• NCLB: Act II – Expect New Rules for Title I on Tuesday – David J. Hoff at Education Week points out that Anre Duncan’s Department of Education will release new Title I regs this week. “Graduation rates” will likely be redefined. The changes may impact minimum cell size for the number of students in a subgroup needed for that group to be include under NCLB’s accountability rules.
  
• Ga. Senate OKs Extra Pay for Math, Science Teachers – EdWeek carried an Associated Press story a few days ago on Georgia’s plan to up the pay of math and science teachers. It will be interesting to see if the move carries over to other states and to other shortage areas (like special education). Georgia math & science teachers would get the extra pay for five years and then they’d have that bonus tied to student performance. That smells like merit pay to me…
  
• YouTube Edu Launches – Cool Cat teacher Vicki Davis commented a few days ago on the launch of YouTube’s K-12 channel. Still some bugs to work out.
  
• Open Education had a piece this week that reviewed some useful sites for teachers.
  
• Teacher Magazine ran a short piece on the annual “Technology Counts” report that Education Week just finished. Who’s Number One? West Virginia (although it shares the spot light in a tie with Georgia).
  

In the last few days I’ve found the Google Reader. I can’t believe the time I save by opening it to see if any of my favorite blogs have been updated (as opposed to surfing out to se them in person). It has the additional advantage of keeping track of blog addresses for me. At may age, you can’t always remember where you’re going!

So after 72 hours with it, I’ve now sucked about 75 blogs into my reader – everything from The Huffington Post to the China Law Blog, Philosophy Sucks! to the Internet Time Blog – and lots more in between….

The word “blog” is a shortened for of the word weblog. The “we” gets amputated from the front of the word. That word formation process is just one example of the new level of creativity that online writing brings to our language.

Blogging has become for literature today something like what keeping a diary was in the 18th and 19th centuries. But not exactly. On the one hand, a blog can be private and personal. On the other hand, it can be designed to promote an opinion, a perspective, or to give advice – to the point of being commercial. It can be closed, accessible only to people you allow to see it. Or it can be very public, easily accessible.

Because blogs have become so numerous and influential, it’s important that students be aware of them and have some understanding of how to evaluate a blog. The skill of discerning fact from opinion is more important now than it has ever been. It’s important that students have some idea of how to find a blog if they want to look at one. Google, for example, has a special search engine that only searches websites it classifies as blogs. And, finally, it is important that students know how to create a blog for themselves if they want to – and that they understand the privacy issues and the liabilities that come with setting themselves up with a blog at a site like MySpace or FaceBook.

I personally think that digital self-expression is a wave of the future that could revive and regenerate the skill of composition in our language. Blogs have a profound impact on literacy in America and we need to be sure our kids are positively impacted by that…