Beyond School

The continuing saga:

If you’ve been reading the last week’s post, you know about the headaches Bloglines’ Image Wall has caused me and other educators who have trained our students in using feed aggregators for research. And you know that I decided to jump ship to Google Reader to avoid future headaches.

Many of you advised that Google Reader was better anyway. I self-taught crash-course in one long laptop session seemed to confirm this. So good: Bye-bye, Bloglines; Hello, Google Reader. No more headaches.

Such was the plan. But as a long-lost friend told me long ago,

The best way to make God laugh is to tell him your plans.

(–her gender and metaphysical assumptions, not mine.)

The Google Reader headache came today and yesterday when I walked students through exporting their Bloglines subscriptions into Google Reader. Done. Easy.

Next step: “Now lets find more feeds in Google Reader. Easy….Say you want to find a feed on colonialism….”

So I enter that keyword, click “find,” and all I get is two pages of feeds on colonialism–and most of those from random “About.com” sites.

Short version: either I’m missing something, or Google Reader’s “find feeds” feature is pathetic.

So really, with endless “pleases” added–if anybody can teach me how to effectively search for feeds on Google Reader with the ease and power offered by Bloglines, I’ll owe you forever.

I think I’m burning out right now–heavy grading cycle–so I’m probably missing something simple. (Like, duh, del.icio.us tag-search subscriptions; but I wanted to introduce those a bit later. I guess now I can’t do that.)

Bah. Pfft. S.O.S. How could GOOGLE, of all things, make a product whose search feature stinks? (Please teach me that I’m missing something.)

If you like this post, please spread it: (But don't tag it "education." That will bury it.)

I appreciated Bloglines’ attempt to listen and problem-solve, but didn’t have time to wait.

Helpful comments about Google Reader led me to explore it and Netvibes yesterday as alternatives to Bloglines and that unfortunate Image Wall.

Google Reader is slower than I’d like, and it possibly caused some crashes on my Firefox (though I’m sure I can go to some help forum and solve that problem). But it, unlike Netvibes, allows the “keep new” feature–in Google Reader it’s “star this” or something–that made me loathe to leave Bloglines.

So off we go to Google Reader. Students will groan–but I bet they change that to “wow, that was easy,” when they see how simple an OPML export-import of feeds from one reader to another is.

And really, when you start thinking about the whole Google package–Google Homepage, Blogger, and the whole Google universe–it seems lazy to stick with an old habit like Bloglines just because it’s a habit. Another addiction to kick.

If you like this post, please spread it: (But don't tag it "education." That will bury it.)

Quick updates on the 1001 Flat World Tales wiki world writing workshop:

1. We’ve set up a Coordination Schedule on the 1001teachers project planning wiki. It’s an at-a-glance chart showing what schools plan on entering the project when. I like the efficiency this affords: All interested teachers can now go there, enter their basic info on the table (school, location, age group, number of students, teacher contact info, projected entry and exit times, and language the writers will compose in)–and find other world classrooms of similar age groups and time-frames to connect to. So it’s self running, practically.
1. Chad Ball in Canada (thanks to Jeff Whipple for the hook-up) and Ms. Cofino in Malaysia are coordinating collaboration for their middle school writers.
2. Michele Davis in Denver (Arapahoe) and I in Seoul are in our first draft peer response stage. Several of my students have expressed how much they enjoy this novelty on their free blogs. Thanks again to Karl Fisch for hooking us up.
1. There has been one bump that we should learn from: we have to communicate better about students who don’t do the assignment before we assign cross-world peer teams. I had to re-do two hours work because a dozen students hadn’t done their “jobs” properly. (In the real world, they’d be reprimanded at best, fired at worst, for not meeting their deadline. Here, they just don’t get any connections with other students in other countries.)
3. Miss Profe (virtual “Get Well Soon” card wished your way here ) has pushed the project into the multi-lingual by entering her Spanish 1 and 2 classes (ages 14-16) in the project. Any other Spanish teachers out there want to connect with her? (Ms. Cofino in Malaysia is looking into this.)
2. Jeff Whipple, tech coordinator in New Brunswick, Canada, and I Skyped a few minutes ago and he expedited the embedding of world clock widgets on both the 1001 Flat World Tales wiki and the 1001teachers wiki. Julie Lindsay’s and Vicki Davis‘ project was the inspiration for that one (and so much more–theft is flattery ). So now all teachers and students can know what time it is for their counterparts.
3. Tom Barrett and I skyped yesterday, England to Korea, about several things, ranging from safe use policies to wiki alternatives to multimedia “digital storytelling” tools. I hope he can get some of his primary classes hooked up with Mr. Smith’s fourth graders in Hannibal, Missouri, USA on the 1001 Tales project. Right now Mr. Smith’s kids are waiting patiently for other primary classrooms to write and reflect with. Any helpers?
4. We teachers and coordinators are going to try to have a Skype conference call this weekend to just reflect on the road so far, get to know each other with voice, and play with ideas for the future. I’ll podcast highlights if all goes well.
   

Tom and I spoke about what’s at the heart of this project–writing and reflecting and improving as writers; making cross-world connections and learning through them; authentic publishing for only the best; and creating publishing opportunities through audio and visual media for students with intelligences other than the textual.

And we went back to why the “blook” idea is not some novelty (though it is that, too), but is instead a way to keep students writing, and gaining new audiences, on their blogs.

By publishing the successful stories on interlinked student blogs, each writer will see their real audience grow, in real time, every time they go to their blog. Simple widgets like Clustrmaps (Tom recommended GeoVisitors instead, which does sound cooler, so I’ll check it out), it bears repeating, are incredibly powerful writing motivators for students. [Update: Let's be honest: They're motivators for adult writers, too. Instant feedback from the world. Powerful.] So are reader comments, and the conversations and connections those lead to.

All of this proves, at a glance, that blogging ain’t just “writing for teacher.” And that good blogs–which means good writing–lead to rich connections with the world. All through authentic writing.

So yes, I’m excited. It’s been messy, but we’re going. More and more connections are being made. Teachers are learning that wikis are easy. Students are learning about other countries through them, and often making new relationships. And all of us are now just curious to see how this digital organism is going to grow.

Why am I thinking of kudzu?

Photo credit from Flickr.

If you like this post, please spread it: (But don't tag it "education." That will bury it.)

Thanks to all who have weighed in at this Bloglines forum. There’s some good, constructive dialog going on. More input from us can only help, since Bloglines is doing its part.

If you like this post, please spread it: (But don't tag it "education." That will bury it.)

I can’t wait until I satisfy my hunger on all of this 21st Century Literacy stuff. Don’t get me wrong: I love it. I love how it makes work these days a labor of love.

But when I read these other bloggers–English teachers all, I think–something stirs inside me. Some desire to take an RSS sabbatical, to cancel (almost) all edublogs subscriptions, and to return to the simple Gutenbergian pleasures of writing about literature.

So here’s a simple hat-tip some wonderfully reflective bloggers out there who make room in their blogs for poetry, drama, literature, philosophy–my first loves, and ones I hope to return to in future, less manic, stages of my blogging. They won’t disappoint:

• Bruce Schauble’s Throughlines
  
• Chris Watson’s WatsonCommon
• Dana Huff’s Huffenglish
• Eric Hoefler’s Sicheii Yazhi
• Jeff Wasserman’s When the Hurly-Burly’s Done

If you like this post, please spread it: (But don't tag it "education." That will bury it.)