Last month, in preparation for my K12Online Conference presentation, I re-read Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s Good Business. Leadership, Flow, and the Making of Meaning. In it, he states that the experience of flow - when the person is totally immersed in an activity and genuinely enjoying the moment - comes from “the steps one takes toward attaining [...]

The first two full weeks of school are now behind me. My grade eight students have been given their blogs. They posted their first entries. The class blogging portal is slowly filling up with student voices. Naturally, I look forward to seeing how these voices will interact and intertwine. What I am really concerned about, however, [...]

When I first started thinking seriously about my role in the class blogging community and reflecting on some of the findings of my research, the usual cliches came to mind: teacher as facilitator, guide, consultant, co-participant. I wasn’t happy with these vague labels and wanted to delve deeper into the impact of my blogging community [...]

My Twitter page shows that I’ve been spending a lot of time commenting on student work in our grade eight blogosphere. Perhaps “commenting” is not the best word to describe what I’m doing. I’m trying to engage students in conversations about the topics they’re researching. This is not just about giving feedback. That would only [...]

This term, my grade seven students will be reading and writing poetry in an online community of writers where they will be given electronic portfolios and encouraged to share their own poetry and participate in poetry discussions. As writers, they will receive tremendous support from an experienced and accomplished Canadian poet, Douglas Burnet Smith. He [...]

Once again, I was forced to take a break from blogging to focus on my dissertation. I spent the last three weeks writing about my research findings. It was a great opportunity to carefully analyze all the work that my students have done and also scrutinize my own involvement and development as a teacher. Specifically, [...]

I received a number of e-mails and comments in response to my entry on Progressive Discourse. Some asked if I could offer an explanation as to why the students switched into the progressive discourse mode. I’ve been thinking about the reason why it happened and I believe that it had to do with three things: [...]

What is the role that the teacher needs to assume in the online community of student bloggers? I’m spending a lot of time right now reviewing my log notes from last year in order to look for references to how the developing community of student bloggers kept influencing my online presence and my understanding of [...]

I have been thinking about the changing role of the teacher for quite some time and this entry is my attempt to vocalize some of my conclusions. It seems to me that the old conception of what it means to be a teacher is, generally speaking, predicated on the notion that teachers convey information. Teachers are [...]

I have received a number of e-mails from teachers who attended my ECOO presentation last week and are interested in how blogging can help them create communities in their classrooms. Unfortunately, I ran out of time at the end of my presentation on communities of writers and did not get a chance to talk about [...]