I'm trying Blogger's Dynamic Templates... Again

Last October I tried Blogger's Dynamic Templates for a day or two before deciding that they simply were not ready for prime time.

I love the crisp, clean look of the Dynamic Templates, but their lack of labels/tags and access to blog archives were simply too much to overcome.

Here's how you find labels, blog archives
and subscribe gadgets.

Well, Blogger recently added some functionality to their Dynamic Templates and so I've returned to give them another shot. On the far right, you can mouse over the edge of your browser and the labels, archives and subscribe functions appear.

I know I use the search function, labels/tags and blog archives a lot on my blog, but I don't necessarily know what my readers' needs are for these kinds of gadgets.  So I'm reaching out for some feedback from you.

1. Do you like the Dynamic look of my blog or should I return to my traditional look? 

2. What functions do you use on my blog? Search, blog archives, labels... etc. 

3. Or maybe none of this matters because you view my blog via an RSS feed or mobile device...

#comments4kids

I have found success with engaging students in reading and writing via blogging. 

Reading and writing are social activities that allow us to communicate with others. When we write something, we always have an audience in mind, even if it's ourselves. However, most of the time, students write for other people, and it's even cooler if those other people were more than just their teacher or their peers sitting next to them. 

This is why I have had success engaging even reluctant readers and writers in blogging. 

One of the hooks I often use is the world map widget that I have on my blog. This map allows a blogger to track the visitors and their locations. When I show this to students, they are often fascinated by how the written word can reach distances that are truly on the other side of the planet.

The red dots indicate the places people have accessed my blog while the ones that are blinking indicate people who are visiting my blog right now. I have yet to meet a child (or adult) that did not find this pretty darn cool.

I have helped a number of students start their own blog, and one of the first things I help them set up is this world widget. Once they have this widget, I get them to write up a blog post. Many of the kids are so excited to publish their post that they rush to their world widget to see if anyone visits - only to see nothing happen.

The problem is that publishing a blog post and waiting for visitors is like hitch-hiking in the Sahara -- no one knows you're there.

This is why it helps for the teacher to be a part of some kind of network. While there is no one right tool to tap into a network of connected people, I have found Twitter to be an excellent companion to blogging.

Once a student publishes a post, I then hop on Twitter and post a Tweet to the hashtag #comments4kids. After I do this, watching their world widget becomes a whole lot more fun!

One of the first times I did this, I had a student who blogged about wanting to get an Iguana, but wanted to ask others for their advice about Iguana's -- when I tweeted his post, he watched his world widget and shouted "someone from France is reading my post!" His smile was from ear to ear. This was a very reluctant reader and writer authentically engaged in reading and writing. Because these red dots kept showing up on the world map, our discussion turned into a geography lesson. When the kids themselves are asking the question, "where's Estonia?" you know you are doing something right.

Do I count how many visits they get on their blog? No.

Have I established a complex algorithm that combines their visits to comment ration? No.

Do I use a rubric that allows me to generate pre & post measurements that allow me to quantify the value added? No.

So how do I know this stuff is successful? If my students show a desire to go on reading and writing through blogging when class is over, then I know I'm on the right track. Where there is interest achievement tends to follow.

No testsandgrades required.

For more on how powerful comments for kids can be, read Kathy Cassidy's post It's Never "Just a Comment".

I'm trying Blogger's Dynamic Templates

As you can see, my blog looks a lot different. I'm giving Blogger's Dynamic Templates a shot. Based on your viewing needs, I would love to hear from you via a comment. Should I stick with this new look or return to my classic layout?

Remember, you can select any one of the seven different Dynamic Views from the pull-down menu in the top left corner.

Here are some of my initial thoughts:

Pros

• I love how clean and crisp the dynamic views look. They reduce the clutter and place my content at the forefront. 

• I'm a big fan of how the reader can personalize their experience by switching between any one of the seven different Dynamic views.

• I like how it shows how many Tweets or Facebook likes each post has received, and that you can click those icons to immediately share a post.

Cons

• The search function seems to only search for words on the posts that are displayed on the page. When I use the search function on a blog, I want it to search through an entire blog's archives.

• I don't see any of the Dynamic Views allowing the reader to easily view and select from the blog's labels/tags.

• I miss some of the widgets like my Revolver Maps Visitor Globe, pageviews per week, labels/tags, but I know that some of this stuff is precisely what clutters up a blog. I think I'd like to be able to place all this stuff in a separate page.

• I tried to place the Revolver Maps Visitor Globe HTML code in a separate page, while this worked with the classic templates, this did not work for Dynamic View.

