To many, this is overwhelming. To others, it’s just how it is. To a special few, it opens up a whole world of the possible, finding creative inspiration, support, collaboration, and strength in each connection.

What does it mean to you? And does this represent you?

Since I started teaching in 1997, I have had a love/hate relationship with copiers and printers. It can be so cool when you have a crisp, stapled presentation ready for 30 kids stacked flush on your desk ready to deliver. It’s even better when the print actually enhances the learning transaction and the standard is internalized as a result.

More often than that paper sucks.

Eight times out of 10 when I get my stuff to the copy room, there is a “jammed” sign on it. Other times it is out of paper in which case I have to use my valuable prep time getting cut on the box and opening reams to load in the machine. Even more frustrating are the times when there is a line of 3 or more of my colleagues all holding their “holy grails” of lessons in their arms waiting impatiently for the one in front to gather her/his business out of the way. Let me assure you, you’ll wish you were in hell if YOU are the one who jams the machine with those lines watching over your shoulder.

I’ve often avoided the copier issues by printing the stuff at my computer. We have Brother laser printers and they often work well. It’s never mattered how many trees I massacred as long as the ink was dark and flowed freely, which up to now it always has.

Alas, printers like people, get old I’m afraid. They need routine operations and recently, two in needed to be taken to a nearby cliff (if we had one in the desert) and put out of their misery. I’m speaking of one-half printing. Sound familiar? Lines streaking? Drum light flashing Morse code?

Today, I had all these wonderful road-blocks to getting my lessons taught. You know what I decided? I decided instead of cursing the printing darkness, I’m going to light a candle. Like an alcoholic in his bliss, I declared power over paper.

It will no longer control me!

I have set down a “what-if” scenario for every paper event I can fathom. I have decided that the wool has been pulled over my eyes long enough . . . paper and teaching . . . I can see so clearly for the first time in 10 years: I JUST DON’T NEED IT!

Van Gogh said art is done within limitation, not without. I will indeed have to get creative at times in order to keep my one-day-at-a-time commitment. My students already have a mother lode of printed material in their texts and their consumable books. I see no reason why I can’t pull this off! Stay with me as I try this path less trodden.

Once again for the blogosphere to archive: “I CONTROL PAPER, IT DOES NOT CONTROL ME!”

Well, besides the fact that you get to manage, control, create and generally be the boss of all the blogs on a Campus site (not to mention hosting them all on your own domain!) there are actually a few other pretty cool ways in which you can put your Campus account into operation.

So for your delectation, and because everyone loves a list… here are 10 ways you can use Edublogs Campus to make serious change in teaching and learning online at your school, college, uni or educational institution of choice!

1. Provide simple to use but powerful webpages for every class

Ever wanted to have a webpage for every year, class, teacher and student… well, the blogs that you get with Edublogs Campus do exactly that. They can have static front pages, look just like a regular website and be customized to whatever look and feel you fancy. It’s never been easier to get your whole school online.

2. Give every student their own eportfolio, publishing and reflective learning tool

As well as being great website tools, the blogs can equally effectively be used as eportfolios where students can simply upload, post or embed their work. But they don’t have to stop there! As a simple publishing tool for photos and stories or as a private or shared reflective learning log, Edublogs Campus blogs are hard to beat!

3. Surpass the paper newsletter with something far more interactive

Not only is it simple for students, parents and other staff to subscribe toany blog but it’s equally easy for them to leave comments, and for you to manage entirely which comments are displayed and which are not. Now, your regular class newsletter can spare the dead trees and allow parents and students to comment freely.

4. Showcase your brilliant teachers, students and school on the web

Parents, and especially parents or prospective students, are increasingly using the web to scout out good schools and this is one way you can make a definite impression. Edublogs Campus is highly Search Engine Optimized (SEO) so, if you choose, you’ll be able to create a significant place on the web that is easily found and shows your quality.

5. Get your materials, resources, plans, minutes and more online, easily

It used to be the case that getting anything up online was a daunting prospect involving FTP, third party services and worse. Not any more! With Edublogs Campus your teachers and students can simply upload documents, images, videos, audio and more and share it in seconds… and we provide you with unlimited space and bandwidth!

6. Provide private, public and semi-public blogs with a couple of clicks

Your privacy and security is really important to us and that’s why we’ve configured Edublogs Campus to allow you to set three levels of access. Your entire site can be completely private to only registered users, some blogs can be public and others private or your whole site can be open. And you can always password protect individual posts too.

7. Get your teachers talking, with each other and the world

Blogging is a great way to reflectively communicate your ideas, aspirations, thoughts and reactions and the edublogosphere is a vibrant example of how much that can help teachers (check out the edublog awards for example). Give your staff the chance to join in, and while they’re at it raise the profile of your organization.

