Imagine being provided with 23 amazing blog posts which have educational relevance for K-12 teachers and their students. As part of our “23 Things” experience in our on-line K-12 Learning 2.0 opportunity, we were asked to select and review 5 blogs from the following list of sample blog posts.

The blog posts that I investigated include the following:

Imagine a ten year old girl deciding to save her December allowance of $1.00 per day to donate to a worthy charity on Christmas day in honour of her recently deceased grandfather? In the “About” section of her blog, Laura Stockman states:

In December of 2007, I decided that the best way to remember my grandpa during the holiday season would be by living my life like he did, by making a difference and being a leader. I decided to honor my grandfather’s memory by trying to make a difference every day for twenty five days. I wanted to be able to do little things, like kids my age typically do, instead of HUGE things that are sometimes hard for kids like me. I decided to write about my adventures here, and I also created a challenge.

I challenged everyone who read my blog to TRY to do something every single day during the holiday season to make a SMALL difference in his or her world. I explained that whoever made the “most difference” in December would win a $25.00 donation to the charity of his or her choice on Christmas night.

Imagine the delight of Laura to find several people who were willing to match her contribution and more? Imagine your students creating a service project and creating a blog to share their story? If you don’t think youngsters can have an impact and a world-wide audience, double-click Laura’s “clustr map” to gain an important insight as to what countries her viewers represent.

As an educator I enjoyed the inspirational 2000 movie called “Pay It Forward”, staring Kevin Spacey, Helen Hunt and Haley Joel Osment. If you haven’t seen it, I encourage you to rent it at a video store as it will impact you in much the same way as Laura’s passionate blog.  One can view a short clip of the “Pay It Forward” movie online at: http://www.metacafe.com/watch/1293108/pay_it_forward_pay_it_forward_movie_by_justin_verrengia/ Imagine how your students could have a positive impact if you introduce ideas and concepts that are shared as teacher resources from organizations like the Pay it Forward Foundation or the Random Acts of Kindness Foundation. Through such endeavours, we are all winners. Thank you Laura for your inspiration!

I would be remiss if I didn’t comment on this blog created at Sargent Park School by the Grade 8  teacher Chris Harbeck. Both Chris and I were very lucky to attend Darren Kuropatwa’s initial workshop on blogging in our own school division in Winnipeg, MB. Darren, as many of you, in the blogosphere, know was a very dedicated high school Mathematics teacher who seemed to be “light years” ahead, in terms of innovation and adopting ways of engaging his students through the use of technology and web 2.0 applications. Chris, on the other hand, taught junior high students Mathematics in the same neighbourhood as Darren’s school. In fact, many of the students that Chris started on the road to becoming more engaged 21st century learners would continue with Darren in high school Mathematics. These two educators, Darren and Chris, fed off one another, took leadership roles in the K-12 Online Conferences and, through their innovative teaching and online sharing, influenced many educators, not only in Manitoba but world-wide, as evidenced by their respective ClusterMaps and feedback comments.

Darren initially introduced the “Scribe Post”process, in which a student took notes during class, and that night synthesized the materials and posted an on-line synopsis for his/her classmates. In addition, the scribe had the honour of posting the name of a classmate to be the next scribe. I was amazed at the attention to detail, and evidence of learning, in the individual high school scribe posts. Furthermore, there seemed to be an undeclared competition as classmates perused past scribe posts and attempted to improve their own post when they were named to take on this duty as scribe. The Scribe Post Hall of Fame was an ingenious technique for providing students with a benchmark or gauge as to what quality scribe posts included and, in many ways, helped to fuel the natural competition to improve. Such student scribe posts, written in a language that students could understand, caused Darren to often remark “My students are writing our mathematics textbook!”

Although I was very impressed with the scribe post process by Grade 12 students in Darren’s high school, I must admit that I doubted that it would work as well with students who were four or five years younger in Chris’ Mathematics classes. However, I was pleasantly surprised by Boeun and his classmates as they adopted and took ownership for this on-line reinforcement of their learning. As any teacher knows, one learns so much better when one tries to teach a concept to someone else. Taking on the responsibility as a student scribe reverses traditional roles as the student now becomes the teacher. Undoubtedly the online feedback and comments from their classmates and teacher helped motivate students. However as a parent, I know that I would be online checking the class blog to see how my son or daughter scribed in comparison with his/her peers. This online blog forms a bridge into the community and should not be overlooked as it is an important vehicle to help parents and taxpayers gain a perspective as to how, relatively expensive, technology is being used  in their neighbourhood school and how students are being better prepared for the future.

