Chris Lehman, an edublogger and the principal at a Science Academy in Philadelphia posted this Letter to a Young Teacher yesterday. I think it will resonate with the M. Ed. students I met two weeks ago. I don’t think they’re considering leaving the profession at the moment, but they might one day.
I am sharing this with the hope that Lehman’s post will give my students a spark of inspiration as they work on their Personal Vision statements in the coming module.
My students are using their new blogs to carry on the discussions we might have done in D2L’s discussion boards. At the end of the class, they’ll choose a collection of their blog posts that represent their efforts in this class. This collection is one of the biggest assignments of the class and the assignment was inspired by one Dennis Jerz assigned his students at Seton Hill.
I loved his idea of including wild cards. In the blog collection, I am requiring my students to ‘[i]nclude two blog entries on any topic that is professionally relevant. The entries should demonstrate your achievements as a blogger, a teacher, or a leader. If you decided to take a risk trying to embed an unfamiliar technology in an entry, a wildcard entry is a great place to show that – whether it worked or not!”
I was going to make this blog post about something else, but it occurred to me that I should share this instead. At a minimum, it shows them one of many possibilities for a wild card entry for their own blogs.
Here’s how the events leading to this post unfolded.
I read an email from a student asking about making comments on her classmates’ blogs. After all, this blogging thing is new to them.
Made a Jing screencast to show her how to do what she had asked me about.
Noticed that she was on Skype, and sent her the link to the screencast.
A few minutes later, she Skyped me again saying she just submitted her first comment to a classmates. I’m confident she was successful.
Here’s the screencast – embedded in the blog.
In July 2007, The Future of the Book released the new CommentPress theme. At the time, I considered how I might encourage my students to use it – the obvious way being for peer review of their work.
Today I saw that James Farmer highlighted a high school biology class using CommentPress in a class wide blog hosted at Edublogs.org. What a great example, too! I’m delighted to have this to share with my own students who work in schools every day.
What’s special about the CommentPress theme? Site visitors can make page level or paragraph level comments on posts. (See this example). That capability might be very useful to M. Ed. students (and their professors) seeking feedback on their work.
In September, The Chronicle of Higher Education did a short piece on using CommentPress [pdf] in academia. It’s a quick and informative read.
The “geek chic” of the MacBook Air was tempting but I resisted and ordered the 15-inch MacBook Pro instead. Needless to say, I’m excited. I’ve been wanting a new computer for a while.
A few of us started our own informal professional development initiative and today was our first Lunch ‘n’ Learn meeting. It started so easily – I offered to show folks how to create a narrated slide show using Photo Story and someone else suggested we make these little demos a regular event. We quickly agreed to do these on days we have Faculty Assembly – about once a month.
Today, there were six of us – one more than we could comfortably fit around the table if we leave room for a laptop to do the demo. (Will we need to find a bigger space? How exciting will that be?) My demo had serious flaws (ugh, sound problems!) but it didn’t matter. Our conversation focused on how and why we might use tools like this in our own teaching and how we might introduce this to our Master’s students for their own teaching.
I said this Lunch ‘n’ Learn started easily, but will it flourish? I hope so. Today, one of my colleagues asked if anyone had something they wanted to learn the next time and I hope asking that question at the end of each session will help us keep up the momentum. By the way, I waited just barely long enough for everyone else to shrug their shoulders before chiming in with something I’d like to learn to do. That’s on tap for our next Lunch ‘n’ Learn and I’m excited!
This photo from Flickr’s CreativeCommons pool by Swansea Photographer
