by Tracy Rosen, teaching & consulting since 1996, blogging about it here since 2007. All views are my own and you should take them with a grain of salt, I do.
Just discovered Wetpaint Wikis.
Really liking them so far!
I started a classroom wiki – to be introduced to my group next week. It is really easy to use and navigate. AND the day after I discovered them they removed ads on k-12 education wikis…though you do need to ask them to do it. It took about 1/2 day, if that long, for them to respond to my request and remove the ads.
Come take a look!
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Dennis Harter writes:
We concern ourselves with the big goals and forget the small goals. We don’t have, often enough, the conversations that allow students to connect with us and us with them. The conversations that show how much we value them and their thoughts.
I commented on this in the original post, but I feel the need to repeat myself here. It is something I want to remember as often as possible. It reminds me of a quote I like to cite…I have no clue who first said or wrote it :)
They don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.
I’ve been thinking about that quite a bit these past few weeks.
A little while ago I was teaching my students some nifty new trick for their blog writing – like embedding media or something like that. One of my students was really not into it and I had to hover and nag for him to get even a fraction of his assignment done. As the bell rang, he hung around until the others left and asked if I would walk him to a new class he was starting the following morning. When I responded that I would he surprised me by spontaneously hugging me! This is a boy in grade 7! At that moment I knew that it was the human connection and not the nifty blogging tricks that was important for that child (and for me, as it touched me deeply.)
Since then, I’m thinking about how to merge those feelings of security and caring with learning. I think that is the key.
Thanks for a great post, Dennis. :)
I had never heard of a blog carnival before last week when I read about this one on Scott McLeod’s Dangerously Irrelevant. A blog carnival is a way of culling together blog posts around a shared theme:
“The goal is to bring the educational blogging community together, to explore themes from a wide variety of starting points, and to respond to one another and refine our ideas. ”
(from
So I decided to submit one of my posts and it has been included in the 2nd Educational Technology Blog Carnival…how fun is that?! :)
The next blog carnival will be focused around the theme of Access and you can read about how to submit by going to the 2nd edition of the Educational Technology Blog Carnival,where you will also be able to read through the posts that were included in this edition of the carnival.
I love this idea – it is a fine one!
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Steve Ransom pointed me towards this video of a grade 1 teacher and how she uses blogs and wikis in her classroom. There is also some parent and student commentary. Her advice is to start small, with a blog for your classroom, and let yourself grow with it.
I’d like to hear her principal’s perspective as well!
(Oh, and I certainly hope she doesn’t work in this superintendent’s district. If she does she may need to watch out.)
[cross ranted as a comment at Stephen Ransom’s EdTechTrek] [and slightly elaborated]
I am starting to think that because many teachers and administrators
still do not know exactly what we can do with technology there is a
reluctance to put it in the classroom.
Example – today the Internet had, for some reason, stopped working
in the west wing of our school. I was at the computer lab with one
other teacher. She packed her kids up and went back because she only
books the computer lab for the last period of the day so that her kids
can ‘play on the internet’.
For her, technology has nothing to do with learning, it is a form of
entertainment. I stayed with my kids and used the time to work on our
Science vocabulary while teaching them how to hyperlink in
presentations. They were linking their vocabulary words to comments and images made by their peers, creating a collaborative learning network around the new terminology they are learning in Science. (Not bad for a wing it activity, eh ;)
For some reason, this teacher has not caught on yet that technology
can be much more than a way to waste time. I can understand the frustration of the new teachers that Stephen mentions in his post, but
until the more experienced teachers and administrators at schools begin
to use technology as a learning tool, really use it, and demand that
good forms of it be available in the schools, it isn’t going to happen.
I can also understand the frustration of the more experienced teachers who are
expected to use technology but who aren’t really given the time to grow
less afraid of it and to experiment with what can be done. There is a huge divide between our students who live and breathe with technology as part of their daily lives and the teachers who don’t. Huge. and while
there are still administrators who don’t use technology in their daily lives and who don’t champion for its appropriate use and availability in the school, let alone the classroom…well…that divide can only be expected to widen.
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