ITM 4: Welcome to the Blogosphere

ITM #4 focuses on how teachers and students are using blogs in K-12 education. Ready to jump into the swirl? (8 min)

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Show Notes:

The word "blog" is short for "web-logs," and Wikipedia defines a blog as "a website where entries are made in journal style and displayed in a reverse chronological order." So why are blog's so popular? First, they are VERY easy to create. Using FREE services like Blogger and Live Journal anyone can create a website in minutes. Second, they are collaborative. It's very easy for more than one person to be a "writer" for a single blog (just like the ITM), and your readers can quickly leave comments to tell you what they they about your ideas. Lastly, blogs are interconnected. The words, images, and links from one blog can be easily posted on any other blog, making it easy to spread ideas quickly.

To learn more about how Blog's are being used in education, check out these websites:

• Support Blogging - wiki on educational blogging


• Weblogg-ed - Will Richardson


• 2 Cents Worth - David Warlick


• Savvy Technologist - Tim Wilson


• Class Blogmeister - free student blogs


• Gaggle Blogs - free student blogs

"Ms. Cornelius" publishes a blog called the Shrewdness of Apes - which is a finalist for "Best Educational Blog" in this year's WebBlog Awards. (P.S. The ITM is nominated in a separate competition - the EduBlogs Awards. So you can vote for both of us without feeling guilty!) Be sure to check out her popular post that includes classroom setup advice for rookie teachers.

Teacher "Mike" writes the Education in Texas blog. His entry on the use (and abuse) of the word "dude" can be found here.

"Ms. Frizzle's" blog covers a wide range of topics and chronicles her life as teacher on a near daily basis. Be sure to check out her post asking: "What is education like in different countries?" Then follow her adventures on her new blog: Öğretmen - her insights on teaching in Turkey as a Fullbright Scholar.

Don Knezek is CEO of ISTE, the International Society for Technology in Education. ISTE is a non-profit organization that is a trusted source for professional development, knowledge generation, advocacy, and leadership for innovation. They also run the National Educational Computing Conference (NECC) - the largest ed tech conference in the world. This year's conference is in Atlanta in June 2007.

Here are some webcasts we did from last year's NECC Conference that you might find interesting.

ITM correspondent Wes Fryer (Speed of Creativity) reported from the rolling prairies of Oklahoma. Be sure to check out his Konza Prairie entry on Wikipedia.

Thanks to the students from Mr. Hernandez' class at Price Elementary School in Anaheim, CA, for helping us explain what the Infinite Thinking Machine is!

"Edublogging" and a Short History of the Edublog Awards

James Farmer started the community-based Edublog Awards three years ago, and sixteen months ago started an educational blogging site called Edublogs, which gives free blogs for educators, librarians, and students (over 30,000 so far!). Edublogs is a labor of love for James, who wanted to give educators a way to express themselves and communicate on the web. He doesn't really think of Edublogs (which runs on the multi-user version of the Open Source software WordPress) as a blogging site--to him, it's more like a website tool to allow educators and students to create "tons" of pages to host podcasts or videos, to provide websites for student resources, or just to communicate with each other. His day job is the "Online Community Editor" for The Age in Australia. Visit Edublogs for a free blogging account, and listen to James talk about the service and how to get started here.


Josie Fraser, who now runs the Edublog Awards from the other side of the world (she took over from James after the first year), is getting very little sleep these days. She, too, holds a day job--one that has a serious commute--so running the awards is taking up any free time she used to have.

Josie talks about her background and the awards in a short (ten minute) interview here, discussing how the awards have been, and are, a way of showcasing the benefits of blogging technology in the face of educational filtering solutions, since these filters often block blog sites altogether. (This is very similar to the impetus behind the SupportBlogging wiki--which, by the way, has also been nominated for an Edublog award this year). Her passion for educational blogging becomes more and more evident as the interview goes on. The awards are also intended to be a resource for educators to draw on for inspiration, to bring educators and students together on a global level, and to help build a feeling of community amongst educational bloggers (there is an online party on the night of the announcement of the winners that Josie says is really fun).

