homoLudens

Packing for Shanghai where,
despite rumors of net access, there will probably be even less posting
than in the last three months. If that’s possible. Time for a brief
reflection:

I’ve stopped using the word “blog.”  At Galileo, we talk about
writing and reading and researching on the web.  From a teacher angle, it means we can:

1. Keep community members informed. (Schedules, calendars, syllabi, grades, etc.)
2. Direct community members to online resources. (The web as a library; the teacher website as a librarian.)
3. Publish selected student work.

That’s a lot of content so content
management software interests us. That interest is rare here in SF
because our tech
situation is rare.  In most city schools, there’s a lack of
infrastructure for digital
reading and writing - internet access and bandwidth, ISP hosting,
individual
workstations, production software, training of teachers. Other schools
and communities have unusual access to all that; most don’t. Our access
is a direct result of three years of my constant finagling: grant
writing, collaboration nurturing, central IT department sidestepping,
hardware repositioning. I’m exhausted, but???!  there may be a
corner turned soon with both hosting and teacher training.

Emphasis on may.
A whole
lot of ‘edu-blogging’ seems concerned with
what’s going to happen soon, with the ‘blog’ or LMS or ‘personal
publishing’ learning revolution just around
the next  digital corner. That corner keeps receding. What gets
happily closer at Gal are supportive and belly laugh-filled and
haphazardly tech-driven partnerships with classroom teachers.

So here’s to the Gal and BAWP web domain jesters and pioneers, a smattering of whom are noted below:

English teacher Allison Heskin’s emporium of knowledge is gradually
opening its doors, already drawing this unsolicited student comment, “I
am surprised. A teacher is actually using a website to teach! You have
the most comprehensive site at Galileo.” She’s going to Shanghai. She
plays poker. She doesn’t worship the Bay Area Writing Project. Her
banner is not as cool as Michelle Moffett’s.

Cecilia Chan is the seniors’ counselor. Her site features a scrolling
reminder of hot graduation news, a countdown timer to the big day
itself, regular announcements of scholarships and post-Gal
opportunities,  and downloadable forms. When she got the idea of
the site as handout manager, she had a second workstation installed in
her office for student use. “You want that list of credit
requirements?” I overheard her say to a kid the other day, “Then
download it.”

Scientist David Barrios is the Mac-addicted, passport-misplacing,
classroom-painting, html-savvy, Giants season-ticket holding Teacher of
the Year. He also plays poker. He gets all this tech stuff in like five
seconds. He will use Blackboard for student drafts before the end of
the year. Really. He will.

And last but never least, Mr. Bryan B., (mostly) patient and willing
designer extraordinaire who makes my occasionally good ideas turn into useful web apps,
like the incorporation of our valuable and underutilized research
databases into our school template. Nothing has so jazzed our teachers
and students as that one addition to our domain. The only things the U.
of Minn. has on us are the staff and money to do what we ‘ve been doing for three finagling years.