I guess I better start reflecting on all of the days for the 31 Day Comment Challenge–May is almost over.  I’ve actually done most of the activities, but have not had three seconds to reflect.

I like the new layout for Edublogs dashboard.  The only glitch I see so far is that the blog tabs at the top of the page have ALL of my students (whose blogs I set up) and so I can’t add another blog and actually see it.  Even though it was a pain to scroll down, at least I could eventually get to all of the students’ blogs–now I can’t get to all of my blogs.

I was just about to add another blog, but I wouldn’t be able to get to it because of the critical mass of student blogs already attached.  I’ll have to ask Bill if there is a way to get rid of some of the blogs on MY account without deactivating them.

The last day of school was yesterday and as usual I have trouble winding down. I’m not sure how I’m always the last to leave the building, but I was for about the 15th year running. I’ve never made it to Jim and Julie’s end of the year party. Alas.

The screening was fun. The kids were very excited to have visitors (whom they almost stampeded when I told them there were doughnuts in the back of the room). Brandon’s mom and Jaquelyn’s grandmother came, along with Kathy and Becky who had been blog readers. Andy, Cindy and Cori also came–that’s a pretty good turnout!

I was really pleased with the finals. The students had to review the film as a whole and discuss whether or not it served the purpose that they had established early on

1. to inform
2. to persuade
3. to effect change

And then tell what worked and what didn’t in the film. They were very insightful and were not delusional about what worked and what didn’t. They caught the sound problems and the choppy editing and the way it didn’t exactly flow together segment to segment. But they also recognized that they did a good job editing the interviews down to the essential and that their visual metaphors made the film more interesting. I was so proud! And if that weren’t enough–their last blog entries talked about what they learned. I couldn’t have hoped for more understanding of what they were supposed to have learned from this project.

I did exit interviews of the kids and filmed it–it’s fun to hear them talk in their own words about their experience. I will be putting the whole thing together–my own meta-documentary.

The other part of the kids’ final was to comment on a blog from VCS–Ms. Cassenelli’s computer class–most of them did. It was a good match for them because the students were focusing on social change–it looked like they were creating their own multi-media information blog about a topic about which they wanted to effect change. Love it when things serendipitously fit together.

The only thing that wasn’t ideal is that cocomment does not work on their blog–it looks like perhaps it is a closed blog? Not sure. But cocomment now works on mine now, so I’m happy.

My students have been getting comments from a computer class in Oregon. I’m not sure if anyone has commented back yet–this will need to be addressed tomorrow.

Unfortunately tomorrow is our last day of school and I’m not sure how many of my darlings will continue to blog over the summer. I will make it part of their final to comment on a blog at the Beaverton school. The cool thing is that many of them have blogs about issues they care about. It might be a nice circle back to the conversations that we had about what we care most deeply about and how we can inform, persuade, and effect change by communicating with others. Perhaps there will be some empathy with people who are trying to effect change in their own small way.

The other thing that was great for me to see on the Beaverton students’ blogs was the way they had incorporated multi-modal forms of communication (video, images, surveys, posters) All were cited, I was glad to see . I’m not sure if edublogs supports surveys or not, but I’m going to investigate. That could be a great resource next year. It looked like the Beaverton school used Google to do the survey. I’ll have to play around.

The kids are in the final stages of editing. One technical question that we didn’t quite figure out was if in Adobe Premiere Elements you can use the audio from a video clip while putting another image over it–a cutaway. I’m sure there is software that allows you to rip out the .mp3 file (0r however it is saved) from the video file, but I was hoping there was an easy way to do it. I’ll need to continue to research (and if by chance anyone runs across this blog and knows the answer, I’d take help, too!)

I found an interesting chart put out by an Australian company that tracks carbon emissions by country.

I was surprised that the US is not the highest. OK we’re close. . .

I also found a Canadian blog that is a resource for teachers, but would be great for any kind of research on environmental studies.

To encourage students to converse via their blogs and to allow easy grading for me, I would like to have sidebar similar to “recent comments” and “recent posts” that tracks the comments the students make on others’ blogs. I think this is possible, but I just don’t know how to do it.

If anyone has technical advice, I would appreciate it.

I just posted this as a comment on Britt’s blog (from Virginia Commonwealth University), but thought I’d put it on my own as well–writing a comment helped me solidify my own ideas.

The idea behind the purpose and audience of a blog is one I wrestle with briefly–and then move on because I feel impelled to write or I will forget what I was thinking.

My blog has multiple purposes and audiences, but I have just left it under one umbrella for my own sanity.

1) I write for my students to show them models of how to blog, how to summarize and respond to research, and post screencasts for “how to’s”–mostly technical stuff.

2) I write for my students’ parents to explain my rationale and keep them informed.

3) I write for my colleagues (known and unknown) who might be interested in adapting the project.

4) But it seems mostly I write for myself to get down the teaching reflections that sometimes find their way to a post-it note (and sometimes not). I’m trying to be deliberate in my reflections.

5) And the added bonus is when someone I don’t know does read my blog and adds insight that I would never have had if I had just written in my journal.

So while I don’t expect to become a world famous writer, it’s nice to know there is the possibility of a wider readership than just me. And with that wider readership, the possibility for collaboration.

I thought it would be cool to put a ClustrMap on my page, but my theme makes all of my pages go over into the sidebar when I put the map widget in the sidebar.  It also is sort of ugly in the footer–I wonder what code is messing up.  I plead ignorance.But, it will be cool for the kids to see–I’ll suggest that they add a Map Widget to their blogs so they can see who is clicking around and reading.  Maybe it will inspire them to comment on more blogs and have a little dot on St. Louis appear somewhere across the world.

I started to notice that the kids are getting comments from people I don’t know. So I checked my Google Analytics and found that we are getting hits from Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. I have to believe that these are students whose teachers also signed up for the 31-day challenge. I’ll get my students’ responses to being international phenoms when we have class today.

I also commented on some blogs out there is cyber-space yesterday and am trying to use CoComment–not sure I completely understand how it works, but I do know that the tags are working . Baby steps.