I’m sitting in Five Easy Steps to District-wide Blogging Tools, presented by Miguel Guhlin and teachers from San Antonio ISD showing examples of student blogging. This is so exciting, and I can hardly wait to go back and share with the teachers of Region 16.

Miguel brought teachers with him who already have classroom blogs in place to show real examples. The first example is of Paul Gates’ Second Grade class at Madison Elementary in San Antonio. According to Paul kids are asking to write during free time so they can work on their blogs!!

The campus instructional technologists also shared their experiences with blogging at each of their campuses, and one idea is the use of poems and creating diagrams using Kidspiration which are posted with the blog. Students enjoy reading and commenting on each other’s work as well as writing their own blogs.

The district is experimenting with various platforms, working slowly to make blogging an effective tool. Right now WordPress and b2Evolution are the two that have risen to the top for San Antonio ISD.

Right now, the blogging is at the K-8 level, but the team is in the process of finding the best combination of safety and rights management to include grades 9-12.

Now we’re getting ready to start on the technical side of setting up a blog, and I am going to close so I can really pay close attention.

The Swish workshop I facilitated this morning was great. Swish is a program which creates .swf (Flash) animation files, and it is so much easier to use than Flash! Also, their education discount is unbelievable…80% off the retail price!
It’s been awhile since I used Swish, and I had forgotten how user friendly and powerful it is. I’m going to have to practice lots more in preparation for the workshop I’m teaching next month.

I faciliated the Podcasting 101 workshop yesterday presented by Dr. Tim Tyson, principal of Mabry Middle School. Wow! That was such a fun and amazing session! Again, the educational possibilities are endless.

The students of Mabry MS create and publish their own podcasts, which are available on iTunes for the parents and students to download and play. According to Dr. Tyson, students actually voluntarily spend much more time on their writing, revising for a polished product! As he said during the training, when is the last time you had a student ask you to let them make more revisions and improvements to a writing assignment??

Now I have to figure out the tools to translate all of this to PC, because the workshop was done entirely on Macs using iLife06. It may not be easy, because that suite made the process so seamless, but I’m sure we’ll figure it out.

I’m posting my first entry in this blog using my Palm Treo 650. If you are reading this, it worked!

Last evening I facilitated a workshop called The Producers: Springtime for Microsoft Producer presented by Dr. Lane Hunnicutt of Grapevine-Colleyville ISD, and it was well worth the time.
I’m so excited about finally learning how to use Microsoft Producer! It’s one of those programs I’ve known existed for years, but haven’t taken time to play with or learn. I even had it installed on my computer already. It is very easy to use, and I think it is exactly what some of our consultants will want to use in conjunction with Blackboard at Region 16 ESC.

Producer integrates with Powerpoint to allow audio as well as video to Powerpoint slides. It’s going to be a great tool for enhancing online instruction.

I am sitting in the registration area of the 2006 TCEA conference, having just finished facilitating the first of many workshops for the week. If this one was any indication, it’s going to be an incredible week with lots of new resources!! It was called Now You’re Blogging: Make Your Own Free Professional Blogfolio, presented by Dr. Karen French of the University of Texas in Austin.

Now I’m putting the training to practice by creating my first educational blog. I’ve played around with blogging before on a personal level, but haven’t really taken the time to develop anything worthwhile to anyone but me. Lots of possibilities for the uses of blogging in K-12 education have been swimming around in my head, however, and I see this as the first step.

Student electronic portfolios? Motivation for writing assignments? Peer sharing? Cultural exchanges? Hmmm….where will this lead?