions. It’s been my privilege to connect with the YR project locally by joining A3WP colleague Jim Faires and his students as they listen to, respond to, discuss, and even take to a worldwide audience YR topics.

In the blogging workshops I currently teach, I always direct teachers to Kevin’s classroom blog. In every session, there will always be a teacher or two who, after touring the Electric Pencil, has a whole new understanding of how blogging can benefit teachers and their students.

Now I have a new resource to share in my workshops. I’ll be directing workshop teachers to Kevin’s NWP article Bringing the World to My Doorstep: A Teacher’s Blog-Reading Habits article. Often in my workshops, I realize that teachers leave all setup with their own blog (an Edublog), but without an understanding that blogging is all about reading – reading other bloggers’ thoughts, ideas, and challenges – and responding. Kevin’s article makes visible “how the world of blogs enriches his teaching, supports his tech liaison work, provides opportunities for his students, and keeps him connected both to his NWP network and to a wider network of educators.”

His article also explains so well the power of RSS, another topic I rarely get to in a 2-3 hour workshop, but I think by having teachers read Kevin’s article, I’ll have a great starting point for introducing RSS early on in my upcoming day-long and week-long summer workshops. I’ll also be introducing the term social media literacy.

“Social media literacy refers to the ways in which bloggers connect and stay informed of each others’ work. One blogger, Chris Heuer , suggests that RSS could be “the fourth “R” in our conception of literacy , noting that RSS-based social media literacy “enables any individual to step into the conversational flow—to not only follow what other people are communicating, but ensure what the individual has to communicate is heard by other people who care about the topic.”

One more time, I want to thank Kevin for his innovative teaching practices, his commitment to bringing others on board with Web 2.0 best practices, and his willingness to mentor 24/7.

I’ve been working fast and furiously to keep up with all the changes happening at Edublogs.org. I’m pretty sure James Farmer never sleeps in order to keep up with the updates, enhancements, fixes, and forum discussions. So here’s a link to my latest Intro to Edublogs Manual. It’s pretty complete, but I plan to keep making updates as needed and posting the links here as well as in the sidebar (under Resources).

I’ve included directions on adding media, using the new visual editor icons, but so far those images, PowerPoints, etc. have not been uploading. Everything else seems to be working well:-)

A huge virtual hug to James for all his efforts – and Sue Waters too! Check out Sue’s video tour.

Amazing what can change with Edublogs in the course of a week! I considered deleting my previous post with its link to my “updated” EB Manual, which as of today is is already very much outdated, but decided to leave it just as proof of what a dynamic application and community the Edublogs.org is.

Hope to have to have a revised manual available by the end of the week.

For an update at a glance, check out The Edublogger’s Quick Tour, created by and updated regularly by Sue Waters.

I just finished updating my Introduction to EB Manual and have included an Edublogs Widget Glossary. It’s hard to stay ahead of all the enhancements James keeps sending our way;-).

I still have a few questions about James’ speedy method for creating student accounts, but am heading into The Edublogger and EB Forum right now to check for recent discussions on this topic – with a goal of adding this section to the manual soon.

As I move through the 31-Comment Challenge (ok, I’m behind), I’ve been thinking about ways to help students improve their commenting skills. Via Donna DesRoches’s “Blogging and Reading Comprehension Strategies,” I found a great free resource to provide some scaffolding for young bloggers: Comprehension Strategy Posters provided by ReadingLady.com.

The posters are available in both Word and PDF formats and include:

• Asking Questions
• Determining
• Inferring
• Making Connections
• OWL (Observe, Wonder, Link)
• Repairing Comprehension
• Synthesizing
• Visualizing

If students were encouraged to focus on one strategy per week, and could refer to the posters, teachers might see less of the “I liked your post” one-liner responses and more of the thoughtful kind of writing the improves literacy skills – and bumps up the learning possibilities of the blogging project. I like how Donna explains the importance of encouraging better commenting: “Blogging is a great communication tool but it is the use of effective commenting skills that will extend and engage global conversations for our students.”

*Note: Image from http://classroomtechtips.files.wordpress.com/2008/05/readingstrategies.jpg

I’m at the Sacramento COE this morning for Dave Warlick’s Preparing Students with 21st Century Skills workshop.

Opening comments are by SCOE’s Ben Anderson delivering his Educating in a Google World – To catch the full flavor, and Ben’s engaging sense of humor, you need to watch his slide show, which included a live Skype call to a friend in Warsaw, Poland – pretty amazing how seamless it is to connect virtually with colleagues thousands of miles away. If his preso is online, I’ll come back and add the link.

