We follow deer tracks in the mud, pretending that we too are wild beasts.
and so it begins!
What happens when you prejudge a book recommendation from a colleague simply because of its name or its audience? For me, that's pretty rare, yet it happened with Guyku. Because I trust the educators of my PLN (Professional Learning Network), I changed my mind, I read Guyku. It's great, so I say, "Go with it!"
With that in mind, I've decided to review this highly recommended book with a specific audience. I'm wondering if children who read Guyku will really care that the title makes it sound like it's a book for boys, yet I think most young ones will enjoy this book.
I just read GUYKU, because of this trust within my Professional Learning Network. This book would be a satisfying read for boys or girls. While, the story of Haiku for guys sounded like a book that only a boy could love, I was impressed that the story would probably be well received by boys or girls.
As I have written on many Tuesdays, I'm giving GUYKU the Six Traits of Writing treatment. While this book could be used to teach many traits, especially WORD CHOICE and SENTENCE FLUENCY. I selected SENTENCE FLUENCY because I think the Haiku message can be taught within the context of the fluency trait.
In Guyku, each sentence is written in the poetic form of Haiku, yet the style and meter of each sentence is NOT repetitious. Quite the opposite. With sentences like
Hey, who turned off all the crickets? I'm not ready for summer to end....
and
With baseball cards and clothespins, we make our bikes sound like motorcycles....
it appears to me that this is a great opportunity to show your students how cool varying sentences in a similar (Haiku) format can be.
Join me. Review this book.
Other educators who have spoken high praise for GUYKU:
IMAGE: "Join the Guyku Club" by Peter H. Reynolds taken from the Guyku website.
Silver Links by Jimby K
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License
Are you using linkbacks, also known as trackbacks, to help track your blog posts?
Last year, I discussed an issue of concern among our professional learning network It's the issue of people not referencing someone else's work and calling it their own.
Many of you commented on this topic, so I've investigated some processes that can help the author minimize these problems.
While I discovered many blog authors who have trackback urls, I learned that Blogger doesn't. They do have a linkback procedure. Google Help refers to backlinks that you can set by going to the Settings on your Blogger dashboard, under Comments. There are many caveats, so I would recommend that you read the help reference thoroughly before you try to set up your back links in Blogger hosted blog posts.
If you are looking for linkbacks or trackbacks on other blogs, they may also be called pingbacks or, rarely, refbacks. I also look for these at the end of a blog post. I use these urls when I link the blogs in my post, so the author can actually see how their blog post was referenced.
Recently, I subscribed to the Huffington Post online, as many of my PLN were quoting their articles. I also signed up to receive email notifications, and that is how I found out about VOKLE.
While I enjoyed Huffington Post's Washington Bureau Chief, Dan Froomkin's, online live interview of Janine Wedel about her new book, Shadow Elite, I was even more impressed with the web application that they were using for this online event. Vokle has a smooth, crisp picture with a clean interface. The sounds are clear and full. There is a back channel that's easily viewed.
I learned there are some host safeguards for comments. You can see them before they go out, just in case there are any off topic participants. This is important to plan for ahead of time, because it's too late when they are there. I was in an online conference when someone arrived just to make off topic remarks and disrupt the session. It's very unsettling for both host and participants, so this is an excellent control feature.
I plan to use this new web application, VOKLE. How about you?
Wishing for a blog roll? Hoping to compile a list of blogs from friendly colleagues that you want to share with the world?
If you do, you know that it's always a work in progress. Sparking my action here, Amy Palko in Bye Bye Blogroll - Hello Links! explains how it quickly becomes a very long list on your blog page. You can organize them under one link where people can view and explore.
While you're at it, you can even provide a tiny blurb about each blog or website that you include in this link.
How often do you read through your archives? How do you check for broken links? Do you edit your tags? If you caught a grammatical error in a blog posting from your archives, would you fix it?
These are all pertinent questions to think about when you write a blog that you hope people will follow. Weed the Garden if you want to keep it looking good. If your links are dead, your article loses some of its meaning. I recommend checking archives, but I know that is time consuming.
Here is what I do: When I'm writing an article about a particular topic that's related to early works, I check out the links in the archived article BEFORE I include a link in the new article. This is a great way to find dead links. It's surprising how many websites change their actual names for their web pages.
