Teaching with Technology in the Middle

Learning Showcase Reflection Posts--just another reason why blogging is awesome

2012-02-24T09:44:00.000-08:00

Next Monday evening, our school is hosting a Learning Showcase Night, where students will take their parents to each class and lead a conference about their learning over the course of the year.

Today I put my regularly scheduled lesson aside to give my students a chance to stop, look back, and reflect on their learning, so they will be prepared to talk with their parents about it.

Fortunately, as much of student work for my class has been published on blogs, students had a chronologically organizaed portfolio ready for them. All they needed to do was sort through and make some sense of it.

In their daybooks students made the chart below, which they used to record notes about pieces of thier work that best hightlighted their ELA accomplighments to date:

Then, after having some time (most only needed about 20 minutes) to get their ideas organized, I told students that they would next take the inforamation on thier chart to create a new blog post, one that would assist them as they led thier parents through the conversation about their learning this year. Here were the guidelines that I gave:

I gave a brief demonstration on creating hyperlinks within their writing, something I've touched on before but never required, and gave students the rest of the period to work on it while I circulated the room and talked to as many kids as I could. What I saw and heard was pretty amazing.

The first thing that initially struck me was how few issues came up with students being uncertian about what they had done that reflected areas such as creativity, growth as a writer, and themselves as a thinker and/or learner. Figuring how ones work shows these characteristics requires some reflective and tough thinking. But students seemed to know right away what parts they needed to pick and why. After a talking with a few students about their process and selections, it became apparent that this reflection came so readily because they had already been through it a few times with the reflective self assessments that I have them complete after each piece. Here is one they used with a narrative writing piece (using Diigo), and here is one they did with a Google form for a writing workshop piece.

One area in particular, students' growth as writers, was the most fun to see them write about. For many students, this was the first time going back through everything they posted on thier blog since the beginning of the year. And as they did changes in their writing seemed to jump right out at them.

Some of the students I talked with were able to trace changes back to a particular minilesson or conversation. Emeli, for example noticed how her sentence structure and use of imagery in her writing changed after we did a lesson using Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings as a mentor text. Jhonnatan pointed out to me how after I had a conversation with him about puntuation that his subsequent posts weren't written in the same multiple-run-on format that his earlier posts were.

And there were also other students who saw apparent changes in their writing but were not able to trace these changes back to any particular lesson or event. Quite a few students just told me that that their writing just seemed to get better the more they wrote, such as Weston. Erin is another such student, and while she wasn't able to pinpoint a specific influence, she was able to tell me that she could put her finger on the piece that caused her to move from being a hater of writing to discovering that writing was her calling. She showed me the draft in her daybook, I snapped a picture with my phone and emailed it to her so she could include it in her showcase post.

Since I started having my studnets use blogs to publish thier work, I've been meaning to do a lesson like this to encourage reflection and direct thier attention to just how far they have come. I had honest plans to so something like this last year, but things got busy and I was too focused on the flow of learning moving forward to build in a day of looking back. I can't say enough about how glad I am that today we finally did it. After what I saw, I couldn't imagine any parent leaving Monday night unimpressed with the learning taking place; I sure am, and more importantly, so are the students.

Finding new hope for research papers (and a new use for Diigo)

2012-02-02T07:01:00.000-08:00

Guiding my students through the process of writing a research paper is part of the 8th grade curriculum. Having done plenty of research writing myself, I value and respect the importance of the process. But to be completely honest, I have never really enjoyed teaching it.

There always seemed to be something missing from the research papers students wrote in my class. Even when students had complete control over what they researched, their writing just wasn’t meaningful. It was forced, mechanical, and impersonal. Every year, I revised my both approach and the assignment, and while the changes I made to my practice usually yielded an improvement, they never affected what I had most hoped to change.

I had just about accepted that research papers were lifeless, when a few weeks ago I tried out an idea for a project with my students that has given me new hope. The project, a research paper, was a little different than anything I had done with my classes before, and I began it before I fully had my head around where it would go. It combined a novel we had just finished, The Hunger Games, with a little brainstorming, some Diigo assisted web research, and a lot of writing. The result was paradigm shifting.

Here was the idea for the project: Students would select and research a topic related to The Hunger Games, then use what they found through their research to write a paper that connected the novel and the topic. It sounds simple, but of course, it wasn't.

In short, this is what we did:

I told my students we would be researching topics that related to the book. As a class, we made a list of related topics that were researchable. Below is the list of what we brainstormed.

Students picked a topic and did a couple quick-writes in their daybook about what they knew already about the topic and how it tied in with the book.

With their topics fresh in their minds, students turned to the Internet to search for more information. I intentionally didn’t give much direction as to what they needed to find through their research. Instead I just directed them to read-up on their topic, and while doing do, use Diigo to 1) highlight important information they found, and 2) attach sticky notes to the site that explained connections they found/realized between their topic and The Hunger Games. For example, a student researching "relationships" may find a site giving information about healthy relationships and put on a sticky note on a fact that she/he felt explained a characteristic of Katniss and Peeta's relationship. They took a couple days to find as much information as they could.

Next came the writing part (here's where it got really cool)

I told my students that they would be using what they found online to write a research paper. The paper didn't have to be a particular number of paragraphs or have a particular organization. What it had to do was show how their topic connected to The Hunger Games, bring in information from three sources (web sites), and give their reader a deeper understanding of both the novel and their topic (here is the full assignment that I posted for students).