Overall, I think I am mostly impressed with Blogger's Dynamic Views but there are a couple issues that need to be addressed. The good news is that it looks like Blogger is already addressing some of these issues.

So what do you think? Should I stick with this new look?

Blogging mistakes

I love to blog. 

I've come to experience blogging as one of the best ways to support my learning, and so I've dedicated myself to publishing one piece of content almost everyday for the last year and a half. 

While I can't say that it hasn't taken the time and effort that some work requires, I also can't say it hasn't been fun.

It's been fun.

Learning via blogging has become a passion of mine.

But to do this, there are times when I make errors. These errors can come as content and/or grammatical. While I do work hard to make sure that all errors are kept to a minimum, I have only so much time and effort to expend and so by definition, there will be lapses in what I can catch or proofread.

Sometimes I have to decide whether to focus more on what I say versus how I say it. You won't catch me writing about the glory of rewards and punishments or how grading can be better used to garnish compliance from kids, but you will find the odd spellng mistake, type-o, or run-on sentence.

Don't get me wrong, I do proofread my blogs. I almost always read and re-read out loud so I can both see and hear what I have written. I work diligently to get the big ideas right, but I won't lose a wink of sleep over a spelling error, missing word or sloppy apostrophe.

One incident in regards to this topic comes to mind.

On June 29, 2010, I wrote a post for the second last day of school titled Made to Learn, and the first comment was left by anonymous:

You have to do better job proofing your work.

That was the whole comment. One sentence in response to my entire post. Guess how I felt. How would you feel? How would your students feel if this was the comment you left them? I'll be honest, this petty comment angered me, but then I took that anger and turned it into a teachable moment.

Here was my response to this anonymous comment:

@anonymous: Do you provide the same, cold, short, indifferent, and utterly unhelpful comments to your students or do you reserve such unproductive, ignorant one liners to only bloggers who try and publish one peice of thoughtful content every day? 

The words we say are important, but often the words we don't say are even more important. Think about that. 

Can you imagine how it might feel to be a child who works his tail off on a peice of writing only to get a response that takes the form of an uninspiring, one sentence critique?
If you feel the need to say such things, please feel free to dispense them on me. I will take them gladly if it means your students or children are not subjected to such thoughtless judgments.

After putting so much time and effort into writing day in and day out, this anonymous commenter's brevity came across as nothing but judgement that took infinitely less time and effort than what I put forward.

I swear, I will do my best to never do this to my students or children. And if/when I do, I'll make damn sure to apologize.

Another blog is born

A couple days ago, Sean Grainger's son started a blog. I wrote a post about it here. Since then, he has received 21 comments on his post.

Well, Sean's got a daughter, too, and the blogging bug has bit her as well, and I have a feeling seeing that her brother got 21 comments on his first post had something to do with it.

Here's Grainger's tweet saying so:

You can find his daughter's blog here:

www.a-veryavery.blogspot.com

I just left a comment, and I hope you do, too.

A blog is born

Sean Grainger is a friend of mine who works as an administrator in my school district. I was excited to see this tweet from him tonight:

His son's blog can be found here at:

www.wyworks.blogspot.com

I left a comment. I hope you do too.

I'm going to blog throughout the summer

I can remember deciding to continue my blogging through out the summer last year, and I've decided to do the same this year.

I'm excited to keep the momentum.

If you are someone who plans on reading this blog at all through out the summer, I'd love to hear from you via a comment.

Lessons I Learned from my Students' Blogs

It is my pleasure to have Al Gonzalez provide today's guest post. Al is a teacher in Washington State that I learn from via Twitter and blogging. He is a member of the Grading Moratorium, and he blogs here.

By Al Gonzalez

I create blog accounts for all my Science students every year. I have students blog about what they are learning in class. Sometimes the blog post is the assignment, sometimes the blog post is a reflection, sometimes the blog post is to share lab conclusions, observations and/or data, sometimes the blog post is a follow-up question or asking students to think about something further than what was done in class, and sometimes I even encourage students to blog about anything they like. The beauty of blogging is that my students get to share their learning, their experiences, their ideas, their thoughts with anyone in the world. I ask parents to read their child's blogs and I encourage all students to showcase their blogs at their student-led conferences in the spring. I also actively seek out classes that we can share with so that they leave comments on my student's blog and my students leave comments on theirs. I find this very powerful and something 21st century kids should find quite natural, being connected.

