I’m really happy to hear that students are blogging in the Yukon, but even more happy to hear that the Yukon Department of Education is supporting their endeavor.

“The Department of Education is being proactive about introducing students to blogging because entering the ‘blogisphere’ presents many teachable moments,” Education Minister John Edzerza said. “More and more educators in Canada are embracing the Internet as a way of enhancing learning opportunities.”

The Yukon Department of Education is using Manila and teachers use an approval process similar to Blogmeister for releasing student content on the internet.

Each student in Ms. Howard’s class has their own RSS feed to their “ePortfolios.” I was poking around a little more and came across Ms. Howard’s Grade 7 Homework Blogs too. This Ms. Howard seems pretty cool.

There is a help section which lays out the acceptable use policy and provides resources. It outlines the main purpose of the class blogs, as well as states that the goal is public participation.

Class Writing Blogs have two primary purposes:

1. They give Yukon students the opportunity to create meaningful content for a wider audiences than just their teacher and peers. In the process, they participate in a structured collaborative writing environment where they will learn to negotiate meaning and knowledge in real and relevant ways. All of these skills will be valuable to them once they graduate into the connected world.

2. They give Yukon teachers a forum to discuss and model appropriate social networking skills, internet and personal safety, and the privacy issues youth face every day when they are online.

We invite public participation in our blogs. Please note that all comments posted are automatically emailed to the sponsoring teacher and site administrator. Student members are not using real email accounts so any mail sent to them is routed to the teacher’s email account. Members who abuse their privileges by posting inappropriate comments will be banned. Please remember you are writing for a K-12 audience.

So I am encouraging you to poke around and give these students some feedback.

It was really interesting to do a term search across the different blogging search engines to prepare for the TagCloud experiment because of the number of student blogs I had found from the TCDSB. I was able to identify a number of student bloggers using Livejournal, Xanga, Blogger … It was really amazing to get their unfiltered opinions - good, bad and sometimes vulgar.

One post caught my attention, it was a way to get around our board’s web filtering software(Websense) using anonymous proxy from a foreign language website. I guess the site was more difficult for websense to identify. Blocking and unblocking websites is one of my department’s domains. So, sorry, but that one’s gone. Another post related to a student’s hope and excitement about taking an online eClass summer high school course. eClass is our board branded Blackboard LMS. Another domain of our department.

Religion, Math, Language, History, Science the postings are all there. I hope that there are some high school teachers from our board who take a peek at what these students are saying.

Setup:

I am experimenting with tagcloud.com to take advantage of the Yahoo Content Analysis Web service in order to find tags around search terms. I used my school board’s short form “TCDSB.”

I wanted a visual represention of the search feeds from different websites by creating a TagCloud around the term “TCDSB.” I also wanted to see if and how the term I searched for ranked within the tagcloud.

This first cloud I am leaning towards blogs:

Blogdigger search for TCDSB
BlogPulse Search Results for: TCDSB
PubSub Subscription
Technorati Search for: TCDSB
Google Blog Search: tcdsb
Feedster on: tcdsb
IceRocket Blog search: tcdsb

http://www.tagcloud.com/cloud/html/TCDSB/default/50

The second cloud I am leaning towards web search feeds:

Google Search: tcdsb
HighBeam RSS: tcdsb
MSN Search: tcdsb
Yahoo! News - Search Results for tcdsb
Yahoo! Search: tcdsb

http://www.tagcloud.com/cloud/html/TCDSB-Search/default/50

The third cloud is a merging of the two together:

http://www.tagcloud.com/cloud/html/TCDSB-Merged/default/50

Clicking on one of the tag’s links will display summaries of postings for that tag and other tags associated with it.

Unfortunately, I have found that TagCloud takes a few days before the clouds actually appear. So I will have to wait before I see some results.

There are a few blogs that claim to be written by famous people who could not possibly be blogging because they are dead or they are fictional characters. A good example is the Darth Vader Blog where you can read the rebellion form Darth Vader’s P.O.V..

What in interesting way to gain perspective and dealve deeper into the characters of a story? I could imagine student’s blogging from the perspective of their favourite literary charachters, perhaps Stanley Yelnat’s from Holes or the magical Harry Potter. The audience of their blogs would be able to respond to the acuracy of their role in the character and offer suggestions.

This would also be interesting for taking on roles of characters in school and class drama productions. With the class offering feedback to the mindset of the characer and then bringing that role into the production.

Another comic I created using GNOMZ