Tagging System to help classrooms find one another

I've been reading Wesley Fry at the Speed of Creativity. He is encouraging meaningful commenting on student blogs. He's created a delicious tag of classroom blogs (classroomblogs) to help us find classroom blogs to comment. He says:

Student publishing is key. David is right, we should be very concerned and focused on blog COMMENTS as well as posts. We should focus on the conversation and the discourse by actively and regularly commenting on the blogs of others. And we need to have our students doing the same things.

As I wrote last week in the post “Edifying Student Bloggers,” we should look at the activity of reading and providing constructive feedback to student bloggers as an essential educational task for ourselves and our students.

As we've traded e-mails today I've thought of an interesting point. What if my computer science students were able to easily find other students studying the same thing and comment on what they are finding. What if these classrooms can trade comments?

It seems we should be able to come up with some standard tags that would enable this. For example:

• 3rdgradescience
• 3rdgradeamericanhistory
• 8thgradekeyboarding
• hsintroductiontocompsci
• 10thenglishliterature
• apenglishclass

Another option would be for textbook companies to allow such collaboration through their portals that they've already created. This would help those who have to adhere very closely to standards keep within the guidelines of ever closing curriculum standards.

I think such tags and methods for allowing cross-pollination of ideas could open up a new world for students. Of course, with new ideas, there are always issues that would have to be worked with. However, I think the possibilities are exciting!

We all know that we need to improve writing at most of our schools. Such methods I believe would create forums for excitement among the students.

It is not just about encouraging students to comment. Having them comment on topics relevant to those they are currently learning allow them to apply knowledge they are learning in the classroom and share that with other classrooms.

Should it be done with tags? Delicious? Blink it? Digg it? Its bigger than that! How?

I'm a classroom teacher blogging! I hope that some of the visionaries out there will help us collaborate on such a system of tagging that would be easy and uniform!

Perhaps there is something already out there.