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It is possible, possible that these words will be shared tomorrow from my classroom along with a very nervous 1st grade teacher sharing out about "what she's been doing" in building a classroom blog and in blogging for a year.

It's possible that I'll link over to this, project it and talk about what I was doing on
A Day in A Life and then talk generally about what I'm doing now, to talk about what a school might do, can do, needs to do.

Yikes.

Well one way to start is to say that I began blogging after reading blogs.

But then that requires I back up....and discuss something even more personal...why I might be reading educational blogs.
Six years ago, I think, I wrote a set of essays when very ill compelled to talk about teaching. It was a kind of diary, pulling from notes I've kept over my career. (Everyday I sit and write on old yellow pads things that struck me about the day, or that I wrote down during the day.) From this, during a time my health was very difficult, I was almost compulsive and wrote about my teaching, who I am, my "reasons." We should all do this rather commonly.

As I did this, I ran across a site on-line looking up better math activities that Susan Ohanian had created. I was looking for one thing to use in teaching and found "something else". That happens all the time. I found many, many articles at her site not about math but about teaching....and politics....there is a big index of current newspaper articles from around the country and back in time and also her perspectives. This is important because papers often charge for archives or you just could not see the many perspectivesall at once as you can there related to things like our current "testing". I found her site very valuable. I wrote to her.
She returned my writing instantly with a lot of encouragement and an understanding. One I never felt from teaching peers....partially because I could just be me on-line. And that was enough.

I knew Mrs. Ohanian from math replacement units, her writing books that I love, and also because she lead a training I went to here in Hueneme.Back when the state was doing things differently. Anyway she returned writing, and I sent her my pieces.
Which looking back was kind of nervy on my part but I was naive. Still am.
Eventually she very kindly placed my writing on her site at Sarah's Notes. It takes time to explain..... but this kind of pulled me into reading blogs on education too and I found The Borderland.

Bar none it was the best site I've read. Period. And the writer I admire more than Anyone I've read in education. Period. He's the "real thing," in many ways I found my interacting there to be somewhat of a paradigm shift. I knew the value of technology but now I was discovering the personal value. When you decide to go learn something who you encounter and how they treat you means a lot. If they treat you in a value additive way, you are compelled almost into your better self. And so I have been.. And as I made friends on-line this would happen in the last year a few more times as I talked to people in many walks of life willing to listen to me about education. This literally amazed me.

If you read on my sidebar my piece about Why I blog? you can learn why I blogged here a year of my life.
Well some of the reasons.

I've been neglecting my connections out in blog world of late because I've been trying to organize this teaching year and writing off line to things that I think need my refining. The more I write the more I realize I need to really deeply read, understand, contextualize and explore which takes my time. Teaching as an art requires discipline and requires efforts applied. If you read Borderland you'll see a master at work. I learn "how to do" all kinds of things from this blogger, Doug Noon. I don't know if he is typical, no, he is exceptional, but he is generous with time and energy and explains a lot both in his posting but also in his direct correspondence. I glimpse things there I need to go just " figure out".
So simultaneously I could share about teaching, tech issues, ask questions, notice things, learn norms, see examples. Dumb luck allowed me to choose to connect with two people who in their generous and teaching spirit then helped me figure out a few things. And in Santa Barbara I knew Judith Green a nd her work in studying children and learning ethnographically led me to more reading, more consideration of "sachool". Out in the world quite a bit is being learned from the rigidity imposed on us in this school-in Underperforming schools narrowed and scripted. And much of it is that this is a kind of final impoverishment. And as teachers this medium allows us a kind of professionality and voice, or awareness that we probably need just to understand why our world looks as it does here. And to understand what's possible. And start this here in our world at Hathaway.

So my first thoughts to a teacher looking at this...is......blogging fills many different kinds of roles,purposes, many simultaneously. It has lots of "faces" and lots of "looks" and redefines "no wrong answers" and certainly plays a lot of roles for me.