Over the years I've learned some things about student blogging that people like Alfie Kohn have known for years. I guess I'm just a little slow to learn these things. For example, it took me a few years to learn that even though it's blogging, even though they get to use technology in school, even though they can connect with kids in other schools, sometimes all over the world, less than a handful of kids ever blogged when I assigned it as homework. I guess I kept assigning blog assignments as homework year after year because I just couldn't believe that my students wouldn't do it just because it was homework. I mean, don't they use technology at home? Aren't they able to get online at home and blog? Not if it was homework. So I learned my lesson and I went from five to ten kids out of 140 blogging to all of them blogging. How did I do that? I have them blog in class. I do not assign any homework and I certainly will not assign their blogging as homework. Do some of them still blog from home? Yes, but it's on their own terms and they blog about what they want to blog about.

The second lesson I learned is along very similar lines. I used to grade, yes grade, their blogs. Ugh, just writing it leaves a bad taste in my mouth (funny, I'm not typing this with my mouth and I'm not even saying it out loud and it's leaving a bad taste in my mouth!). I started by making each blog worth 10 points. Why? Well to motivate my students to write them and to reward them when they finally wrote them. It was a disaster. So first I assigned them as homework, then I had to give over 130 kids zeroes over and over again because they weren't writing their blogs! Could I have been any worse? What started as a small part of their overall grade turned into a drop of a letter grade for many of my students. So I made blogs worth five points instead of ten to make it better. Yeah, that didn't fix a thing. It still sucked.

Well, ever since I abolished grades, thanks in a huge part to the blogs, DM's, emails and support of Joe Bower, I think my student blogs are flourishing. Let me show you some examples:

Here are a few 8th graders who have beautiful blogs:

saraha (some of this student's blogs weren't even class assignments!)

levic (check out this student's glogs and his slideshare!)

natalinac (we do use little paper but when we do I love scanning it and having students put their work on their blog)

And here are a couple of 6th graders who have even taken me up on writing about more than just what we do in class:

kyrstens (I love this student's Unit blogs. Totally creative, and no, I didn't pick this one just because she said I'm cool)

shanyan (great use of pictures in this blog!)

If you have students who are blogging point them our way. We do NOT participate in commenting competitions (comments from competing kids sound so insincere and they always write, "comment me back," which we are a bit sick of hearing) and my students practice thoughtful commenting that begins with actually reading the other person's blog. So if your students want to share information and get some new readers, I have over 130 students bloggers at MrGonzalez.Org.

I love learning from my students. I am practicing listening to them more because they know what they want and they know what they're doing. Sometimes I get so wrapped up in being the professional in the room that I forget to listen to them, especially when they aren't telling me directly.

My learning and Social Networking

I am a teacher, but I'm a learner first.

My head spins when I think back upon how my learning has been influenced by social networking.

• Google Reader: I don't need someone to tell me what to read. Traditional newspapers and magazines just don't make much sense to me. Who gives them the right to tell me what to read? Why do they get to pick what's on the front page? Google Reader allows me to tailor my own personal newspaper with the RSS feeds from my favorite blogs.

• Twitter: It's so important to find like-minded colleagues, but the laws of probability tell us that you have a better chance finding them if you look amongst billions of people virtually than a handful of people physically. Our workplaces simply can not expose us to a large enough population - Twitter has provided me with the opportunity to find my tribe. 

• Diigo: I come across a lot of information in a day. In fact, too much. Quite often, I can't read everything I'd like to but Diigo allows me to bookmark all my stuff with tags. In other words, Diigo is my virtual bookshelf where I place my stuff, and on that bookshelf, I have labels that allow me to easily retrieve anything I've come across. A real life example of this: for the last few years, I've tagged stuff about math, and for the first time in my career I now have the opportunity to teach math, so when I went back to my Diigo, I had 20+ resources to look at. As I read through my stuff, I knew that I had not read them when I tagged them then, but I was sure glad I had them now. 

• Posterous: I use posterous to capture excerpts, pictures and videos that I come across that I wish to comment on. Often I might get around to blogging about these in a more sophisticated manner; however, I really like the idea of sharing with others my thoughts on the stuff I come across on a daily basis. I can think of a handful of people whom I would love to have a live subscription to their daily research, viewing, reading and musings.

When I share this with others who have yet to engage in social networking, their first reaction tends to be something like this "How do you have time for all this stuff?" While I will I agree that I do spend time and effort at this, and that getting this social networking thing "figured out" can initially take a lot of both, it ultimately is one of the cheapest, most efficient and effective ways of gathering such a quantity and quality of information to support my learning.

