Hello yeah it's been a while...

..not much, how `bout you?

Ahh, the 70s. I couldn't resist. I'm guessing England Dan & John Ford Coley - let me look it up. Hold on a second, wait for it... Yes! I was right. Kind of embarassing, really. I don't listen to radio and even if I did I doubt you'd hear that stuff anymore except on the cheesiest soft rock/easy listening stations. And another pet-peeve - I don't know when stations decided we don't really want to know who performs the music anyway, but when I do have the displeasure of listening to radio (my wife sometimes channel surfs when we are driving somwhere) they NEVER announce the artists. Drives me batty when I hear an old song and then we rack our brains for an hour trying to remember who did it, waiting patiently for the voice break and hoping this will be that one time in a thousand where the DJ will put our suffering to an end with the old, "and you just heard..."

So what brings me back to the blog. I decided last week to strike up the student blogging idea again. I got some nice tradebooks from the parents of my students at an annual Barnes & Noble fundraising event and wanted to get the students to start reading science that is way more interesting than what gets covered in the textbook and doesn't require me to copy newspaper articles every week. So the reading blog seemed a perfect fit.

I've created a basic assignment consisting of a choice between a heavy reading requirement ( a 200 page book, e.g.) with a limited written requirement (3 blog entries) or a limited reading requirement (25 newspaper/magazine articles) with a heavier written component (one blog entry per article). Students also have the option of turning in their logs in the traditional pen/paper fashion. I've posted links below, but the blog is just starting and no student entries yet. One separate blog per class. Only students and I will be allowed to post or comment.

The other nice thing I discovered is that Blogger has made it significantly easier to add outside content to the blog. So I've posted some site feeds from a number of science & health news providers to the sidebar, offering a source of reading selections to those students who want to take the articles path, right there on the blog itself. Check it out.

Science Readers (Blog)

Assignment