Here are a few more Seth’s posts I shared with my students last year.

I have to applaud the federal government being for being so with the times by starting their new site Apps.gov. However, am I the only one who sees the irony with the fact that YouTube is prominently posted under their Social Media Apps section, yet pretty much no school site in America can access YouTube? So YouTube is too evil for our schools, but not to evil for our government employees? All I can say is LOL!

So what’s been keeping me so busy? I now have 145 student blogs up and running. Whew! I can tell you that many times over the past couple of weeks I kept asking myself if I was out of my mind! When I came up with the idea of setting my students up with blogs I figured I would start with two classes. Then, almost without thinking, I jumped in with both feet, hands, and every other appendage, and now all five of my classes are blogging.  So here’s the question…has all this work (see my reflections) been worth it? I can easily say “oh yeah”.

Here’s what I am seeing with my students blogs (blogs are listed on the right side of the home page):

1.  Excitement. My students were given an assignment that I started last year. The Weekly Reader, which I got from Jim Burke, is an incredible assignment that I enjoyed grading each week. However the students seemed to dread it. But now what I am sensing is an excitement from them. Now they know that I am not the only person who’s reading their work. Now there is so much more a sense of ownership because they are producing work and ideas that are being shared with the world, rather than “just their English teacher”.

2. Community. What I told my students is that blogging is a community thing. That the idea is you read what I say and comment. I read what you say and comment, and then maybe blog about what you’ve written, etc., etc.  I did not make it a requirement that students go to other blogs and make comments. Yet every blog that I go to seems to have anywhere between one and three comments. It’s fantastic! They are creating a community on their own that I don’t think I could have created had I tried to.

3. Teacher Involvement. Okay, admit it, mostly if something doesn’t involve us directly we don’t put much energy into it. Well, I took a chance and announced my student blogs at our last faculty meeting. My thought was really and truly no one would take the time to even glance at them. Boy was I wrong! Not only have teachers been visiting the student blogs, they have been taking time to make comments on the blogs! Wow! Seriously, I don’t even need to address what kind of message this sends to the students.

Right now I am riding high. Looking back at the immense amount of time put into this entire thing I can say it was more than worth it. Actually I have no words to express how worth it this whole thing is. What my students are getting from this is amazing and priceless.

So in closing I want to thank all of my colleagues who have supported and continue to support OUR students; and I would ask all my readers (my PLN) to click on over to Lahaise’s Lair and check out my student blogs. Hey, you might even want to comment on one or two.

Here’s what I found at The NY Times: “The thing that concerned me most about it was it seemed like a direct channel from the president of the United States into the classroom, to my child,”  said a father in Texas. What? I feel like I am living on another planet right now. Maybe I was raised wrong, but my mother taught me that the President of The United States was someone to admire and respect. (Okay, so I haven’t always felt admiration and respect for a president).

Or this from CNN: "Thinking about my kids in school having to listen to that just really upsets me," suburban Colorado mother Shanneen Barron told CNN Denver affiliate KMGH. "I’m an American. They are Americans, and I don’t feel that’s OK. I feel very scared to be in this country with our leadership right now."

Seriously, what am I missing here? This man is our Commander In Chief. He is our president who wants to tell children that the best thing they can do for themselves and our country is to get an education. How is that grounds for keeping your child home, or flooding your school with calls inquiring as to whether or not they will be showing the broadcast, or calling the whole thing a socialist plot?

Alright, lets get down to the nitty-gritty here, shall we? This isn’t about politics. This is about racism. That’s the ugly, nasty truth. These people don’t give a darn what their kids watch, it’s all about having a black man for our president. This is why I really and truly believe that…

I start school on Wednesday and this year we have Channel 1 at our school. In my opinion Channel 1 is just another way for bad teachers to show more videos, but besides that Channel 1 requires us to show TEN MINUTES of ads each and everyday! So now my students will start every day by watching ads that we have absolutely no control over. We must keep them on, and we must keep the volume up, otherwise we lose all those fabulous free videos.

This is madness! Parents are worried about the child watching our President, the leader of the free world, but I have not heard of one parent complain about their child being held captive by a series of ads, IN SCHOOL! Please help me understand this.

I truly want to weep right now for the anger and shame that I feel toward this situation. I love my country, and for the first time in 8 years I love our president, but right now, I’m ashamed to be called an American.

