First of all, I want to thank the folks who link to me in spite of the fact that I don’t update as much as I’d like.  I did what some might consider a foolish thing and compartmentalized several of my interests across four different blogs, and the end result is no single one of them gets updated enough.

That said, We have been back at school for a week now, and I’m getting in the the swing of things again.  I love the new building we have.  It is the realization of a dream and a lot of hard work that others did, but I am glad to reap some of the benefit.  On Friday, contractors set up my projector, so now I always have a way to show what’s on the computer.  I just need to figure out how to use the SMART Board I asked for and we’re set.

I really like my classes this year, and on Monday I have to remember to thank my principal for her infinite wisdom in seeing that I needed to teach more 9th grade than 10th grade this year.  Not that there is anything wrong with the 10th graders, but I’m enjoying my 9th graders so much that I’m happy to be their teacher.  They’ll get all embarrassed if they find this post, but I just want to pinch their little cheeks.  And that is not to say I am not enjoying the seniors and sophomores that I am teaching this year, because I am.

We had Field Day on Friday, and I was on the Light Blue Team.  I did some things I shouldn’t have done, considering the shape I’m in, with the end result that I have been sore for two days, but I had a great deal of fun, and we WON!  Wooo!  Go Light Blue!  I would like to say that my successful shaving of a balloon clinched it, but really congratulations should go to my teammates who bravely won the pie-eating contest.  If someone has pictures, I’ll be sure to post.

Well, I have to get some things done for tomorrow.  Be sure to visit my personal blog, Much Madness is Divinest Sense tomorrow.  As a blogger for 2,996, my tribute to Eric Andrew Lehrfeld who perished at the World Trade Center on 9/11 will appear at 8:46 A.M.  I will post a reminder tomorrow.

My blog is one year old today.

In the midst of public debate over the safety of MySpace users, MySpace is addressing concern with new restrictions (free registration or BugMeNot). MySpace users over 18 cannot friend users 15 and younger unless they know the user’s full name and/or e-mail address. As the AP article points out, however, MySpace (and for that matter, almost any web site) has no way of determining whether information submitted is accurate. Predators can lie and say they’re 14, and kids can lie and say they’re 22. Besides, kids are often not very protective of their personal information. The gesture is hollow at best, but I’m not sure it’s really MySpace’s responsibility to make sure its users don’t put themselves in a position to be victimized or victimize other users. The only thing that’s going to keep kids safe online is parents who watch what their children are doing. Allowing your child to trick you into getting a passport, which she uses to attempt to meet a man she came in contact with through MySpace in Jordan, is a perfect example of poor parenting.

Update: Check out this related article from SignOnSanDiego.com.  It’s a shame that schools feel they have to take measures to protect children because their parents won’t do it otherwise.

Blogger blogs hosted at Blogspot.com have been down for hours. There has been no news from either Blogger or Google (who owns Blogger) about the outage. Rumors are starting to fly about a DNS attack. Blogger’s status page is inaccessible, but it looks like you can still login and even update. At any rate, the scroll of updated blogs seems to be moving — none of the blogs I tried to click on from the scroll is up. I don’t recommend posting or changing your template, as I imagine your posts will disappear into the ether. If you go to Google and type in the URL for the status page, you get this teaser:

Blogger Status. Friday, February 03, 2006. We are currently experiencing some problems with Blog*Spot. A percentage of blogs are completely inaccessible. …

The Google cache for the page is from January 26, so that’s no help.

Lots of educators host their blogs through Blogspot. Just thought some of you might be wondering what was going on. I’ll post updates if/as I get them.

Check out Bloggers Blog for more (I can’t help but think there needs to be an apostrophe in there…).

Update: Blogger’s status page is now visible and has this message:

Saturday, February 04, 2006Blogspot is again experiencing problems – we are investigating.

Posted by Eric at 16:04 PST

I have checked out a couple of Blogspot blogs, and they seem to be up (for now).

Second Update: The status page is now blank with just the word “ok” in the corner.

