I’m sitting in a meeting in an 8th Grade English classroom right now. I grabbed Born Confused by Tanuja Desai Hidier off the shelf, which I haven’t read. Here goes:

“And I wiggled my sack onto my back and walked on.”

1. iGoogle – Our tech-savvy Upper School Division Head has made the radical decision to go paperless with her fall teacher “notebook” at our upcoming division retreat. Rather, she has put all of the important parent letters, schedules, meeting agendas, etc. into Google Docs. She will then send each of us an iGoogle tab with the Google Docs gadget front and center. Also on the tab will be a variety of gadgets she wants to highlight as possible teaching tools. Each month she will send us a new tab with new gadgets, always keeping the Docs front and center. As we’ve been playing with this idea, I’ve been creating my own personal tabs to keep track of my favorite new gadgets and an aggregator for my favorite blogs.
2. Ning – On the heels of the fabulous Building Learning Communities conference this past July, two of our 7th and 8th grade teachers have decided to set up Ning Learning Communities for their students. One teacher is an English teacher and looks forward to giving each of her students their own blog space through the Ning, and hopes that it will become a safe place for her students to experiment with their writing. A math teacher plans to use his Ning as a place for students to discuss homework, work on group projects together, and to show their step-by-step work somehow. Can’t wait!
3. Scratch – My Ed Tech partner-in-crime, Jen Cronan Flinn, and I attended a full-day seminar at MIT this summer and had the opportunity to learn how to use Scratch, the latest educational programming software to come out of the MIT Media Labs (home of Logo.) We are excited to pilot Scratch in several grades, and one of our goals is to come up with ways beyond math to integrate this fantastic program.

In early January, I used my commute time to listen to a podcast of Ed Tech Talk’s Women of the Web show featuring Konrad Glogowski. I was completely inspired by his story of how he set up individual blogs for his Canadian 8th Graders and gave them four glorious weeks to blog and write without any guidelines or instructions, only to write about what they were passionate about. (click here for that show’s podcast and show’s chat notes.) Newly inspired to challenge my own 6th Graders, I gave a little speech at the beginning of our most recent Blog Club meeting and challenged them to write about their passions, interests, things they weren’t writing about for school assignments. I followed up with a few examples, none of which anyone took me up on, but they got the general idea.

Toward the end of the Club, one of the quieter students asked me how to create links to individual songs in iTunes. I noticed that the two songs he was linking to were by Jimi Hendrix and Led Zeppelin, two of my own personal favorites. I asked him about his interest in classic rock and he instantly lit up and went into an animated rant about how none of his friends understand that this is the music that started it all, that has the best musicians and that everyone his age should be listening to. I looked at him and said “That’s what you should be blogging about.” He responded by saying “I can write that kind of stuff?!” YES! He lamented the fact that our club meetings are so short and I reminded him that he can write posts onto our blog from anywhere with an internet connection, including home. He immediately began typing away, and by the end he exclaimed “This club is so much FUN!” Woo hoo! (Disclaimer: he hasn’t finished his post yet. I’ll link to it as soon as he’s done.) The Blog Club’s blog lives here.

(Jimi Hendrix photo courtesy of http://flickr.com/photos/toofarnorth/134541124/)

We had our first meeting today, and while I was thrilled to see that 12 kids showed up, I was somewhat disappointed that none of them were girls. In any event, the boys were eager to get started recording podcasts today and I had to pull back the reins a bit as we had some decisions to make. Were we blogging and podcasting or just podcasting? Was this a blog about life at school or about life in general? Was the target audience the whole world or just the MCDS community? Would each podcast episode have several segments, or would each group/topic do a separate podcast? How would we preserve the students’ anonymity?

In any event, I asked the kids how many of them had already blogged or podcasted outside of school. About 5 hands went up. The subject matter on their blogs ranged from movies to music to skiing. They divided themselves into 3 groups of 4 and got to work right away, and their emphases will be Music, Humor and Movies. This has the potential to be pretty cool.

Our home will be: http://www.mcdsblogs.org/blogclub and I’ll be sure to post updates on our progress.