Checking this links is very important for another reason. It is the way that you cite your sources, so it's critical to keep these citations current.
I wish there were some dynamic agent or web app that could check links, but I don't know of one. Do you? If so, it would be wonderful if you would share it here.
"Key Note" by william.neuheisel
Attribution License
Have you had trouble with spammers, phishers or other internet interlopers? Many of my Professional Learning Network, including me, have recently experienced troubles with our various interactive social networks, including blog comments and Twitter. There is also the less obvious, yet serious problem: thieves that steal your postings without attributing the work to you.
Do You Lock Your Online Doors? In the beginning, I didn't, but now I do. At first, I just tried to avoid the issue of phishing, spamming and theft. I ignored the Direct Messages, deleted the spam comments and stopped blogging. From my own experiences, that makes you more vulnerable which seems to be just what these people want. Just as you do at your own home, I would like to recommend that you take a more proactive stance against personal attacks. To begin with, I'd suggest that you LOCK YOUR DOORS!
The first time a phisher captured my Twitter account, I thought it was an accident. This first phisher was an educational group communicating with me. Eventually, as I discussed the problem on Twitter, they stopped sending their tweets of new blog posts in my name.
Unlocking by Gabriela Camerotti
Attribution-NonCommercial License
Even after that experience, I was naive. I didn't realize that some SEO's follow you with the hope that you will follow them. When you do follow them, they stop following you. They capture your Direct Messages to promote their new products, games, or blog posts. When you call their attention to it, they don't know what you are talking about since they don't even follow you. I wonder if you have had any similar experience?
Finally, I changed my password. That was very aggravating, but it did stop the phishing. I had to remember: "Lock the Doors!".
Another recent problem is spamming comments on my blog posts. Some of my professional learning network recommended allowing comments to go right to my blog, and I believed that would allow people to comment with the least trouble. That worked well for me for over two years, yet "a good deed never goes unpunished". Do you still allow open commenting without approval? If so, how do you deal with spammers?
Over the past two months, I've had at least five different spammers attack my blog comments section. I didn't notice it at first, as they were adding their spam comments to my older posts. Fortunately, I found them in the email notifications when new comments appear on my blog.
I wanted to counteract the spamming, but still allow unrestricted comments on my new posts. These are some of the measures that I instituted for this blog.
I locked down the comment postings on my old posts, and these comments had to be approved before they would be posted. That worked for about a week, but the spammers started direct attacks on my new posts. Has this happened to you?
In the end, I've changed all my blog comments approval system. Your comments must be approved before they will appear on my blog. Philosophically, I'm opposed to that. I want my readers to KNOW that all comments will be posted. I want to assure you that all comments, negative or positive, will be posted, unless they are off-topic spamming. How are you solving this blog comment spamming problem?
The last problem is the most offensive to me personally, just because it is so personal. I use one of the most generous Creative Commons copyrighting licenses available, but some people ignore it. They seem so desperate to appear creative and original that they don't make attributions of other blogger's work on their blog posts. Have you experienced this problem?
How did I discover it? Just as I discover cheaters in my classes, they usually give themselves up. Many are loosely connected to me in my professional learning network (PLN). When they advertise a new blog post about a topic of interest to me, I want to read it. My original intent is to learn more, but then I'm disappointed to find they use the same links that I've found to discuss the same idea from MY perspective. What's worse is the use of direct quotes from my blog posts without attributions. I'm flattered that they take my ideas or my words, but I would appreciate a simple link to my original article.
How are you dealing with this phenomena? My original response was to stop posting. That's a dead end proposal, because I want to write about my ideas, experiences and practices.
mother and daughter by pomegranates Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License
As my n2teaching Hearts and Minds blog develops, I include new interactive applications for teachers, and I can't bear to delete the earlier ones. As far as I am concerned, if they were important enough to select as examples of applications that have educational value, I still want to keep them on my blog.
Having the widgets, badges and other interactive applications on my blog makes my second column very long, in comparison to the right side. I don't really think people access those applications located towards the bottom, and I would like to share these with readers and my PLN(Professional Learning Network)colleagues.
