The Organization of an Unsystematic Hive

So this year I am the editor of my school newspaper, The Buzz. I have a co-editor who works with me as well. Other than us, it's three freshmen. This is a horrible staff. I wish it was a class but unfortunately we can only meet after school every Tuesday. At the beginning of the year I knew I wanted to make the paper more organized and so much better than it was but I didn't have the full motivation until now.

I went to a field trip this past Friday; Southern Connecticut University was having a Journalism conference. My 21st Century Journalism class went to this to get some ideas of the journalism world of today. One of the other high schools that was there was Wilbur Cross High School of New Haven. The advisor of that group was passing around copies of their student newspaper to everyone that he saw. Their paper is 20 pages to our 4 nevermind all of the pictures that we don't have. This really motivated me to start getting more organized.

In my Journalism class we learned about wiki pages and how to use them. I decided that this would be a good idea. I made a wiki page for our newspaper where everyone can compile their articles all together, have a place for everyone's emails, an article idea page, and we can all comment on eachother's articles to make them the best that they can be.

We ar actually gaining some new staff. I made our first deadline November 12th and the hopefully the first paper will go out on the 14th. I'll keep everyone updated!!

The Teachers' Views of Education

In my entry The Politics of Education, my teacher, Mr. Miller, left me a comment with a link to site that he thought that I should check out. It's called SupportBlogging.com which is full of blogs by teachers, principals, students, and parents about educational issues. I was looking through the blogs by teachers and found a blog written by a teacher named Mimi. In her blog, It's Not All Flowers and Sausages, she "vents" about her day and about all of the drama going on in school and with her co-workers. One of her entries is called, Parents Say the Darndest Things. She talks all about how parents don't want to hear that their kids aren't doing well and make up excuses. I rather enjoyed the conversation she had with the first parent about the Harry Potter book. My mom works at an elementary school as a special education aide and she hears this stuff all of the time so I have a feel for what she is saying and I know my mom would appreciate it. I know I'm going to keep on reading this blog. It gives me a sense of what teachers are thinking and that they have feeligns too!

The Parents' Views of Education

I was searching for another blog to look at involving education using Google Blog Search and came across a blog that is used for parents, teachers, and community members to talk about certain education issues. Betrayed - Why Public Education Is Failing is a very interesting perspective to view. Laurie Rogers writes all about topics, involving education, that adults of the community would care about. In her most recent entry, Education Flux is a Barrier to Truth, she talks about how the schools' curriculum is not up to par with what she thinks it should be. She even makes a good analogy using the episode of I Love Lucy when Lucy and Ethel work in the chocolate factory. At first it's easy to get the chocolates into the wrappers but then the belt starts moving too fast and in a panic, they stuff the chocolates into their mouths. Rogers relates this scene to the children in the public schools of America. She says that they haven't been properly wrapped (or not taught enough information) and have been sent down the conveyor belt of life too fast with the administration panic to pick up the pieces.

This analogy is actually really accurate. In this day and age, children are being forced to learn things too quickly just so they can pass standardized tests and are being pushed onto the conveyor belt of adulthood too soon and without the proper preparations, or "wrappers". Even thought Rogers writes for the adults of her community, this blog really interests me and I find that she has a lot of interesting and insightful things to say about the way education should be.

The Politics of Education

Since I've been looking up news articles about education, I decided to see what other people are saying about the educational issues of today. Education Week seems to be a very political blog about the issues dealing with education today.

One of the really interesting sections of the site is the Campaign K-12. This section talks about how kids and teachers are dealing with the election. One entry that really fascinates me is "Obama Has the Kid Vote Locked Up". It talks about how if kids were to vote, Obama would be the winner. In the entry, it is stated that according to the Scholastic Presidential Election Poll for Kids Obama got 57% of the vote and McCain received 39%. The poll was done through schools I believe; maybe online as well. I think this is a very interesting entry.

Another section of the blog that could be interesting to look at is the Special Education section. I would be interested in looking at it because it has entries involving trying to get better teachers and entries about different programs for autism and more. The only thing is, though, is that you have to pay for it. I think that if someone is writing a blog and wants his or her thoughts to be heard they shouldn't make people pay to read it. It seems to me that the people writing this blog aren't proud enough of it so they try to make it hard for people to read it by making people pay.

The Blog Olympics

I was asked to check out a few different blogs and to compare them; which ones are good, which are bad, do they all have good and bad qualities, and which is just the best blog overall. These three blogs are very different so how can someone tell which one should earn the gold medal?

Well, the first blog that I looked at was a blog for "tips and downloads for getting things done". Lifehacker seems to be a blog by many different authors, but they all give tips about about many different things in life. This could be a very helpful blog. The only thing that could be a problem is if the people writing these blogs give good tips. There isn't really a way to make sure that these tips are valid so I guess a person's own judgement is needed. I've read a few entries from this blog and they seem like they might be pretty helpful. There was an entry about how to navigate by using the night sky. There was also a really cool entry about a map that shows you where police officers usually hide out to track your speed. I would go to this site a lot if I wanted to see if I can get tips on something.

The second blog that I looked at was one written by members of the Huffington Post Internet newspaper. This blog focuses on the main issues of today. As I'm looking at it right now, most of there stories have to do with the election (mostly for the democratic side) and major political events. Even though the election is really important in the lives of Americans at this time, it's not the only newsworthy thing out there right now. The writers do write about other things such as entertainment and world news that but these entries have the option of a "quick read" which makes it seem like these entries wouldn't be as interesting or as important as the others without the "quick read" option.

The third, and final, blog that I looked at is written by a math teacher naming himself dy/dan. He seems to write about what he finds in his everyday teachings and comments on it. Some of the entries are very interesting and have a humorous tone to them. Sup Teach? written on September 27, 2008 really caught my attention. It was funny and it was great how he was reflecting on his beginnings of teaching by reading this of another teacher. He also writes about how his school just started to add advisory and his thoughts on how to go about utilizing it. Dy/Dan is a funny guy and it seems like he really loves to teach

The sum everything up, blogs can be for personal use, informational use, or something to help others. There can't necessarily be a best blog. There are so many categories that you can't pick one best blog out of all of the blogs in the world; that would be impossible. I have to say that all of these blogs are "the best" in their own way and they all deserve the gold!