• Loose Parts: Our twin sons’ preschool teacher recently launched this fantastic blog, where he intends to explore issues pertaining to Early Childhood Education, anti-bias curriculum, communication between teachers and parents, professional development, etc.
• The K Files: Our next-door neighbor (and close friend) is documenting her school search for a kindergarten for her daughter. She is tackling some rocky terrain, including the San Francisco USD lottery system, public school vs. private school, school readiness, language immersion, etc. Her blog is already receiving a fair amount of traffic and is stimulating some lively debate in the comments sections.
• Abby & Jon’s Pregnancy Blog: Abby, a friend and former colleague, attended my CAIS presentation last spring and decided to make her first blog about her pregnancy & and new parenthood experiences.
• Kindness Mural Project: Armed with successful blogging practices, Abby used a blog to document an amazing global elementary art project she piloted at The Phillips Brooks School last Spring.
• MCDS Book Corner: One of the MCDS Librarians, Anie S., launched a blog this Fall, highlighting what’s going on in our school’s library.

http://k12online.wm.edu/its_elementary/player.html

http://k12online.wm.edu/GradeOneClassroom.wmv

If you attended today’s session, please be sure to leave a comment letting us all know how you’re intending to use blogs & podcasts in your schools. And once you’ve gotten one set up, be sure to let us know how to find you!

You can download a .pdf (with links) of my presentation (updated as of 8/07) here:
Hello World!

http://www.mcdsblogs.org/trout

http://room12.edublogs.org/

1. Banyan Room

2. Maple Room

3. Huckleberry Room

To give a listen to the kids’ work (which I must say, sounds fabulous!) go to any of the 3 class sites below:

• Huckleberry Room
• Banyan Room
• Maple Room

The iRiver is my new best friend. I’m impressed with the sound quality, ease of use and storage capacity. Less impressed so far with the Snowball USB mic we just got, but I’ve admittedly only just started playing with it.

Over Spring Break, our Director of Facilities discovered that a neighborhood duck had decided to build her nest right under the Middle School play structure. Being the tech-savvy school that we are, of course, we had to create a blog for our own feathered mom-to-be. I used the comments section of the first post to track the fascinating flurry of emails that went back and forth between our faculty members today as we discussed how to integrate the duck into our classroom conversations. To see our duck’s blog, point your browser to: http://duckdiaries.edublogs.org/

Each Spring, the MCDS 1st Graders host the First Grade Library as a culminating project to celebrate their collective growth as readers and writers. Students hand write a series of stories, edit the stories, type them into a PowerPoint template I’ve created for the project, print the stories out, illustrate each page and bind them. Then parents and students fr

om other grade levels peruse the “library” of stories and check stories out to read and write reviews.

This year, we decided to add an audio component to the project. Each student will pick a favorite story and we will record them reading the story. The plan is to burn a CD of stories for each class, and to hopefully create a podcast of the stories that the larger community can enjoy.

I’m experimenting with our new iRiver T30, which I absolutely love in some ways, but is turning out to be a lot less M

ac-friendly than we had been led to believe. (MP3 files won’t import directly into GarageBand — Audacity is needed as a go-between.) In order to upload the kids’ audio, I’m doing a rather convoluted set of steps which I would love feedback on — I actually have no idea if this is the best way to do it. It is definitely NOT simple, and there’s no way that I’d ask a classroom teacher to do this for him/herself. So here are my steps:

1. Record students reading their stories onto the iRiver (I thought about adding an external mic, but the sound quality w as practically identical.)
2. Drag the mp3 files off the iRiver onto my iMac desktop
3. Open the files in Audacity and edit out the stuff I don’t want. Export the files as an mp3 or wav file. I’m doing it this way because GarageBand won’t recognize the mp3s directly off the iRiver.
4. Import the Audacity-created mp3s into GarageBand. Add jingle music ot beginning and end of stories. Use the Share Podcast command and save the mu4 file to my desktop
5. Upload the mu4 file to my archive.org account (I won’t even MENTION how cumbersome that process is!!)
6. Create a blog entry in the class edublogs blog with a link to each individual podcast
7. Burn a feed for the blog using feedburner
8. Publicize

I have only done 3 files so far, and it was really time consuming and a lot of steps. To hear what I’ve done so far, go to http://huckleberry.edublogs.org or to http://feeds.feedburner.com/huckleberry and see if you can get it to work.
Click here to hear my maiden attempt at uploading audio to archive.org before I had the kids do any recording.

So really — world — I’d love any advice about how to simplify this project and how to keep it relatively inexpensive and teacher-friendly.

Thanks in advance and I’ll be sure to post more about this as the project progresses.

