Blogging Exemplars

I’ve had some conversations over the last few days with some 486ers about what “counts” as a good blog. In the spirit of sharing and highlighting some good work, here are some examples of your awesome blogging situated in the expectations of the class rubric:

1. Integration of Voices – Alicia

• This post is a great example of Alicia struggling with both grant writing and inquiry and finding support in the community of learners. The post spurred additional comments, kept the dialogue going from multiple perspectives, and prompted tangential thoughts on other blogs. If you happen to frequent the world of EduBlogging, you’ll find some highly linked blogs and a rich community of teacher-learners out there on the interweb.

2. Investment Over Time – Andrea

• This blog is a good example of writing that is done frequently and thoughtfully. Our class does not seem to have a dearth of things to write and think about, and it’s really a strength of this community. It’s easy to post a lot, but to post frequent, thoughtful musings is another thing entirely. Keep up the great work in this area. It’s obvious that so many of you care so deeply about what we’re doing here.

3. Breadth of Issues Addressed – Kathryn

• Much thinking about a variety of topics: student engagement, teacher/student interactions, both personal and professional planning, higher education experiences as they relate to social justice, personal reflections, and professional development. Again, think back to the rope metaphor. Professional growth means critically looking at all aspects our identities as they change over time within different contexts.

4. Support for Claims and Opinions. – Suzanne

• Part of good reflection means situating learning within the larger constructs and relevant research. This post by Suzanne does that by relating (and critiquing) interpersonal experiences with the larger social norms that shape those relationships. By not separating things into their various parts, she is able to present an ecological perspective, and it’s much richer because of that.

5. Critical Considerations. – Lisa

• In this post Lisa begins to bring up the notion of what social justice looks like in an inquiry classroom and the interplay between theory and practice in learning. It’s a really great start to a larger conversation and should definitely be expanded on, especially in terms of how technology plays into different educational environments.

6. Capitalizing on Features of Blogs. – Chris

• The cool thing about setting up a unique blog format is that you can really let it be whatever works best for you and your readers. Chris has set up some interesting functions on his page (tag clouds, current readings, random science nerdiness, etc.) and it strengthens the other posts because it keeps it interesting for the readers and informs while still remaining professional.

Personally, I don’t always follow a strict format with blog posts. Usually I just write to get things out of my head and into a forum where those thoughts can be publicly challenged. And keep the rope in the back of your mind. It’s really the thoughtful wrestling with complexity that matters…

Trackbacks – Another Tech Tip about Blogging

->  After you read this (or before if you don’t care about trackbacks), make sure you keep scrolling down to the last post to see the cool graph that Joe posted.

     My favorite thing about blogging is the conversation and I’m always trying to think of new ways to get everybody talking and see what everybody else has to say.    I thought I’d post a bit of info on trackbacks which can help people follow a conversation around our blogworld.

     When you talk about somebody else in a general way, it’s fun to include a link to their blog;  this is a link a reader can follow but provides neither a trackback or a ping.     If you are referencing something another blogger said in a specific post, it’s helpful to make your link a trackback to that post which causes two things to happen:

1. It posts a small portion of your blog post around and including the text with the link in the comments section of the other person’s post.
2. It sends the other blogger an e-mail saying that you referenced their post.   I think this is the ping part but somebody else can correct me if I have the vocabulary wrong.

To find the trackback URL for their post, I go to their blog and click on the specific post that I am referencing (this brings it up so you can see all the comments) and the URL that is in your browser heading is the trackback URL.   It will look like the regular url with the specific blog reference (such as teacherkathrynj) but it will also have something like /p=5 or /post-title-with-dashes or something else.  That is what you need to copy as a link to make the trackback happen.

     Anyway, it’s a nice way to make sure that the conversations that move around our blogworld have some connections.    You can e-mail me if something about this isn’t clear or log in and correct it – our class blog is kind of like a wiki that way.

     Here’s a link to a comic strip about blogging which Joe posted on his blog but kind of fits with this post about me and my blogging fixation.

Camp Lesson Planning (The GraphJam Version)

Hey 486ers: Just the latest tasty morsel from GraphJam. It reminded me of the lesson planning you have been doing this week in class. Also, I highly recommend this website for funny graphs. Definitely preview before using with kids though, which is just good practice anyway with the interweb. Have a great weekend and good luck on Monday.  I’ll see you all later on that day for pluses and arrows.

Where in the blogosphere is Thomas P?

Hey all, I was having some issues with the URLs to my blog so I wanted to make sure that everyone has the most up to date (and most important, correct) links.  It is correctly listed on the blogroll of our class blog and I’m hoping they it stays that way for the time being.  Cheers!

