I'm Officially Back Online

A summer spent chasing waves in Hawaii, Southern California, Mexico, and Peru was just what I needed to recharge my batteries after a challenging and busy 06-07 school year. And I'm back to my blog with a renewed sense of direction, not to mention that it is now my official job as Technology Resource Teacher to help teachers explore ways technology can enhance curriculum (now that the roll-out of our school's 1:1 laptop initiative is beginning with freshman). Last year, while teaching a full schedule of English courses, I feel like I just dabbled on my blog. This year, with the opportunity to visit classrooms in all disciplines and work with faculty on all kinds of explorations, I hope WatsonCommon becomes more of a resource and classroom collaboration jump-off point.

I'd like to start by addressing a question raised by a fellow freshman English teacher. Some context first. In our English department, blogs have been the starting point for most teachers when it comes to integrating technology into curriculum. It just makes tons of sense in English class. So last year, many teachers set up their students on blogs and used them for a range of assignments, from journaling to documenting project to commonplace books. But the students didn't have laptops. Things are a little different now, and I suspect the use of blogs will become even more integrated into classes, hopefully, beyond English classes. There are all kinds of questions for our school now. I'm not going to get into them in this post. But I will pose the questions I find most interesting and imperative. Clay Burellfirst brought it up with me last year during one of our first Skype sessions: How do blogs not just become another place to do homework? How can they not lose the sense of ownership that they foster inherently?

Sorry, all of that to get to the question raised by my colleague: Should we use Blogger or Moveable Type--which is hosted on our school's server and is, therefore, private? So my assignment became to create a simple comparison between the blog engines with which I had some experience. But the real question becomes where does the blog fit in the curriculum? For example, there are obvious reasons for maintaining secure, private blogs. But for my classes, the public nature of the blog is the piece that connects to the curriculum. So here's a rundown of the blog engines I've tried.

Blogger: I think it's the easiest to set-up and maintain. And once you have a Google account, Reader goes really well with Blogger. For most of the more advanced feature it lacks, there are free html badges. However, I've heard that setting up a private set of blogs, say a whole class, makes things a lot more complicated.

TeraPad: I started to play around with it last year. For the tech-savvy, I think it could be very effective. It can host files and forums, amongst other features. I don't know much else about it. Anyone?

Edublogs/Learnerblogs: I've gone back and forth between Blogger and Edublogs, and I've ended up at Blogger each time. The one time I had a class with edublogs, there were some problems with reliability. But those seem to be worked out. And WordPress is a great tool. It's also kind of nice to be on an education-specific blog engine.

I'd love feedback and/or testimonials on any of the tools listed and others.

Introduction to WatsonCommon

I started this blog as an experiment, a way to figure out if a blog is an appropriate tool for my Sophomore English students to use to post an ongoing assignment called a Commonplace Book. The idea behind the assignment is that there is so much information and external stimuli in our world that confusion sets in if we don't have some way to log and file the information most relevant to us as individuals. Seems appropriate especially for the digital age, but this is not a new concept, it's been around since the eighteenth century. I was introduced to it by my department head Bruce Schauble whose parameters include:
1. Copy out passages from readings which interest you or strike you as being noteworthy
2. Record other pieces of incoming data fromthe world at large: bits of conversation, turns of phrase, song lyrics
3. Make note of questions that occur during the course of the day
4. Write down brief ideas or reflections as they occur
5. Include visual data: pictures, charts, ads, drawings

To pay such attention to what's around us creates a certain kind of attention to life that otherwise couldn't be cultivated. So that's what I'm going to try to do here. As a thematic guide, I'll try to use essential questions, which will become blog categories or tags. And I've decided that a good place to start, since an analog CP book is easy to grasp, but to go digital is something different, would be to explore what it means to blog. What are the ethics? What about copyrighted material? How can we benefit by being able to see others' commonplaces? Will sharing generate some new kind of awareness?