Notes of a New Professor

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.

Carol, one of my friends “back home,” has been *reminding* me to start blogging again. So, Carol. Here it is. The first post in my new blog. I hope you’re not too disappointed.

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.