For me I spent a year trying to talk about teaching on "A Day In A Life" but allowing myself to talk about anything I felt I wanted to...so art or momming or just sharing poems comes through because it had for me a shared journal aspect. If you understand me I am compulsive, want to write, want to find meaning, that form is a reflection of me.
I found myself reading different kinds of things that others wrote too, on-line in their blogging journey...from their daily life learning who wrote more technical things, who might write to deeper meaning in teaching. I like to read Throughlines for example. The author Bruce Schnable is so incredibly enlightening and philosophic that my framing teaching simply improves with the reading. In fact he is also an artist, photographer. In his work I find something akin to a place to rest, for me. He reminds me of what it is to "think" and by example see what this can be as something to "do" here in cyberspace.
He has a piece up on Josh Waitzkin's right now you may see if you hit the link who just wrote The Art of Learning, a chess player, and you might know him from his father's book on their life" Searching For Bobby Fisher". I wrote to this writer a bit ago, Josh, as he helped shape my writing/teaching/meanings over my career and he has very kindly corresponded.
Is a kind of on-line friend. I cannot tell you what things like this mean to me.
The piece on his book on Throughlines is great. Go see.

I also read Mark Ahlness, always. He encouraged me greatly by linking to my work on his blog, Mark's edtechblog. He is just inspiring. Great info on blogging, on his class blogging, on education issues. And he does terrific things like.....his Earth Day project which is a national treasure. Go on his site and find out more. Please.

So I started out here getting to the best of the best, by my usual"dumb luck", and they encouraged me. On Doug's site I found things and he would answer questions. I loved his"cloud of tags." Didn't know what it was but loved it.... I didn't know what anything was..... but he made a bookmark with my name on it there. I though I was "famous"....he got to me you know... and he knew it...... and I discovered del.icio.us . This is perhaps my favorite thing that I have ever seen. It is a "thing" one can put on a blog that allows you to share articles, sites, pieces you find on the internet. You get in a group of people by inviting or sharing and you can see things they post too. Hopefully I showed you today.... I had thousands of "bookmarks" in my computer and moving about a third into the public space was the best three days of figuring out I ever spent. And reading Doug's articles and now reading others in my group it has definitely transformed my work. It has been more than a "social network", it has been an introduction into what we might do with students. Group brain really.
How we might evolve learning and "make it smarter".

This said on the side of my simple blog are several things, articles I have written indexed, places where I share things I read through a "reader service" and even a way I keep track of how many people come to my site. By poking around you'll see this.

But you'll only be looking at one person, who wanted to see what she could do.

So let's look at something that shows some other possibilities.
Remember this is just something that I'm putting on here so that after our talk you can read this and see a few things....and then it might be good to try a personal blog say on Blogger or Wordpress and just try it.

I was very interested in Wikipedia. This idea of a wiki I'll talk to in my discussion but Wikipedia and my favorite the Uncyclopedia are examples of something we can collaboratively build. You can go in and add content, edit, state an objection or a challenge and evolve it. Imagine this! Many people write them with their students, or become involved with them. This is an aim of mine. I want to create a global " Sharing our family traditions through food" Recipe Wiki and have students blog in recipes from everywhere and the stories that evolved them as they reflect "who they are". Ethnographic. But that's just a personal project...it probably already exists. I'm afraid to look.

We talk a lot at Hathaway about "collaboration" and then reduce it to petty watching one another to see if we all did the" cat ditto". No.....let's look a bit wider...This is what collaborative learning is about. We need to grow up a little bit and look at the outside world beyond the limits of the hood. This is where we need to send our kids, so let's go there first. It's time to model what we want and get away from modeling a thing I call being "stuck in time, stuck in limits, stuck in our pathology", it is frankly a way OUT.

So let's go to a wiki constructed to help teachers connect to teachers blogging and students blogging. A place you can add yourself to or simply use to learn a bit more. I slowly, slowly am looking at the bloggers so I can become better at this:

Support Bloggers

You'll see so much here.....but it really helped me.

I read a blog called Learning Is Messy. This great blogger, Brian Crosby, talks about teaching and blogging , technology and this helps me a great deal when I need something I look it up here. He has shared about a very ill student who is a student in his room via a laptop. This means a very great deal to me because it shows me how we can create ways...open windows and doors in this medium... so students may learn in ways we have not thought of before. But of course it's also a very human and very real feeling blog, because learning is really messy...it is... and this helps me by lessening my anxiety about " not knowing".

