My Eduplog Nominations

I am doubtful that anyone will nominate Tom Johnson's Adventures in Pencil Integration, seeing as how there is no 19th Century Satirical Blog category (and it really can't be called "new" if it takes place back in the day).  So, with that in mind, I am doing a post about the Eduplog Awards of 1897.

Eduplog Award Nominations - 1897

Best Individual Plog: This was a hard one, but I'm having to go with Waldo's Pond.  I love the way he takes up Thoreau's notion of finding a pond and thinking about life.  The combination of poetry, sketches and thoughtful reflection make this a truly literary education plog.

Best Individual Tweaker: With the explosion of opium dens and the use of cocaine in medicine, I'm a bit shocked that anyone would ever glorify the concept of a tweaker. Shame on you, Eduplog!

Best Group Plog: Caravan to the Valley does a great job creating a satirical plog mocking William McKinley's Caravan to the Top.

Best New Plog: Theodore Grant's Losing My Sideburns deals not only with what it's like to be a new teacher who must shave his sideburns and dress professionally, but also what it means to completely lose one's former identity in becoming the "man in charge" at this one room schoolhouse.

Best Class Plog: I'm Down with Brown. It's a brilliant plog dealing with social class issues throughout this current Spanish-American War. Topics such as marginalization and racist language (hence the brown) . . . oh, what's that? Wrong use of the word class? Oh well, I'll keep it up anyway.

Best Resource Sharing Plog: 20th Century Learning Resources - George has a way of finding all the resources that are necessary for the Industrial Age and locating them in a daily paper. Nice work, George! Where else will I find the 18 Ways to Integrate Origami into Daily Paper-Based Instruction?

Most influential Plog Post: We Are the Factory. I love the notion that in creating this current modern factory model, those of us who are complicit in it become the factory itself.

Most influential tweet / series of tweets / tweet based discussion: I almost went with the meadowlark on this one, but I'd have to say the robins at Steele Park.

Best Teacher Plog: Learn to Serve. I love the way Ruth gets her children to serve without feeling coerced or falling into the overly progressive trap of "let's go fix the world."

Best Librarian / Library Plog: Mary Emerson's Damn Dewey's Delightful Decimal System is a mildly irreverent description of the life of a lonely librarian with a keen sense of alliteration and irony.

Best School Administrator Plog: I Assist in Intending, in a Super Kind of Way is an honest, funny and often bizarre portrait of an assistant superintendent of a small rural district.

Best Educational Tech Support Plog: A Sketchy Solution has saved me on many occasions when I simply couldn't figure out how to fix a pencil.

Best eLearning / Corporate Education Plog: Thomas Edison's Education Funhouse might be a bit overly corporate, but come on, it's Thomas Effing Edison, guys! The man who invented (or had other people working for him who invented) the light bulb - the very symbol we will forever use when drawing clip art pictures of people with an idea. If we're going to have corporate buyout of education, let's at least keep it entertaining in the process.

Best Educational Use of a Phonograph: Can You Hear Me Noun? is genius in the way it captures both the limitations and the strengths of the phonograph and the human voice in education and grammar in particular.

Best Educational Use of Motion Pictures: Check Out Some Skin! I realize the marketing on this one failed, with many patrons assuming it would be a peep show. But regardless of the box office dud, this was a real hit with my classroom. Who knew the epidermis could be so fascinating?

Best Educational PowerSlide: How PowerSlides Lost Their Power is a self-mocking PowerSlide making use of everything we dread when we hear the first rumbling of that Edison projector: comical typeface, cheap stock photography, entire paragraphs on one slide. You get the idea.

Best Educational Use of a Social Network: Ray's Cafe. Just go there sometime and try the pie or the pi. Either way, you'll never have enough. People connect in a deep social network on a daily basis.

Best Educational Use of a Virtual World: Isn't that precisely schooling already is? A dark virtual world with draconian discipline all in the name of the "real world?"