My current dilemma is partially created because I use my blog like a website. This is a necessary requirement in a way, since I want to keep my official professional development archives easy to access and simple to use
To solve the issues of reader accessibility, I decided that I should experiment with 3 column blog templates. My goal is to keep the blog post in a central position, yet have more information easily accessible for the reader.
I researched what is available for someone with rudimentary programming skills such as mine, and I found many examples that I would like to share. My basic criteria for the 3-column blog templates search were:
****minimalistic color and structure ****free ****compatible with Blogger ****attractive ****easy to adapt
I was greatly inspired by cgseibel's Technology for Learning blog where she uses a 3-column blog template, so I have looked for similar ones.
Here is a Diigo Webslides presentation of a small grouping that met my criteria.
Life often becomes more powerful through the relationships we make. Whether the opportunities are face-to-face or online, we can meet people in the most serendipitous ways. If it hadn't been for a fire in a Texas server center that shut down Weather Pixie, I would have never met Tamsin, the young woman, the talented programmer, who created Weather Pixie. I want to honor my Ada Lovelace Day pledge by sharing a brief description of her contribution to technology.
Tamsin is the programmer who developed the awesome widget called WeatherPixie or What to Wear. In my professional opinion, as an educator, I believe WeatherPixie is one of the most valuable web applications that teachers can use.
Not just educators love Weather Pixie, so you might want to try it out, especially if you like knowing about the weather. You can set up Weather Pixie for your area or for any area on Earth.
Weather Pixie is a web application or widget that anyone can use. I believe parents and educators of children of the preschool through elementary ages can use Weather Pixie to help little ones learn about the weather and what types of clothing to be worn each day. If it is raining, the Weather person (select a boy or girl) will have an umbrella or raincoat. When it is sunny and warm, they may wear shorts.
A colleague first shared Weather Pixie with me in September of 2007. In turn, I share it, as a widget and blog postings, with my readers. I hope you will download and use a Weather Pixie for your blog, website or wiki to teach your children or students or just for your own enjoyment.
Tamsin Bowles is a young, very resourceful programmer who appreciates her privacy. She lives in a metropolitan area of the United Kingdom where she works as a programmer. She made Weather Pixie because she wanted to keep up with the weather throughout the day, and we are the beneficiaries of her idea. If you like her work, you can donate at her website. She has a wishlist and Weather Pixie swag. Her family and peers have every reason to be very proud of her. I'm glad she loves technology and programming, and I look forward to hearing more from Tamsin in the future.
Sunset at T-Ball by Stuck in Customs Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License
Tim Walker, historian, writer and teacher shares ways to improve your work capabilities through specific "deliberate practice". His use of the Professional Baseball Spring Training analogy is effective and fun to read. This would be a good article for teachers to use with students. It's a good place to start when thinking of professional development or streamlining work to make it more fun.
Those baseball players, young and old, go through practice regimes of increasing intensity over the weeks, preparing themselves to play full-bore by Opening Day. The best of them hone their games, winter and summer, through deliberate practice.
in the business world could emulate ballplayers
in their systematic pursuit of improvement. Here’s what I’ve come up with:
Commenting on a blog post helps the reader/commentator and the blog author. The author of the blog always benefits from the feedback of their colleagues and other readers, while the commentator benefits by sharing their ideas and related links. Even though anyone can write an adequate blog, there are many tips that will boost the efficacy of a blog. You can make the process faster and the writing better. The same could be said for the commentator.
When you take the time to comment and add to the conversation, I think you should include related links, including those that are directed to similar postings of your own. I am not alone in this opinion. There are many blog postings that explain why it's important to add appropriate and active links when commenting. This is a typical point about commentators linking through there comments:
Many bloggers (myself included) believe that good comments should be rewarded with a link back to the commenter's site (if they so choose to include one). However, the way you go about commenting and including a link will clearly demonstrate whether you are there to contribute or merely to take.
When commenting and adding to the educational professional development conversation, I hope you will use the .html that will give you an active link here on this blog that refers to the blog or website you are quoting. Here's how to insert the url and name of the link you want to activate:
Why do I hope you will do this? I want to continue the conversation. If your link in your comment is not active, most people will not take the time to copy and paste your link. We all benefit from your investment of time to learn this little bit of code used in Blogger, because your links will be active. Readers will have an opportunity to learn more and continue the professional development conversation. That helps all of us improve our educational practice which directly improves the educational experience of students as well.
