patrick delaney :: Blog

Title speaks for itself. And yes I know, I can experiment with a Firefox blog editor or Flock. Just wondering if anyone has had any luck with Mars?

So Karen McComas and Gail Dessler, both Writing Project teacher consultants, have started posting a bit within this eLgg community. My gut tells me this might be just the tool for continuing or branching out the work we did over the last few years with Youth Voices, a high school-based student blog community. And it's, in my estimation at least, incredilbly affordable: looks like $1000 for 200 users, bare bones. It won't be easy to find the $1000, only because k12 money is never easy to find, but I think I can do it. Trying the interface here with teacher friends is helpful. It would be fantastic to do a trial run with students before the school year. I've got at least five from Galileo who say they'd do it. I bet we could get a few more from Lompoc, Elk Grove and Sacto. With the evidence of good student reflections and evaluations, it would be that much easier to get the money, maybe even some extra for tweaking for special purposes. (Dave hinted in a comment on Karen's blog about a k12 adaptation in the works. And there's a special purpose tweak example: permalinks for comments?) I'm wondering if it's appropriate to enroll students within this trial installation? And if not, I wonder if we could get a trial install - bare bones - for use for June and July? By then we'd know if we wanted to really deploy it in August.

Heard about Elgg last night (again!) during the June 6 Teachers Teaching Teachers skypeCast. Dave (whose last name I couldn't find) mentioned an installation of Elgg that he was using to do what I'm thinking of doing for a private / public online community of high school students in California. Here for the tour.