Just want to let you know that I appreciate being allowed to talk at your staff meeting. And again, if you think I can help out with tech integration in your classroom don’t hesitate to email me. We’ll always have YouWho.

Here’s a link to my Diigo account, specifically the tag Education. That long list of blogging educators, Support Blogging, is in there.

I’m going to be talking today about blogging in education to the CCSD 62 Instructional Services team. I thought I would write a new post to them, then low & behold I see that one of my current favorite bloggers, Jeff Utecht, just wrote about this same topic! Jeff is the Technology Specialist for the Shanghai American School. He is also a very clear & concise writer.

In Jeff’s most recent post, Communicating from the Classroom, he talks about teachers starting off using blogs as a simple classroom website. The allure here is the ease of use afforded by (most) blogging platforms. Posting homework, files, & reminders are all super simple. But there is a transformation to be made.

Now, before I go any further I say they “use blogs” but that doesn’t mean they are blogging. I do believe there is a difference. Teachers find the ease of which you can setup a web site and post new content using a blogging program simple and straight forward.

This is also an idea that Will Richardson writes about a lot.

When I post to my blog, it not only has a chance to be read by a billion people, it also lives on in the Google-able and Technorati-able world of content. It also gets linked to by other people having other conversations. And it also creates a real sense of ownership of the ideas and the membership in the community.

I know this transformation is hard to get your head around. Don’t I just want to connect with my students? My parents? My community?

If you look at the Illinois State Standards, or the NETS Standards for that matter,  you can start to see the power of blogging. The ability for us to communicate with our students, connect to outside experts, primary sources, fact checkers, or just other frames of reference allow us to revisit & revise or argue & authenticate!

Other educators are asking the same questions we are: How do I teach this? How can I invigorate learning in my class? How can I possibly help get my school off the AYP watch list?

Using a blog as your daily planner of classroom activity is a great idea. So is connecting to other people and engaging in reflective conversation, using new tools for learning in class (nod to John Davitt!), and enhancing everyone’s understanding of information literacy.

I just talked to the CCSD principals today about blogs, and since nobody kicked me out of the meeting I’m feeling pretty good. Since we will be working together to become comfortable with this I thought I’d post CommonCraft’s Blogs in Plain English video here. CommonCraft have great intructional videos explaining these modern web technologies, but it is up to educational communities to adapt them for our specific purposes.

In the hands of skilled teachers blogs become powerful tools for authentic writing, but they are also great touchstones to build relationships with other experts, which helps us connect to primary sources, vet information, or work collaboratively. Think about the abaility to publish your work or you class’ work to a worldwide audience; what can you do with this work that you couldn’t without the use of technology?

This post is directed to CCSD 62 LMC Specialists & Assistants.

I am still learning the ins & outs of the district, so I didn’t realize the number of building meetings Monday. At first it seemed like a good time for us all to meet, for me to get to know you, but now it seems like there are too many conflicts. I think you have a regularly scheduled meeting September15 – if I could attend that…

By way of introduction – if you’d like to have a face-to-face meeting now or anytime, do this – download Skype & create an account. Once you do that add me to your Skype contacts. You can search for Seth Bowers & I’m the one in Chicago. Or just add me. My account/Skype name is ssbowers. Also, I have a link to my Skype Status in the left navigation of this page. For the uninitiated, Skype is a free, VOIP service. It allows you to call, videochat, or text chat from computer to computer. You can record calls to create podcasts and collaborate with others around the world. For a small fee, $25-$30 I think, you can also get a real phone number that regular phones can call, call regular phones, have voice mail, have your phones forward calls to your Skype account, et cetera. Pretty cool. I still just use the free version though. So call me.

Getting down to business, the district did not purchase a library automation system (Alexandria) over the summer. Let’s approach this as an opportunity. We’ve been given the go ahead from Susan to proceed & get a tool in place, and I have agreed to incorporate textbook inventory as well. I think that if we can get a handle on what percent of total books we have to replace district wide the new tool will pay for itself by the second year.

To that end we have Bob Cook from Follet coming in to do a demo on September 11. If you are interested in attending please let me know. I am also working with Dave Stephens of Alexandria to demo their product – but Dave is out of town at the moment so more information on that later. You’ll be invited to that too.

What I would like to see happen is to get a solution in place by the end of September, give them approximately three months to work on importing our database, and then get some college kids in over the holiday break to start on textbook inventory. By the end of the year we should be able to conduct inventories of the LMCs in a reasonable amount of time. Did I mention we plan on getting the good scanners with on-board memory?

Moving right along, thanks for visiting my blog! This is my preferred method of delivering content on the web. It is easy, lithe, and fast, and lets educators get in, create content, and get out. This blog (ElasTECHlearning.com) is owned by CCSD 62 but housed by Edublogs. We have it for the whole district. If you are interested, head to our home page to launch your blog. If you would like a personal assistant to get started all you have to do is call (Skype, phone, email, Twitter!) and I’ll come running.  I see this as the platform for educators to communicate & collaborate. We will start linking district blogs to www.d62.org, probably under the email link on the individual schools staff list entries. Mine will probably best fit under Services > Technology, but I am open to redirection. I think we can make a case for placing a principal’s blog & and LMC blog on the home page of each school – but we can work through this together.

If you are interested in reading some assorted blogs of other educators peruse some of the links I have in my blogroll. That’s the name of the list of links on the right side of this page – the one that starts with Alan November.  By the way, I also serve as a consultant for Alan. If you head to his homepage NovemberLearning.com (different than his blog on the right) you can find me under Our Services > NL Team Consultants.

This is already obnoxiously long. I apologize! Leave me a Comment below if you like (I would like!) and launch your blog if you’re ready – or just give a jingle. Sorry about Canceling the Monday meeting – but a lot of you have conflicts. If you have Monday afternoon open I’m happy to come to your building.  -S

The whole sign-up & email issue has been sorted out! Phew. You can now head to blog.d62.org and launch your blog.

In geekier news you can now post to & read your blog from your iPhone. Head to the iTunes app page and get the WordPress app. For more information head to the main iPhone WordPress blog.

My name is Seth and I’m the new tech director for d62. I started July 1, 2008. I’m very excited to be here & hope some of you will join me out in the blogosphere. Beyond the District 62 blog site we will be launching a district wiki courtesy of Wikispaces.

Even if we haven’t met yet, contact me bowerss@d62.org if you’d like to start your classroom blog.