Reflections on Workshop 2.0 - Blogs as Classroom pages

I just finished my first workshop for this year. It was on Making Classroom Web Pages with Blogs. It was open to all teachers in my district, only 4 came. I tried a new, modified format which had mixed results.

Workshop 2.0 - I wanted a workshop that was more interactive than a standard “sit and get” workshop.
Overall the workshop was a success. The participants learned a lot of what they wanted to know through our conversations and left with a classroom web page (actually 3 pages). I’ll do a 3 hour version of this workshop next month at our local Southwest Center for Educational Excellence. Upon reflection, I think there are some things I would like to change for next time.

1. I showed them 3 places to make web pages: Blogger, Edublogs, and Wetpaint. I think I will leave out Blogger next time. The purpose I put it in was to show them how easy it is to make a blog, but it took more time than it was worth.
2. I think I’ll invert the agenda and show Wetpaint first instead of last, since they have to sign up for it anyway to edit any pages. I ran out of time to show them more about Wetpaint, even though we used it for the whole workshop.
3. I had a separate notes and agenda page. The notes page was unnecessary because it involved too much flipping back and forth. We could just use the agenda page for notes.
4. Instruct the participants on how to flip back to the wiki on a separate tab to take notes. I don’t think they understood that it was Ok to edit the agenda. I could ask separate people to add various notes to the agenda during the workshop. Collaborative note-taking on a wiki is a very new idea, and may take a while to work out kinks.
5. Most participants still wanted to use pen and paper to jot notes on. I guess I’ll give in and copy an agenda for them to take notes on.
6. The beginning workshop writing prompt needs to be more open-ended, but not general in purpose. Maybe, “Why do you want create a web page?” This needs to be one wiki page instead as comments on a blog entry. They will also need an overlap task for those who finish their answer early.
7. To get participants to use the treaded discussion, I need to teach it, give a stimulus video, then give them some time to think, type, and reflect.
8. I need to be prepared to talk about Edublogs control panel.
9. I should include how to add a Feedjit map and Voki script to the blog.
10. Quit 5 minutes early to allow reflection time at the end to comment on a “Takeaway” Edublogs post.

There were also many things I liked.

1. I loved using the Wetpaint wiki as an online handout while teaching about the Wetpaint wiki.
2. I think it would be Ok to integrate more about 21st century skills: internet safety, blogs, wikis, connected networks, collaboration, Creative Commons, global focus, and the role of creativity in learning. They were curious about the direction technology is moving in education.
3. The discussion was great.
4. The examples of how I had used blogs, wikis, and my classroom web page in my classroom were very illustrative.
5. They were fascinated by the Feedjit and Clustermaps map of visitors. (It’s one of my favorites, too.)

Workshop 2.0 is a new approach, but I think it has tremendous potential after some adjustments. Read/Write Web interactions will have to be taught, though. If you have ideas or comments, please leave them below.

• Since it was such a small group, the workshop turned out to be a good mix of lecture, discussion, hands-on, and one-on-one just-in-time learning.

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