Edublog Awards

I wasn't going to do Edublog Awards, but it's Sunday night after Thanksgiving and I'm trying to procrastinate in every way I can. So here we go:

Best individual blog: Think Thank Thunk
Shawn has a special place in my heart. Most people around these cyber parts think I'm a math teacher. I actually teach science. I just hang out with the math folks. Mainly because when I first started looking for blogs to call home I found a ton of really good math blogs and....umm.... Michael Doyle and Ben Wildeboer for science. He came out and started blogging about the redunkulus things he was doing in his physics (and math and comp sci) class. Oh and standards-based grading. Lots of that.

Best individual tweeter: Sam Shah / @samjshah
Like his blog, his tweets are a nice mix of personal and professional. He created his own tshirts and a map of his twitter friends. I look forward to his favorite tweets every time he posts them. He also gave a great presentation on the joys of the blogotwitterversphere that I always send people towards when they ask me, "Why blog/twitter?" Basically, Sam has become his own meme.

Best group blog: InterACT
I generally stay away from education policy. It's just not a rabbit hole I want to fall into. However, the InterACT blog is a collection of California teachers (huge emphasis on teachers) that blog about the state of education both in California and in the rest of the nation. Always a good read.

Best new blog: Educating Grace
I could also have gone with two great new bloggers - Frank Noschese and John Burk. But like American Idol, these two physics bloggers are going to split the vote. I also don't double nominate, otherwise Cornally is a shoe-in. Instead I'm going with Grace Chen's blog. The best compliment I can give her is that I hardly every comment. Usually when I comment it's because I can quickly shoot off a response. With Grace, I need a few days to think it over. Then I realize I don't really have anything to add because she's so much smarter than me and has already thought things through. She technically had one post in 2009 but I'm not really counting that. It's like a redshirt year right?

Best resource sharing blog: Science For All
Obviously, this is a science resource site. I'm not big on the dozens of sites around that are just post after post of things like the Top Ten uses for Animoto. Kirk does a good job of finding and posting a balance of resources. I trend more towards the reports he finds but if you need to find cell animation videos he's got that too.

Most influential blog post: Without Geometry Life Is Pointless - Habits of Mind
It went viral and got picked up in random non-math and non-teaching places. Up until this post I felt like a super cool hipster guy who knew about this secretly awesome blog and if you guys new about it you'd be jealous of me. It turns out Avery and I are practically neighbors so you can continue to be jealous of me.

Best teacher blog: f(t)
I won't say too much about Kate's blog, mainly because there's close to zero chance that you haven't read it before. It wasn't the first blog I read, but it was the one that got me hooked. It's great. Kate's great. Her skin is great. Hugs all around.

Best educational wiki: SciDo
Perhaps technically it's more of a GDoc but there's a wiki for it so I'm counting it here. I've blogged about it already.

Best educational webinar series: Math 2.0
A lot of good stuff on math and math education. If they put the archives into a form I could download to an iPod it would be even better (hint hint). 

Best use of a PLN: Virtual Conference on Soft Skills
Riley put together a murderer's row of presenters and I still find myself going back and checking old posts. It also got many of us to blog outside of our comfort zone which was cool to see.

Best educational podcast: Math/Maths
This is an enjoyable weekly podcast about what's going on in the world of math.  It's a show about math current events rather than learning about math. Hosts Samuel Hansen and Peter Rowlett include a list of links to go with each show and you can find good resources to use in class.

Runner up: A History of the World in 100 Objects
I just wanted to link this because it's so awesome. I've never had occasion to use any info from this in class so I didn't feel I could nominate it. It's great though and currently takes up over half of my iPod space.

Lifetime achievement: The Science Goddess
Over 1500 posts is an achievement by any standard. The Science Goddess was the first blogger I read regularly. Her blog roll served as the source of all my initial Google Reader feeds and in her comment section I was first introduced to a newly National Board Certified Teacher named Frank Noschese.  She's been through controversy and career change and still manages to publish quality posts each time.