New Semester

For the 1st semester, 2008, we will be working with Teen 9 and developing a blog for the restaurant reviews.  We have lots of groups:

Jardins: Cory and Robert
Itaim: Henio and Marcia L.
Perdizes: Rich and Jeane
Morumbi: Enery
Santo Amaro: n/a (sorry)

An article to read…

From Debbie here at Paulista Jardins…

http://www.hltmag.co.uk/sep07/sart01.htm

Updates!?

Just to let everyone know what has been going on with my groups:  I began having problems with time in T7, so I decided to lighten up on the blog project with my groups.  I will resume activities this week with an activity related to the writing assignment they will be doing. 

However, I have began writing activities for what I think will we do in IT1 next semester.  Remember the post about my students´ brainstorming clusters for blog activities?  Well I have come up with some general categories for the activities and have been organizing them into groups.  I will be posting them later this week and hopefully, you all will be able to help me to expand and start creating activities for these topics.

I will keep you posted!

An article from Terry…

That reminds me, Terry sent an email last week:

Wikis and Podcasts and Blogs! Oh, My! What Is a Faculty Member Supposed to Do?

a great article about blogging/teaching

I found a great article about blogging and teaching.  I think it is very important for our work.  Give it a read and tell me what you think:

Linkin´ (B)Logs: A New Literacy of Hyperlinks

My Teen 7 Blog Clusters

Here is a link to my Teen 7 Brainstorm Clusters that we did last on Thursday, September 6th, 2007. In the 2 classes I decided to work in groups of 3. You can see the results for yourselves. I was impressed by some of the groups´ imaginations. This will give us a place to start.

See the group here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/10124756@N08/sets/72157601948743189/

What to do next?

I am going to throw Rick´s doubt back to the group.  What do you think you should be doing with your students?  What will get them to have fun, react and produce? 

Remember, we are testing this idea; nobody knows what should be done next.  I know Renato is trying something more open, not necessarily related to the topics we are discussing in class.  This approach will probably work best for him.  For me, I am going to work on free, but guided activities, also not directly related to the class material.  But not everybody has the same perspective. 

I would say that Rick should work on writing prompts with his students.  This is something he is very good at, but will it work here in the blog project.  I don´t know and we will only know if we try.

Don´t forget that we have to ask our students what they would like to do.  Last Friday we had a discussion at the meeting about this.  We decided that a brainstorming session in class would be a great idea.  Try this on the whiteboard and have someone take a picture with their cell phone and post it to the blog.  Then post it here to our blog for everyone to see!!! 

I think we are going in the right direction and just to have students writing is something very positive. 

More to come later…. 

Blog Activity Prepared

I have just added a blog activity to www.alumni.clearwiki.com.  It took some time to explore and experiment, but I think it will go well with my students.  There is a lot to do in the activity, but it can always be made into a 2 day activity. 

Feel free to use it, but tell me how it works.

getting ready for week four…

Last week was really productive for my groups.  They created their blogs and began exploring them.  As expected, everybody wanted to change their themes to have a different look.  We went through the steps to do this and they loved it. 

I wanted them to make their first posts to have an idea of how to do it.  These guys learn really quick, and I imagine that they will eventually be telling me how to do certain things!

To see my groups, go to my static page here to the right.  There are links to all their blogs.

 I also put Renato´s groups up on his page.  I was really pleased when he told me his group insisted on doing it in pairs.  Of course he agreed and they are working in pairs (with one triad).  I am glad to see students responding to the project and giving feedback.

I am planning an activity for my students this week where they will be writing about someone that they would like to meet.  First they will explore www.43people.com and find a person that they would like to meet.  They will then post at 43 places and send it automatically to their blogs. 

I have done this on my own blog with the post about Irvine Welsh.

Keep an eye for my activity at the Alumni Wikispace under Blog Project.

User roles in WordPress

You can have many people contributing to a single blog.  This blog is a great example of this, although I am the only one posting.   Each user has a role and can do certain things on the blog:

What are the different roles?

There are four roles: Administrator, Editor, Author, and Contributor.

Here is what they can do:

Administrator (for class blogs, this is the teacher and for individual blogs, this is the student)

The Admin can do everything. Complete power over posts, comments, settings, theme choice, import, users – the whole shebang. Nothing is off-limits.

Editor (class blogs – students; individual blogs – teacher)

They can publish any posts, edit any posts, edit any published posts, edit any pages, moderate comments, manage categories, manage links and upload files. They can also delete any posts and any pages. They can read, edit and delete private posts.

Author

Is able to edit their posts, publish their posts and upload files. And they can delete their posts too.

Contributor

They can edit their posts but cannot publish.

Advice
Be careful what roles you give people, especially if you want them to be an Editor or joint Administrator. Promoting someone is easy – removing a role is much harder.

If you have a class blog (Jeane, Rick and Lucia) you will create a blog and add the students as editors by having them register an account at WordPress.  If you have individual blogs (Grazi and Renato), you will as the students to create the blogs and then add you as an editor.