Dave Warlick has started his presentation…without PowerPoint. Presentation is posted to Slideshare. Handouts are at http://handouts.davidwarlick.com.

Below is a mix of some of his tech tools and words of wisdom:

• Started with an emulation of Twitter – http://davidwarlick.com/ajaxchat/index.php – pretty cool, since SCOE blocks Twitter

• For the first time in history, the best thing we can be teaching our kids is how to teach themselves
  • They need to be literate – knowing how to do what you need to do now
  • Plug for Wikipedia – information escalates but it’s still as easy to navigate – As an educator, don’t go back to the good ol’ days of books as sole source of information. THE SHAPE OF INFORMATION HAS CHANGED. We need to teach students to prove the authority of the information. We need to be journalists with openers like “according to this source…” Our job is not to teach which sources to teach, but to show students how to evaluate. Wikipedia is really good about currency of information e.g., announcement of Pluto’s fate – if you check date and minute that article is published – Wikipedia less than a minute behind BBC news.
• RSS (Netvibes.com) – Shift in that information comes to us. We’re training information to find us. Recommends Netvibes.com because it’s web-based, you can make your aggregator look like a newspaper. Demoed from view point of social studies teacher. Cool tab feature. Went to Technorati, “which is to the blogosphere what Google is to the web.” Enter a specific term such as cartography, find blogs that are specifically about maps. Go back to Netvibes, tell it where link is – then drag down into tab box. Strange Maps – very cool (but I can’t find the link). Flickr example -grab flickr.com/photos/tags/map – so only photos labeled with “map” will come up
• New model is more about us modeling new literacies than teaching them
• What about arithmetic? – 2 things have happened in last 15 years: we’re working with digital numbers (in the 1000s) – into his Library of Links (from Technorati) – For a demonstration of a raw data link, he showed the ANSS site (connected to seismographers all over world). Started by copying data, grabbing Excel and pasting it in – used text to column feature to clean it up – went through wizard and used scatter plot in graphing tool – You can “make numbers tell their story.”
• Words of Humankind – Searched for presidential inaugural addresses – and tag clouds – TagCrowd – new tool! Allows you to for example top 75% – added new Web 2.0 twist. Gives you ability to zoom out and look at content in new way.You could compare Churchill’s “Blood, Sweat, Tears speech to Roosevelt’s “Day that will live in infamy” speech.
• Today, all information is made out of numbers. It’s about the ability to use the information to accomplish goals.
• The Long Tail – 1998 study – Developed by Chris Anderson – calculating line where everything to the left shows hard copies of books available in store because they’re lucrative enough; to the left books, etc, not lucrative enough to market – but are available online. Dave uses lulu.com to surprise to publish his books.
• 21st century – we have to communicate with multimedia. Information now competes for attention – therefore kids must learn to write well, including with images and animations. – used iCan sweatshop video.
• Beacon HS in NY – Humanities school (alternative) paperless school – teachers evaluate quality of work based on its strength as communication piece, not the technology component – Othello assignment -What was the difference in entertainment from 1500s to today? Students produced movie trailer and in the process became script writers, collaborators, videographers.

In a nutshell – 3Rs to 3 E’s: Expose truth,Employ information, Explore ideas – spam (costs US billions in investments to block it out) – Cost of controlling HIV/AIDS. Any definition of literacy in 21st century must explicitly include a conversation about ethics – k-12! Right and Wrong on Internet – A student & teacher information code of ethics – grabbed from journalists association. Students must be able to justify how something they’ve cited is true – teachers must model this accountability. Spam peaks in august – kids bored – and don’t have ethical background in place.

I couldn’t stay for his afternoon hands-on session, but I’m glad I made it to the morning session.

A highlight of my recent trip to Denver for the NWP’s Urban Sites Conference was meeting Alexander Jefferson. He was on the same flight from Sacto to Denver. I spotted him at the baggage pickup zone. It probably seemed like an idiotic question, but seeing an African-American gentleman wearing a Tuskegee Airman jacket, I had to ask, “Pardon me, but were you a Tuskegee Airman?” As I stood with him for a few minutes, listening to his story, I vowed to think of ways to make his lived experiences accessible to other teachers – and their students. He was actually on his way to present to students in one of Denver’s public schools (saw his picture a day later in the Denver Times as he stood surrounded by young students).

