Writing in Digital Environments Project

Ideas Becoming Reality

It's exciting to see Tom Hoffman's work. He has posted a demo on his October 16th post of how to put together an RDF graph for organizing curriculum planning with standards.

I've now been able to put together a video prototype [Quicktime] of the process using my new schemas and Damian Steer's RDFAuthor application. It is more than a prototype--it works completely, however, an application actually used by teachers would have to hide more of the RDF mechanics and syntax from the end user. Having those guts exposed is useful, however, if you're trying to understand what I've been babbling about for the past six months.

I'm looking forward to talking about more new ideas with Tom at Ed Blogger 2003 in San Francisco. As our plans evolve, I'll post more here.

Blogs As Science Journals

I finished my proposal for NECC 2004 today. Our presentation will be "Blogs As Science Journals: Increasing Science Reading and Writing". I'm excited to be using this concept with the TechReach Project and to be incorporating the Search It! Science database. Students will be able to choose books from Search It! Science as they work on their science inquiry projects and maintain their blog science journals.

Students and Comments

I'm working with a teacher on the appropriate ways to use comments with younger students. She would like to be able to preview posted comments before they are published to a class web log, similar to the Junior Author capability. Any ideas or suggestions for how to achieve this are welcome!

TypePad Directory

This web log is now listed in the Typepadistas Directory under "W". I'll be spending part of my weekend cruising through the rest of the TypePad community.

Experimenting With Fonts

Thanks for suggestions and comments that have come to me via email and the commenting system here.
I'm hoping future posts will be easier to read. All that I learn will help our student bloggers this school year.