Galileo: Arquillos Emeritus: This is a very blog-like Manila site shared with me by an attendee at the first Google Teacher Academy. The teacher responsible for the page is no longer at the school, but his work remains online as an example. You can poke around the school to see what else they are doing, but as might be expected, not many of the teachers are making frequent use of the site’s features.
This was also the case for many of the repeat attendees in the blog class I taught at Laguna Beach last night. It seems if they don’t use their new blog right away they quickly loose confidence (and their usernames and passwords) and don’t get back to it. I’m realizing that a three hour session is not nearly long enough to get someone into the practice of blogging (rather than simply introducing them to the concepts and setting up their blog). Some of the participants will be returning again on Thursday to re-take the same workshop, but I hope to be able to offer more follow up sessions (rather than new sessions) in the spring. I also plan to give this issue more thought.
In the meantime, the middle school in Laguna, Thurston Middle School has taken a big step in a new direction, thanks to the hard work of their tech lead teacher, Andy Crisp and some inspiration from Mabry Middle School. Check out all the blogging teachers at Thurston. Change is happening. :)
Even these blogs, though, are mostly of the one-way announcement variety. I’m starting to recognize what a significant professional development effort would be necessary to move large numbers of teachers (rather than isolated individuals) into reflective two-way blogging. The process would be even more involved to help them facilitate student blogging as well. So this is what it will look like as the excitement wears off, eh?