8. Embrace the social web and kickstart your school into the future

There’s no stopping it, the web is becoming increasingly a place of comments, feeds, blogs, widgets and ‘web 2.0′ or ’social’ applications. Getting an Edublogs Campus account is a great way to start building up your staff’s literacy in these technologies and empowering them to take their first steps into the interactive web.

9. Let each teacher use it each and every way they want

We’re quite serious here… if you look through all the tens of thousands of edublogs created at our free site you can see teachers using blogs in a myriad of different ways, from homework reminders to discussion forums and more. Sometimes the most exciting and worthwhile thing you can do is let your teachers (and students) experiment.

10. Replace your entire school website!

We’re quite serious here… you can easily use Edublogs Campus to replace almost any website. It’s got contact forms, subscription built in, is highly customizable, editable by any staff member (or student!) and is supported, regularly updated and fully hosted by us at no extra charge. You could even save a lot of money!

As I went prowling around Edublogs and edubloggers in general, here are some of the juicy tidbits I turned up.

Educon 2.0: There is a lot of talk about Educon 2.0 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, January 25-27, 2008. It’s an education conference that explores the future of schools, especially where teaching mets reality on the ground, not fantasy. Are you attending? Been blogging about it? You can track more information on the event through Hitchhikr.

Educating the Edublogger on Edublogs: Sue Waters on The Edublogger has been turning out the tutorials for Edublog users. So far, she’s released How To Add Your Photo to Your Blog Side Bar, Tips For Doing A Blog Makeover, and Getting More Out of Widgets!

Release of the Horizon Report: It’s the talk of the edublogosphere. It’s the 2008 Horizon Report (pdf). Rumors are that we’ll have a summary of it here on Edublogs Magazine soon. Stay tuned.

Hiding Behind Your Blog: Cool Cat Teacher showcases a teacher brave enough to tell the school principle that she had a blog, and it turned out great!. This is a topic near and dear to Cool Cat’s heart as she says in Why Should You have to Hide Behind Your Blog. There are still a lot of teachers fearful of reprecussions, and there is nothing wrong in blogging anonymously, as long as you are doing it for the right reasons. It’s a tough call. What do you think? Are you blogging about this? Does everyone know who you are behind your blog?

Flat World, Ebooks, and Flickr and the Library of Congress: This week, Kevin’s Meandering Mind covers Two Million Minutes in the Flat World, the book by Tom Friedman and a documentary on the emergence of math and science in China and India and, the concern about lack of these skills in the US. An interesting combination of perspectives on the subject. He also brings up ebooks and the announcement that the US Library of Congress has joined with Flickr to put thousands of photos from its archives up on Flickr.

An Educational Resource a Day: Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day covers sites for learning more about language studies, specifically ELL, ESL and EFL. This week’s goodies include Schoolr, Student Self-Access To Websites Of The Year, The Best Websites For Intermediate Readers, Last Day For Educational Blogging Survey, Songza, Vocabulary Games, Evaluating Teachers, Tour Through Time, The Best Websites For Beginning Older Readers, and Medline Plus, among many others. His site recommendations cover the gamut and are helpful for all teachers and students.

Flixn, Martin Luther King, and Interesting Class on Copyrights: Yes Tech! had a teacher with a new webcam asking about how to use Flixn and gives a few insights. In honor of the holiday, some web resources on Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. are offered along with a very strange lesson in Weird Al Gives Lesson About Copyright.

Learning to Teach and Blog: Reflection 2.0 is about Kate Olson, a new teacher, and she makes a good point in her post on finding interesting web tools each week, Jing + Tumblr = Great Day, about the frustration of images not fitting within the WordPress Theme. In theory, WordPress Theme designers are supposed to take image width and column width into account in their designs but they don’t always. Remember, WordPress blogs automatically give you a choice of a thumbnail version or full-size version of all images you upload to your blog. Other posts by Kate included Humbled by a Widget and Learning As I Go, more lessons learned along the blogging way. Good for you, girl! Keep learning. We love learning with you.

Teachers Training Teachers Presents Spin The Globe: Graham Wegner of Teaching Generation Z was invited to be on the Teachers Teaching Teachers webcast with Doug Noon recently discussing their project, Spin The Globe.

Bringing Blogs to Elementary Students and Wired Wednesdays on Always Learning: Always Learning has started offering the details on helping elementary students learn how to blog. In Learning to Blog: The Elementary Way and Blog Pals: Adventures in Blogging With Third Grade, some great tips, course outlines, and advice is offered to help others bringing in blogs to the classroom. In The Technology Toolbox: Choosing the Right Tool for the Task, the author creates a chart that shows which tool is the right one for the task. A work in process, it’s a great start to helping other teachers figure out if a blog, social networking, or other web tool is the right one for their project. Another exciting announcement came in the post about The Future of Learning in a Networked World which covers the Teach and Learn Online organization from Australia and New Zealand, and includes the announcement that every Wednesday will be “Wired Wednesdays” where the Professional Development program will host an after-school PD session on the whys of 21st century living. How exciting!