The caveat is that many other blogging platforms use a different snippet of code, but you can learn these also. The more you practice adding active links, the more effective you will become in adding value to each conversation. Isn't that one of the reasons why we collaborate in our Professional Learning Network?
It is that time of year again. Blog Action Day Returns in 2008 with a new topic but the same mission. Have as many people around the world post their blog on a single topic on a single day. If you have never participated in Blog Action Day, this is your year to begin. If you have already participated, this is the year to continue. The topic of Blog Action Day 2008 is Poverty. Will you talk about how rampant it is? How we can eliminate it? Groups and programs that are successfully working to eliminate poverty? You decide and write your blog post on Poverty for Blog Action Day 2008 on October 15, 2008. Click on this badge to go to the Blog Action Day website and register your blog right now.
BubbleSnap was recommended by a colleague in Plurkadia, so I tried it out. Whether you have unlimited time to think of a clever saying to go in the bubble, or you need something NOW, BubbleSnap will work for you.
My colleague used shared how she used BubbleSnap to develop an introductory letter for her students. I think another use would be to develop a captioned BubbleSnap picture to be used as an anticipatory set, questions on a test or any number of other educational ideas.
I downloaded, captioned, emailed, saved and copied my sample BubbleSnap to blog in under 5 minutes. You can also use your Flickr pictures.
BubbleSnap is easy to use, and the steps are very straightforward. You can email, print or blog your BubbleSnap. I recommend it for anyone, but especially for teachers and students.
Blog Action Day is back for 2008, and you can participate. This would be an excellent project based learning activity for any level of student or classroom bloggers.
It is easy to sign up, and you will get a widget to encourage your friends and readers to participate. The name of your blog, podcast or other online mode will be listed among the various participants.
Plus, a great amount of attention is turned to the worthy cause that is the focus of Blog Action Day each year. This year the Blog Action Day topic is Poverty.
Last year, on October 15, 2007, millions of my Blog Action Day friends and I wrote on the Topic of 2007: the environment. Since much of my biology training and teaching experience is in the area of the environment, I decided to join this worthy cause.
I focused on a living, migratory animal whose very existence depends on a clean environment and a healthy ecosystem, the Monarch Butterfly. Their migratory path from Canada to Mexico each year takes them through our area. My Blog Action Day posting, n2teaching: Momentous Monarch Migration, revealed just how spectacular and environmentally relevant their yearly migration can be.
Participating in Blog Action Day is a most enjoyable LEARNING experience. I recommend it to all my readers.
Some of my favorite edtech bloggers are using Wordle, to make word clouds from a text sample. The resulting visualization is great. I want to learn how to use Wordle, so I decided this was the best opportunity to begin another PLN activity. I am selecting various blog posts that are important to me, inserting the text into the Wordle generator and posting the resulting Wordle.
The blog LearnMore: Library Stream by Steve Campion is a wonderful introduction to tags and clouds, and I will pass this URL on to those I think need it. I have noticed that teched people are often very informed about computers, yet sometimes lack insight into cataloging and datamining. Both of these are skills I continue to hone. I enjoy the activity of deconstruction of text to summarizing tag clouds.
One specific problem area that I am noticing as I read other people's blogs, is what seems to be a total indifference to the necessity of tags. Another major problem is their lack of tags using words found in the posting. For example, a blogger had asked us, the forum participants, to provide some teched resource information, but the words used in the posting were not those used in the tags. Because the tags were incomplete and inaccurate, they were ineffective. This caused confusion among the readers.
Recently, I noticed a forum posting that referred me to a teched blog, but the blogger had not given the correct URL for the posting referenced. After an hour of sorting through the blog titles, I finally found the posting. I don't ordinarily stick with an issue such as this, but there was a desire to share this major issue (lack of tags or even proper titles) with others. Other bloggers can learn from this experience. It is an opportunity.
Being more like a chaotic stream of consciousness, blogs do not have the organizing structure that is inherent in websites and wikis. I believe it is the responsibility of bloggers to organize their chaos through tagging and clouds.