Blogs We’re Reading, Podcasts We’re Listening To and Tools We’re Playing With:
As an informal mixer/warm-up to the topic, I asked everyone at the beginning of the meeting to introduce themselves, the schools they were from, and if appropriate, a favorite Web 2.0 resource they are currently using. This is the list of resources mentioned (be sure to add others as a comment below!):

1. Jon Udell’s Weblog
2. Knitting Blog
3. Moodle
4. Plone
5. Home Brewing podcasts
6. Daily Kos
7. Flickr
8. del.icio.us
9. Psychology podcasts
10. NY Times podcasts
11. eHub
12. Mozilla Sunbird
13. SF Chronicle Tech Talk Podcast
14. Poker podcasts
15. Blue Frontier
16. boingboing.net
17. Edublogs
18. Learnerblogs
19. ESLBlogs
20. Class Blogmeister
21. How to set up a student centered classroom blog

Visual Search Engines:
Our first presenter was Angela Neff, Director of Technology at St. Matthew’s Episcopal Day School in San Mateo, who gave us a brief overview of what Web 2.0 is, with comparisons to various Web 1.0 tools and websites. She then presented a host of visual search engines and challenged us to break (or at least examine) the Google habit by experimenting with some of the cool tools listed below:

1. KarTOO
2. Mooter
3. Clusty
4. Grokker
5. Ujiko
6. Ditto.com

Podcasting:
The next presenter was Jason Stone, Director of Technology at San Francisco Day School, who spoke about how his 5th grade Spanish teachers and students have been experimenting with podcasting as a wonderful extension of the Spanish curriculum. While SFDS have been able to post MP3s to the website for years, they are excited about how podcasting lets users subscribe through aggregator (most students use iTunes). By using a stand-alone MP3 recorder, recording becomes really easy and not dependent on having a laptop handy. With the newest version of iLife, GarageBand makes podcasting really simple and Apple has a really good tutorial on creating and posting a podcast.

Plone Content Management Software for School Websites:
Next up was Preston Tucker from The College Preparatory School in Oakland. He took us through the stages of growth and development their school’s website has gone through over the years. As their original website grew, it slowly became un-navigable and untenable with over 600 separate pages, until finally his school asked him to move the website from a Web 1.0 to a Web 2.0 structure. After studying and analyzing many other school websites, they decided to use Plone, an open-source CMS, to develop their new site. Some of the key advantages to their new site include:

1. Calendars, pictures, and news are now easily brought to the front of the site
2. If the school changes it’s branding, logo, colors, etc. it is easy to change
3. Searching and using the site mirrors an analogy of the simplicity of Google, rather than the drilling down through the links like Yahoo
4. Non-technical users put their information, documents, photos, etc. into forms that are controlled centrally and viewable by any browser
5. Students now beginning to be webmasters
6. Plone has a number of out-of-the-box import/export features for various document types

Using Moodle Course Management for a School Website:
Richard Kassissieh from San Francsico University High School was up next to talk about how UHS has moved from using WebCT to Moodle for many of their course listings and teacher interactions with students. He has made it easy for us to review his presentation by posting an outline of it here. I also mentioned the Moodle that is being built by the New York Consortium of Independent School Technologists (NY’s equivalent of BAISNET) and how it might be an interesting model for us to consider as well. Richard also spoke eloquently about the importance of teacher blogging, how it changes writing, how we ought to visit and support each other’s blogs, and how the voices of those of us who work directly in schools need to be added to the edublogosphere (which is already well represented by ed tech consultants.) Visit (and leave a comment on) Richard’s blog when you have a minute! If you have a blog of your own, please leave the URL in a comment below or email the info to BAISNet.

Talking to Students About MySpace:
We ended the BAISNet portion of the meeting with a presentation by Brad Lakritz from Marin Academy. He recreated a presentation he recently delivered to 9th and 10th graders at his school as part of a larger panel (including older MA students) on the topic of MySpace. One especially salient point was that he equated Web 2.0 technologies as being the “reality internet” outcropping of the reality TV shows, including many very real dangers and pitfalls. His school consciously made the decision to arm students with information and statistics about web usage and the public nature of MySpace, rather than using scare tactics. He gave the example of how his 16-year old daughter felt that giving him access to her MySpace account felt as though he was listening in on her private phone calls, yet she failed to understand just how very public her online communication was indeed.

At Least They Brought Yummy Food…
MCDS has been experimenting with inviting various vendors to school to deliver some of our professional development to teachers. Following the meeting we invited a vendor to present to BAISNet and some of our own faculty and…well…let’s just say that it was not a very effective presentation. Thanks for those of you who managed to sit there for what felt (to me) like an eternity. Personally, I vote for keeping BAISNet meetings BAISNet meetings. ‘Nuff said.

Conclusion:
Thanks to the wonderful presenters and to all of you who braved the rainy weather this afternoon! If you weren’t able to attend or are reading this entry from parts unknown, please feel free to add to our lists of resources, ask questions, leave comments, etc.

Big thanks to Mike Hetherington at mhetherington.net for his crystal-clear how-to instructions on how to set up a learnerblog site for students.