Today marks the 3rd anniversary of Hurricane Katrina’s sweep through the Gulf Coast. Having lived in – and loved – New Orleans for 4 years (teacher’s credential from Tulane), I want to annually remember this catastrophic event with a mini film festival:

Where Y’at New Orleans?

When the Levee Breaks

Hurricane Katrina: The Ones We Forgot

Heading out for a walk through the Sierra Foothills, at 2,000 feet above Sacramento – another levee town, with my Katrina survivor Nola.

I just updated the handout for Registering for an Edublog Username by making the screen shots a little larger and easier to read. Since many teachers like to print a copy of the manual, I’m trying to keep the pages to 30. I deleted the section on selecting time zones since it no longer seems necessary to adjust the time zone.

As always, suggestions are welcome for improving and updating the Intro to EB Manual (latest update = August 25, 2008)

Ok, this is more a rant than plea, but someone needs to speak up for the many first or second-year, non-tenured teachers, who are obviously not really in a position to register a formal complaint regarding the amount of their valuable time and energy that is being siphoned off by BTSA (Beginning Teacher Support and Assessment) requirements. BTSA is a California thing, but I imagine other states and countries have similar programs. I visited the website, but had trouble getting past the logo, which visually suggests to me that the program is all about assessment, but allows for slipping in a sliver of support.

Fortunately there are BTSA mentors who are absolute heroes to their assignees. Take, for example, Edna Shoemaker, a high school English teacher who mentored…..high school English teachers at her school site. My Area 3 Writing Project colleague Bee Foster described her sessions with Edna as “So worthwhile!” Edna was her thinking partner and number one supporter. During their sessions, Bee could rethink and rework her lesson plans, and walk into class the next day ready to engage her students in powerful, well-crafted literacy activities.

So if you are a BTSA mentor and you suspect that your assignees are less than thrilled with their program, I would like to make a few recommendations:

1. Travel to your new teacher – By saving them the travel time of coming to your site, you’ve already gifted the 1st/2nd year teacher a little much-needed time.
2. Help build your new teacher’s network – If you are an elementary teacher, for instance, mentoring a high school history teacher, use your district connections to find the “just in time” link to a veteran teacher who would be happy to share his/her unit of, for example, the Neremberg Trials.
3. Work to redefine your district’s definition of the “required weekly meeting” so that your Tuesday 4:00-7:00 session, for instance, does not prevent your new teacher from attending a Tuesday 4:00-7:00 session at a nearby university with a guest lecturer/educator in his/her discipline.
4. Allow your new teacher to be a hero at his/her site. If, for instance, he/she is ready and able to step into an assistant coaching position – that would keep that particular sport going at the site, providing a group of students with equity of access – adjust your weekly meeting time.
5. If you value the program, then encourage outstanding teaching colleagues to sign on as mentors.
6. If you question the value of the program or feel it needs some revisting, speak out!

It is my goal to revisit the BTSA topic throughout the school year and add to the list of mentor heroes. If you know a BTSA hero or would like to add to or discuss items on the suggestions list, I welcome your comments!

The National Writing Project and Google Docs have teamed up to offer high school teachers and their students a wonderful opportunity to kickoff the school year with a collaborative writing project: Letters to the Future President. The project invites students to write about issues they would want our next president to address, and to publish their writing for a national audience.

I’ll be heading to Florin High School on Tuesday to help a group of students and their history teacher get set up for the project.  Here’s my agenda:

• Introduce project via NWP website
• Show Lee Lefever’s Google Docs in Plain English
• Have students create Google accounts
• Have them create gmail accounts – with names teacher can readily recognize (e.g., johnd@gmail.com vs. baddude@whatever.com)
• Invite several students into Google Doc I’ve projected to screen and give live demo of inserting comments, hyperlinks, etc.
• Have students create their Google Doc (in this case, students will work collaboratively in teams of 2-3)
• Have teacher explain naming conventions so that can readily distinguish each group’s letter from the rest.
• Q & A – and call it a wrap:-)

Hats off to the many great teachers who embrace the concept of writing to make a difference and to the organizations that support them in their efforts to take their students’ voices to the word.

A very enthusiastic new Edublogger, Tammy Null, emailed a question today regarding adding some teachers to her eSCIweb site. Creating a handout on how to register seemed like a good idea. I’ve added this one-pager at the end of the updated Intro to EB Manual (page 30).

“I think the big mistake in schools is trying to teach children anything, and by using fear as the basic motivation. Fear of getting failing grades, fear of not staying with your class, etc. Interest can produce learning on a scale compared to fear as a nuclear explosion to a firecracker.” Stanley Kubric

For the past couple of years, Nikos Theodosakis‘ The Director in the Classroom has been my top recommendation to teachers wanting to venture into filmmaking as part of their curriculum. In addition to tips and wonderful graphic organizers, Nikos also lays out a compelling argument (on behalf on his own children – and all children) for why filmmaking belongs in the classroom, starting with Part 1:

• Learning in a world of change
• Living and learning in a visual world
• How filmmaking develops higher order thinking skills
• How filmmaking develops personal and social skills
• How filmmaking raises awareness

I have a new favorite: Reading in the Dark: Using Film as a Tool in the English Classroom, by John Golden. I found this gem while attending the July National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) Institute for 21st Century Learning. What a great resource for secondary teachers – and probably upper elementary too. “Even though this book deals with cinematic technique and film study, it is ultimately a book about using film to help students improve their reading and analytical skills.”