It's well worth looking at the list of nominees for great blogging (and wiki) inspiration. The two previous years' nominees and winners are also posted at the official site. Anyone can vote (so call your "nana," as Josie says). Vote for InfiniteThinking.org here and SupportBlogging here.

Vote for the ITM!

We're proud to announce that the ITM has just earned a nomination for "Best Group Blog" for this year's EduBlog Awards! We love producing this blog, and I'm constantly amazed at the great posts that are published each week. Kudos to Wes, Lucie, Tom, Mark, Julie, Lucy, and Steve!

If you love the ITM too, please take a minute to submit a vote for us! And tell you friends too! Voting ends on 12/16, so what are you waiting for?

Nominations and info on the EduBlog Awards are here.

Voting is only one-click away. So vote now!

Thanks again for all your support!

Chris : )

Flat Classrooms

Two pretty amazing "School 2.0" stories to report from the trenches.

Vicki Davis' 10th grade Computer Science class at Westwood Schools in Camilla, Georgia and Julie Lindsay's grade 11 ITGS class at International School Dhaka (ISD) in Bangladesh are in the middle of a two-week combined project to discuss topics from the Thomas Friedman book The World is Flat. The students are paired, with one student from each high school classroom, to work together. First they record an introduction to themselves, then they work together to produce a collaborative wiki, video, and podcast. There is even an amazing grading rubric. Wow.

Chris Craft, that innovative language arts teacher from South Carolina, has done it again. Using old computers and Skype, Chris brought his 6th graders into a direct videoconference with students at an American school in Lima Peru. To prepare, he had them work on a wiki and research common topics about Peruvian culture. They chose topics such as food, sports, and others. In their dry run, when they established video contact, the kids were wild with excitement. Click here to read this description of the actual day--you'll be glad you did! Talk about helping students become excited about learning. Double wow.

Vicki, Chris, and their students are the "Infinite Thinking Machines." Hear them describe their projects in a short audio clips here.

Taking the School Out of Learning

G'Day,

I've written and thought a lot about "School" and "Learning" over the years. A recent article from the UK's Times Online serves as just one more example of the clash between assembly line schooling and digital learning. Here we have the typical "Hacker" versus "The Establishment" confrontation (jamming phone signals to prevent cheating on national exams).

I suggest we're in a transition between schools modeled on factories and the personal learning available through the Web and social networking / Web 2.0 applications. With the Web came easy plagiarism, then came Turnitin.com. With "Web 2.0" came Wikipedia, RSS feeds & podcasts. How does education respond? Monitor student mouse-clicks or do something radical like change homework assignments? A bit too snide, sorry about that.

But the point is clear: when do we stop putting energy into the "Clamp-down" and invest it in the "Ramp-Up?" You might guess I have a lot of opinions about this, but here's a quick quotation for an article currently in press. It suggests considering the "open source community" as a model for schools in place of the top-down, factory model:

Although the contrasts are many, the most significant demands stating at the outset: an open source community is built on the premise that people want to create and contribute and that they can be trusted. With this foundation of trust, good things emerge. Shouldn’t education expect the best from people, as a matter of efficiency, if not out of principle?

I'd love to see what people think. As digital technologies undermine the "one-size-fits-all" approach, what aspects of "schooling" can we leave behind as rust-belt remnants, artifacts related to the logistics of a mass production model, not pedagogy, cognition or human development? And what elements do we need to add to make personal learning scale?


Please add your comments to this post.


Cheers, Tom

Unleash Your Inner Artist!

