Although I frequently use del.icio.us (#5), I haven’t advocated for you to start. You might consider it. Goodness knows, I get a lot of benefit from it with over 1500 tagged sites and counting. What’s del.icio.us all about? This video from The CommonCraft Show explains it:

You can use Google Reader (#7) to subscribe to del.icio.us tags so new resources come into your Google Reader account just like new blog posts do. You can sign up for certain tags or things from certain people or even certain tags from certain people.You can also look at del.icio.us accounts in useful ways. For example, my user name is fiedler. One of the tags I use is med505. If you ever want to see all of the resources I’ve tagged as useful for this class, you can at http://del.icio.us/fiedler/med505/. That gives you four pages! Yikes. Maybe you are only interested in the MED505 tags that deal with writing. That’s as easy as adding a + sign. http://del.icio.us/fiedler/med505+writing/.

Adding del.icio.us to your online toolkit is not required for this class, but I highly recommend you play with it when you have a few free moments. As useful as it is for your life as a student, it will be even more useful for you as a teacher. Don’t believe me? Go back and watch the video if you skipped it.

This latest project started about two months ago when I was Skyping with a colleague. Their teachers’ college has a Macintosh laptop initiative and they are switching to RapidWeaver for student portfolio development. I played with RapidWeaver a year or two ago and decided I should look at it again.

My new faculty web page is the result of my dabbling. The little springy things on the first page and on each of the class pages make me smile. I might get tired of them but for now, I think I’ll let them stay.

I know I should work to integrate my faculty web page and professional portfolio into one cohesive unit but I think that will be a task for summer.

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.

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.

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.

After 20 years in the public schools, a trip through a doctoral program, several stints of adjunct teaching, I’m now an Asst. Professor. We’re starting a new Master of Education program and our first cohort of students will be arriving in just under two weeks. It’s an accelerated program and will focus on the Teacher as Leader in Curriculum and Instruction. The program will be delivered in hybrid format, but is heavily online.

I’ve been busy developing the first course, Teacher As Leader. The course content is on the open web although the students will be seeing it through the lens of Desire2Learn which, I hope, explains its rather spare appearance. Inside Desire2Learn, I’ve been fiddling and tweaking the course home page. I wanted to make it a warm and welcoming place but there’s only so much one can do. As I was doing an Internet search for one of the things I had in mind, I found a blog post by Laura Gibbs (online instructor at Oklahoma University) in which she talked about “Decorating the Walls.” It resonated with me because that’s exactly what I had been doing! So, I took a few hints from her and added a few more widgets than I already had.

So, Carol. Here’s the front door of my classroom and you can see a hints of what will be happening in it here. My plan is to have my students blog, too. Please stay tuned.