Category Archives: Blogging

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Test From Flock – Or I Better Not Get Caught Using Word to Write My Blog Again!!!

OK – I was made fun of (just a little) by several inhabitants of the Bloggers Cafe right after David Warlick sat next to me, saw that I was authoring a blog post, noticed I was using Word and said, “You use Word to write your blog!???” which brought much jovial kidding (I think it was jovial). Jeff Utecht and Mark Wagner showed me a few options (the whole time chuckling). So, here I am trying this new version of Flock even though I’ve heard both good and bad about it.

By the way not long after it was noticed that I use Word, someone saw that I wasn’t using RSS (I am now) – I must say that I did my part providing comic relief (even though none was needed) to my fellow bloggers. OK, time to see how this works. Did I mention I heard about this through my Twitter feed?

Learning is messy and sometimes embarrassing.

Blogged with Flock

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Cafe Envy

Jeff Utecht wonders why those of us populating the Blogger Cafe find it more engaging than many of the sessions. Well for one, you have a group of the most knowledgeable edtech people from all over the world in the same place, at the same time sharing and mashing all that knowledge and enthusiasm – “ and that’s powerful and addictive. You aren’t tied to “the topic” of a session – you can pick and choose and blend topics.

More intriguing to me is how do we replicate “Bloggers Cafe” on the web? Of course the answer is you can’t – Blogger’s Cafe has no time zone issues (if you’ve ever wanted to do a Skype session with other places in the world you know how difficult time zones are to deal with), it has no connectivity, platform or software issues. Sharing is immediate and not bound by what you can see or hear or feel on your computer.

This is the first “Cafe” and no one could anticipate its allure and how it has leveraged the entire conference. But it does then beg the question – how could we capture any of its power over the net? Skype or Elluminate are good tools for connecting – but the time zone issue clouds them. Wikis, blogs, feeds, and so forth all have their place – could they be mashed in some way to capture any of the magic of this place? It would be more than worth it to try – so you do it – you have the time, don’t you? Hmmm – yep that’s the rub. What new web 2.0 (3.0 actually) app could we come up with that would do this – you’d be a gazillionaire if you come up with it and develop it because this is way too powerful and meaningful.

Jeff Utecht, Chris Lehman, Darren Draper, John Pederson, Janice Stearns and I Skype-chatted a great session by Will Richardson just now –  Dean Shareski, Clarence Fisher, Bill Fitzgerald and others joined from as far away as Canada – here we were live Skype-Chatting Will’s preso and sharing it with people thousands of miles away.

Afterwards Chris Lehman may have captured the essence of “Blogger’s Cafe” when he said, “Blogger’s Cafe  is the reflection time not present in the sessions.” We all literally said, “AHHHH!”

Here’s to another example of “messy learning”

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My Home Today?




Blogger’s Cafe

Originally uploaded by BCrosby

Yesterday was EduBloggerCon – today, for me, is nothing pre-planned other than tonight’s keynote with Andrew Zolli and the opening reception at the Georgia Aquarium. So I’ll probably hang out here in the Blogger’s Cafe and clean off my laptop’s desktop (which is embarrassingly messy), blog some, plan more of my conference and hopefully have some conversations. After the last few days of running around, should be a nice rest for the rest of the conference. So if you’re here at the conference and have time to converse, you know where i probably am.

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No Rest For The Weary!

You’ve probably noted I haven’t posted much lately … I’ve been sick … it’s end of school year syndrome … just too busy. Our last day was Wednesday, but I had to completely box up my room, even though I’m not moving classrooms because the entire school is having asbestos abatement done. All the carpet and floor tile is coming up. The floor tile is the culprit – contains asbestos circa the early 1960’s. We’ve been told for years that as long as the tiles are in one piece we needn’t worry because the asbestos is held in the tile unless the tile starts to flake (We’re all very reassured by this … cough, cough).

We had planned to do one last blog post on the last day, but the gods weren’t with us – cooler than usual weather messed us up because it changed the day’s schedule and just didn’t give us time. We did shoot a little video of our finished animal designs – we had planned to do some interviews about them on tape but that didn’t happen either … best laid plans and all.

I have about 50 projects around the house waiting for me (got most of the vegetable garden in today …  finally) – but I get to go to NECC this year so now I hope to have some time to prep for that … I have to figure out what sessions to go to.

My big news of late is that I got a new MacBook – an administrator in my school district got it for me even though only HP’s are allowed in my district!!! “……because you’ll use it well….” and since it is a district owned computer I can get it tagged and put on the network (shhhh! I just won’t mention what brand it is when I send IT the MAC number). It has an 80 gig hard drive and I really want at least 120 gig – would love 200 gig – but the guy at the Apple Store told me I have to leave it as is or I void the warranty – and since it came with 3 years of AppleCare I don’t want to do that. However, I perused the web some and found several references to others’ having the same thing happen and some say that they have gotten Apple on the phone and were told as long as an Apple certified repair place does it you are OK (the Apple Store guy told me no way you can do it under any circumstances). ANYONE OUT THERE HAVE ACTUAL EXPERIENCE WITH THIS!?

