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.
Is there an image on this post? Next to When the students paragraphs there is a placeholder showing in IE (PS I use IE with your blog because this theme often doesn’t let me post comments in FF).
Thanks for writing a post for the celebration.
I frequently sit back and wonder if James realised when he approached me last year what the outcome would be and whether he realised how important the decision he made to the approach of The Edublogger would be? When you normally think about blogs by companies their posts focus solely on their products whereas he sort of broke tha model by not taking that approach.
PS we have some exciting new launches over the next few weeks.
Excellent post about ClustrMaps – one day I would love to also read about the workshops you run on blogging. e.g. how you stage people through them, their focus, what works, what causes issues.
Thanks, Sue. I’m in IE now and deleted where the image X was (I was going to insert an image of the YouthRadio ClustrMap, but it didn’t show up). I should probably think about switching themes too. Maybe next month…for Blogwalker’s 3rd birthday!
James did break the model, and bringing you on board added a whole new layer to the EB community:-).