Nov 23rd, 2008 by Mark Spahr
One of my new projects at school is a class blog. You can find our blog here. This has been a goal of mine for about a year now. There are some unique challenges to pulling something like this off when you teach at a juvenile correctional facility. The number one thing that I have to protect it the identities of my students. Maine state law requires confidentiality for all children in the juvenile system, so my students are required to use a “user name.” Another challenge is controlling the students’ access to any means of communication outside of the blog. Any little widget that allows sharing a post by email, delicious, or some other web 2.0 platform cannot be accessible to my students (this is a big reason why I couldn’t use edublogs or blogger). In the end, I went with a self-hosted wordpress blog (a big thanks to my brother who provided the server space, just like he did for this blog).
I am a big proponent of working to improve reading and writing skills across the curriculum. The purpose of the blog is to get my students writing something related to my class on a regular basis, and to provide an authentic audience for their work.
I added a clustrmap to the site as a way of reminding my students that people can see their work. We have not had a lot of people looking in from the outside, but the first time I showed them the clustr map with dots on it from outside of Maine, there were a few raised eyebrows in the room (I think it may have gotten their attention).
It will be interesting to see where this goes and to follow the writing of my students to see if there is any improvement over the course of the semester.
Tags: 2008, Class Blog, Culinary
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Nov 3rd, 2008 by Mark Spahr
Me and my big mouth. All I said at the faculty meeting was “It would be cool if we had a mock election for our students.” Next thing you know, I am printing ballots and organizing the whole thing for my school. I do find it curious that the Culinary Arts teacher is the one who is doing all of this. Wonder what happened to the Social Studies teachers at my school? The tabulation of the votes will be conducted in Google Docs and I have embedded the charts below. So just in case you are worried that you won’t get enough election coverage on Tuesday night, you can put your finger on the pulse of our student mock election right here. I expect results to start posting around 8:30 a.m. EST (GMT-5).
Tags: Election2008, Google Docs
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Oct 16th, 2008 by Mark Spahr
I am heading down to Augusta for ACTEM’s MAINEducation 2008 technology conference tomorrow. This wil be my second time attending. Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach, recently returned from Australia (where she helped to kick off the International Powerful Learning Practice cohort with educators such as Jenny Luca), is the keynote speaker. There are several sessions that look promising, including one on student filmmaking from Dr. Tim Tyson. I have been thinking about adding a video project to my culinary class and hope to get some good ideas or at least some good inspiration.
I plan to head to the Geek of the Week session during the lunch hour for some roundtable discussion of favorite web 2.0 tools. After the conference ends I am heading to the Wicked Decent Learning meetup at The Ground Round to catch up with Jeff and Dan.
Tags: ACTEM, MaineEd08, Wicked Decent Learning
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Sep 11th, 2008 by Mark Spahr
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"Questions abound about the inquiry-based teaching approach. Here are answers, from how to meet standards to how to keep control of the classroom."
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Four-day school weeks are something that have been proposed here in Maine. Here is an Edutopia poll covering that very subject.
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