And this is also where my planning also started to fall apart. I didn’t know what exactly a paper that did these things would look like. So, my students and I figured it out together.

We brainstormed ways in which such a paper could be organized, and eventually decided that most would fall into one of the following categories:

Use the topic researched to analyze something in the book (like with the relationships example above),
Explain the facts behind the fiction (how real hovercrafts differ from those in the book)
Show multiple connections between the topic and the book (how types of roman gladiators mirrored characters in the book).

How kids decided to organize their paper depended on what they found in their research, particularly the connections they wrote on their sticky-notes. Fortunately, Diigo makes accessing these notes, as well as the content highlighted, pretty simple.

Screenshot taken from student's Diigo library

We made some rough outlines, and started writing. The content I usually teach with research papers (quoting and paraphrasing, bibliography, citing sources) and essays (introductions, paragraph organization, conclusions) I back-loaded in through mini lessons and conferences while students were writing.

Students published their projects (research papers) on their blog, we took a day to read and post comments on each others, talk about ones we thought were really cool, and complete a brief self-assessment of the experience (right). Also, the rubric I used to grade the self assessment and project can be found here.

Unlike the research papers that my students wrote in the past, these make for pretty interesting reads. Below are some links to a few of them:

For Liz's project, she analyzed and drew comparisons between poverty in the US and in Panem.

Weston made some interesting comparisons between the Hunger Games and Jersey Shore in his piece.
Alycia used her research to write a post examining the science behind the genetic mutations featured in the Hunger Games
Asia analyzes Katniss' relationships as well gives advice to anyone caught in a love triangle in this tip sheet.

Jacob researched force fields, and wrote this post about figurative force fields that exist in the Hunger Games.
Luis wrote about his analysis of the wilderness survival techniques used by characters in the Hunger Games.
David wrote this brief, but interesting, piece that compared Hunger Games characters to types of Roman Gladiators.

Making sense of what worked

Earlier in this post, I called this experience “paradigm shifting” for me. And it was. I now look upon writing research papers more favorably. What made this experiences so different was that it treated my students like writers. The writing they did was the real type, not the scripted, certain-number-of-paragraphs, topic sentence-supporting details type. It put students in a position, where writers often are, of having to make a number of decisions based on the information they have and how they want to get it across.

It was hard, too. I saw my students struggle a lot more through this process than any time we had written research papers in the past. By not knowing myself what these papers would turn on out to be, when a student asked me for help, I wasn’t able to give them a quick answer. Instead, we would end up having these long conversations about what they found through their research and what they were trying to make happen in their writing. There really wasn't much more I could/should do. The eventual form this paper took was up to students, as writers, to figure out.

When the process was all said and done, the final product was amazing. Not necessarily “amazing” in the sense that all of my students produced the greatest research papers ever written (though there were a few that were better than any produced in my classroom before). What made these papers so great was that they had life and personality. Their words had a voice of their own, not separate from the author who wrote them. And all of them, even the ones that were a bit rough around the edges, clearly reflected a considerable amount of thought. These were papers written by students who were not just going through the motions.

This isn’t the last experience my students will have in my class with writing research papers; I never planned for it to be. My intentions were for this assignment to be an introduction to the genre of research writing in the context of a creative activity that would also extend their thinking about a novel. Later in the year, we will build off of the skills introduced here to write a more formal research paper. A paper that I'm going to be doing more thinking about before I begin taking my students through the process.

I need to think through more this idea of formal writing. In my mind I've kept it separate from creative writing (I even said above "an introduction to the genre of research writing in the context of a creative activity), but now this separation is seemingly less distinct. Formal writing need not be formulaic, and creative writing need not be it's own, segregated genre apart from the more academic types. I know this to be true now from my experiences with this project, seeing my students give life to writing that I had dismissed as hopelessly dead.

Say Something 2.0 (beta)

2012-01-18T12:12:00.000-08:00

A couple weeks back my student teacher, Kim, was reading aloud to students from the novel, the Hunger Games, while students read aloud in their books. Throughout reading, she would take short breaks, allowing students to participate in Say Something, a "during-reading" activity is exactly what its name describes. For it, students stop reading, turn to a partner, and say something about the text. The partner responds, then takes his or her turn saying something and getting a response. The entire process doesn't take more than a minute or two, after which students continue reading.

While I circulated the classroom during one of the Say Something sessions, I overheard multiple conversations that I thought were absolutely brilliant. There were students making these incredibly insightful comments on what was happening in the story that had rarely spoke up in class. But just as I started thinking about how much I was liking this activity, it occurred to me that there was something that I did not like. Here were all of these great ideas about a text popping up around the room, but outside their own conversation, students didn't get to hear them. I was thinking about solutions that didn't necessarily involve a whole class discussion (which I love but would take away from the amount of time that doing Say Something allows to be spend actually reading), when my thoughts drifted back to an evening last week.....

I was sitting on my couch alone, family asleep, and was watching one of the Republican debates. Not after long, my interest began to fade, and I decided to check my Twitter account. I noticed that a few of those I followed were tweeting about the debate, and curious, I decided to search Twitter for all debate-related tweets. My engagement level began to shift almost immediately as I moved between the debate on television and the real time commentary in response to the politicians on the stage. In some cases, the statements made on the tweets made me laugh out loud, others presented a perspectives I hadn't considered, and other tweets were so ridiculous that I was left with no choice but to tweet back to them.

