I am posting to see if FeedBlitz picks this up and delivers it to my email.  I will let you know how to do this in a later post!

I have set up a subscription at FeedBlitz that will allow community members to receive a notice when new items are posted with the tag "plugged-in."  If we all use this tag for our posts, we should get all the messages that concern Plugged-in to Reading.

Just click here to go to the subscription page. 

On Friday morning I had the chance to visit Ross Anderson's classroom at Sligh Middle.  What a lively Plugged-in to Reading lesson was going on.  Mr. Anderson had the students listening to the CD of The Skin I'm In and taking notes, recording questions, and so forth, as a shared reading activity for the whole class.  Then they answered questions, discussed vocabulary, and ultimately read aloud the predictions they had made a week earlier when Mr. Anderson introduced the book.  Some of the students also shared their work on the "What does this face say to the world?" graphic organizer--if we can get a scan of one of these I will share it in the resources section.  The students were buzzing with their work on the "In other words" g/o; I learned some new slang myself.  

I had the opportunity to visit Plugged-in classrooms today at Armwood HS and Marshall Middle School in Tampa.  It was great to see all the materials up and running.  I got to see a vocab lesson, some student reading logs (with annotations for tracks on the Recorded Books), and a classroom working on literature circle books and roles.  One teacher had set up the plastic vertical "shoe holder" to house the CD players for the students and has been pleased with this system ("$6 at Walmart!" was her comment).

Note that one of the great features of TeacherPlaces is that you can set an access level for virtually everything that you write.  Below each text box you will see a drop-down menu which allows you to decide who can access or "see" what you've written.  You can select "Private" for those items that you want to capture at TeacherPlaces but you want to keep to yourself.  If you choose "Private," only you can see the item, whether it is your telephone number, email address, or your list of personal likes and dislikes.

On the other hand, if you select "Public," then any visitor to TeacherPlaces will be able to view what you wrote.  When visitors come to the home page, for example, and click on "see what others are syaing right now," your post to your blog will be visible to them if it is "Public."

Finally, you can allow access to your information or posts to only those logged-in members of TeacherPlaces, or to members of a community that you belong to.

By coding different information differently, you can control at a very "granular" level who has access.  You may want everyone to see some things you write, and you may want to keep others private until you are ready to share.  The option is all yours!

Joining a community at TeacherPlaces is easy.  Communities allow groups of members who share an interest to interact with one another, share documents, view each others’ resources, and build knowledge collaboratively.

To join an existing community once you have registered at TeacherPlaces, simply search the topics that people are writing about by typing a tag or keyword into the search box in the lower right corner of the window.  That search will produce a list of resources and users interested in that topic.

If you don’t see what you are looking for, go back and click on the “Random tags” link just below the search box.  That will produce the “tag cloud” or list of topics that people on the site are interested in.  If you see what you are looking for, click on the tag and you will be given a list of the people and resources on the site that have listed that tag.

Under the heading “Matching users” toward the bottom of the list, you will see any communities that have been formed on that topic.  A click on the link will take you to the community main page.  In the box to the right, below the community icon, you will see a link “Click here to join this community.”  Click the link and you are in!  It’s that easy.

One of the things that you can use to keep track of topics and what people are saying about them is the RSS feature of the site software.

RSS is a really simple way of publishing, or syndicating, information over a network. In fact, that's how it got its name: Really Simple Syndication.

A stream of information that someone publishes using RSS is called a "feed." There are thousands of feeds available to you over the Internet, including everything from the oldest form of syndicated content, the latest news, to specialized feeds that deal narrowly with a single topic of interest, like this feed. When you make arrangements to receive a feed and view it on your computer, you are said to "subscribe" to the feed. It is a little bit like subscribing to a magazine that is delivered through the mail to your house, or signing up to receive home delivery of your local newspaper.

Once you have subscribed to a feed, as with the newspaper that is delivered to your door, all you have to do is pick it up and read it. With RSS feeds, you subscribe and access your feeds by using what is called an RSS "reader." Nowadays, that task is most easily accomplished using your Internet browser, although there are stand-alone programs that will pick up your feeds and display them without opening your browser. Remember, though, that your reader cannot pick up your feeds and display the information without first connecting to the internet and retrieving them.

There has been a lot of discussion about these guides, which were designed as non-consumable booklets to guide kids for writing in their journals.  Some people seems concerned about letting kids use them directly and copy the contents for kids to write on.  These same pages are already available in the Resource Binder for copying.  As we look at developing additional levels of the program, I am wondering how teachers are actually using the guides.  Please share comments so that new development can reflect teacher needs.  Thanks!

I am happy to be able to register as part of this brand new professional practice community.  I am interested in the teacher experiences with Plugged-in to Reading, a program written by Dr. Janet Allen for adolescents who struggle to read proficiently.  I had the opportunity to help develop the program for my employer, Recorded Books, who publishes the program.

Welcome to Teacher Places. You may join any of the community discussions or start one of your own.