Alex was one of 32 Tuskegee Airman to be shot down over Germany, and the only one to have written about the African-American experience behind barbed wired in a German prison camp: Red Tail Captured, Red Tail Free. From NPR’s recent interview, you can get an idea of his energy, his resiliency, and his commitment to fighting for social justice.

I hope within this school year to arrange a videoconference with Alex Jefferson (from Wayne State University) and teachers in my district’s Teaching American History grant – and to stream the event so that a nation-wide audience can learn from this extraordinary American.

As I continue on into Days 4 and 5 of the Comment Challenge, I realize what a valuable opportunity this project is for observing how a growing group of people, from around the globe and from all walks of life, come together to form a community. And I now understand how coComment works. Unlike the more elegant co-mment that I mistakenly registered for yesterday, I am now able to add tags to my comments, just like I would to one of my posts. Well that’s pretty cool!

Day 4 Activity: Ask a question

On the project wiki, I clicked on a Day 4 link and wandered into the blog of a teacher of Portuguese (I think). The only post I could find in English was his/her take on the Day 4 activity. Since I could not really find anything about this blogger as a person (quite the opposite of yesterday’s venture into the Intrepid Teacher blog), my question to him/her was “As a teacher of Portuguese, what would you like to be asked about teaching in a digital age?” I would like to get a better sense of who this blogger really is.

Day 5 Activity: Comment on a post you disagree with:

In scrolling through Bloglines and Google Reader , I realize that I choose to subscribe to like-minded and inspiring bloggers. While pondering where I would locate non-like-minded bloggers, I noticed a front page story on today’s Sac Bee titled “Kids are reading, and not just Harry Potter,” written by Jay Mathews of the Washington Post. I couldn’t find the link at sacbee.com, so I’m copying basically the same story from today’s Modesto Bee – http://www.modbee.com/local/story/289046.html. If the Sac Bee does not give online access to the comment feed for this story within the next 24 hours, I’ll hop into Modesto’s comment box and let readers know that not all educators value the Accelerated Reader approach to motivating young readers.

Since today is already May 4, I’m doing a little crunching to catch up on the 31-day Comment Challenge, following the guidelines in the wiki.

Day One Activity: The kick-off is a commenting self-audit and a reading activity:

1. Answer the following questions:

• How often do you comment on other blogs during a typical week?
  On an average week, probably 1-2 comments (but that’s not counting Twitter responses;-)
• Do you track your blog comments? How? What do you do with your tracking?
   OK, the whole concept of co-mment is new to me. So up to now, no, I haven’t been tracking my blog comments. (Oh, my, so much to learn!)
• Do you tend to comment at the same blogs or do you try to comment on at least one new blog per week?

2. I’ve read through Gina Trapani’s comment guide and realize I should be more aware of whether I’m actually contributing new information in my comments (ok, even if there are already 57 comments, for instance, I need to read through them before adding my 2 cents worth).

Day Two Activity: Comment on a new blog:

An hour later, I’m just now emerging from a scroll through the Comment Challenge Wiki list of participants. I was drawn in by the scope and depth of topics posted by the unemployed Intrepid Teacher, with his passion for teaching for social justice and his straight-from-the-soul writing style.

Day Three Activity: Sign up for a comment tracking service:

I am a total newbie to Co-mment, but I’m sure that if Sue Waters recommends it, it’s worth exploring.

Three activities into the Comment Challenge, I am envisioning what a powerful model this would be for students.

I’m joining the 31-day Comment Challenge, which I first read about this morning in my friend Kevin’s blog. In a way, I think Challenge organizers Kim Coffino, Sue Waters, Silvia Tolisano, and Michele Martin have added structure to a direction I’ve been moving in the last year or so – moving away from reading “first wave” bloggers, who are typically convention keynote speakers, published authors, etc., and, instead, reading blogs of fellow teachers, from near and far, who work directly with students. Twitter, I think, somehow has much to do with my switch in blog reading habits. It’s so easy and fast to read 140 character microblogs, and from a Tweet, I’ll often click on the Tweeter’s link and journey over to their blog. What I like about the 2nd wave of bloggers is that, unlike the 1st wave, conversations are more likely to happen, as opposed to a zillion people posting comment after comment. I feel a sense of community. With this idea of community in mind, I look forward to joining the challenge to becoming a better blog citizen.

Heading off to read Gina’s Guide to Weblog Comments and to figure out the best way to jump start the challenge (since I’m beginning in Day 4;-)