It then occurred to me that my activity on Twitter was a lot like that of my students during Say Something--I and others commented to a common experience and shared responses in return. But being able to carry out these interactions in a medium like Twitter (as opposed to the physical classroom), had some distinct advantages: I didn't have to wait my turn, I could comment at any time that I liked, and the size of the group with whom I interacted had no limits.

Seemed to me like moving the Say Something activity in my class to a digital space could make it a lot more productive and engaging. I couldn't wait to try it out.

Since Twitter is blocked in at my school, I set up a chat room in Today's Meet, and shared the link to it with my students on my website. The instructions for this new version of the activity (yes, I did call it Say Something 2.0) were modified after my own experiences with Twitter. I would play the audio version I had of The Hunger Games, while students would also read along in their books. When students wanted to Say Something in response to what was happening in the book, they would type their comment into our chat room, where other students could then read it and respond, if they so chose. Afterwards, students would refer the the transcript and write a brief reflection on their contributions and learning during the activity.

I had a feeling that this lesson was going to be awesome. It was going to pull kids into a book in a way that just reading alone couldn't do. They would extract levels of meaning from the text that they otherwise never would have known.  Even my most weak and reluctant readers would not want class to end. Students may even want to applaud at the end of the lesson....like sometimes people do in the movie theater.

But looking back on it now, I guess I really shouldn't have been that surprised when the lesson crashed and burned shortly after it got off the ground first period.

After only reading a couple pages in the book, blank looks began to creep across my students faces. Comments typed became less connected to the text. No one was even attempting to follow along in the book. And I, still clinging to the hope of what I thought this day would become, let the lesson continue until my students finally brought me back to reality.

One of my best students stood up and shouted, "I have no idea what's going on!"

"This book sucks!" another shouted. Seeing others nod their head in agreement, I realized that class would not end today with a standing ovation.  I decided to cut our loses and salvage what I could. We closed the computers, turned off the audio, and reread together as a class.

Seems that it's near impossible to follow along in a novel while typing comments and reading a string of others scrolling across a screen, even when that novel is being read aloud.

I chalked this up to a learning experience about kids, technology, and multi-tasking. But my learning did not end at the realization that this was a failed lesson. Actually, that's just where my learning restarted.

When my second period class walked in, we tried the lesson again, but this time with one minor change: we didn't try to read the novel and write at the same time, so it was sort of structured like the no-tech version of Say Something.   I made a few other changes as the day progressed in response to what I saw happening with my students. By my sixth period class, here's roughly what the lesson looked like, with my revisions written in bold:

Students entered the class, logged on to their computers, signed in to the chat room. Students needed to join the room using their real first name (having taught for this many years, I don't know why didn't foresee the need to make this one explicit from the start).
I reviewed the procedures for the Say Something activity we did the previous day, and explained how throughout or time reading today, we would stop and say something, but type our comments in the chat room, as well as respond to the ideas of others using the @ symbol and that person's name. Commonly understood abbreviations or text-speak was fine, so long as the abbreviated words were school appropriate.
While we read the story together, all computers were left closed.
At various places throughout the story, we would stop reading, open computers, and take 5 minutes or so to have a Say Something conversation about the text. Students could refer back to what they had read in the text while participating in the conversation, but not read ahead.
After with about 10 minutes left in the class we would stop reading, and students would complete a self assessment/reflection of their reading, learning, and participation in the activity. To do so, they would look back over the transcript of the conversation and complete this Google Form that I had posted to my class blog.

That's it. The lesson took about an entire hour, and it rocked. That change in format I made after first period made all the difference. Being able to direct their attention on the novel, students understood it and were able to have a conversation in our Today's Meet room that was productive, and in many ways, transpired like I had initially hoped it would. The online space for the discussion enabled multiple conversations to take place at once. It was difficult to follow them all, but I remember at most points noticing the majority of my students to be involved in at least one strand at any given time. And when compared with our conversations in person, it did not seem like anything was lost on the depth of the ideas being shared. Actually, it seemed like having students put ideas in text format (that they could spend more time with to process and return back to if needed), combined with the exposure to a wider ranges ideas shared and conversations to drop in on, deepened the level at which they experienced the novel.

Discovering new possibilities

There was something else that I saw happen, something that I didn't expect, that also added an additional layer to this activity. My students didn't want to do it silently....like I had directed them to do. I figured that the reading and writing happening in our chat room would require students' full attention, so in my attempt to keep students from experiencing the type of information overload that afflicted my first period, I shushed the whispers I heard among students during our Say Something breaks.

After a while, though, I began to notice that many of the comments I was trying to stifle were in fact tied to the conversation taking place on-line. So, after trying in two classes to redirect students' verbal comments to the chat room ("talk with your fingers," I heard myself say), I decided to see what would happen in my last class if I just let them talk. And what happened blew me away.

Sure enough, my sixth period began whispering to one another in response to what they were reading in the chat, and when I didn't make any move to stop the talking out, other students joined it. It was as if the conversation just changed spaces, but after listening to it for a little while, I realized that there more going on than just a venue change.

I noticed that some of the comments students saying out loud were weird. Not weird like off-task or silly, but weird like disconnected. One student would respond to another even though they didn't ask a question. Or someone would interject a comment that was insightful but completely unrelated to the topic conversation taking place.