I count myself very lucky to consider Darren and Chris as colleagues and “twitter-mates” in my own professional learning network but most important as friends.

As one who has been taught to embellish through clauses and compound sentences, I was eager to see what this 14 year old blogger, Morgante Pell, had to say. I liked his idea proposed below:

If we recognize that the art of brevity is an important one, why do absurd length requirements continue to be enforced? I understand the student’s need for some sort of standard scaffolding to write with, but how about trying a new one? Instead of having requirements, how about constraints? Force students to think about each and every word by limiting the number of words allowed. Try it yourself—can you tell a fragment of a story in just 140 characters?

Two of Morgante’s ideas got me thinking. His reference to the Twittories (where 140 individuals create a story in which each person contributes using 140 characters to the on-going story-chain before advising the next individual to continue) and the challenge of attempting to create a message in 42 words  caused me to reflect. Could these ideas be blended into a classroom exercise to foster brevity? Perhaps it is too early in the evolution of Twitter to expect all students in class to have a Twitter account and be able to go on-line to create a story-chain with all segments constrained to 140 characters or less. Perhaps a teacher might create a classroom Twitter account and share the password with all students so that they could all go on-line at school or at home and add their creative 140 character entry to the on-going story. I would give each student 24 hours to make his/her entry and then, using Darren Kuropatwa’s “scribe post” technique, that student would pick another student in class (who has not yet contributed) to make the next entry advising them when their 24 hour writing window expires. Do you not think that students would be checking on-line frequently to watch as the story-chain unfolded and to find out if they were nominated as next to write.

For those educators who are not yet ready to try Twitter with their students, here’s an alternative. Obviously if teachers are encouraging students to go on-line they should all be using an email account that cannot be traced back to them as individuals and all references to others in class are through “nick names”. Imagine that the teacher starts the story-chain off with a 140 character statement like “It was a dark and stormy night as a mist rolled in from the highlands and enveloped the quiet village that was home to our hero, Lancelot.” This statement is then emailed to another class member who continues with the story and emails the cumulative story-chain on to a classmate advising her/him of the 24 hour window. Another alternative would be to break your class into two or three different teams. The same story-starter would be sent to the first person in each of the teams and then the respective team story-chains would unfold. Based on the number of students in each team, the stories might cycle two or three times through all team members before the last person in erach team is asked to bring closure to the story. Imagine what learning would go on as each of the team story-chains were compared and contrasted!

I apologize to Morgante for not writing my reflection in a more constrained fashion butI do thank him for providing me withideas that can improve learning in the calsssroom.

With so many online references to educational blogging, Anne Davis’ two page summary of the benefits of blogging should be required reading for all K-12 educators not only ” … for all high school English teachers who have kids write for the refrigerator” as Emma states in her feedback comment.

Anne’s bulleted entry that states …

The worldwide audience provides recognition for students that can be quite profound. Students feel more compelled to write when they believe many others may read and respond. It gives them motivation to excel. Students need to be taught skills to foster a contributing audience on their blog.

resonated with me. As a educator, I recently attended a meeting with other retired teachers who were discussing ways of contributing back into the community. Following up on Anne’s recommendation, it might be worthwhile to attempt to organize retired teachers who would like to become on-line mentors and provide feedback to student blogs. Whether these “motivating mentors” or “blog boosters” (how’s that for a catchy organization name) chose to “connect” with students from their former school(s) or wished to support children in another country, I’m sure the adult feedback and comments would be well received.

This blog was originally shared with me when this Grade 2 class was awarded the 2006 EduBlog Award.  What is most impressive about this site is that, with the help of an innovative teacher, even Grade 2 students can get world-wide exposure to what is happening in their classroom. Some might say that this teacher took advantage of the “opportunity” presented when this duck chose to build her nest on their school playground. Others might say that the idiom “opportunity knocks but once” certainly applied in this case. However, I believe that we, as educators, must be ever-vigilant to hear the “knocks” so that we can turn such opportunities into “teachable moments”. Undoubtedly Marin County Day School staff members capitalized on this opportunity by getting primary children to draw, sing and speculate in writing about the duck in their playground. I’m so glad they didn’t “duck” this opportunity and shared their experiences in their “Duck Diaries” blog.

Take care & keep smiling :-)