Edina Digital Age Learning

Much of this session focused on policies for student blogging and people sharing their experiences. The #comments4kids Twitter hashtag and Comments4kids wiki were mentioned as great sites for publicizing student work and inviting comments from other students or educators around the world. Jeff Utecht shared these guidelines from the International School in Bangkok. Our Web 2.0 Code of Conduct (.pdf alert!) has some similar content, but perhaps too heavy handed in our wording? Note: #13 was actually added by our lawyers! One participant suggested that the forms permitting student blogging should be sent out a couple of weeks after the blogs have been set up, to be able to say, "Here's this cool thing your child did. May they have permission to continue?!" Others cautioned that it was important to get permission ahead of time, especially if the audience was public. This led Steven Anderson to wonder out loud over where permission should stop. Do we need parents to gr...

From Jackie Roehl, Area Leader for Language Arts at Edina High School and author of a GREAT blog on National Urban Alliance Thinking Maps English 10 is continuing the practice of having each student create a blog. This year English 10 students will use their blogs to write about the various texts that they are reading for pleasure. The English 10 team has entered into a partnership with U of M Professors Richard Beach and Cynthia Lewis who will be assigning nearly 60 graduate students to read and comment on the Edina English 10 student blogs. The English 10 team is also submitting a research grant proposal to David Hyerle , the inventor of Thinking Maps , to analyze the student blog entries to study the impact of Thinking Maps on writing, reading, and relationships. If American Literature teachers want to have students establish a blog this year, students should still have last year’s English 10 blog online and could simply add entries to that blog. That continued blog could become...

Today was the first day of Tech Camp , and this afternoon I taught a course on Blogging with Students . Here is the presentation. Classroom Blogging View SlideShare presentation (tags: blogging classroom student authentic ) I'd love some feedback on the "Blogging Cycle" concept.

I was planning to write this post today, and then I saw a post from Scott McLeod with a chart showing student learning curiosity and engagement with content. To answer Scott's question about whether technology is to blame for this, I think the answer is NO ! The other day I saw a post on Clay Burrell's blog regarding a webcast he attended from a group called Teachers Teaching Teachers titled, "How to Make YouthTwitter Less Schooly" or something to that affect. Clay has had some interesting posts in the past about "schooliness" or "schoolishness" if you prefer as it relates to student blogging. It got me to thinking about, whether "schooliness" was a digital/technology issue, or whether it has been around regardless of technology's influence. I see my own two children's experience (admittedly a small sample) similar to McLeod's chart on learning curiosity. They are both naturally inquisitive, and excited about learning, but I ...

Two articles came across my desk recently that I thought I would share. The first, is an article about student blogging from 21st Century Connections . It speaks to some of the concerns that staff have had about student blogging being too "schoolish" and offers up a way to engage students and allow them to drive the discussion. What I also liked about the article was the concept of not just getting students to write thoughtfully, but also to use blogs to get students to read critically. The second article was an interview Daniel Pink conducted with Thomas Friedman on education in a "flat" world . In the interview they discuss the need for a liberal arts education, and both left and right brained instruction. Will Richardson had an interesting video post on the brain from Jill Bolte Taylor that has some good left and right brain information.