It wasn't until that I looked down at my computer that I realized what was happening. The online conversation never stopped. Students were still using this space to respond to others' ideas, both posted in the chat room and shared out loud. And the same thing was taking place in our physical class discussion.

I had never before thought about bringing such a hybrid-type conversation into my classroom. But I really liked what I saw, and it's got me thinking....

I feel like physical class discussion and conversations carried out digitally (chat, disc forums) have their respective place in my classroom. Each has their own strengths and weakness with respect to the exchange of ideas and student learning. But in these hybrid conversations that I saw unfold in my classroom when I let students chose the mode in which they expressed their ideas, students seemed to interact in both spaces simultaneously without much trouble; actually, this is where they gravitated to naturally.

And from what I can tell, they benefited from the experience, with these benefits stemming from the advantages that were afforded through interacting in this unique hybrid environment. I saw students draw out deeper levels of meaning from the text from being exposed to a greater number of interpretations during the short bursts of interactions that the activity allowed. All students seemed to be engaged. The overly vocal ones got to say what they needed to, and those who were typically quiet or just had a hard time getting a word in, had an outlet for their ideas.

I'm excited about what we stumbled accross, but I'm still processing it.

I'm wondering what it means that my students so naturally were able to carry out a conversation in two spaces at once. I didn't set up the lesson like this; it was they who pulled it in that direction. One that I found to be incredibly surprising considering how much trouble students in my first period had when trying to follow along in a novel while also conversing online. I'm sure the complexity of the language used in the novel had something to do with it, but I'd bet that it is also, in part related, to their communication experiences outside of school.

I'm wondering what this means for my teaching. I've known that there are some communication differences between my students and I ever since I've seen the ease at which they can carry on a conversation with a few of their friends in-person while simultaneously texting others. I couldn't do this to save my life. So on one hand, my experiences with our hybrid discussion may have been a lesson to me about engaging kids at their level. But on the other, I keep thinking about this infographic I saw the other day on the decrease in brain activity scientists are finding in people who try to multitask, and it makes me wonder if encouraging such types of interactions would actually be a disservice to my students.

So, I'm thinking now about what role, if any, such a hybrid conversation could play in my classroom. What would a class discussion or Socratic Seminar look like if it was carried out in this manner? Is this a step in the direction of 21st Century Learning? Or is is a step backward for the learners of today?

Blogging to get myself blogging

2012-01-05T16:47:00.000-08:00

I've always been better at starting than finishing. In part because I can be scattered, but mostly because I like to bite off more than I can chew, trying to juggle so many tasks that I don't have time to really do any of them well. I just do my best to keep from loosing grasp on too many of them at any given time.

Last year, when I decided to coach wrestling, I did so at the expense of writing to my blog. For two months I didn't touch it. This year, in taking on coaching again, I made an agreement with myself that I wouldn't neglect my blog writing.

It wasn't easy, but I held myself to it. The past two months, I ended up writing five posts, four of which I felt were worthy of being read. I know, it doesn't sound like much, but I'm pretty proud of my accomplishment. I'd be even more proud, though, if I actually managed publish more than one of them.

With the wrestling season over and a little more free time on my hands, these three perfectly good starts, hiding out as drafts in my dashboard, are eating at me. I'm not completely sure why these few unpublished posts are so unsettling. I actually have more drafts than published posts. It probably has something to do with the tremendous amount of effort that went into finding the time to write these past months.

In any case, I'm going to make another agreement with myself. By the end of next week, I'm going to get a couple of these posts finished, revised so they are at least partially intelligible, and published to this blog.

This post is part of the process. I know that if I say it and put it out there, I'll hold myself to it. And perhaps having this additional pressure will help me to resist the temptation I'm feeling right now...the one where I'd rather keep the post in draft form than hit that publish button.

Hunger Games Blog-Out!

2011-11-27T10:32:00.001-08:00

As I wrote about in my last post, my students and I have spent the majority of our learning time this year engaged with the Hunger Games. With the second half of the novel, students mainly spent class time either reading it, writing about it, or talking about it. They kept an ongoing double entry journal in their daybook that they would write in each day, responding to events in the text as they read.

Every Thursday, students would build off of what they had written in their double-entry journals in an extended piece published to their blogs during our weekly Hunger Games Blog-Out. My requirement for the blog post was deliberately broad, so as not to stifle student creativity, ownership, and the opportunity writing with meaning. I only asked that students write blog posts that were thoughtful and focused primarily on their response to the text, rather than simply retelling what had happened. I've linked a few of my student's posts here, here, and here.

Friday, for the second part of our Blog-Out, students would read and respond to the posts written by their classmates, writing comments that spoke back to the ideas of the author or other commenters about evens from the Hunger Games. With about 15 minutes left on our commenting days, students would complete this brief reflection/self-assessment I made on a Google Form and posted to my classroom blog; it focused on both their writing and the ideas they encountered written by others.

We pretty much followed this routine of reading and writing, blogging-out and commenting for six weeks, as we read the second half of the Hunger Games. It went incredibly well, with students coming to look forward to both having the space and time to compose their thoughts, and receive responses from their classmates.

