My friend and colleague Lauren, who returned to teaching this year after working with administration at my school, has started a blog called New Teacher Assistance. Lauren’s self-proclaimed audience is new teachers, but we can all learn from her insights.
Welcome to the edublogosphere, Lauren, and watch out — I might recruit you to help me with my GISA presentation on using blogs and wikis for professional development!
Check out Scott McLeod’s post on advertising at Dangerously Irrelevant.
Ditto, Scott.
I have been approached by companies wanting to advertise on this blog, although to be honest, not in quite the same manner, thank goodness. I loved Scott’s response.
I don’t like advertising on blogs. If you want to do it, that’s fine, but I never click those links, and I admit it makes my flesh crawl a little. I link to Amazon products, which is not the same thing in my opinion because it’s relevant to my post, and I use the referral fees to buy books for my classroom and for me. Not to mention I earn very little in referral fees. I also have complete control over the products that appear on my site. Finally, Amazon never approached me asking to advertise. To me, any ads on the site are a reflection of the owner, and if I cannot completely endorse every product that appears in ads, I won’t have them on my site. Tools like Google AdSense generate links to products I might not necessarily endorse. Once I was asked about advertising on my site, and when I checked out the company’s site, I discovered it was full of typos. I don’t want anyone to think I endorse a product whose Web site looks like that.
I have also been approached by folks wanting to write guest posts, too. This site is huffenglish.com. My words, my thoughts, my opinions. I speak for myself alone. I pay for the hosting fees. I do not speak for my employer. I own all the language on my site. Therefore, I can support and endorse everything that appears on the site. Why would I allow a guest post? It doesn’t make sense to me. If someone is interested in blogging, they ought to start their own blog. If they don’t have a lot of readers, then they need to work to earn them over three years like I have.
This site is mine. Everything that appears on huffenglish.com is mine unless attribution to someone else is provided. I have put a lot of work into this site, and I am proud of that work. Why would I compromise all that by accepting ads or guest posts?
It occurred to me this week that as my blog approaches its third birthday, quite a lot of content is buried in the archives that might actually be useful to new readers of the blog.
At my school, I am often sought out for technology ideas. For instance, my school is really good about publicizing the things I do with blogs and wikis. When The Atlanta Jewish Times called the school looking to speak with educators about their use of technology, my colleagues made sure the reporter, Suzi Brozman, talked to me. They are really supportive of what I do with technology, and they seem really interested in the applications available. My colleagues, in short, see me as a leader in integrating technology into the classroom. But I’m not nearly doing enough. So much more could be done! A cursory glance at the things Lisa Huff (no relation — I don’t think!) is doing with her students was enough to tell me that. I was quite humbled by what I saw — saving and sharing her posts in Google Reader left and right. Here is what I want to do next year:
I find myself feeling so excited about these potential ideas that I want to sit down and plan it all out, which is crazy because I’m not really sure what I’ll be teaching yet (for one thing), and I still have seven weeks this year. I know what you’re thinking. Go ahead and try some things. Better late than never, right? Well, I just might. My ninth graders will be studying poetry and short stories soon (May), and I see some potential there. I think the student blogs will need to wait for next year, but perhaps I can do a poetry project using wikis and VoiceThread and/or SlideShare.
It didn’t occur to me until I saw Lisa discussing it in her blog that the fact that students could display their finished work through these types of online portfolios might be the “something extra” that makes them attractive to colleges and employers — a pretty persuasive argument for, as we say down here, getting off the stick and making it happen.
I have been using Bloglines to keep up with my RSS feeds for as long as I can remember. I decided to play around with Google Reader today to see if I liked it better, and I have to say I liked it a lot better.
I like the way Google Reader enables me to click on a feed and see all the posts in that feed, even if I have already read them. In Bloglines, I had to go through an extra step (selecting from the drop-down menu next to “Display items with the last x”) to view feeds I had already read, and even then, I couldn’t figure out how to review just one feed instead of all the feeds in a folder, which I frankly didn’t want to do.
My feed subscriptions all imported properly in the folders where they were on Bloglines. Navigating was a snap. The look was pleasing to the eye — it seems like a small thing, but the display looked so much nicer. For example, pictures, embedded audio, embedded video, and the like all seemed to “behave” better in Google Reader. Subscribing to new feeds and organizing them into folders was easy. If I click on a feed to read the post on its blog, it opens in a new tab in Firefox. This is nice because in Bloglines I had to right-click (control-click) on the feed, select “Open in New Tab,” and then I could look at the feed. If I didn’t take this step and opened feeds in same window, then hit the back button to go back to Bloglines, I became confused about which feeds I had read already and often missed some I hadn’t read yet. I always found this very frustrating.
I like the shared and starred items features. The discover feature is nice, too. It’s fun to be able to keep up with how many subscribers follow a feed, and a new feature in Google Reader enables users to do this; however, in Bloglines, you can also see the names of the public subscribers, which was nice.
Check out this comparison of Bloglines Beta and Google Reader for more information. I should point out I was not using Bloglines Beta, but rather the older version of Bloglines. I think Bloglines Beta has more features. I’m not sure Bloglines compares as well with Google Reader as Bloglines Beta does.
