Quality Blogging & Commenting Audit Meme

As a follow up to the series Stepping it Up: Learning About Blogs FOR your Students, I would like to crowdsource more samples of blog posts and comments for teachers to practice recognizing, evaluating and assessing various levels of quality work.

A meme might be a good way to get the ball rolling.

Wikipedia defines a Meme as:

A meme  is “an idea, behavior or style that spreads from person to person within a culture.” A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural ideas, symbols or practices, which can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals or other imitable phenomena. Supporters of the concept regard memes as cultural analogues to genes in that they self-replicate, mutate and respond to selective pressures.

Quality Blogging and Commenting Audit Meme

In order to gather more audit samples from a large variety of age groups and authors, I challenge you to publish a blog post with a post or comment audit.

1. Select a blog post or blog comment to audit (Professional or Student)
2. Take a screenshot or copy and past the post or comment into your blog post (be sensitive whether you want to reveal any names or references)
3. Include or link to the rubric you use to assess the quality of post or comment
4. Audit the post or comment by describing your train of thought regarding the level of quality you would assess your chosen post or comment
5. Suggest how you would coach the author of audited post or comment to improve
6. Tag (at least) three educators and challenge them to audit a post or comment
7. Leave a comment with the link to your audit post on Langwitches

If you have not been tagged, please feel free to jump in, write and link your own audit blog post.

I am tagging Andrea Hernandez, Maggie Hos-McGrane, Nancy von Wahlde, Edna Sackson, Linda Yollis, Kathleen Morris, Kim Cofino

Looking forward to their quality blogging audits

Nearest Book Meme

While scanning my RSS Reader, the words book and meme, struck me.

Chris Craft from Crucial Thought posted a fast and easy book meme, that you can participate in.

Here are the rules:

• Get the book nearest to you. Right now.
• Go to page 56.
• Find the 5th sentence.
• Write this sentence – either here or on your blog.
• Copy these instructions as commentary of your sentence.
• Don’t look for your favorite book or your coolest but really the nearest.

The nearest book on my desk is  IT’s Elementary- Integrating Technology in the Primary Grades by Boni Hamilton.

Here is the sentence:

In many schools, the distrct ITS department may be uncomfortable about who will manage the new equipment, so the person in charge may need to assure in writing that ITS will not be required to service donated computers.

Wordle Meme- Documenting your Zeitgeist

There is a Wordle Meme floating around the bloggersphere, started by GeekyMomma. Here are the instructions:

1. Create a Wordle from your blog’s RSS feed.
2. Blog it and describe your reaction. Any surprises?
3. Tag others to do the same.
4. Be sure to link back here and to where you were first tagged.

I would like to take the meme several steps further.

Since the RSS feed of your blog will be only a snapshot in time of what your are posting to your blog,

5. Create different Wordle clouds of your blog’s RSS over a period of time. Do it once a month for the next year.

Save your  Wordle screenshots in a special folder on your computer or even better create a set on Flickr to store your archived clouds. See what story your  Wordle clouds tell as you compare them to each other. Start documenting your “Zeitgeist” (Spirit of the Times) as mentioned by Chris Betcher in his K-12 Online Conference presentation I like Delicious Things. An Intoduction to Tagging and Folksonomies

6. Share other uses (at least one)  you have found for Wordle (for your students or personally) to your blog post

Look at Web2.0 Wednesday Challenge‘s examples

Here is Langwitches’ RSS blog feed November 26, 2008

Reaction:

What are some of the tags that stick out the most:

tags, tools, children, ICT, storytelling, classroom, Animoto, great, Art, Journey, Alphabet.

The word “tags” must be so big, because I post daily my del.cio.us links to my blog. The last few days were mostly these automated del.cio.us posts and few authored posts. So, I feel that that it is not an accurate “snapshot” of what Langwitches is mainly about. It is a snapshot if this past week only.

The following is my del.cio.us cloud taken as of November 26th, 2008. I will also start storing this snapshot with a timestamp on Flickr, in order to be able to compare in the future to others.

Here is my “other” suggestions how you could use  Wordle with your students. Our elementary school teachers may times(in different grade levels) have their students create a self portrait and ask their classmates to write an adjective or describe that person in a sentence around the illustration. How about if you start a text document and ask each student to start writing their name about ten times. Then have other students add to that document words that they think of when describing him or her. You can then paste it into Wordle and voila have a word cloud about the student. Make sure you make it clear that it is OK to write the same word more than one time.

I created the following word cloud by copy and pasting several recommendation letters that were written about me into  Wordle.

I am tagging the follwing people to join in by contributing Wordle uses in the classroom and getting into the habit of “wordleing” to documenting their “Zeitgeist”:

1. Paige McGee
2. Katie Bennett
3. Kathy Balek
4. Melanie Holtsman
5. Andrea Hernandez
6. Chrissy Hellyer
7. Kim Cofino
8. Heather Vlach
9. Nancy van Wahlde
10. Anyone else who wants to jump on board