Being a Globally Connected Teacher, Child Safety on the Web, and Comparing Schools from 1977 to 2007: Chris of Betchablog recalled the magic of being a “globally connected teacher” in In Real Life, detailing the power of social media like Twitter, Skype, and blogs to connect with people all over the world. In Data lives Forever, we get another lesson that children have to learn early “the full implications of something as seemingly harmless as putting their photo online. They often don’t realise that, just like The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins, once something goes online it is near impossible to remove it.” Chris continues with Wrapped in Cotton Wool about the struggles of keeping children safe on the web while allowing them access to modern technology. In an interesting “joint post” with Sue Waters of The Edublogger, they wrote Making your photos worth 1000 words about integrating Flickr with Picasa. To lighten things up for the new year, Chris shares a funny email called School 1977 vs. School 2007. It’s funny because it is so right on.

Bringing Cell Phones to School – Principals Insist! Leonard Low of Mobile Learning talked about Principals Trying out Cell Phones, summarizing it with:

Wow. Educators having a dialogue with students and discussing mobile phone manners and ethics? Might those students get insights into the acceptable use of mobile technologies (useful for the rest of their lives, no less) that they wouldn’t otherwise get from a blanket ban on mobiles at school?

He continues with his fascination with Barcodes in ZXing Open Source Barcode Library discussing ZXing, an open source Google Code project that he says could become one of the most flexible readers available. He also talks about how to create a free SMS auto-reply learning tool which allows students to SMS and receive “on-demand learning and support information on their mobile phones” which is a nice round off for the week with his most recent article on principles and cell phones.

Exploring Educon: The blogger at Not So Distant Future is starting a series of post on the Educon conference, including “Conversations That Matter“, a look at what many considered an excellent session by Kevin Jarrett and Sylvia Martinez on “Influence Without Authority” which looked at the Future Search process. Earlier, the blogger covered the issue of personal learning networks and moving them into the professional practice of teachers in “Keeping It Real” which seems to be a hot topic around the edubloggers circles lately.

This is just the first of many walks around Edublogs looking for what our favorite bloggers are covering. If you have a bit of Edublogs gossip to add, please contact us at please Edublogs Magazine.

Michael Guggenheim uses his blog for education – as a teacher to document his nonprofit organization and his extracurricular activities teaching even younger students how to use a computer.

S.P.L.A.T. Inc. (Showing People Learning And Technology) was set up by Guggenheim to help him tutor youngsters at homeless shelters, low income housing projects, and community centers. Whatever funds he raises goes to the distribution of used computers, monitors, printers, and donated software. He himself teaches basic computer skills and also shows the younger children how to use computer learning games.

Guggenheim got interested in computers because he discovered that his dysgraphia, a learning disorder that impairs his writing, wasn’t affected when using a computer instead of handwriting his school notes.

He started his nonprofit after participating in school-sponsored volunteer work and observing that some children had little or no access to technology. According to the an article in the Los Angeles Times:

“Many disadvantaged kids and teenagers don’t have the opportunities and access to learning and using computer skills,” Michael said. “The tool that changed my life was a laptop, and it’s a skill that’s necessary to learn to get good grades and a good job so you aren’t left behind.”

He isn’t blogging about tutoring or using the blog as a classroom or teaching tool. Instead, he has a novel blogging purpose – to let donors and funders know how he is using their money. SPLAT is a non-profit with an EIN (IRS) tax exempt status and donations are welcome.

Developmental dysgraphia is a neurological condition which affects fine motor skills. Writing becomes distorted but other social skills aren’t affected. While a typewriter or word processor won’t improve the motor skills, they do allow students to keep up with their written work. Guggenheim, however, may be onto something using computer games. Games which involve hand-eye coordination, or mousing or trackball games, might help as part of regular therapy.

According to the US Department of Education Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), there are more than 6.5 million children with disabilities entering or currently within the educational system.

Graham Wegner of Teaching Generation Z has been nominated twice for the Edublog Award in 2006 and 2007. Wegner, of Adelaide, Australia, is a primary school educator and has been teaching for 21 years and online since 1996. His blog covers teaching thoughts, philosophies, blogging, and observances and interaction with the Australia public school system.

The other winners were top notch educational blogs including Reader’s Choice Award Winner Study Hacks, Editor’s Choice Eduwonk, and Editor’s Choice Runner Up HackCollege. You can see the voting results and the list of all the great nominees for the Best Education Blog Award on Performancing.