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This post is intended to be read, linked away from (and back to), as well as listened to. The podcast attached here comes from the last day of a 14-day summer institute. In it you’ll hear the participating teachers read their curriculum plans (or dreams), and discussion comes from these. Multi-tasking should give you a sense of what our summer work was like. Try it! Read the summaries here, go out to the participants blogs, and do all of that while listening to their comments on the podcast. Have fun! We did.
This summer Ken Stein, Nancy Brodsky, and Paul Allison (along with Felicia George) co-facilitated a 10-day (plus 4 home days) summer institute for teachers in the New York City Writing Project. After several days of writing with Writely, subscribing to blogs with Bloglines, and following an inquiry online by bookmarking sites with del.icio.us, the seven participants were given WordPress blogs. Here’s what they created.
Thanks go out to Nicole, Madeline, Annette, Lorraine, Cynthia, Karen, and Seth for helping us find the flow this summer!
If you’re a teacher who is new to blogging, these blogs by your peers would be a great place to start reading and responding. If you’re a veteran of the blogosphere, please welcome these newbies with a lot of generosity.
Blogs created by participants in the 2006 New York City Writing Project’s Summer Technology Initiative:
Musings http://www.nycwp.net/nicolemarti/
We need more blogs like this one!! More examples for our students of what grown-ups do when they blog. Nicole Marti’s blog is filled with
incredible photographs of life in NYC . She includes her thoughts and feelings as an English as a Second Language teacher. She has a gentle sense of humor that rings through the posted text and images. Geek tip: Don’t miss Nicole’s side-bars. This blog is a good example of using different categories to organize the various topics. There’s a good use of links in her text. Join her as she relaxes on a park bench enjoying conversation and eavesdropping.
On Finding Flow, Flotsam and Jetsam http://www.nycwp.net/madelinebrownstone/
In the summer she lives near the ocean and she writes about “flow.” Madeline Brownstone blogs about ways to get into doing work and enjoy it, as well as ways to motivate students to flow in the work that they are doing for school. This blog uses several pages at the top to present additional topics. The cluster map is an interesting way to see where other bloggers are located who are visiting this site. She refers to the theories of psychologist Csikszentmihalyi about work, creating ideas, and flow. In addition to her professional reflections on teaching and working, she includes interesting photographs of nature and poetry. She also announces the debut of her website to be used with students and teachers: popcorncoversation.org. It sounds like an exciting virtual space for people to come together and talk about their expertise in urban planning, design, engineering, science and technology. Stroll through the “flow” of Madeline Brownstone’s blog!
Annette Kraus http://www.nycwp.net/annettekraus/
A clean sleek look. Annette Kraus has made a scent-free site; no smell-o-rama going on here. There is “space” here to think. Annette blogs about health questions and about creating blogs for teachers. She explores Multiple Chemical Sensitivity, a medical condition that leads to a increased sensitivity to chemicals, including perfumes and colognes. Annette also records her “teacher thoughts” and questions in her blog. She proposes a blog for team teaching to help teachers keep track of students, assignments, and rubrics. This blog is a good example of one teacher’s thoughts about her work experience in the New York City school system. Annette is new to blogging. If you are too, this might be the place to start.
Lorraine Nowlin http://www.nycwp.net/lorrainenowlin/
Lorraine has been exploring various forms of fiction writing. This blog (one of her three) is mostly focused on her own writing, but may also include some writing about her teaching experiences. She blogs about interactive fiction on the Internet, and practices her writing with the inspiration of pictures (mostly of pictures of dogs at the moment). She sees this blog as her online writer’s notebooks and is courageous to welcome comments and recommendations while she posts original fiction. That is an excellent way to model for her students that it’s not necessary to wait for the “perfect” version before posting. Her sidebars include links to sites that will help her find inspiration for her writing, as well as websites about writing. She also blogs about Internet marketing on this site. I would recommend this blog for people interested in writing, especially creative writing, and how blogs are influencing this field. She knows that beauty is truly in the eye of the beholder.
Cynthia Turnquest-Jones http://www.nycwp.net/cynthiajones/
Former rapper with
DMX and driver extraordinaire, Cynthia, has created a blog exploring the dynamics of Father/Daughter relationships–a topic that may fuel a series of children’s’ books. She has included photographs from the Internet to illustrate her postings about her life, her memories, and her field research talking to others about father-daughter relationships. She shows how the use of art in a social studies lesson can really get the students motivated. She is an inspired teacher who posts about how she engages her students with projects that assess learning without the students even realizing it! An aspiring writer of children’s books, she helps us see connections between the closeness of father-daughter relationships and the caring that goes in to teaching children. She is interested in a wide range of topics and always has something thoughtful to say about them!
Karen Levy http://www.nycwp.net/karenlevy/
Karen Levy’s blog contains a wealth of information. A New York City DOE librarian, she has been blogging about toxins and reading, which isn’t to say that reading this blog is toxic. Karen started out blogging about pesticides, but she has also included posts about reading. She writes about current events related to using the blogs in schools. She also asks visitors to her blog to submit suggestions of role models for her students of athletes interested in reading. She posts honestly about her thoughts on a range of topics, from political events in the world, to environmental concerns in her neighborhood, to school policies, to the challenges of maintaining her blog. Visit her website about books and reading for teens:
http://reading.nycwp.net , or better yet, register at the site and post your own ideas!
Seth Kupperman http://www.nycwp.net/sethkupperman/
Ever wondered what a physics teacher thinks about? Read Seth’s blog, “endless forms most beautiful.” Physics, teaching, blogging, and the rest of everything else that’s important wrapped up into a … a blog. A physics teacher or any other teacher might get some good ideas for blogging in their classroom by looking at this blog. His del.icio.us bookmarks would be great to share with other physics teachers. Seth also blogs about how he can use common misconceptions about physics to inform his teaching. You can look forward to
following this blog as it develops to find out how many misconceptions we mere mortals have about the physical universe. In addition to blogging about teaching physics, Seth also explores life as a student of physics and the trials (and excitements) of trying to get a research article published. Pull up a chair and encounter the investigator.
