Pedabloggy-Brainstorming its variety

[Joyce Valenza]

I just posted this to my blog and thought the conversation might be just as good or better here:

First–Where am I? I am in between conferences. I left PSLA, our state conference, and I on my way to DC for Computers in Libraries.

At PSLA, a wonderful national speaker offered a fine basic workshop on blogs and wikis. She noted that there really weren’t any school library blogs of note, or none that she could easily find using Google. (Seems strangely reminiscent of that American Libraries kerfuffle, no?)

I smoothed my own feathers and began to think. The reason this nationally know speaker could not find our blogs is because we are blogging a little differently from our public library colleagues. The examples she shared feel roughly into three buckets: book reviews, professional development, and public relations. We blog differently.

Over the past two years I have probably launched or inspired 100 blogs. None of these efforts have my name or the term “school library” attached to them. I’ve launched or helped to launch global issues discussion blogs, research blogs, literary circle blogs, character interpretation blogs, and much more. I’ve seen so many other creative efforts.

So, it occurred to me that it would be useful to create a tool to showcase what these efforts look like and how they might be used in our own classrooms and libraries. It might also be fun to create a sort of taxonomy of pedabloggy, ala the brilliant Design Patterns for Eduwikis by Bernie Dodge.

Please help me brainstorm in our new Pedabloggy wiki! http://pedabloggy.wikispaces.com
(Simply get a wikispaces account and edit away.) I’ll clean it up when we reach crit

[Cathy Nelson]

Funny you mention this. I did part of an after school staff dev today for "new teachers" in their "induction" year. I thought surely there would be some who would know blogs and podcasts fairly well. My contribution today was to show that professional development could be truly personalized by using aggregators. Surprise, Surprise. Very few of them seemed to have a clue what i was talking about. But i think I piqued their interest. I introduced RSS, briefly overviewing blogs and podcasts, and what one could get from them. I showed my bloglines and how the 160 feeds I get are truly my interests, both personal and professional, and I let them glimpse my iTunes too. They seemed quite amused that I have a daily devotional and a soap opera in my itunes, mixed in with several professional dev style ones. I tried to allow them to hear a smidgen of David Warlick and Grammar Girl, just to show one that can be used for personal prof. dev. and one that might be used for instructional purposes. I showed some blogs as well. My favorite 2.0 tools I shared, though, were Flickr, Hitchhickr, and Technorati. Believe it or not we did not have a wifi connection (as was promised--bummer), but thankfully I've learned to go prepared for that. Plus I only had roughly 20 minutes. My parting advice to these newbies was to use an aggregator to track a few to begin with (blogs and/or podcasts) so they can get a feel for how they work. Then begin adding, taking away, and fine tuning what they use. Eventually they will find a way to integrate some web 2.0 in the classroom for student engagement. I don't know if I'm the one to edit the wiki---i am by no means an expert myself. But I thought you and others would like my story. Thanks for creating this ning.