Final Update: Logged in this afternoon, and Blogger’s status page apologizes for the outages and explains that the problems were too widespread to keep users aprised of the issues. They assure users they are taking steps to prevent this in the future. At 8:00 P.M. PST most of Blogspot was restored, save one of their filers, so some blogs were still inaccessible and could not be updated. I did notice that two blogs I tried to read returned a 403 Forbidden error. By 11:00 P.M. PST the server had been restarted and all the blogs except for “some legacy users have domain associations between Blog*Spot and external domains” were again available. As of this last update, “these associations are not functional at this time.”

Who would you like to see start blogging?

I would love to see Jim Burke and Carol Jago start blogging. Both have contributed so much interesting dialogue to the field of English Education that I can’t see how they can fail to be excellent bloggers. Of course, there is that sticky problem of how much time they already devote to their careers…

The obvious answer is “me,” because the students don’t seem to be getting much out of it. This is a short vent about my students. Each day, I post an update to my classroom blog. It doesn’t take long. I find it enjoyable. I give them a short literary story, then I recap the day and make announcements. I also created a wiki for them.

They won’t, WON’T use them. It’s frustrating. Why am I bothering? I don’t want to give up, but I feel… sort of defeated. Do I need to require them to use the blog and wiki in order to ensure that they will be? That just bugs me to have to do, but I’m not above it.

But the kicker is what they said yesterday. They might actually use my site if it was on MySpace. Can you freaking believe that? They claimed it would be easier to check. Oh, much easier I’m sure than typing a URL once and bookmarking it so you never had to again. I have already resorted to posting extra credit on the site and not mentioning it — ever — in class. Mixed results. Well, no results, really.

OK, tell me to keep plugging away and it will pay off eventually.

MySpace. Please.

Without realizing it, I seem to have hit upon a hot topic in the technology in education blogosphere with my post about student blogging yesterday. I was simply thinking about concerns I have about my own students — and reminded that I had meant to post about those concerns by Bud Hunt.

I have been visiting the posts written by others, and I wanted to say that I wholeheartedly encourage the use of technology in education. I have found blogs and wikis a valuable resource. My students aren’t yet participating as much as I’d like, but I see some real potential. What scares me is the “blogging” they do on their own time. I am concerned that they are posting things that could lead to their harm. I think it is our job as educators to, well, educate them about the dangers online. Actually, I think it is the job of parents, but I have to wonder how many of my students’ parents can possibly know they have MySpace.com sites when I read the things they post on them. I floated the notion of having a learning session with students during one of our morning programs, but I haven’t yet heard from the powers that be.

That said, I think benefits outweigh the risks, and I hope that was clear.

You can read some excellent posts on this topic at:

• We Are Afraid at Dave Warlick’s 2 Cents Worth
• We Are Empowered at Dave Warlick’s 2 Cents Worth
• Generation @ at Weblogg-Ed
• Blog Writing at Mousing Around
• Alarm Raised at Instructional Technology in Tucson

If you’ve seen others, let me know.

I recently wrote about students being suspended for blogging at a Catholic high school in New Jersey. It seems that the dangers inherent in student blogging have been a hot topic recently in the education blogosphere. Ed Wonk writes about students in Texas who faced disciplinary action because of the content of their blogs. But what if their writing is actually putting them in danger? What if they are doing reckless things, such as posting their cell phone numbers, where they live, where they go to school, and lying about their ages? What if they’re getting involved with people who are dangerous? Bud the Teacher recently asked himself this very question.

Most of my students have MySpace.com sites. They are posting fake ages and admitting to drinking and drug use. They are posting provocative pictures of themselves. In other words, they are inviting the attention of a pedophile or a dangerous person like David Ludwig. My husband is a true crime writer for Court TV’s Crime Library website. He has become quite savvy at tracking down the weblogs or websites of both victims and perpetrators in the news over the last year, beginning with Rachelle Waterman, a sixteen-year-old girl who encouraged and aided her two 24-year-old boyfriends to kill her mother. Waterman had a blog at LiveJournal, another popular blog-hosting site. After that case, others cropped up: Joseph Edward Duncan, who kept a Blogspot blog, was a level-three pedophile who killed most of Shasta Groene’s family, including her brother Dylan, after he kidnapped the two of them in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho; both Taylor Behl and her accused killer, Ben Fawley, had online presences; most recently, David Ludwig, an eighteen-year-old boy, is accused of murdering the parents of his girlfriend, Kara Beth Borden.

