Reflection 2.0

Today was another one of those days that made me really happy to do what I do.  Almost happy enough to not mind getting stuck on snowy, slippery roads trying to climb the mile-long hill leading up to my house on the way home from school (in my Honda Civic)  

Last week, a colleague asked (begged) me to help a student with a project he wants to do for National History Day, and of course, I said “sure, what’s he need?”  Well, it turns out he needs to create a website for his project on Watergate and neither he nor his teacher have ANY knowledge of how to create a webpage.  I, on the other hand, have that part pretty much down, but am more than a bit shaky on my Watergate knowledge - we’re a good team!  I immediately turned to learnerblogs for this project.  Learnerblogs is part of edublogs and is where student blogs are supposed to be housed, rather than in edublogs.  I have developed a system for doing this that gives me complete access and monitoring abilities while still allowing the student to use the blog as if it were his or her own.  I’ll do a post on that process later.  Back to our project! 

We created a blog that has a static front page rather than a post page as the front page of the site, essentially turning the site into a “regular” webpage rather than a blog, if you think about it in simple terms.  We renamed the posts page “Discussion”, which will allow him to have blog features on his site, but he will otherwise be using this as a simple website where he can post his research.  I love the features on learnerblogs (exactly like edublogs) that make editing and embedding media so simple -  I think this is the perfect way for this student to get his project done without having to completely learn web design or HTML.  You can check out his project here - we just started it today, so he doesn’t have content up yet, but I really love the page titles he has created and the theme he chose. 

The reason this student and this project inspired me to actually used the phrase “I *Heart* Teaching” was that he isn’t in one of my classes, I had never met him before, and I was doing this work with him on my prep time - and I LOVED it.  It was so neat doing this project that had such direct purpose and was so related to what he and I are currently so passionate about - his Watergate project on his part and web tools on mine.  He had a need, I helped him find a solution.  That’s my favorite way to teach.  So much of what we do sometimes seems like we throw tools and ideas at kids for “someday”.  Well, this one was for TODAY and it felt good!

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You can check out 2 VERY basic screencasts (with Jing) that I did showing the process of creating a learner/edublog with a static front page here and here.  I’ll be creating a more “professional” one, but I’m out of time for that tonight.  I’m still learning that when recording, all the little glitches I run into and mistakes I make turn into more than tiny glitches and mistakes - they often mean re-recording, which with Jing and my slow upload speed means many precious minutes being wasted.  Also, Jing has a 5 minute recording limit, which is not enough for most screencasts that I need to do.  I’ve downloaded Camstudio, but haven’t tried it out yet.  Camtasia itself is just a bit too pricey for me yet!