OK, where’s that list of things to do? I’d better get started.

Learning is messy!

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Come Join Me On WOW2 Tonight!

Women of Web 2.0, Cheryl Oakes, Jennifer Wagner, Sharon Peters, & Vicki Davis have asked me to be a guest tonight on their live webcast. On their web site they describe themselves as:

“…four women who not only love using the tools of the Internet but also love sharing the tools with others.”

I’ll share what my class has done and is doing right now using Web 2.0 tools and more. That’s tonight (Tuesday) 6:00pm Pacific Daylight Time – 9:00pm Eastern.

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Staying Connected

One of the tough things about teaching at an “At Risk” school is the turnover. In the last 4 weeks we gained a new non-English speaking student and lost 3  (almost 4) students. I’m rolling my current class to fifth grade next year and came to realize yesterday that out of my current 25 students only 14 will be with me next year. A few have already moved out of our attendance area and had to be issued a variance in order to finish out the year here, and 6 more students will be lost to the new boundaries they’ve drawn.

One of the students we lost 2 weeks ago has made a reconnection though. I woke up Saturday morning and checked my email and there was a new blog post waiting for approval and some comments. They were from Maija:

*I Miss You All!*
Hey you guys I’m here on my computer, and I had nothing to do, so I thought, hey I should go on our class blog!!!! So I did, and I started commenting people (if that’s okay Mr. Crosby?)!!! And I decided to write a blog saying I miss the good times we’ve had together!!!! And I really missed that!!! Like Mr.Crosby said “Has any of you gone to a new school?” I have and I know how it feels now!!! I was nervous, and scared! But once you get used to it you’ll be fine!!! Thanks Mr. Crosby!!!!
I’ll talk to you guys soon!!!

I guess it is about the connections.

Connections are messy?

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The Cost of 1:1

workinghard.jpgWe read all the time about how cost is one of the disincentives to technology in schools, and certainly I don’t know if my current experience is anywhere near what does or would usually be the case, but I left this as a comment on Tom Hoffman’s blog and thought it was worth posting here too:

“My 1:1 laptop pilot is going pretty well so far with old Apple iBooks – 7 years old – we use Appleworks because it “came with” and iPhoto and iMovie and web browsers and Flickr and blogs and wikis and all kinds of free math and language and science software – haven’t paid for anything but new batteries – once (AND I’m rolling this class to fifth grade and plan on using them for an eighth year). I don’t know if laptops will usually last this long – they aren’t the latest and greatest and the screen resolution isn’t fantastic – but I haven’t found anything I wanted to do yet that they won’t do (I expected that to happen by the way – “sorry guys we can’t use Fun Brain, the computers are too old” but that hasn’t happened yet. We paid over $1600 per originally so we’re down to almost $200 per year per computer, but the price has dropped close to half and current computers have more power etc.
Maybe it depends on what you want to do with them??? But so far we’ve done everything we wanted to. I do have to use a newer computer when we video Skype, but how often would you need more than one computer doing that in your classroom at the same time? Not that I would necessarily start a 1:1 laptop program in Kindergarten – but 7 years means our current 6th graders (I’m in 4th) could have received these laptops in K and still be using them today as they leave sixth grade.”

So … how far offbase is my experience?

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Good News All Around

Celest was back today after an almost six week absence. She rang our Skype bell just as students were entering at nine and except for recess and lunchtime – and a short break to take a blood draw, she was with us all day. She got a chance to read the 28 comments left for her by her classmates, and many of you, on her blog (she read non-stop for over twenty minutes – she really enjoyed them – thanks). Mainly for her benefit we spent a little time brainstorming topics for future blog posts, she even started one.

Next, we got her started on our animal wiki pages project, a tie-in to the field trip we went on 2 weeks ago – she’s never been there : ( . We also did some multiplication facts practice and explored angles online. All-in-all a good day.

About 10:30 though Celest dropped a bombshell on us when she explained that she has been told that she will be able to attend “regular school” next year!!!! – we’re not sure where yet – maybe here, her area has been moved to another school’s attendance zone … so we’ll see.

There was one scary part of the day though – not long after Celest came on I noted a mark on her cheek about the size of a half-dollar. It was brownish-red and seemed like a sore. My vice-principal came through not much later and noticed it right away … we gave each other sad looks … and she left. All was well though … when Celest turned her head a few minutes later the “sore” turned out to be a press-on decal of a cat with a red bow. Whew! She let me take a picture of it –

cheeky.jpg