Gems in Blogs

I wander through blogs. Partially because I will be teaching teachers about technology over the course of the year and partially because I learn so much. I came across a great wiki in the works called The First Day Wiki by reading a blog that I can't really tell you the path that I followed. There are some very good things in the General page already.

Working on All Burners

Today I've spent more time thinking through how I'm going to use the tools that I have generated. I now have a Classblogmeister set up. It works differently from Blogger, but the advantage of having a protected area will make it worthwhile.

Last year, I assigned chapter closure problems. They propose a problem for the student to solve and it requires them to write about how they think through the problem with others and by themselves. It also asks them to solve the problem step by step and describe why they do things the way they do. It finally asks them to tell me what they learned about math, and themselves as mathematicians.

I will give them the class blog to write about the problems. I still have time to decide how they will use it and how it will work with the grade. I am also going to ask them to journal their thoughts on math.

I am now creating a wiki page that I am going to call Math Class at a Glance. It is going to be what the blog was originally intended. Each class, someone will be chosen to write about what was learned in class that day including what the bellwork was, what was taught and practiced, and the homework assignment. I will give students the ability to update the wiki entries for bonus points on tests based on the grade they received.

This is all very much under construction, but I believe it will prove useful.

Moving Ahead with Wikis

Joining the Classroom 2.0 ning has already paid great dividends. My first discussion post generated information that I sorely needed. Now I can plan on using Wikispaces without having to worry about having each child having an email id to create an account.

I would like to sign up with Classblogmeister, but I have a feeling that you need to have backing from a school district. Since I'm at a small private school, I'm not sure what to do. I guess I'll keep with the idea of using blogger. Maybe I'll just sign on at the start of class and have the students take turns writing at the end of class. It won't be just what I wanted, but if it was tied into a wikispace it should work just fine.

I'm working on a template to use with my teachers at school. I want to try to use a wiki for a carousel brainstorming activity. I want them to answer questions and move around the room from computer to computer instead of moving from flip chart to flip chart. It will give the teachers a few minutes to talk together about several different ways they have used computer and get to update a wiki at the same time.

I have a lot of plans for the year. It will be interesting to see where I get over time.


Yeah! I've gotten set up with classblogmeister. I've just started poking around in it, but it looks very promising. I should be all ready for September. I was beginning to worry that I would have to make it more abbreviated, but now I'm full steam ahead!

Podcasting in Progress

I found a very nice guide to creating a podcast if you have an Apple. It walked me through the GarageBand and iTunes steps. Now I have to upload the file somewhere. They suggested uploading it to a weblog and then creating an iTunes link for it. More to come...

...so I found ccPublish to store the file on Internet archive.org. It's up there. I can play it and bring it into iTunes as music, but I want to see it as a podcast.

The Four Week Dash

I just got back from two weeks of travel up to Niagara Falls, over to Vermont and New Hampshire, then down through Massachusetts, Connecticut, and finally back to New Jersey. I met some incredible people at various museums and historic landmarks. Several outstanding tours include the Seward House in Auburn, New York where we learned that there was more to William Seward than memorizing Seward's Folly. Our tour guide was a gentleman who started as a gardener at the house 30 years ago. He showed us a man who was at the right hand of Abraham Lincoln. In the Fort Klock Homestead in St. Johnsville, New York we learned about a fortified house that was restored by a group of musket-loving gentlemen from a Klock decedent. We had a thrilling trip on the Mount Washington Cog Railway in New Hampshire. We loved both sides of Niagara Falls, but really treasured the Cave of the Winds tour on the American side as we felt the power of the falls in our face from the Bridal Veil falls.

I brought along my iPod and had a chance to listen to some of the Women of the Web podcasts as I was settling down for the night. It is a great source for gathering my thoughts on the coming school year. As I was thinking about the coming year, I decided it was time to change my personal school web page to a wiki. There are a number of reasons: it takes less steps to log on and make changes, I have tremendous troubles with editing with Verizon's online on my iBook and iMacs, and somehow my Verizon account got all fouled up with its count of how much space I am really using so I have to be careful of how I FTP files so that their computer "thinks" I have enough space.

I was going to redo the files using NVU and then FTP them, but that would have taken a lot of time. So, yesterday I bit the bullet and opened two windows, one for the wiki and one for the original web page. I created it at 8:30 in the morning and finished by 3:30 with a breakfast and lunch break. So it was, maybe, five hours of work. I doubt that I would have finished that quick creating static web pages.

Sometime this week, I'm going to do the same for my math web pages.

Now begins the four week dash to solidify my direction for K-8 computers. This begins my sixth year. After the change from OS 9 to OS X in the lab, this year should be so much easier. I like to take time to review what I did last year and determine what I'd like to add this year. It's nice to have this blog to keep a record of work for the future.