Edina Digital Age Learning

I have been reading Discovery Educator Steve Dembo's "Teach42" blog for the past year and following his updates on Twitter . He is a former kindergarten teacher turned "passionate" education technology advocate and I consider him to be part of my "personal learning network!" Last month, he set out on an ambitious project titled " 30 Days to Being a Better Blogger ". The idea originated last year with Darren Rouse at Problogger .com , but was not necessarily focused on educational blogging. Dembo's project was geared for educators, and I am going through the steps on this blog to show it's potential. He has added a wiki page here , and encourages educators to sign up for the challenge. While the idea was to do everything in November, the site will remain up and can be done at any time. I have gone through the list of 30 tips (You'll note many changes have occured on this site!) and have included below some that I think would be...

The following is a screencast for adding a video clip to a Gaggle.net blog. Unfortunately, Gaggle.net does not allow embedding at the present time, so you have to click on the link when finished to view it.

Yesterday, I had the pleasure of reading to 10th Grade Language Arts classes at Edina High School . Since they are all blogging, I decided to read a blog post that I thought would be of interest to them. I chose a recent post by Doug "Blue Skunk" Johnson, titled Facebook-An Educational Resource ? In the post, Doug explains his philosophy regarding blocking sites for student access and the things he will be sharing with principals in his district about social networking sites like Facebook . I talked to the students a bit about our filter, and why we block sites like Youtube . Since our network sees a 10th grade student the same way it sees a 1st grader, and Youtube has content that may not be appropriate for 1st graders, it needs to be blocked. (I won't go into the question of whether Youtube has educationally appropriate content, or whether our network should be reconfigured to differentiate between 1st and 10th graders...) After reading Doug's post, I asked them if...

Earlier today I asked CoP members, and other staff who are blogging with students if they had any students who fit Will Richardson's definition of a good student blog . Later, I saw Clay Burrel's post at "Beyond-School.org" regarding one of his students who fit the bill as an excellent student blogger. It may be worth giving kids an exemplar of what student blogs can look like. Tim K's response regarding his students attitude about blogging at school brings up an interesting point, "some suggested writing about movies they see outside class (definitely makes it seem less “schoolish,” which seems like a problem with blogging assignments in general). " Do blogging assignments seem too "schoolish" ? How can we make them more authentic, and less busywork? I'd love to hear your comments.