Extreme social networking

This just in: the first Personal Genome Service.

No longer will you have to rely on Shirley McLaine to find out that you have an Egyptian princess or a Russian nobleman in your past. You can find out for sure and maybe they’ll come pay you a visit. 6 degrees of separation? No longer is it just a party game ending in Kevin Bacon, it’s going to be on the web, searchable, representing the web of humanity via the latest web 2.0 technology. You’ll have cousins showing up by RSS in your genome/blog reader.

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Blogging snapshots

I thought I’d give a couple of blogging snapshots of my sessions with the second graders and the high school guys.

I have to say that these second graders are really taking to the blogging. We have gotten a lot done in a short time. This week they blogged their thoughts about writing and drew some cute illustrations. They did this for homework and brought it to the lab to type. They ran out of time to answer all their comments. See their posts on Neville’s Bloggers.I only have this group a little under an hour and they haven’t yet mastered the typing skills but it is pretty impressive what they are getting done. I am orchestrating this project a little different. They don’t have individual blogs. It is all done on the class blog. I think a classroom teacher would be able to manage it. At first it takes a lot of time, just as anything else would as you are setting up the process. The students have had to learn a number of routines quickly. They save to the network drive on a folder entitled blogging inside Miss Neville’s folder. Right now they are typing their post on word, then we copy and paste onto the blog under Miss Neville’s sign in. Right now we are helping a lot with these mechanics but I don’t think it will be too long before the students will take over. They use these titles on their files; for instance, “Brittany’s Post on Writing”. Then when they save it on the hard drive. They are learning to click before their name and use a one word descriptor for the particular post. An example for this session is “writingBrittany”. This routine will help keep us sane, organized and will expedite the process. We even had parents enter the conversations on the commenting part. That was great. We even had younger brothers enter the conversations, too. I know this group is going to take some interesting turns and we will learn a lot. Miss Neville is enthusiastic and sees the potential.

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Fun And Motivation With FD’s Flickr Tools

Years ago I came up with an idea for a writing prompt that I felt was pretty “schema neutral” – all kids would have experience enough to be able to write a story about this prompt. I call it “A Day As Your Shoes.” Several years ago Corbett Harrison, who among other things had the concept for and started the Writing Fix web site and still maintains it, put my prompt on the site. He made it an interactive prompt to mimic how I have students brainstorm their ideas. Since all students have experience with shoes (at least in this country) and going to school - they will all be able to bring schema for this story.

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