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Excellent justification for why teachers need to write themselves if they want their students to be better writers and how blogging is a great medium for the writing journey. November 26, 2011, Langwitches Blog

great blog by Australian teacher on how and why they are helping their students to build digital literacy skills through eportfolios and blogging

The Learning Network Blog on NYTimes.com. For two years, students, teachers, parents and others have posted and commented on this blog. Daily lessons for subjects across curriculum based on Times content are offered. Suggestions are given for using the The Learning Network posts in the classroom. The Learning Network is accessible without a digital subscription, as are the articles linked from Learning Network posts.

By Alyson Klein in the Politics K-12 blog of Education Week, October 11 2011. The blog post outlines the recent Harkin proposal for reauthorization of ESEA/NCLB

Blog on Education Week

Fascinating must read on how "attention blindness" prevents us from seeing the bigger world and how unstructured charges to students on finding academic uses of iPods they had been given as Duke first year students led to interconnected learning, innovation, etc. Excerpt: But it got me thinking: What if bad writing is a product of the form of writing required in college-the term paper-and not necessarily intrinsic to a student's natural writing style or thought process? I hadn't thought of that until I read my students' lengthy, weekly blogs and saw the difference in quality. If students are trying to figure out what kind of writing we want in order to get a good grade, communication is secondary. What if "research paper" is a category that invites, even requires, linguistic and syntactic gobbledygook? Research indicates that, at every age level, people take their writing more seriously when it will be evaluated by peers than when it is to be judged by teachers. Online blogs directed at peers exhibit fewer typographical and factual errors, less plagiarism, and generally better, more elegant and persuasive prose than classroom assignments by the same writers. Longitudinal studies of student writers conducted by Stanford University's Andrea Lunsford, a professor of English, assessed student writing at Stanford year after year. Lunsford surprised everyone with her findings that students were becoming more literate, rhetorically dexterous, and fluent-not less, as many feared. The Internet, she discovered, had allowed them to develop their writing.

Official blog site for Community College Week.

Preview of Google PLus's value to HE Excerpt: "Facebook does allow some selective sharing, but doing so is difficult to master. As a result, many professors have decided to reserve Facebook for personal communications rather than use it for teaching and research. "I don't friend my students, because the ability to share is so clunky on Facebook," says Jeremy Littau, an assistant professor of journalism at Lehigh University. "This gives us ways to connect with people that we can't do on Facebook." In Google Plus, users can assign each new contact to a "circle" and can create as many circles as they like. Each time they post an update, they can easily select which circles get to see it. B.J. Fogg, director of Stanford University's Persuasive Technology Lab and a consulting faculty member for computer science, says he plans to use Google Plus to collaborate on research projects: "Probably every project in my lab will have its own circle." Mr. Littau is even more enthusiastic. He posted an item to his blog on Thursday titled: "Why Lehigh (and every other) University needs to be on GPlus. Now." "I want to start using this in my class next term," he says, adding that he aims to expose his students to the latest communication technologies in all of his classes. He plans to try the video-chat feature of Google Plus, called "hangouts," to hold office hours online. The new system allows up to 10 people to join in a video chat. Mr. Littau may also hold optional review sessions for exams using the technology. "I can host chats a few nights a week," he says."

Randy Bass's home blog page on social pedagogies

by Derek Bruff, November 6, 2011. The best justification of the Innovation Lab premise that I have seen. "Sharing student work on a course blog is an example of what Randall Bass and Heidi Elmendorf, of Georgetown University, call "social pedagogies." They define these as "design approaches for teaching and learning that engage students with what we might call an 'authentic audience' (other than the teacher), where the representation of knowledge for an audience is absolutely central to the construction of knowledge in a course."" Often our students engage in what Ken Bain, vice provost and a historian at Montclair State University, calls strategic or surface learning, instead of the deep learning experiences we want them to have. Deep learning is hard work, and students need to be well motivated in order to pursue it. Extrinsic factors like grades aren't sufficient-they motivate competitive students toward strategic learning and risk-averse students to surface learning. Social pedagogies provide a way to tap into a set of intrinsic motivations that we often overlook: people's desire to be part of a community and to share what they know with that community. My students might not see the beauty and power of mathematics, but they can look forward to participating in a community effort to learn about math. Online, social pedagogies can play an important role in creating such a community. These are strong motivators, and we can make use of them in the courses we teach.

professional development 30 day challenge to engage students through blogs

Blog on Education Week

Blog on the Teacher Leaders Network (TLN). The blogger, Bill Ferriter, teaches 6th grade language arts in Wake County, NC. He has designed professional development courses for educators nationwide on the use of web2.0 technologies in the classroom.

very good blog on June 5, 2011 by K. Walsh on 7 reasons why instructional uses of social networking software can create opportunities for learning, connecting, and engagement

Published by Learning Forward and the National Staff Development Council, this site contains the journal archives as well as related topics (including newsletters and a blog).

By David Hayward and originally published in April 2009 Integrating Technology column of Beyond Penguins and Polar Bears; here it is part of the blog Expert Voices published by the National Sciences Digital Library. The post provides a great overview of Diigo, with advice on how middle school teachers can use it.

Richard Byrne's blog on Free Technology for Teachers always comes up with excellent resources. This one is the Story of Bottled Water produced in 2010. I noticed below on this page videos about plastic and how 1 cheeseburger=15,000 Googles. I assume the last one is about the environmental costs of technology.

blog and newsletter site for the Harvard Graduate School of Education, includes Richard Elmore's writings

Good comparison by Amy Greene at the Evergreen State College on Diigo vs. Zotero

Blog on high school economics and 4th grade collaboration on Lawn Boy book that focuses on economic principles that guide a young boy's lawn mowing practice into a money maker. I like that because it takes sophisticated principles and presents them within an interesting story that grabs 4th graders and high school students. Then through a collaboration online between the two age groups, they discuss the book together through a series of Skype interviews/interactions.