And it's fun.

The Daily Riff

The Daily Riff is an excellent blog for anyone interested in understanding progressive education. Here are two articles that I loved:

Why Testing Fails Us


"Hacking" School Ratings and Student Assessments

Professional Development & Social Networking

My blog was born on January 6, 2010. Today is June 10, 2010.

In 5 months, my blog has:

• Over 20,000 visits
• Over 11,000 unique visitors
• Over 33,000 page visits

I have to admit I am more than happy to see these kinds of numbers, but I do have a grander purpose for sharing this with you than just boasting.

If you are a progressive educator who advocates for education reform and changes to the traditional model of school, there is a good chance that you may be in the minority in your school. In fact, you may find yourself being the only one...

This can be both challenging and lonely.

I can only imagine the number of teachers who have had their progressive voices shushed or outright silenced. Being an agent of change can be challenging enough, but doing it alone may verge on the impossible.

Often having even one like-minded person to share your thoughts and feelings can help you persevere through opposing adversity, but what if there isn't even one like-minded person to be found?

This is why the Internet and social networking has proven to be so liberating - the world is a big place and there is a good chance that somewhere out there like-minded people exist. Twitter, Facebook, blogging, nings and other forms of social networking provide us with an unprecedented ability to find them... from any where in the world. Time and place are rendered obsolete.

While I would never suggest virtual relationships can or should ever replace our physical ones, we are no longer bound to only our locals. When colleagues in the "real world" no longer provide the like-minded support that we desire, we can look to colleagues in the virtual world.

In the spirit of networking, please consider taking a minute to leave a comment:

• Feel free to remain anonymous
• Why do you visit this blog?
• Where in the world are you from?

Google Reader

I was talking to a good friend of mine the other day, and we got to talking about blogs. He told me that he reads about 3 different blogs on a regular basis. I told him that I had about 35.

We were both shocked. He couldn't figure out how I kept track of so many sources, and I couldn't figure out how he didn't have more sources to pull from.

In the end, I explained that I don't read everything that I subscribe to, but he had to admit that he had to artificially limit his number to 3 in order to keep his sources managable. The difference between us was that I had a filter and he didn't.

The filter I use is Google Reader.

I shared with him how Google Reader helps me to manage my time with so many blogs. Rather than having to go to each blog to read the information, Google Reader allows me to subscribe via RSS feed and then all my blogs come to me in one place.

I always told myself that I would keep my number of blog subscriptions to a minimum, but it turns out that there are so many different sources of information that I want to be privy to that I need Google Reader to help streamline all my sources.

I have the Mobile RSS app on my iPhone too, and it rocks. I keep informed without wasting much of my time actually navigating to and from sources.

Needless to say, he now uses Google Reader and subscribes to more than 3 blogs.

Teaching with Technology: Twitter, Blogs, Wikis, Nings and Discussion Forums

Technology is a medium for content, and so technology should be integrated into all of our other curriculums; it is not suppose to be an entity all too itself. So how do we incorporate technology into our classrooms? And with the prevalence of texting, social networking and on-line chat forums, how can we best prepare children to use this technology in a moral and responsible manner?

This session will show you how any subject can use the Internet to further your students learning:

Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/ is a kind of micro-blogging. Rather than using Twitter to share 'what you are doing', it is better used to share 'what has your interest' or 'what do you know that I should know'. If used in this way, Twitter can be a very effective way to share information.

Blogs: A blog is short for the word weblog and is a type of website, usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, news, opinions, facts and much much more. This tool is best used to create one-way conversations between users.

Wikis: A wiki is a website that uses wiki software, allowing multiple users to create and edit each other’s writing. This tool is best used to allow users to interact with each other’s writing and projects.

Ning: Take Facebook's social network power and make it private - a Ning allows a group of learners to network by utilizing the power of uploading photos, videos, blogs, discussion forums with ultimate privacy. A Ning could be described as an 'all-in-one' private social network.
Discussion Forums: An Internet Forum, or message board, is an online discussion site. It acts like a bulletin board and allows people to post and reply their comments. This tool is best used to create two-way conversations between users.

This session can be tailored to focus on any combination of the technologies listed above. It can range from a broad overview to a specific tutorial on how to use one specific social networking tool.

For more on Joe's take on social networking, check out these blog posts:

Teaching Social Networking: Finger Dipping
Twitter is Sold Wrong 

Social Networking on Prezi

For more information about booking Joe Bower for a lecture or workshop, please contact by e-mail: joe.bower.teacher@gmail.com


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