Transcendentalism and Twitters

One class of college prep students is studying Transcendentalists this week. I've done some creative planning to get this study into my schedule before they take the Georgia High School Graduation Tests next week.

While reading postings on the EC Ning , I saw an idea from Jim Burke that I decided to adapt to my classroom. He highly recommended Stanford's Encyclopedia of Philosophy, so I divided the information between collaborative groups and had a conversational round table as an introduction to the Transcendentalists. Then I chose nine different reading selections from Transcendentalist writings (particular chapters of Walden, "Self-Reliance," portion of "Song of Myself," Prelude to Leaves of Grass, "Civil Disobedience") and had each group choose which section they would read for a short round of literature circles. (See initial assignment.)

As part of their individual reading, I asked them to do transactional reading journals and gave them 10-15 options for writing their journal entries. I also wanted to encourage students to incorporate technology into this study, so I gave them the option of creating a blog for the journal assignments or creating Twitter postings. I did adapt the writing options for the Twitter postings.

Yesterday when I gave students time in class to work on their journals, two students tried to access Twitter at school. I can access Twitter when I log in, but unfortunately, the powers that be that control our system's technology must have decided that Twitter is not acceptable for students to access and have thus blocked its use on campus. Thankfully these two students are quite savvy and are willing to do this from home, but I just hate that my students cannot use these technologies at school!

Blog List Application Out There?

As you'll notice on the right hand side of the blog, there is a list of blogs that I like to read. Maybe you noticed that the majority of the blogs I list are educational policy blogs. The others are related to teaching English. While the blogs entries I write are about after-school hours and how I try to have a life, I can't seem to shake that side of my brain that wants to read about and talk about school.

What I would really like is a Web 2.0 application that allows me to create my own blog list to watch. I find that most of the time when I go to my own blog it is to see my own blog list rather than write, though I am enjoying the writing of the entries. Where do I go to find out if there is such an application? I guess I'll Google it!