Golden includes over 30 films, ranging from E.T. The Extraterrestrial to Life Is Beautiful , and provides strategies for viewing each, including reading strategies (e.g., predicting, responding, questioning, and storyboarding), textual analysis (e.g., characterization, point of view, iron, and connections/comparisons between authors’ and directors’ choices) and classroom tested suggestions for developing units. Tons of powerful images pulled from films, along with thought-provoking “Questions to Consider.”

I’m working on a presentation right now for our Sacramento Educational Cable Consortium’s upcoming Video in the Classroom event.  I’ll be sharing both books during my session – and am seeking a third to add to the list.

Whether it be by voice, cell phone, email, iPod, blog, wiki, video, websites, or another as yet invented thing, I will communicate my message via any means that students will hear. I will not be afraid of the medium if it a highway to my students’ psyche. I will not erect roadblocks where I should build on ramps.”

I’m updating the wiki I use for my workshops to include some new resources such as Vicki Davis’s slideshow presentation, which includes the above quote, and am thinking about some recent conversations with teachers who are fast becoming contributors to the blogosphere. Teachers from my local Writing Project, for instance, who are using their wikis to extend content resources beyond the school day. Take, for example, the fabulous Ms. Duenas, who has uploaded her entire set of PowerPoints to accompany her district’s 6th grade math program to her wiki. I suspect through Dee’s enthusiasm and commitment to sharing best practices, she’ll be bringing others at her site on board with Web 2.0 technologies.

I’d like to address two questions from teachers who have recently joined the blogosphere and have also added wikis to their toolkit.

The first question is about subscribing to a wiki. With wikispaces.com, readers will not see the RSS button or link, so how do they follow? Here’s the answer:

Step 1: From the sidebar, click on the Recent Changes link.

Step 2: From the Recent Changes screen, click on the Notify Me tab. Decide whether you want notification when anything has been changed or just changes to specific pages in the wiki.

Step 3: Choose your reader and that’s it.

The second question is from one of the most dedicated, outstanding teachers I have ever worked with, who happened to join me for my A3WP Summer Tech Institute. I’ve know this teacher for 16 years. Believe me, the list of students whose lives she has changed and the teachers she has mentored and supported (including me!!)is an incredibly long one! She left the workshop with a blog and a wiki ready to go. Her immediate goal was to provide a strong school-to-home connection and to open the world to her students (from a location where the deepest differences diversity-wise are economic). She called yesterday with this question: What do I tell my superintendent in a meeting I’ve requested to talk about why the tech guy has blocked access to Wikispaces.com?

I suggested maybe starting with Karl Fisch’s Did You Know? or Michael Wesch’s Information Revolution, plus the NCTE’s recent definition of 21st century literacies.

I’d like to keep adding to her list. What are your suggestions? How are you using wikis with your students and/or staff? What should I add to her list?

Although I generally use Firefox for my browser, last week I was facilitating an Edublogs workshop for the Area 3 Writing Project and noticed an issue with embedded files when viewed in IE: the files appear as  blank boxes and no amount of clicking can activate or open them. So I turned to the EB Forum and found the solution: Use Firefox!

But if you must use IE, here’s your workaround: Same as always, you will need to copy the embed code from the media site and then open the HTML editor of your post or page. Put your cursor where you want the media file to appear and paste in the code. Then click on Publish or, if you’ve already published this page or post, click on Save. Do NOT go back into the Visual editor. For some reason, with IE, if you head back into the Visual editor, the embed code changes, which is not good.

I’ve updated the Intro to Edublogs Manual to include the embedding issue – and also added instructions on adding a hyperlink to a comment. Here’s the linik: http://blogwalker.edublogs.org/files/2008/08/edublogs_08-14a3wp1.pdf.

For the past year or two, I’ve been including three of Michael Wesch’s wonderful short (3-5 minute) videos in my Web 2.0 workshops, usually in this order:

• Day One: Information Revolution
  
• Day Two: The Machine Is Us/ing Us
• Day Three: A Vision of Students Today

I know many of you also tap into these resources. So if you haven’t seen it and you have a free hour (yep, 60 minutes), I’m pretty sure you will really enjoy his Portal to Media Literacy presentation…thought provoking, informative, and definitely an hour well spent! “Being human is all about learning.” “If you have the right question, you can set your students up to learn…and to learn and to learn.“  And so many more gems.

I just finished a week-long tech workshop for the Area 3 Writing Project. What a treat to hang out for five days with 18 enthusiastic teachers, eager to add Web 2.0 tools to their classroom toolkit. For many it was a steep learning curve, but all left with at least one Edublog ready to go. Throughout the week I would periodically suggest that they check out the wealth of tips that the wonderful Sue Waters keeps sending our way via The Edublogger. The post I most often referred them to was 100 Edublogs Themes Separated into Categories .

This morning I’ve added another post and a comment to my list of favorites from The Edublogger:

• Here’s My First Five Tips for Writing Better Blog Posts – From Sue – Once again, Sue puts it all in a nutshell.
• Teacher and Student Blogging that Succeeds – From Dean Shareski (via Jan Smith’s comment on The Edublogger) – I like how Dean has nailed down some realities about blogging, e.g, ” Blogging is way more about reading than it is writing. Many teachers don’t see this at first.” Lots of food for thought contained in each of the five pointers.

Heading into my workshop wiki to add these three links to my blogging resources.