The tag cloud is very visual, yet it is text. I believe this understanding enables a wide variety of learners to access the blog posting they want to read. Isn't that what bloggers want? Visitors...Readers....Clickers;D
Steve Campion posted a wonderful blog about a critical issue in the interactive web. Tagging is a very important skill, and I believe those who can search effectively may also tag effectively.
A colleague on Classroom 2.0 mentioned that he was not getting any feedback, on his blog, when he started a conversation about international educational technology groups. Since many teachers have provided information about these groups, I thought I will help him add to his list.
Doesn't each writer hope that people find their blog interesting and helpful? I thought the answer was yes, so I was curious to discover why he wasn't receiving feedback on this blog posting. I began to investigate the situation so that I could learn from it. Learning from others is a common goal among teachers involved in professional development. Find an interesting question and learn about it.
What started out as a short bypass to help out a colleague, turned into another, excellent learning opportunity for me. I discovered that links need to be accurate, the link in a posting should take you to the exact posting the blogger wants you the reader to access. I also discovered that blogs need to have layers of organization for ease of access, and tag clouds can represent a necessary equivalent of an online bibliography.
At first glance, I looked at my colleague's CR2.0 discussion tags, and I selected a "lack of significant tags" thesis that may be keeping people from his blog post. I know that many of our international edtech friends watch our blogs, just as we watch theirs. I thought maybe his intended audience, international education technology advocates, didn't scope out any relevant tags. To figure out if this might be the case, I looked at the tags he used in his CR2.0 discussion.
The CR2.0 tags for his discussion, Non-US Ed Tech Organizations, were: ed, organizations, tim, blogging, tech, intended, consequences, holt. I believe that the tags: organizations, tech, and ed, were helpful and quite appropriate. The other tags seemed fine for people looking for my colleague's blogs, but didn't relate to the topic at hand, international organizations for educational technology. Therefore, I noted that adding the tags, international, educational, technology, provided in his CR2.0 discussion title might allow improved access to the relevant blog posting, therefore helping him get more comments relevant to his request for names of organizations.
Next, I went to my CR2.0 colleagues' blog link to find the posting he was referencing, so I could reference the tags he used there. The blog link provided did not take me to the relevant blog posting. The link given took me to the front page of his website/blog, so I had to click on it to get to his blog postings. That was alright because I felt confident that I would find the relevant blog posting soon.
After I clicked into his blog postings, I began to look through his current postings and the archives for a title that related to International Educational Technology Organizations. There were two postings that "kinda sorta" looked like a title that related to his CR2.0 discussion topic. I clicked on one of them and read it. This blog posting was not about international educational technology organizations, per se.
Since I always keep a time record for my professional development journal, I looked up to discover that I already spent an hour trying to find the relevant blog posting, so I stopped there. While I was happy to spend this time to help a colleague, it appears that I was not successful. I did not find his original blog, so I could not add to his database he was hoping to build.
While the intended consequence of my initial adventure did not occur, the unintended consequence was more valuable. I received an extremely important aha moment and discovered that some key organizational tools, such as tag clouds or titles with ALL relevant key tags, can make or break the viability of our blog posts. This is knowledge that any of us might use to enhance our own blogs.
Belatedly, I discovered that while my "lack of tags" thesis may be partially correct, the larger concern was appropriate access to the content of his blog. I found a table of contents in the archives, and so I had to click on Archives to access the list of postings. None of the blog postings that I could see mentioned the key words: international educational technology organizations. I looked around for some other way to easily refine my search, for instance a tag cloud for his blog postings. I didn't find one.
It seems that my colleagues' blog is set up to increase click statistics, but accessibility is a more critical concern because it brings people back to your blog. Quick access has special relevance for those bloggers who direct you to read a particular blog posting.
Why do we use links in our postings? I think we use links to improve ease of access to relevant data and keep the reader interested in the topic we are discussing.
In the end, my colleague gave me the opportunity to increase his Technorati rating and include an excellent topic for my own blog posting. BTW, I discovered that the missing tag was world. I did finally find the appropriate blog posting on developing a database for international educational technology organizations....I think;D
What started as a journey to provide a list of international educational technology organizations became a constructivist search for relevance. As a result, I learned some valuable lessons that I will use.
