Prototype

Still Tinkering

Once again I've been using blogs for administrative purposes in my classes, and once again the students are saying little or nothing. They do seem to find it convenient to have handouts and supplemental materials posted to the site, but then I have to remember to upload those materials.

I've been trying out a blog in a slightly different context: Since late last year, I've been teaching creative writing to teenagers once a month. It's a remarkable program, created last fall by a Korean writer, and I'm having fun with it. All the kids are Korean, and many have been in Canada for just a few years. Their English is remarkably good, and they're excellent storytellers.

When the program's website went down, I created a little blog for my students; when the site came up again, I turned the blog into The Zine, a place where students can publish their work.

By June they'll each have a mini-book of their own writing, but this is another way to help them reach an audience and to see what their work looks like in this medium. I've been encouraging the kids to submit stuff, but most seem too shy. Well, I'll see them again on Saturday and try to persuade them to send me more of their writing.

Two from XPlana

... both PDFs:

Educational Weblogs: Whats & Whys

and

Personal and Collaborative Publishing (PCP): Facilitating the Advancement of Online Communication and Expression within a University

From The Potential of Personal Publishing in Education I: What’s doing & who’s doing it?, which has more on "what’s already going on".

Educational Bloggers' Network :

Here is yet another promising site: Educational Bloggers' Network. Now if I only had time to rummage around on all these sites...

--Crawford

Weblogs in the Classroom

Here's a useful survey of blogging activities and resources as of last winter: The NITLE News Volume 2, Number 1, Winter 2003

Launching "Prototype"

This is an experimental blog for educators, designed to give them experience in shared authorship and to provide a source of links, resources, and other materials that can help them develop blogs of their own. Please feel free to explore what's here, and to add to it anything you think would be helpful.