Browsing student blogs and comments
via Flipboard on a Friday Blog Out

This commenting time gave students the opportunity to learn and practice something that I always have trouble teaching....responding to writing. The comments students left for each other spoke to the ideas within writing, not the writing itself. Only rarely would a student leave a comment saying something like, "you need to add more detail," or "you misspelled a lot of words." Because of the nature of the Blog-Out assignment, with it being response-based around a common text, it was natural for students to write comments that served to converse with others' ideas. Honestly, I didn't foresee our blog commenting time having this affect, but I'm excited that it had. It will definitely ease the creation of the larger-scale writing community we will be building as we enter into our writing workshop in the near future.

I also found that responding to each others ideas, Students' attitude toward writing changed dramatically over this time, as well. Many of the posts written at first were minimal, clearly written to get over with. But as the process progressed, students writing became more about clearly articulating a position with a clear audience in mind. Students were writing for their own purposes, rather than mine. They began to see that their writing didn't have to be a certain way, that it was their thoughts and thinking that mattered and doing so they formed a deeper connection to and understanding of the book.

We finished the book and had discussions of it in students' reading groups. The conversations went well, but this didn't feel like the right place to end the unit. From reading students blog posts and listening in on their conversations, it was clear that students had and/or were forming deeper understandings of events from the text. They needed the opportunity to develop and share these ideas, and for it I designed a final project. One that incorporated students' blogs and let them take their creativity beyond text alone. One that empowered them to use digital tools to create something awesome.

I'll write about this final digital project and share some of my students' work in my next post.

Glogging into the School Year with Mixed Media Poetry Projects

2011-09-12T18:58:00.000-07:00

The first real project that my students dive into combines poetry, writing, and multimedia composition through several minilessons and the website Glogster. The project takes about a week to complete, and within it students write, collaborate, use digital tools, and self assess. It's an awesome project that is perfect for starting the year; it introduces students to each other and elements of my class that they will build upon throughout the year.

Writing

The writing component of this project serves both to introduce students to each other and enter into the writing process. For it, we focus our attention on two poems that address different aspects of one's individual experience. The first, Being 13 (author unknown, but I linked to it here) defines this difficult age through timeless experiences that many adolescents can relate, and Where I'm From by George Ella Lyon, where the speaker captures aspects of her past that were important in defining her present identity.

Over the course of a class period, we read the poems, do some focused freewriting in response to each, discuss, then spend a little time creating copy change poems where students model the author's structure and organization to create poetry of their own. The lesson is a tight squeeze for into a one hour class, but it gives students an excellent experience with writing for different purposes as well as the start of two drafts and an aching hand.

When students return the next day, they freewrite in response to the following quote from Peter Elbow's Writing Without Teachers:

To improve your writing you don't need advice about what changes to make; you don't need theories of what is good or what is bad writing. You need movies of people's minds as they read your words.

This writing invariably leads to discussion about their past experiences with learning writing in school, and it also leads in to the conversation about the importance of feedback for writers and the types of feedback that are most useful. I then introduce students to the concept of writing groups, and introduce them to theirs, whom with which they will have their first meeting today and will be working with throughout the school year. This first meeting, which consists of each writer reading their piece aloud and listing to the responses of group members, tends to be fairly short, and after students finish, we have a quick conversation about revision, and they spend what is left of the class time revising and developing one of their poems.

Glogging into Digital Writing

Glogster has established itself as a digital tool in most teachers' toolboxes, and as a result, my students need little overview about how to go about using it. Once signed on, I instruct students that they will be creating a Glogster poster with their poem being primary focus. I ask them to consider the mood of their poem, and to be deliberate about picking a both a wall for their poster and text box for their poem so that these visual texts build upon they mood their text creates.

We also review the idea of symbolism, and I ask them to make decisions about the graphics they include so that they in some way way symbolize the concepts that are expressing through their writing. After it appears that most students have these aspects of their poem well under way, I bring in another mini-lesson on using images and fair use, inviting them to include CC images in their digital poster as well.

As they take the better part of the class to type (and continue to revise) their poem and make selections about visual elements, I make sure to talk with as many students as I can about the decisions they are making. I try to keep our conferences encouraging and positive, which this year has turned out to be incredibly easy.

After a couple days spent creating their digital posters, I introduced students to an additional layer they would use to add to the meaning the reader of their poem would experience: video.

Author Interviews

A neat feature of Glogster is its ability to grab a video and/or audio to be included on the poster directly from a computer's webcam and mic. After introducing this feature and brainstorming a list of questions they could ask each other about their writing, students got back in their writing groups and took turns interviewing the author of each Glogster poster. Each student included their interview on their poster, adding yet an additional layer of expression and type of media to their projects.

Sharing

Students embedded their completed Glogster poster into a post on their blogs, and after a brief conversation about leaving comments, visited the posts of their classmates to view their projects and leave feedback. I asked students to first visit and comment on the projects of those in their writing group, as they have privileged insight into the journey undertaken by the author of these projects. Afterwards, they were free to visit and leave comments on any of their classmates' posts.

Assessment

Grading writing is always tricky. On one hand, students should know what is expected from them and how they will be assessed. On the other, using a rubric with set criteria neglects the differences that students bring with them to my class and emphasizes product over process. Using standard criteria to assess a writing-based project can't begin to assess the thinking and learning that occurred through creating the project.

So for this project, and those that will come after it, I focused on assessing the important, but often unseen, aspects of this project the only way I know possible: by having them assess themselves. I posted the directions to the self assessment here.

Reflecting on Reflection....

