Kassblog

My journey to understand high school writing instruction continues. Konrad Glogoswki describes his use of blogs to encourage reflective writing practice in high school English. I am struck by the Ripple Effect tool Konrad uses to help students see how blogging (or other forms of reflective writing) help them better understand a topic. Konrad also describes specific techniques to get himself out of the way of student-student dialogue about their work.

Towards Reflective BlogTalk

My latest Blackberry wish is to be able to easily post pictures I take from the Blackberry to my blog as new posts. This leads to two questions.

- How do you find out the URL of a Flickr mobile image? I want to post Blackberry photos to my blog as easily as possible, but the javascript-based image insertion tool in my blog doesn’t work on my Blackberry. Yahoo Go! allows me to easily upload Blackberry photos to Flickr, but then I can’t get the image URL from the Flickr app in Yahoo Go!, though it displays the image very nicely. Without the URL, I can’t embed the image into the blog post. I tried blogging by email, but the images just ended up as attachments instead of displaying inline. Surely, a way to do this must exist.

- Does a good mobile blogging application exist for Blackberry? I’m thinking something like MarsEdit for mobile phones. It would just need to support the RSD protocol.

How do you post photos from your phone to your blog?

Update: writing this post brought good karma — I got mobile photoblogging to work on Nucleus CMS by sending the photo as MMS instead of email. Never mind the above questions, since sending by MMS makes uploading the image to Flickr unnecessary. I still wouldn’t mind a dedicated mobile blogging application. One final hiccup: Nucleus’ NotifyMe is not firing on items added using PostMan, so subscribers don’t receive email notifications. I only use that on my other blog, anyway.

This is totally 2005, but I’m happily using my Blackberry to read email from our family domain and post to this blog for the first time. GMail for domains and Google apps for BlackBerry are powering the former, and Nucleus is powering the latter. I was not aware that the nucleus stylesheets were PDA-friendly, but they look great. You can even read this blog very nicely on a PDA, if you were to feel so inclined, and you weren’t completely over doing that about 18 months ago. There are previous few moments when I actually need to post and don’t have a laptop, but it’s good to know that it’s possible.

Update 10/19/07: The audio files are posted. Speakers include Rosalind Wiseman, Howard Hiton, Laura Kastner, Marti Olsen Laney, and Eban Goodstein.

Catlin Gabel hosts the PNAIS All Schools Conference this Friday, October 12. We are planning to record and podcast all of the featured speakers and as many of the Catlin Gabel presenters as are interested. The potential to provide a national audience with a useful resource is very exciting to the conference organizers. We have purchased a half dozen Olympus WM-300 and lavolier mics and coordinated with our theater director to collect the recordings. Having had success podcasting internally with Drupal, I plan to install a new, public Drupal site for these podcasts. Permission to record and publish has been obtained from the featured speakers.

I would love feedback and tips as we anticipate this event, especially if you have done this sort of thing before.

I have updated my blogroll to reflect what I am regualrly reading. Check it out in the bottom half of the right-hand column. Blogging has become my primary means for professional development, and the Educators category my main resource. Keep up the great work, everyone!

I have thought a lot about blogging here the last couple of weeks, but I have not come across much worth blogging. I think that’s a good sign, as we have been consumed with the return of our fifth staff member from maternity leave, new job descriptions, server room power improvements, testing our new help desk system, and so on. My big open-source projects — two alumni web sites, gallery, Moodle, and custom scripts — have been stable lately after a period of intensive development. I have a new middle school podcasting project on the horizon, but it’s still in testing and I will talk about it here when it matures some more. We are also poised to make some big improvements in online help resources by way of a new knowledgebase starting in January or so.

I did appreciate Christopher Sessums’ recent post on action research and teacher technology integration and told him so. I need to read more blogs like Chris’ and fewer blogs from the leading edubloggers who speak (to me, at least) solely from the ed tech consulting perspective. Other voices in my blog reader include a principal, classroom teachers, school web site developers, graphic design experts, and usability experts.

The upshot of these two points is that I will write when I have something worth writing about! Have a delightful Thanksgiving.