You can call it the uglier side of the blogosphere if you want to. Basically, I just wish my students would at least set their sites to be viewed only by friends, or make them private, which is easy enough to do. They probably don’t realize this, but websites can be cached and will be available for years after they thought they deleted content. While Google only make caches available for a short time, sites like the Internet Archive Wayback Machine make them available for years. Unless they know how to alter their HTML to prevent search engine robots from caching their sites and adding them to search engines, they can’t do much to prevent this from happening* (see suggestion below). I just wish my students would play it safe and look out for themselves. But they’re young, which often means they believe themselves invincible.

* If you have a website and want to do this, simply add the following code somewhere between the <head> and </head> tags: <meta name=”robots” content=”noindex,nofollow,noarchive”>.

I do not guarantee 100 % that this will prevent your page from being crawled by search engine robots, but it has worked for me in the past when I so desired.

I have noticed two interesting trends in educational blogging. First, most of the teacher bloggers I’ve come across are new teachers with less than three years experience. Second, educator blogs tend to be complain fests in the manner that my old teachers’ lounge was. Before you get upset with me, let me explain that I don’t think there’s anything wrong with either trend, necessarily. I just think educational blogging could be more.

It may be a cliché, but in my experience, that doesn’t make it less true: new teachers tend to have the most enthusiasm and the desire to try the newest thing. Therefore, it makes sense that many of our veteran teachers have not started blogging. I don’t mean to generalize, but most of the long-term veteran teachers I’ve worked with are not crazy about integrating technology and use it as little as possible. Many of them balked at Georgia’s requirement to be proficient in technology in order to re-certify. Computer gradebooks and e-mail were high on the complaint list, too. What’s the point of Power Point? I suppose I might feel the same way if I had been teaching very well, thank you very much, for 25 years without Power Point. I would indeed be very suprised to find that many of these types of teachers even know what a blog is, much less are open to the possibilities of blogging for students and teachers.

I have worked in several schools in which discussion in the teachers’ lounge dengerated quickly and often into the realm of complaining about our students’ discipline and the lack of support by administration. This sort of discussion has now become fodder for many teacher blogs on the Internet. In these blogs, teachers tend to take on an air of the soldier in the trenches — the commanding officers are clueless; we’re on our own, and it’s survival of the fittest. Frankly, it is depressing. I know, I know it is the reality in a lot of schools. I have taught in those schools. I know what it is like to drive to work and cry the whole way because I didn’t want to be there. I know what it is like to want to scrap teaching altogether. I understand the need for support from other teachers. That’s why we need to vent. When I read your blogs, I empathize. Last year, I climbed over the fence. I never thought I’d teach in private schools. I had been told by a non-authority who didn’t know much about it that the pay was awful. I took a job in a private school because I couldn’t find one in a public school. My pay and benefits did not decrease. The happiness I feel each day when I’m going to work cannot compete with my experiences in public school. I am excited to be teaching again. I am rejuvenated. I don’t have discipline issues. I have taught for two years at my school and not given a single detention. I am not advocating jumping ship. You all don’t have to make the same decision I did. But frankly, there are opportunities out there. You can teach somewhere that doesn’t make you miserable every day you go to work.

After having written this, I can’t help but feel I’ve just made the lot of you angry with me. So be it. My bit on technology expressed my concern over integration of new teaching methods. I would love to hear about the ideas of veteran teachers. Can you imagine how much younger teachers can learn about methods, ideas that worked, approaches to material? My bit about complaint fests expressed my concern over your happiness. May you find a place to be happy, because we need you. We don’t want to lose you as an educator.