Daniel Pink encourages us to nurture the creative side of our brains in A Whole New Mind, a stimulating book that draws attention to a new skill set possibly needed by workers in this age of globalization. Interestingly, Pink notes that MFA degrees are becoming more relevant than MBAs in the working world and he describes six concepts worthy of aptitude development: design, story, symphony, empathy, play and meaning. Pink gives practical ideas for developing facility in these areas and others have suggested that A Whole New Mind is the ideal companion to Thomas Friedman’s A World is Flat.

Teachers looking to develop these sorts of skills in their students might want to consider a truly unique piece of software called Art Rage 2. Art Rage 2 is a painting program developed by a New Zealand based software company, Ambient Design. It is unlike any other painting program as its tools mimic real painting tools. For instance, the oil paint tool employs a paint-like texture and runs out of paint as you drag the "brush" across the digital canvas. Other
implements include chalk, felt pen and crayon tools and each is adjustable in terms of color, width, and pressure. The most unique feature of Art Rage 2, however, is the ability to load tracing images. A digital image can be uploaded to appear underneath your painting canvas. This makes it a cinch to trace with the tool of your choice or to simply turn the image to blendable paint. Tools can be set up to automatically select the correct colors from your digital image or you can choose your own hues. Pictured here this blog posting is an example of a “chalk” drawing I did in Art Rage 2 and the original digital photo I took last summer while visiting Monet’s garden in Giverny, France. Perhaps Claude would be rolling in his grave if he knew of modern day technological advances!

Art Rage 2 is completely engaging for students. My students are currently finishing self-portraits, which we are publishing to an online gallery. Many kids have even downloaded Art Rage 2 at home as the basic version is free and available for both PCs and Macs. I recommend upgrading to the paid version ($19.95), which allows for layers and additional tools including glitter. What kid (or adult!) cannot resist glitter?

The classroom implications are limitless. I can see students using this software to create their own maps, label blank maps, trace Google Earth imagery, record scientific observations, and to create graphics for other projects such as digital slideshows and web sites. My eight year old daughter came home today from school with blackline mandalas to color today, and it just occurred to me that these pictures could be uploaded and colored using Art Rage. Try playing with Art Rage today and add other potential project ideas to the comments section of this blog posting!

Tomorrow's Leaders

If you are reading the ITM, chances are you are looking for new ideas and strategies for integrating technology in your school. While ITM bloggers and readers are excited to share tools and strategies we've discovered, I'd like suggest that you not leave untapped an important resource that's already an intregal part of your school --TOMORROW'S LEADERS.

Are you tapping into the your students as valuable resources? The National Education Technology Plan was developed with input from Student Voices. Ideas from students in Student Views on Tranforming Education and Training Through Technologies provide insights that a generation of "digital Immigrants" could not have envisioned on their own.

Why not include student input as you update your local technology plans? In his article "Vision to Action: Adding Student Leadership to Your Technology Plan", Dennis Harpers makes note that

"Students make up about 92% of people in attendance in any school. Most technology plans focus on the role of the other 8% (teachers, administrators, adult technical support staff).

It is no wonder that

“Students report that there is a substantial disconnect between how they use the Internet for school and how they use the Internet during the school day and under teacher direction. For the most part, students’ educational use of the Internet occurs outside of the school day, outside of the school building, outside the direction of their teachers.”' Pew Internet & American Life Project (2002).

The investment we made in our Student Technology Leadership Teams ten years ago have produced a return many times its original cost. Not only has the school benefitted from the services, ideas, and energy students brought as we developed solutions for maintaining growing networks of computers, training staff, and designing innovative ways to integrate technology, but students gained invaluable opportunities to develop leadership skills. Dennis Harper's Gen Yes includes several models for integrating student leaders in your schools. States such as Kansas, Wisconsin, and Kentucky have developed state-wide student tech leadership initiatives. No need to wait until your state develops a program, programs such as TechSavvyKids and SWAT started as local initiatives. Examining these models can help you find strategies for including student voices in your school.

Today's students are "The Infinite Thinking Machine" - let's provide them with the skills and the opportunities to develop into tomorrow's leaders.