Hi Bill, I got your comment and thank you. Sure you may use whatever you find useful. It would be great if you let me know what was useful- since that is always a bit of a moving target.

Rick-- Two things I found interesting was the rubric for assessing the blog and your discussion on the difference between a blog and comment. I am new to blogging and trying to assist a few teachers explore blogging in their classroom. Thanks...

Bill,
I just spent some time on your blog. Wow, you may be new as you say, but you have added a great deal of resources in a short time. It looks great.

Bill,
First of all there are many people out there doing a lot more blogging with students than I am, but here is what we do.
First of all this is a team approach, combined with my language arts teacher. For our teacher blogs we use wordpress that I host myself. Install is easy and the hosting fits well with other things I do. We use four blogs for students, with about 20 kids in each one. They are set as contributors so that any content has to be approved. Although there are some who disagree with this practice, blogging is new to our school and district and this allows us to do what we need to do. Using four blogs was arbitrary, balancing time clicking from site to site with giving students space. Our kids this year have not launched these yet. Again we use wordpress but for this we are using http://learnerblogs.org.
If you have the time for management, installing worpress mu might be a good solution. Install is easy and you can give blogs to anyone who wants one.
We use wikispaces quite a bit too. I have used PBwiki on my own servers in the past and this works well too.
If your teachers want some of my students to read and comment with their students let me know.

Rick,
Thanks for sharing with me! If I used WordPress, did you assign each student a site that was just theirs? Or are you able to assign blog pages within a classroom blog page. This is the part I don't understand. May be you can point me to some classroom samples to look at...
Blogging is new to me. So I ventured off into my own blogging site at www.bloggingonthebay.com. I am using as a professional development site for the teachers I am working with. I appreciate any advise or ideas you can give me. Or point me in a direction to learn more...

For some good student blogs check out
A Really Different Place
Thin Walls Project
Durffs class blog

Ditto!

Sue

What is one successful Professional Development tip with teachers that you have found that works and why? Please share...

Hi Bill
Have just been enjoying reading your blog and was wondering if you would be interested in adding your blog details to the new International Edubloggers Directory at http://edubloggerdir.blogspot.com?
Patricia

I just registered for Educon 2.1....

Hi Bill
You are now live on the Edublogger Directory. Top of the list as I type :-)
Hope it will prove a useful resource
Patricia

Hello,

I'm sending out messages to everyone I know right now, and this virtual Ning network is no exception. My name is Andy Pethan. I am a 21 year old student from Olin College of Engineering. I am a part of a group of 6 Olin students (near Boston) who is taking a year off to pursue our interests in education, entrepreneurship, design and technology, bringing us to the logical project of a business that designs collaborative software for schools! I found you in a search for "middle school", and since our project is specific to middle schools, I thought you might be interested. Our project is called AlightLearning, and this is our "short" project description:

We are working under the assumption that within ten years, the landscape of modern education will have fully integrated what we now define as new classroom media and tools: video, online collaboration, open source curriculum, and internet-based software. We hope to pioneer a web software tool that acts as a platform for this new media, bringing the power of the web and its tools to students, teachers and parents in a secure, comfortable and innovative environment. More importantly, and unlike many of our competitors, our software will empower teachers to better integrate higher level thinking skills, individualized learning, goal setting, reflection, and effective feedback and evaluation. Our goal is to have our free software at a pilot middle school by April 15th, 2008, continuing to develop and coordinate with our users to create a product that other schools and individual teachers will want to use to improve their students' learning in and out of the classroom.

Our team is currently trying to win an idea competition on Ideablob.com You can find us at http://ideablob.com/3975. We would love your support in the form of a vote within the next couple days, but more importantly we'd love your feedback and comments. Our description on Ideablob is short, and even the one above hardly gets at many of the issues we would like to take a stab at solving, but at least it's a start. Note that winning this contest will raise $10,000, a large and useful sum of money for a web-based company running on “sweat equity” and minimal costs.

Feel free to email me back, post on my profile, check out alightlearning.com, or do anything you like!

Thanks,
Andy Pethan
rockychat3@gmail.com

Hi Bill. I was wondering if you and your students would be interested in participating in a nationwide SAT Vocab Video Contest @ MIT university. If not, perhaps you have some educator contacts you could direct me to. You can view contest details at BrainyFlix.com Please let me know. Thanks!