Blogging through 2006-07: Part 1

(there is an intro at Blogging through 2006-07: Intro Links to posts on this blog are in green, links to posts on my classroom blog are in red)

The 2006-07 school year promised to be an exciting one. It would be my second one blogging with a group of third graders, and I had learned a huge amount about what worked and what didn't the year before. I also had a lot of new ideas I wanted to try out. This is an attempt to string together some of the important events of that school year.

• August, 2006: Summers are always the time for me to learn, grow, and write more. Big event for our school was Arbor Heights - a dozen years on the web! Spurred on by this, I created a Wikipedia entry for my school. As summer ended, I was consumed with fear over DOPA passing, and frustrated with school filtering - Worse than DOPA - the Whitelist. Launching the new class blog, I posted Blog for a new year in the new classblogmeister location (new email account for me, changed the domain forward for roomtwelve.com). The new class was all set up and ready to go.
  
  
• September, 2006: Finally said good-bye to last year's class, with Sail on! and on the same day posted Fighting filtering, noting the district blocking of Technorati, David Warlick, Edublogs, my school's wiki, and much more. I was beside myself. Also on the same day, I welcomed the new class Welcome to roomtwelve.com! There was still a huge amount of tech stuff happening at the personal level: Another day, before it really starts. In the classroom there was a lot of word processing practice, learning how to navigate within our local server to open, save, edit, etc... By the end of the month, students were posting their first articles, introductions of themselves - amazing! I wrote about the first day of student blogging in Almost there. Three student examples: Logan, Lindsay, and Riley2.
  
  
• October, 2006: I tried to draw some early comparisons between last year's group and this year's in Amazing start. The first live recording of me speaking put into a podcast was Open House - a podcast! I tried it again at a workshop I gave for my colleagues at wiki work. I was still frustrated about district filtering policies when I wrote Riding a bubble and watching my back - which followed a request to the tech department to be sure a list of several hundred sites were unblocked as part of the K12Online Conference. I assigned a second blog writing piece in Scary Writers, which turned out amazingly well, considering I only gave the kids two 15-20 minute periods in which to write, and then post to their blogs.
  
  

  A note about student writing on blogs. We almost always wrote in MS Word first, and then did copy/paste to the blog. We did at times use paper/pencil to generate a list of ideas prior to writing, but usually all writing took place exclusively on the computer. To see our classroom blog with ALL student blog articles listed on the left (from the entire year), in chronological order, follow this link. It's a long page, but there is so much to see!