I’ve had it rolling in my head for a long time now that I wanted to modify Helene Blowers’ great public library Web 2.0 project, Learning 2.0, for the staff in my elementary school.  She set up a variety of Web 2.0 “things” for staff to explore and comment on.  Participants created a blog to track their thinking and give me the URL for the project’s blogroll.

My colleagues are busy, and I liked the idea of doing something where they could work at their own pace but still have a record of explorations.  I liked her sense of whimsy and letting folks play, and out of play, to make professional meaning.  And I wanted my colleagues to have that same sense of exploration and fun, and then to think about if and how those tools could fit into their classroom.  As I like to say, “Lead with the need.” 

Thanks to Helene’s Creative Commons license, I finally got around to putting it together and launched Exploring Elementary 2.0 with my staff today: a six-week self-paced exploration of Web 2.0 tools, with an eye on how to integrate those tools effectively in elementary school classrooms.  I pared down the initial 23 tasks to 17 so we could finish by our district’s June 1 cutoff for 07-08 PD and changed around a few of the tasks to better fit an elementary teacher’s needs.

And here’s what I think is really cool … let’s say you’re a media specialist out there and you know you want to be doing more PD and you know your staff wants to explore but neither of you have time to be in the same lab at the same time.

You can use this project, too!  The project can easily be adopted in your building with little effort on your part.  If you’re a media specialist, all you have to do is:

1. Arrange for your staff to receive PD credit for participating.  (My principal is giving 10 PD hours’ worth of credit.)
2. Sell the idea to your staff.
3. Collect their blog URLs and send them to me for the blogroll.
4. Track your staff’s progress via their blogs.
5. Turn in your district’s official paperwork when they’re done.

What’s in it for you? You get ready-made PD that’s all set to go.  Perfect if you need to announce one last initiative before the Board announces next year’s budget …

What’s in it for me? I work in a small building where the staff knows one another and quite well, so we get the benefit of a whole bunch of perspectives from which to draw inspiration.

So what do you say? Hope you’ll join me for this journey.  Drop me a line at slmamblog@gmail.com if you’re interested.

PS - Yes, this is similar to the California School Library Association’s project, though their tasks more closely mirror the original Learning 2.o project.

A few of the personal blogs I watch seem to be marking April as Photo Month: “30 days, 30 photos.”  The idea is that participating bloggers upload one photo to their blog on each day of the month.  There isn’t necessarily a theme to the images (though many seem to reflect nature or domestic life).  So it must be pure aesthetics that drives folks to do this, or maybe a sense of amateur documentarian.

The project kind of reminds me of the 3191 blog, in which two friends (who lived 3191 miles apart), each took a photo each morning of their lives.  Their first year was subtitled “A Year of Mornings” and is under contract to become a book. Now they are in their second year, “A Year of Evenings.”

And it’s reminiscent of the A Day in the Life of _______series, which sent photographers all over a country to capture photos during a single day.

I love seeing our school through children’s various photographic projects.  It has me thinking … how could we use photographs on K-12 blogs to track something over time? What could students use digital cameras to capture? What can we design to help them process (ummm… I mean mental process, not film processing!) the photographic data/information in a meaningful way?

Image: LibraryThing

In introducing Roberta’s guest post about LibraryThing (click on “LibraryThing” in the right sidebar to see previous posts about this wonder-tool), I mentioned that I thought an incoming fifth grade teacher might like this as a way of tracking her reading logs as well.

She loved the idea but asked about how to track things easily.  I discovered that on a member’s profile page, in the bottom right-hand corner, there are a couple of different RSS feeds that one can subscribe to in a Bloglines or Google Reader account.

So think about what this can mean for our students and teachers … no more paper reading logs to get lost or left at home! Teachers tracking student progress via a single login at Bloglines!  And if we can begin this journey for kids while they’re still in elementary school (and, as Roberta points out, still young enough that they remember every book they’ve ever read), we can start them on a lifetime reading journal.

And thinking just a bit further, I am wondering about what our cognitive process is when we tag something.  We can describe its physical attributes (color, size, number of pages), its subject matter, its genre, its location (”cottage,” “basement”), who gave it to you, gender of protagonist, key items that appear, location, and more.

What would kids be demonstrating by tagging their books? Help me put that cognitive process into words … I think it could be a powerful revelation … but don’t know how to say it.  Any cataloguers out there? I bet that’s something they can describe for us.