Seems as if the time between my posts around here has been getting longer and longer lately, I blame myself and a chronic case of writer’s block for that. I had two wonderful conversations with about 15 campus administrators last week during my districts’ Administrators’ Technology Conference.

El Paso conversation MP3

2^nd Grade – You Otter Listen

Every student in Mrs. W.’s second grade class (their class mascot is an otter) will be given a short book to read. Once the students have finished reading their books, we will work with each student and have them create a podcast reading their book aloud (the books are very short). Each student will then write a post, at an Edublog site we are in the process of establishing, explaining what the story was about and what they liked about the story. We haven’t really finalized the graphic portion of this project yet, but students will either draw, scan, or photograph a picture of the book which we will upload to a yet to be established Flickr account. The Flickr file will be embedded into the post along with the podcast. We are hoping to generate a number of comments on these posts that include the location of the commenter which we can then show on a world map, and talk about how we exist in a global and connected community.

5^th Grade – Student Science Fair Podcast

I’ve already worked with one of our fifth grade teachers to establish a class blog using Class Blogmeister . Although its been slow getting the students to post to their blogs on a regular basis, a few of them have really began to embrace the idea. If you get the chance, please take the opportunity to visit their blogs and leave them a comment. We all know how inspiring it is when we know that people are listening to what we have to say.

This afternoon Mr. S. and I talked about assigning topics for students to blog about, and are leaning towards having the students write a post about their upcoming Science Fair projects. Of course, this discussion led to the birth of a project that focuses on having students create a student “Science Fair” podcast where they give an overview about the upcoming Science Fair and interview each other about their projects. The details of the project are still a bit fuzzy but will be worked out in the coming days. Of course any suggestions are welcome.

I’ll keep you posted on the progress of each of these projects.

Image Citation:
Butcher, Lil. “Otter portrait.” lil butcher’s photostream. 23 June 2005. 30 Jan 2007 <http://www.flickr.com/photos/glisglis/21073406/>.

I really like the practice David Warlick has, and I know others, of setting up a wiki that supports some of the presentations he delivers. Drawing inspiration from David, I have nearly finished setting up a wiki page that goes along with a workshop I am delivering February 22 on the use of blogs in the classroom. Although there are a few more items I will be adding to the wiki over the next few days, I am going to publicize it now with the hope that you will provide me with some feedback, letting me know what you like about it, and where I can improve it. One thing that I am very interested in doing, again drawing inspiration from one of David Warlick’s wiki pages , is adding a section that embeds blog entries from those people that are attending the workshop. Right now the section is titled “Session Blogs and Comments” and can be found at the bottom of my wiki page. I can’t help but think that this is an extremely powerful way to immediately show how these 21st century conversations are connected. I can tell from David’s wiki that these “Session Bloggers” entries are tied to a unique tag and fed through Technorati, but I am unsure how to go about coding something similar into my wiki page. Does anybody have any suggestions? David?