As if…

…you needed any more email.

I’m not sure if any of you know of this resource or not, but SUNY Oneonta runs some really excellent email listservs as a community resource for teachers (primarily in New York State, but not limited).  I have my email client set to dump emails from this listserv into a specific folder and then I read it when I get a chance.  The Earth Science list community is very strong and has over a thousand members on the list, but the other subjects are a bit less active.  Still, it’s a great electronic resource for all sorts of things from labs to State Ed. administrivia.  This has been one of the most enduring professional development routes I have ever taken and it always provides lots of food for thought.  Plus, it has allowed me to network across the state and create some cultural capital with other science educators.

Some more info on listserves here.

Grant Writing Ideas

Hi everyone!  I was hoping maybe we could use the class blog to also help us collaborate on the grant projects.  I was thinking about assistive technologies for students with disabilities in science labs and stuff like that.  I know chemistry people were having trouble finding things, so here’s a neat website I found that has at least some ideas for assistive technologies in the labs — I’m looking for my bio-related stuff, but they have some neat ideas for things that would facilitate pouring chemicals and stuff like that if you were interested.  It’s a little weird navigating the site, but look around if you’re interested.

Blogrolls

Hi everyone!

Here is a blog hint that I’m hoping many of you will implement.    Your blogroll is an area where you can keep a list of blogs you frequently read so that once you go to your blog, it’s easy to get to everybody else’s blog.    You can edit this list by going into the Admin area of your blog, clicking on “Manage” and then on “Links.”    That screen allows you to either add or delete blogs in your blogroll.   

One thing that would make it easier to navigate these blogs would be if everyone could, at least, add the Class blog http://08edu486grs.wordpress.com/  to your blogroll.     I posted the whole URL so that you can just copy and paste it.     If you don’t have this link in your blogroll, I feel like I have hit a dead end in the blogosphere when I read your blog.    Some of you have added all of our classmates and that gives me the flexibility to go anywhere – thank you!

Kathryn

joe’s inspiration – photos from yesterday

Following Joe’s lead, here are my pictures from yesterday’s amazing event…

Enjoy!!

Again, great job EVERYONE!

Let’s see, pluses and arrows (vectors) as promised:

+  You truly engaged with Freedom School scholars as PEOPLE first!  (evidence? eye contact, names, joking, connection, accessibility of language and physical presence, and it was CLEAR you loved to be with them!

+ Your stations were designed with EXPERIENCE FIRST (formal science language to follow)

+ Consistently heard language that prioritized process and rationale over outcome (final, one-right-answer)

+Teaching through questioning – heard it in ALL groups, consistently!  NICE!  (Tough to do well – keep practicing!)

-> Consider how you can “recognize” competent participation in the discourse of science (e.g. posters with contributors names next to ideas; verbally credit and re-use a new named construct such as “Michael’s theory about diffusion”)

-> Consider depth of probing – How many follow-up questions did you ask before changing topic.  As Alicia pointed out, everything can’t be depth work, but the depth work is what is often most difficult and therefore important for you to practice.

-> Consider ways to position students as resources for one another – e.g. develop cultural practices and norms in which it is expected that students respectfully respond to one another and push each other’s thinking forward.

->  Consider what your specific content-related objectives were for your station (e.g. Students will be able to identify 3 “controls” and define “fair test.”)  Did ALL students reach these objectives?  How do you know?  If not, how could you fix that?  For camp, because of incredible access to resources (small teacher to student ratios, more time, etc.), we have the chance to help EVERY student achieve rigorous (but few) objectives. What will those be?  How can you set up the best possible scenario to help EVERY student reach these objectives?

A few group-specific pieces of feedback:

+ The questioning strategies going on with the questions station with eggs were great.  Alicia: “What makes you think this is salt water?” (probing for evidence)  Kristin: “What’s a hard boiled egg sound like?” (scaffolding questions that invites physical investigation); and Michael: “That’s a good question, but let’s think of some more general questions.”  (working with the good in students’ contributions even when they weren’t exactly what you wanted.  Again, tough skill and important!)
(more to come… ran out of time right now…)

Freedom School Photos

Freedom School photos are linked online now at my Flickr site.  Enjoy.  Oh, and I highly recommend Flickr as a photo hosting resource.

Blog Reader Applications

I highly recommend setting up some sort of feed aggregator/reader for all the blogs in the class.  Wikipedia has a list of common readers here.  Personally, I use Google Reader and find it to be awesome for making blog reading more efficient.

And if you’re looking for some good blogs to check out, here’s a list I published a while back.  Enjoy.