It is funny but the people who are in this realm blogging help each other. Help me. If I asked they would do more. And they share a lot about the ups, downs, practical applications. And this helps.

Now I am also a "woman". One thing I noticed was we can do a bit better by our contribution to this world of blogging , writing our reflections on the day, on education and by building a "presence" that does not define us as "good shoppers".
So I started my site "A Random Act of Poetry" to share my personal poetry. I don't know if I can explain this to a staff that I have often not shared my personal self with....but I am creative, I feel, I live. I am dealing with all the things that are normal in a life, now cancer, illness and so......I needed to try that. Write poetry others can read...because just in my journals....well I wanted to share out. I'm getting a bunch of pieces, essays, finished to post into a teacher network Doug has built. I took time on them, one per week as I reflect on teaching in this class in this time. So my writing life includes...blogging on a children's site, How Beautiful You Are, my site A Day In A Life, A Random Act Of Poetry, some pieces for Susan at Sarah's Notes and nowI am preparing to write to teaching in a teacher group. Wow, talk about a typing life. But I really think it's all about working on evolving a routine. And it has reflective practice value for me.

But that's me.....

I love something that was put on my blog counter a few days ago...
here is a counter page...this is where I kind of look at who looks at my blog...
anyway they linked me to this site which is so great for beginning teacher blogging....
Blog if You Love Learning
It is very helpful.

I belong to Plans for Us too but have done nothing yet....but I WILL.
I think it has exciting possibilities.Hope they will not give up on me...

Okay I'm just writing here a piece to follow up a talk I haven't yet given.
So it feels a bit odd but I think blogging is a support system that we need to be involved with everyday in everyway to assist in building better students, ones ready for their world. Without this we are disabling them. That is clear.

I'm convinced that students out in the "world we don't know" can now "know us", care and can build with us an infinite interface with projects, classrooms, teachers. It can revive us.
We are "Under performing" and we should make the effort to share our world with the world.
We work hard and we have unique things we might tell about our world.
Our children enter a society where this on-line presence is a norm.
Yes, there are lots of things to consider. This is why reading others, seeing what they do, trying a personal blog helps. Wordpress and Blogger are the two you see here. I found them easy to use. But I also found My Teacher Pages easy to use to build links to kids to content, I found photo sites like Flickr and Picassa to share photos, I found so much it's impossible to put it all here in this little follow up. But if you are a teacher reading this at my site ASK ME and I'l make time for you. One teacher has asked and I need to get over and help her.

It's pretty fun, actually, which is also why I do it, it is a source of inspiration and pride. You see I don't feel or accept "Underperformance". Nor do I quit. I have a responsibility in what I do. We carry this working inpoverty schools. We have accept to stand at the line, when everyone else says they "can't see it". We showed up.
Sometimes I write to advocate, sometimes to share a children's book. Sometimes to talk about language, poverty, to share frustration. But mostly I write to self reflect and improve. To learn from this new medium how to do something that matters for kids, myself. As I watch my own children on-line noting ,we have 7 active computers in our house, I realize this is the "new place" for learning. We need laptops for EVERY STUDENT , school and home, projectors to screeens, we need to build blogging, we need a community where we bookmark together. We need to, as grade levels, build collaboratively through this creating not only places for kids to visit but putting our work there for kids. We need to 'journal' on-line. We need to build relationships with teachers and schools away from us and talk to each other. We need to get projects brewing. We need to find projects like the Earth Day one I mentioned and we need to join them.
We can research if we can get "on". ON.
You can't operate in a "blocked" system or without what you need. We need to dream, ask, re-ask, re-ask....we need to go out and show our District how what we do matters,
which is why I think I was asked to present this.
Let's understand that we can teach a little differently. We can facilitate a little differently.
We'd want that for our kids.
It's been very exciting for me. And super for my class.
It is intolerable our network isn't "there yet" and talking 3 to 5 years more is unacceptable...is sad. Really sad.
Three to 5 months, order the things. Much like the movie, "If you build it he will come". If we get resources then I have no doubt you will transform learning. You'll be as enraptured as I am, as our kids are becoming. It's the future. We have to embrace it. It's fun.

Ask for what we need.
Insist with me.