But also, as expected, there were quite a few students who were thrown off by the idea of assessing themselves. For years, they've been given the message that learning is determined by the teacher, not them. Some students, in their assessments expressed relief that I wasn't just judging their final product because it did not truly reflect all of the effort and hard work they had put into their writing and/or learning how to use Glogster. There were others that quickly created sophisticated digital posters, who weren't able to say a whole lot about their writing or learning. And there were also a handful of students who were angry that they had to assess their own learning, wanting instead for me to do it for them.

Like or hate the concept of self assessment, my students will have plenty of opportunities to practice this sort of metacognition this year, and it's my hope that as we continue the process of writing and reflecting, that all of my students will feel more free to embrace the messy process of learning and the opportunity to reflect on the importance of what they have done.

Overall, this project turned out to be a terrific experience. Through carrying it out, I got to learn about this amazing new group of students, and the students got to learn about and connect with each other in ways they previously had not. They got to compose through multiple mediums and experienced moving back and forth in their writing between physical and digital spaces, and they experienced the practice of writing to think and learn, as well as writing for publication for a public audience.

This project served an important role in building our new classroom community, and it set the tone for the writing we will be doing for the next 175 or so days together. I'll be sure to keep posting about how that goes.

Below are a couple examples of projects by students who asked me to share them. I'm sure they'd love to receive some feedback!

Callie's project, titled "Callie's Poem"
Justin's Project, titled "Being Me"
Megan's project, titled "Being Megan"
David's project, titled "Being 13"
Katelynn's project, titled "Being Me"

Revisioned Student Blogging

2011-06-10T10:42:00.000-07:00

*This post is a follow-up to two posts I wrote earlier in the year, Rethinking Student Blogging, For Real and Headfirst into Blogging.

It is also the extended version of a piece I wrote for the UNC Writing Project Newsletter. Portions not included in the Newsletter article are written in bold.

When I was first presented with the idea of using blogs in the classroom, it was suggested that they be used as a way for students to respond to a question or text and the ideas of others. I set up a classroom blog, had my students use it as a space to respond to a story we read, and quickly decided that I wasn’t impressed. Physical class discussions elicited greater depth and participation, and besides, there were better online venues for students to interact share.

Recently, however, something happened that has caused me to rethink the blog and its potential in my classroom. I started blogging for myself.

I created my own blog where I write about what matters to me and enter into a conversation with others of the same interest. I learn from these other bloggers and integrate their ideas into my own, composing my new knowledge in a digital space where writing is no longer constrained to a pencil and daybook, where the world is my audience.

How I have come to know blogging hardly resembles my initial conception of it, as a teacher-centered space for student response. Real bloggers are engaged writers because they write about what is important to them, and knowing this helped me to understand that meaningful writing needed to exist at the heart of student blogging if it is to be successful.

With this realization in mind, I decided this year that I would make a second attempt at using blogs in my classroom. I've always had my students compose and share pieces of thier choosing in our writing workshop, and if meaningful writing was my goal, our existing workshop provided just the place to begin our journey into blogging.

Getting Set Up

In order for students to feel a sense of ownership of their blogs, I decided to have them each create their own (as opposed to creating a single class blog where each could contribute) on the educational blogging site, Edublogs. While it wasn't my first choice because of the learning curve presented to new bloggers, Edublogs was free, provided plenty of options for composing and customizing, and had an incredibly simple sign-up process. Within minutes, students created accounts, named their blogs, and were ready to start blogging.

To give students access to the blogs of their classmates, I created this Google Form. On it, students typed in their name and pasted the url of their blog. I then shared the resulting spreadsheet on my website, were students could then be able to browse through their classmates (and those in other classes I teach) and access their individual blogs.

Becoming Bloggers

During class time that we devoted to writing workshop, I made sure to have computers on hand so that students could write their final drafts to their blog when they were ready. Every two or three weeks students would publish a new piece to their blogs and also take time in class to read and post comments on the published posts of their classmates. The process was fairly simple and on the surface wasn’t much different than how we did things before blogs. What happened after we began these digital sharing sessions, though, was pretty exciting.

I noticed it on our first commenting day when a student turned around and told her friend about a post she read that was really good. After she made this comment, I noticed that student in earshot was reading the piece the student mentioned. By the time I got to my computer and read it, seven students had posted comments. By the time the author arrived to my class (the last of the day), 25 comments had been posted on it. She came in the next day with the sequel to that post in hand, and her enthusiasm for writing has only grown since. And she was just the first.

As we continued to blog, so did this trend of students talking during class and in the hall about student writing. Students gained reputations for their writing, and networks began to emerge both in our school and beyond. They established their identities and started thinking like writers, borrowing ideas from the posts of others and viewing the events that unfolded in their lives and in the world as new topics to write about. They jotted down notes in their daybooks and freewrote with purpose. Revision was taken seriously, and proofreading gained a new significance.

In years past, I've observed my students growing in such ways as writers over the course of the year through writer's workshop, but the scale at which this growth took place this year was unlike anything I had seen before, and I'm confident that blogging had a lot to do with it. Sure, I am a better teacher of writing this year thanks to participating in SI last summer (shout out UNCC Writing Project!), and without question my students' experience would not have been near as powerful it were not for my improved practice. That being said, writing as bloggers afforded my students opportunities not avaliable to writers in physical spaces alone.

