Week 6 - A glooming peace this morning brings...

Today I had the laptops out and ready to go so that students can work on their 20 Percent Project.  Students seemed to be working.  In a somewhat unstructured time, students were working quietly.  There wasn't a lot of chit chat.  They had their heads buried in computer screens, they were talking about their projects, they were really working.  On the most part, I just stayed out of their way.

Last week students had their first blog post due and one of the neat things about students blogging is that they get to interact with the world.  One student said that a person from South Korea looked at his blog.  That's pretty cool.  Other students are excited about getting 30 page views.

Just to create a spirit of competition, I told them I had over 700 views at the time he was in class and now you can see that I have over 800.  I told the students that I would have a prize for the student that had the most blog views.  When students turned in their blog urls on a Google Form, I had them choose what they wanted their blog listed as.  A lot of students chose to just use their name and blog, for example, Cindy's 20 Percent Project.  Based on title alone, I think the most intriguing blogs are "Teaching a White Boy to Dance" and the other side of the project, "A White Boy Learning to Dance."

One problem we are facing is that our district has blocked urls that have "blogspot.com."  However, they can log on to Blogger and create their blogs and update their posts.  This makes it difficult for kids to comment on someone else's post when connected to the school's wifi, but I may have to leave that out as part of their grade.

From now on, I'm going to highlight one student's blog on my posts.  Ivan is an 11th grader and his project is to create a website for our district where art students can share their art with him and he'll post it to the website.  He's creating a virtual gallery where the audience of exceptional art will go beyond whatever classroom that piece was created in.  It's in the infant stage, but a very promising project.

Ivan's AUHSD Art Blog