E
nglish teacher Tom McHale sets down his cup of coffee and boots up the computer at his classroom desk. It's 6:50 a.m., and he has about 45 minutes before his sleepy journalism students will begin filing into his class
room. He logs in and opens up his personal Weblog on the school intranet.
There, he does a quick scan of the New York Times headlines that are dis
played on his homepage and clicks on one of the links to read a story about war reporting that he thinks his student journalists might be interested in.
Using his Diigo tool bar, he highlights the lead paragraph and then adds a sticky note annotation asking his students to analyze the effectiveness of the writing. With a quick click, Tom chooses "bookmark" on his toolbar, adds a bit of annotation to the form that comes up, and saves it to his Diigo journal
ism group. With this one step, he archives the page for future reference and automatically sends the link and his note via RSS to display on his journal
ism class portal for students to read when they log in.
Next, he scans a compiled list of summaries that links to all the work his students submitted to their Weblogs the night before. Seeing one particularly well-done response, he clicks through to the student's personal site and leaves a positive comment about her submission. (He notices that a couple of his students have already left some positive feedback to the author as well.) He also "Diigos" that site, tagging it to his "Best Practices" list, which will send it to the class homepage as well for students to read and discuss, and to a separate Weblog page he has created to keep track of all of the best examples of student work. It's now 7:00 a.m.
After taking a sip of his coffee, Tom takes a look at his research feeds.
He's been asked to keep abreast of the latest news about technology and
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1 58 • Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms
teaching writing, and this morning he sees his Google search feed has turned up a new version of Zoho Office. He clicks the link, reads about the new ver
sion on the site, and then clicks on a different "Diigo" button that uses an account set up for all of his department colleagues to share. When the form comes up, he writes a couple of lines of description about bow it might ben
efit the department, and then saves it in the "Technology" list, which auto
matically archives it to the tech page of the English Department Weblog.
Later that day, all the members of his department will see his link along with any others his colleagues may have added as a part of their daily e-mail update from Diigo. He also decides he wants to create another search feed for the words "journalism" and "Weblogs." With a click on the toolbar, a dia
log box appears. He enters his terms, and then clicks on the Feedster.com radio button (one among four choices). He hits OK, and a new feed headline box is added to his portal.
At around 7:05, Tom uses his personal Weblog to upload an assignment on symbolism for his Major American Literature class. When he opens up the document online to check it, he adds it to a different Diigo group under his English login, and it gets sent to a separate Web page set up on the English site for American Literature Best Practices. The rest of the American Lit teachers will get an automatic e-mail later in the day notifying them of his published artifact, which they can use in their own classes. Then, he cre
ates a post for his Lit class portal that has a link to the assignment, and he publishes the post to the class homepage. Automatically, parents who have requested notification will get an e-mail that their son or daughter has home
work to do that evening. E-mails also get sent to a couple of counselors who are tracking at-risk students.
At about 7: 15, Tom decides to scan the latest school news feed, which aggregates all the new posts from the school Weblogs he is subscribed to. He sees that the basketball team won the county tournament, the new edition of the school paper is online, and the superintendent has posted important infor
mation about an upcoming safety drill. He clicks through to read the entire post, and then leaves a comment suggesting a way to alleviate crowding in the hallways during the drill. (He sees a parent also has a suggestion about the timing.) Back at his page, he decides that he doesn't want to scan the soc
cer team news any longer, so he goes to his subscription page and unchecks the feed. He does notice, however, the "New Feeds" section lists a new "Tech Deals" feed that the tech supervisor has created. Because he's looking for a new home computer, he clicks to subscribe to it.
At 7:25, he checks his audio library and sees that the MP3 interview that two of his students did with the principal has been downloaded to his player.
He lifts it out of its cradle and puts it in his briefcase so he can play it on his car stereo during his ride home after school. If it's good, he'll upload it to the
Epilogue • 1 59
school podcast page, where 135-odd subscribers (mostly parents) will automatically receive it so they can hear it and hopefully get most of their questions about the new building project answered.
Withjust a few minutes left before his first class, Tom opens the personal journal part of his portal and types in a few notes about an idea he had for the lit project his students are completing next week. He files them into the
"Literature" subfolder so he can pull up relevant notes all at once if he needs to. Now that his volume of e-mail has been drastically reduced, he scans the few messages in his inbox, takes a last gulp of coffee, and opens his class
room door to the sound of happy students.
I
I
1
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Index
graphic illustration, 24 (figure) Weblogs, 23-24
Child Internet Protection Act (ClPA), 12 Class portal:
graphic illustration, 2 1 (figure) Wcblogs, 21-22
Classroom20.com, 14{}-141 Classroom setting:
Facebook, 136-139 Flickr, 103-1 10
live streaming, 1 25-126, 128-129 Ning, 14{}-143
1 66 • 610gs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms Conversational teaching, 1 5 1 Copyright, 105, 108, 109 Creative Commons, 105, 108, 109 Creekview High School, Canton, Georgia,
1 3 8-139 Literacies" (National Council of Teachers of English), 32, 73 Delicious.com, 8 1 , 90, 9 1-92, 97-99, 109
getting started, 97-99
graphic illustration, 98 (figure) Denver Post, 58
"Digital Bites," 109 Diigo.com, 91-97
getting started, 92-97
graphic illustration, 93 (figure), 94 (figure) Disney Corporation, 58
"Flickr Toolbox: I 00+ Tools for Flickr Addicts," 109
Global portal, 35
graphic illustration, 76 (figure) Google Video, I I I , 1 2 1
Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans (2005), 4, 65, 107 Internet safety. See Safety issues Internship program. 141-142
"Jane's E-Learning Pick of the Day," 90 Java script, 81-82
1 68 • Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms
National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), 32, 41-42, 44, 73 graphic illustration, 1 14 (figure),
1 1 6 (figure), 1 1 7 (figure) video publishing, 121-123
"Podcasting with Windows Media Player,"
1 1 5
collaborative content creation, 147-148, 1 50-1 5 1 , 153-155
contribution goals, 153-155 conversational teaching, 1 S t information explosion, 147
interactive readers, 152
Really Simple Syndication (RSS), 71-83 aggregator software,
interest�based learning. 1 3 1-133 ReadlWrite Web, 6, 7
See also Facebook; Ning Social Networks in Education, 140 Social Web, 85-99
Twiner, 86-89
See also Social bookmarking services Software, Weblogs, 19, 22, 47-48, 53,
78, 120 Sony, 58
Sprankle, Bob, 141
St. Joe H20 (Missouri), 142-143
1 70 • Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms
"Standards for the Language Arts"
(National Council of Teachers of English), 32, 41-42
Star Trek, 58
"Students Teaching Students," 1 1 6 Sudan Tribune. 82
Turn Homeward, Hanna/ee (Beatty), 65 2 1Classes.com, 53
Welker's Wikinomics, 64
Westlake High School, Austin, Texas, 88 Westwood High, Camilla, Georgia, 63
graphic illustration, 62 (figure) Wiki Engines, 68
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