For one of my classes I try to have the kids blog regularly. It’s a hard thing to do from a technical point of view. There are very few inexpensive or free sites where I can have the students write and yet maintain a bit of control over their writing in case they say something inappropriate. A lot of blog sites also require users to have an e-mail address. That’s less of an issue for me as a high school teacher, but it’s a real concern for elementary teachers.

I have used 21 Classes. It’s a nice site with fairly easy to figure out controls. When I first tried it out they let you sign up 50 students for free. That’s been cut back to 10 which isn’t terribly useful. For $8.95/month you can raise that to 100, but with classroom budgets under strain it’s not easy to find $89.50/year for blogging.

KidBlog seems to be a new and cool solution to the problem. For those who blog on other sites, it seems to run off a WordPress engine (which I like). From the teacher’s point of view, it allows you to create sttudents without them having to have e-mail. You can set it so student posts must be approved by you first, and you can even keep your whole blogging coummunity private  if you like.

KidBlog also allows you to set up multiple teachers/administrators on one account, and seems to have some way to link the kids to more than one class. This opens up room for collaboration between teachers and classes which could have interesting possibilities at the high school end of things.

As far as appearances go, KidBlog offers only two templates for personalizing your site. It’s not much, but this isn’t a crucial issue unless you’re hyper sensitive about their design choices.

KidBlog is free at this point and there’s no indication that any change is in the works. It looks like a pretty cool blogging platform that will satisfy almost any teacher, and almost any administrator.

I signed up with Diigo.com last year. Diigo is a social bookmarking site, very similar to Delicious. Both sites allow you to take the bookmarks that you would normally create in Explorer or Firefox and easily post them on a public website so that you can share them with other people. These are very handy sites for teachers (especially those who don’t know how to create a website) because they both allow you to setup a collection of links for a research assignment and then send your students to just one URL where all your sites are listed.

In other words, instead of separately writing down the websites and their URLs for my assignment on Sir John A Macdonald, and having the kids punch them into their browsers (and make lots of errors in the process) I can simply give them my Deliious link http://delicious.com/mrpuffin/sirjohna which has all the various sites listed.

Social bookmarking is handy on its own, but Diigo allows you to share bookmarks in a cool way. A group of people (students in my case) can share a common area to post their bookmarks. They can edit each other’s work and leave comments for each other.

This is really very cool for students collaborating on research projects. Yesterday I had students researching historical Canadian human rights issues pool their bookmarks in a Diigo group so they could each use the best of the material that the others had found. The login of the person who posted the link is put beside the posted link so you, as teacher, can easily see who’s contributing and who’s not. It’s quite easy to hold people accountable.

You also have an ability to edit most things. I haven’t checked out everything yet, but I think you can edit almost anything potentially offensive that your students could post.

There is an educator version of Diigo, as well, which allows you to create users (without them having to submit e-mail addresses) and create groups for your users to work in. Understandably, that’s incredibly useful in a classroom setting.

The only downside I’ve seen so far was the length of time it took Diigo to process my application for an educator account. I first applied last May and it seems to have been approved last week. Admittedly, all of this service is free (including the education upgrade) so I can’t really complain, but with the lagtime involved I wouldn’t plan on using Diigo really soon after you apply for it.

This morning I read a great post by Joel Ralph of Canada’s National History Society. In his position as the education guy with the History Society, Joel spends a lot of time working with teachers in general, and at conferences in particular. He’s seen how a lot of history teachers meet for PD sessions and he has some doubts about how it works.

What’s the problem? Teachers who teach the same discipline all show up at these conferences, but the conference does “not actually provide space and time for them to talk to each other.” In other words, as teachers we go to conferences, listen to and watch presentations, and never actually talk to the many people there who are working in the history classrooms doing the same things we do.

Joel wants more of an “unconference” where people are free to talk and mill about with others in an environment with limited structure. Lightning Talks may be featured to give the event some cohesion and talking points to start conversations.

I like Joel’s ideas. I know him and he’s a bright guy so I don’t doubt his ideas. What I’m a bit skeptical about is the teachers. I’ve tried coaxing teachers into sharing ideas, lesson plans, or exams face-to-face and online and it’s not easy. Teachers don’t readily share. We learn quickly to scrabble and collect all the resources we can so our own classroom can be better and our own lives can be a little bit simpler. We don’t quickly share our ideas because if another teacher takes our idea and uses it in his classroom, we may not be able to use it in our own.

We tend to go to conferences the same way we teach. Most teachers stand in front of the room and the class is very teacher-centric. The notable exception to that is computer teachers, especially those dealing with new media that emphasizes collaboration. These teachers tend to go alongside their students and spend time coaching rather than lecturing. Lecturing is still necessary from time to time, but it’s not the focus.

In the same way, most teachers expect to be told what to do by some authority figure, rather than gently nudged and coaxed into doing something in a sharing session. The notable exception to that seems to be computer teachers. The Manitoba Association of Computing Educators has held a couple of brilliant and unorthodox unconferences that Joel would’ve really appreciated. (One was even held in a pub.)

Can an unconference work with history teachers? Maybe. I hope so because I think Joel’s right and the current system of conferences needs updating. Facebook, Twitter, and iPhones are changing the way kids communicate, and as teachers we can learn from that and figure out better ways for us to communicate. While some of the things the kids are doing aren’t great, a lot bear some investigation. Milling about with a bit less structure can lead to surprising conversations and unexpected insights.

It’s risky. Trying something new in your classroom or your professional development can lead to miserably disappointing results. But the only way to test an idea’s brilliance is to take it and run with it. If we never try anything new, we’ll never know if there’s a better way.

I just checked into my GMail and discovered I now had Google “Buzz.” I’m not yet exactly what it does, but here’s what Google says about it.

I’ve been playing with Twitter for a while now, but I got one more concrete demonstration of its power today.

I tweeted early today that my students were working on an assignment about Canadian immigration posters from early last century. A couple of hours later I got a tweet from @jralph telling me the online archive of The Beaver had some of the very style posters we were looking at. I never would have found those on my own and here someone just came out and offered them to me.

How great is that!! I love Twitter.