BlogWalker

Muddling through the blogosphere

Happy First Birthday to The Edublogger!

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Of all the EB enhancements James Farmer has added over the past year, The Edublogger is my absolute favorite.  Such great tips, so well explained, and so easy to turn around and apply to my own blog and blogging practices.  Thank you, James, and Happy Birthday to The Edublogger (Sue Waters)!

Seems like with every contest The Edublogger promotes (i.e., 30-Day Challenge to Better Commenting), both the process and the product become road maps for 21st century teaching and learning. So in response to Sue’s call to join the celebration by writing a post on any of 12 topics, here’s my contribution:

#9 Favorite Blog Widget: ClustrMaps – Last year I was helping Jim Faires, a 6th grade teacher in my district, get his students up and running with YouthRadio, a collaborative project developed by Kevin Hodgson. Jim was introducing his students to podcasting. The question he posed to the class was “What if the whole world was your audience?!”

When the students completed their podcast, they watched as Jim uploaded it to the YouthRadio blog.  It was then that one of the them spotted the ClustrMap. Jim opened the enlarged view. Try to imagine their amazement and exhuberance when they realized the blog had visitors from all parts of the world and every continent (ok, not Antarctica). Suddenly students were scurring for an atlas to accurately identify each state and country.

Not only was the ClustrMap a built-in geography lesson, but it also illustrated and answered Jim’s question: truly, the whole world had become their audience.

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