Blogging gave students a chance to do more than tack their final drafts to the classroom wall. It broke down these walls, and entered students into a new type of writing community, one where their words could be read by anyone at any time, where their ideas were widely received and could be disseminated instantly, and most importantly, one where they were able to feel that writing about what mattered, mattered.

Blogs as Digital Daybooks

As students became more familiar with writing in these digital spaces, it wasn't just their attitudes that changed. The role of their blogs evolved as well. Rather than only using them to publish final drafts, students would use their blogs to jot down ideas and start new pieces with the “save as a draft” feature. Sometimes they would abandon drafts and began new ones. And other times they would return to the ones they’d abandoned. By the end of the year, students’ blogs functioned much like their daybooks, and many found a balance between working through ideas in both spaces.

Growing into Digital Writers

The types of writing that students were doing changed, too. Blogs provided students the opportunity to add new depth to their writing through integrating various digital elements. Of course, this didn’t happen all at once. Along with those I typically do on craft and mechanics, I also led mini-lessons on different digital composition tools, many times learning right along with students.

By the end of the year, they became quite good, too, at drawing upon digital tools to compose ideas beyond words alone. Within their pieces, students included hyperlinks to outside web pages, past posts, and the posts of others; they inserted Creative Commons images, videos, and music within their writing; and they also embedded digital projects they created themselves like podcasts, slideshows, animations, and comics. Listed below are a few examples. I'm sure they'd welcome any feedback that you'd like to leave!

After writing this poem, Carol retold it in this post using only images that she created using Pixton
Juan created this comic retelling a scene from our team's canoe trip, using Toondoo. Pierre, his canoe partner told his version of the event with this animation he created with xtranorml. Will, who did not go on the trip, created this animation with Goanimate to explain how the day went for those who stayed back with the substitute.
Heather created this book using Storybird, which was inspired by previous posts she had written. Check out her blog here and see if you can notice the recurring theme of her writing :)
Allison created and embedded this 3D pop-up book about her experiences in 8th grade using Zooburst
Lorenzo embedded a video slideshow that he created on Animoto into a post he wrote about child abuse.
Shaytania and Katelyn wrote this poem on a relationship told from perspectives of both people in it. Along with the text, they also recorded themselves reading their poem, which they posted as a podcast created using Audioboo.
Ta-Layza wrote a rap about what she had learned about gymnastics and recorded it using Audioboo. She posted her performance of it here.
Erin created the Alice Jacob fictional series. With each chapter, she gave readers links to other pieces in her series.
Belen wrote this piece on her favorite music, where she included multiple links to related pages and sites to listen to the songs.

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Reflections on Digital Teaching

2011-05-18T14:40:00.000-07:00

Last week my friend and colleague Josh sent me an email, asking for a favor. Below is an excerpt from it:

Steve,

Early in the month of June I am participating in a panel discussion entitled “Using Technology to Enhance Teacher Effectiveness” that is being put on by the NC Network of Grantmakers and being supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. I believe many of the practices in your classroom are incredible and should be a model of instruction. That being said, I would like to outline some of your pedagogical approaches as examples of how technology can increase teacher effectiveness. Below is the session description and below that are some specific questions. I would love to have your thoughts regarding these points so I can help share the great things you do. You are da man!

This sounded like a great opportunity. I love sharing my practices, and I'll do whatever I can to further the integration of technology in our school. Besides that, I can't possibly turn down anyone who thinks that I'm da man.

So Josh, of course, I'll help you out. Thanks for keeping me in mind, and also thanks for giving me permission (I did ask him first) use this opportunity to reflect on the ventures my students and I have undertaken this year, and post my thoughts in my blog while they are all still fresh in my head.

First, I'll start with some of the high points of how my students and I learned with technology this year. There is overlap between them, but I'll break it down as best as I can.

1. The Digital Inquiry Project

Earlier on in the year I reflected on an observation I made that many of my students didn't know what they wanted to learn about. It struck me as odd that group of teens who are growing up in a world so rich with information were not continuously thinking about new questions and subjects they wanted to learn about. Everything they could possibly want to know was only a few mouse clicks away, and I felt that if I didn't give them the chance to learn how to be a digital learner and contribute to this continually expanding wealth of knowledge on the web, I wouldn't be doing my job as their teacher in preparing them to live and learn in the 21st century.

Out of this perceived need grew what came to be the Digital Inquiry Project, which I wrote about in detail in this post here.  This project gave students the chance to be the directors of their own learning.

In short, students decided what they wanted to learn about, scoured the web for content that answered their questions, organized relevant content through social bookmarking, and then used what they learned to inform pieces of writing they published to their blog. As students wrote, thought, and responded to the writing of their peers, they developed new questions and interests, which they reflected on and used to guide future learning and writing.

2. Diigo for (and beyond) Organizing Web Content

When swimming through the sea of content on the web, students could quickly get lost and even drown without a way to keep track of and organize sites they find.   It was for this reason, that initially, I introduced them to the social bookmarking site, Diigo. With it, students bookmarked sites, tagged them to keep them organized, highlighted text that was important, and included sticky notes of their own thoughts and ideas.

As the Digital Inquiry project continued to evolve, my students developed the ability to use Diigo seamlessly in their web browsing, and I experimented with and discovered new ways to use this cool web tool.

In my most popular post, Diigo for Digital Writing Reflection, I discussed how Diigo provided a great way for students to reflect on their own writing that they had published digitally. In my post Research Writing 101 2.0, we discovered how Diigo simplifies and expedites the research writing process.