English teachers, here’s one to pass on to your students. In celebration of his blog’s seventh birthday (quite impressive!), Neil Gaiman is going to post one of his books online for free for a month. Readers vote on which book they want to see. It might be fun for book clubs or classrooms to participate in a literature circle or perhaps even create student blogs to discuss the book.
I have enabled Gravatars in the comments. If you don’t have one, you can get one by following the link I provided. Gravatar stands for “Globally Recognized Avatar.” Your Gravatar will be associated with your e-mail address and will appear on every site that allows Gravatars when you leave comments. For instance, Education Wonks uses Haloscan, a commenting system that allows Gravatars. If you don’t have a Gravatar, a generic image will appear next to your comments on websites that allow Gravatars.
If you would like to see what Gravatars look like, just scroll down to a post with some comments. If you select a post on which I commented, you’ll see my Simpsonized image next to my comment.
I know quite a few new and prospective teachers and bloggers read this blog based on feedback I’ve received. I wonder if you have yet experienced the Web phenomenon known as the “troll.” Truthfully, I haven’t had too many problems with trolls, though they have occasionally cropped up. I have a clear comments policy, I moderate comments, and frankly, I don’t think much of what I write encourages trolls — it’s not exactly controversial or edgy.
I was utterly astonished when I read Vicki’s post in which she shares her answers to Scott McLeod‘s 2008 Education Blogosphere Survey:
What do you wish you could eradicate in the blogosphere?
Death threats and profanity. Small minds think that they can intimidate voices into being quiet. I am still missing Kathy Sierra terribly and wish she’d give us all a present and come back during 2008.
As recently as last December I received a death threat as well as some comments akin to those sent to Kathy calling me derogatory names and filled with sexual perversion. I wish there was a prefilter before it got to my premoderation or a “spam capture” or “smut capture” with automatic e-mail sent to the person who does it as well as a log of their IP address done automatically. These are a distraction and when they get back to my family, it makes them want me to quit.
When I read that, I thought, “Someone threatened to kill Vicki? I can’t think of a reason why anyone would say something like that to Vicki, who is one of the warmest, most genuine people you’ll ever meet. She is unfailingly positive in her encouragement of other bloggers and teachers, and I can’t for the life of me figure out why anyone would even think of harming her, much less send her a death threat. Frankly, I thought it was scary.
Obviously, if you receive a threat of any kind, I encourage you to report it. However, if it is your garden-variety troll leaving nasty, rude comments, I would ignore them — the reason they are so nasty is that at some point they learned that negative attention is still attention, and they will get attention quicker, in some cases, if they are rude. All these people did was transfer this behavior to the Internet, where it thrives because people feel anonymous and feel shielded by the distance between themselves and the person they are attacking. In fact, I would go so far as to say that most people who make trollish comments online would never say the same things to their target’s face. Most of the time, people will leave you alone if you ignore them.
But it is hard to ignore nastiness. I have my own trouble with it. I recommend doing the following:
Most of all, a piece of sage advice I first read in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale: “Illegitimi non carborundum.”
I have been reading Thomas L. Friedman’s The World is Flat as part of an online PLU course. Really the course just gave me a good excuse for reading a book I had been wanting to read for some time.
I am still finishing the second chapter about various flatteners that have brought us to the point where we find ourselves today, and I could not help but be struck by his comments regarding blogs. Is it just me, or does he seems somewhat more concerned about the negative aspects of blogs and blogging in comparison with the other flatteners he discusses? He says at one point, “A blog is your own personal virtual soapbox, where you can get up every morning, and, in the form of a column or a newsletter or just a screed, tell the world what you think about any subject, upload the content to your own Web site, and then wait for the world to come check it out” (117). Perhaps the word “screed” just jumps out at me, but I see this comment as somewhat negative. Yes, some bloggers write screeds, but I don’t read many blogs like that. He praises the bloggers who were able to expose “Rathergate,” but in the next breath he adds that “no one is in charge, standards of practice vary wildly, and some of it is downright irresponsible” (117). I know that what he says at true, but part of me wonders if he isn’t worried because bloggers are, as Charles Johnson quoted on the same page describes them, “an army of citizen journalists.” It just makes me wonder if Friedman feels threatened by bloggers.
I have to say I have found the book engaging and intriguing, and frankly, I have learned a great deal from the book. I know one thing — it is critical that educators help students prepare for entering this new flat world, and I don’t think all of our schools are doing enough.
Another curiosity I have about this book — when I posted on my reading blog that I was reading this book, a reader who had never commented on my blog before left a comment suggesting I read alternative theories by two other authors, criticized the length of Friedman’s book, and then left. A quick Google search unearthed four pages of extremely similar comments. She has not, at least not in the comments I have read, really explained her passion for convincing others not to read this book, or at least not to take it as the last word, but she clearly has some kind of agenda. It would not surprise me to see her comment here, as I think she monitors Technorati or Google for blogs discussing this book, and it is my hope that rather than leave her standard comment, she will be willing to engage in a discussion of her particular concerns about this book.
At any rate, as I progress through the book, I do intend to post my thoughts about it here.
If you are interested in reading my first post at the Faculty Room, “a cooperative blog presented by Big Ideas and published by Authentic Education,” it was posted today: “Born With a Desire.” Please read it and let me know what you think in the comments.