Where Have I Been Today?
Process Reflections for July 25, 2006

Been here there and everywhere.  Oh what a spin I’m in.  After lunch I was all set to start a new blog that will host my podcast series.  Sounds cool huh? Well, I think it will be. You see, I wanted to do podcasting cause it’s just so cool, but didn’t have a angle, but one came to me this week.  I prefer podcasts that have more than one person talking, a dialoge of some sort, so I thought I could try to host one that involves engineers and other people working in different fields of technology.  It would be a podcast where professionals speak to and with my middle schoolers.  How cool. So, I thought, where better to start than with Laura Ventoso, the civil engineer who mentors my students’ Future City  competition.  I was delighted to get an email from her last night saying that she would not only be happy to do a Skype interview for podcasting, but that she would get her engineer friends to do it too.  That’s so cool.  I’m meeting her for a drink Thursday so we can talk about it. That leads me to what I wanted to do this afternoon–start planning the series and setting up a blogspace to host it. So, Paul had a brilliant idea.  We registered a domain:  popcornconverstation.org   Paul’s going to hook that into a wordpress blog and then make a drupal blog at:  blogs.popcornconverstaion.org where my kids will do their blogging.

Just so you understand the name: popcorncornversation….it came out of something my principal said one day.  He said to the faculty: “When I visit your classrooms I don’t want to see ping-pong, I want to see popcorn.  I had no idea what he was talking about.  He was referring to converstational style.  Ping-Pong conversation is when the teacher lobs a question to the class and a student answers back to the teacher; the teacher sends another one out and so an and so forth.  In a popcorn coversation the question sets the class in motion. The coversation is more natural, each one “pops in” when he or she has something to add. It’s amazing how well it goes with 7th graders.  (Of course they didn’t come that way.  I had to teach them the technique.). I learned the technique during a Great Books Discussion class.  The teacher does not participate, except to keep track of who speaks and how many times, and interjects when there is someone who needs a boost.  Anyway, that’s where the name came from, and that’s my expectation for the podcast/blogspace I want to cultivate.  After fooling with getting the domain registered I went to Podcast Alley to research engineering blogs.  Not much, but have started listening to a cranky mechanical engineer in Chicago who records on his drive to work.  Bookmarked a few more for checking in later.

This morning we envisioned our utopian classrooms all with blogging going.  I can see it….my only futuristic elements are for more seamlessness among writely, blogging, flickr and sketchup.  I hear that many teachers in our group are in schools where reliable computers are few and far between.  I think that stinks.  But, even in my own school teachers have technical problems and get all vexed about using computers.  It’s hard for them.  I can’t work without them. Oh well…

Tomorrow what will I work on?
Either planning my new weblog/podcast site or planning the new curriclum for our 7th grade elective class that Shantanu, Melissa, Michael and I  teach—each taking one stream.  I got the go ahead from Shantanu to start planning it around Web 2.0 services–Hooray! Just bounced this by Paul and got the goahead on the new blogspace/podplace .  That’s good because i need to get my thinking straight on that before I meet with Laura on Thursday.