Reflections:

(I’m all about the process, but if you just want the bottom line, keep scrolling to my conclusions.)

1. I set-up two websites, one for my students and this blog.

2. After working hours upon hours to set everything-up on our home server we realized it might be better to pay the few dollars per month and get professional hosting. That required more hours of set-up and learning a whole new system.

3. I’m ultra picky and just had to tweek every little aspect of the websites style sheets. Just one tiny detail: before 2 months ago I knew absolutely, positively nothing about html or CSS code or even what a style sheet was!

4. Staring at code, learning it one your own, is hard. Ultimately I was victorious and can now open up a style sheet and start playing around with relatively good results. I “broke” my site often in the beginning, not so much recently.

5. I spent hours and hours and more hours finding just the right and perfect theme for each site, only to change them over and over again (I just made another major change yesterday in fact). So was all of that a waste of time? As I reflect I say no. What better way to learn something than to dig into it over and over?

6. Although I’m continually behind, I’ve read about 100 posts from my RSS feeds per day.

7. I will literally return to work with skin paler then when my vacation started as a result of sitting at my computer approximately 16 hours per day (some days more!).

8. While I was good to my mind, I wasn’t good to my body and didn’t ride my bike once. Oh those first few days of commuting to school will be tough.

9. I set-up a website for a colleague who plans on directing the entire school there for leadership announcements, etc. (see more about this in my conclusions).

10. Each of my 1st period students has been set-up with their own blog, all ready for them to start posting as soon as their permission slips are returned.

11. Got a SmartBoard and began learning the software. Also began looking into tips and tricks from the online community.

12. Researched and tried a plethora of new online tools!

13. Spent many, many nights chatting with former (and a few current) students on Facebook.

14. My goal of a post per day on Paige’s Prose didn’t quite happen.

So all of that leads me to…

My Conclusions:

If you look at my list above what stands out is a monumental amount of learning on many fronts. One of the most prolific changes (or possibly just a shift) that occurred in me this summer came from all the fantastic posts and articles I’ve been reading. I’ve been lucky enough to find some amazing colleagues and feel privileged to glean knowledge and ideas from them (see my Blogs I Follow). What I’ve learned from them has helped me, but also frustrated me.

Here’s what I’ve always believed, but now more than ever before:

No one person should control the technology of a school.

I spent yesterday with a co-worker setting up a site similar to mine for her students. As we talked through her goals she came to one that made me pause. You see she is the leadership teacher at our school, so all leadership based events are scheduled through her. What she eventually wants for the site we set-up is that it to be the go-to place for the entire student body. She’s setting up a calendar and different pages for each grade level. Very cool.

But what’s wrong with this picture? Why are we doing this? Why did I spend (literally) my entire vacation doing this? Isn’t this stuff supposed to be on the school website? That would be a logical thought, but unfortunately reality hasn’t played out that way. Our school website is pretty sad. (why do you think I am paying to have my own?) This is a result of one person controlling every aspect of technology for a “community” of about 2000 (not including parents)! This is seriously wrong.

So here’s what I’ve come to believe:

1. School site technology should be monitored by consortium of individuals. Certainly at every school there are a few people who are completely capable, and almost as important, willing, to “assist” with the technology responsibilities. If it takes a year to get a piece of software loaded onto a computer, or the antivirus updates happen every three years, isn’t that a bad sign?

2. More trust needs to be put into the hands of teachers. It is a bit insulting that as a highly-educated, professional, adult, we are not “allowed” to monitor certain things ourselves (i.e. using YouTube or GMail).

3. The technology leaders of the school must be given time to train the teachers who are not tech savvy. That’s the only way we will ever progress. If there is a problem with teachers “abusing” certain things I believe it stems from not being properly trained.

So now what? What’s the answer? I truly wish I had one (and hoping some of you do!). In 12 days I return to school, and while I’ve taken little time to re-charge, I have learned an awful lot. Maybe just enough to make my job more frustrating than it already is.

I would love to hear how things work at your school.

BTW, if you don’t have OneNote in your MS Office suite. You can download a trial copy. It’s good for 60 days, and if you find that you don’t want to purchase it, just transfer all that stuff into a Word document. OneNote makes it really easy.  Remember, Microsoft offers teacher and student versions of for reduced prices.

So check back often, and I hope you find something useful in my OneNote notebooks.

What do you think? Possible? Desirable?

Thanks so much to Darren @ A Difference, for turning me on to this great video!