Most recently, we stumbled upon an another unexpectedly handy use for Diigo, which I have yet to write about. My students had just completed a couple days of web research, gathering information for their research papers. I was introducing them to the concept of creating an outline for their papers, and after introducing one of my classes to the concept of sub topics, a student pointed out to me that she could easily determine the sub topics in her paper by looking at the tags she assigned to the sites she bookmarked. This is a great idea, and I'm still thinking through how this is going to influence how I have my students research, bookmark, and tag next year.

Blogging

Every year my students write. I love seeing them develop their identities as writers and learn the power of their words. This year, though, the growth I've seen in my students as writers has occurred on a scale more grand than I any that has graced my classroom before. I thank blogging for that.

I put a lot of thought into just how blogging would fit into my class. In my post, Rethinking Student Blogging for Real, I wrote about my own journey as a writer through blogging and contemplated how I could guide my students in conceptualizing blogs as real bloggers do. I can honestly say that my students are now blogging for real, and the journey to get where we are we all learned a lot about the potential that exists in these digital writing spaces.

Like in years past, much of my students' journey as writers has occurred in the context of a writing workshop. The principles of this workshop have all stayed the same. Students wrote about what mattered to them, engaged in writing as a process, collaborated with and supported the writing of classmates, took writing pieces to publication, and shared published work with the class.

With most writing pieces, students began working through ideas for their drafts on paper, and when they were ready, typed out and developed their pieces on their blog. And while the words they typed evolved from what they started with pencils, continuing the process in an digital space afforded them to add entirely new levels of meaning to their pieces. With their blogs they were able to hyperlink to outside sites, their other pieces they had posted, and even related posts of their classmates. They added videos, and podcasts, and slideshows, inserted and attributed Creative Commons images, as well as embedded polls and surveys to make their posts more interactive.

In addition to using existing digital elements to support and add depth to the meaning of written words, my students' blogs are also a space for them to publish multimedia elements that they create themselves. A student may tell a story through images and music through Animoto, through a cartoon or comic strip with either Goanimate or Toondoo, or create a multimedia poster with Glogster.   Though these tools are hosted on different websites, each site gives users the option of embedding their composition on a blog or website. Because of this, my student's blogs serve as places for them to both post their writing and digital stories that they create elsewhere on the web.

Having the opportunity to compose their ideas digitally has, without question, engaged my students in a depth of thinking significantly greater than that afforded through the written word alone, and while many students embraced and enjoyed this process, the most engaging aspect of publishing their words to the web was the audience that blogging gave them.

Every other week we devoted class time to reading and responding to the blogs of our classmates. On these days, I would overhear students whisper during class and talk in the halls about posts they really liked. It was not uncommon for a student for a student to enter class and find a piece they published the day before to have 20 comments or for a student to be approached by a peer in another class who asked hopefully if they planned to add a second part to a story they started. The power of this authentic and captive audience drove my students to want to write, to value written expression, and it gave them affirmation that their voices and ideas mattered.

And while I believe it was the peer audience that most contributed to the fire that blogging kindled for my students, their passion for writing continued to grow as they began to notice that it wasn't just classmates for whom they were writing. Particularly after we began the Student Blogging Challenge, students quickly began to see that the words they published to the web were also being read beyond our school, state, and even country. This image below is a screenshot of the visitor tracker from Anthony's blog, with each dot on the map representing a view his blog had received. I can't imagine that anyone, even the most reluctant writer, could not be inspired and motivated by seeing by seeing they had such an audience.

On Students and Learning

So, you want to know how I know meaningful learning is taking place through the activities that I described above?

That's an easy one to answer....

I know my students are engaged in meaningful learning because they have the space to reflect on their own thinking and learning
With such a wide variety of writing students are publishing on their blogs, it would be impossible to evaluate each with a single rubric. And even it it was possible, attempting to do so would serve counter to the goals which I had in place for conducting our digital writing workshop. The main goal was not that each student demonstrate an ability to compose writing that fit into a particular predetermined mold. Rather, the goals of having students engage in such a process were for them to grow as thinkers, learners, and as writers; and therefore, it is these areas that were assessed.

In order to cary out such a personal and metacognitive assessment, students reflected and wrote in response to several points posted on this assignment. Here is an example of one of these assignments. Through completing this reflection, my students better made sense for themselves the significance of their experience with the assignment, while also making their thinking and learning visible to me.

I know my students are engaged in meaningful learning because I read what they write.
   On their blogs, students have a chance to write about what matters to them. Many of these pieces focus on issues that are central to adolescents. They write about love and relationships, popularity and fitting in. Through these pieces, they seek to better understand the world in which they live and in doing so, better understand themselves and their place within it. In each post I read, I see aspects of students' identifies emerge that previously did not exist, and in reading the comments that other students leave on these pieces, I see connections between students that would not otherwise be made and affirmation to all involved that the rocky road of adolescence need not be traveled alone. I cannot think of any learning that is more meaningful.

And as for their actual abilities to express and convey their ideas through the written word, one needs only to visit the blog kept by any of my students and read from their initial posts to the present. Though all have grown differently, the changes that my students writing has underwent in both content and mechanics is amazing. In some cases, this growth is obvious, such as in developing and understanding of correct punctuation, capitalization, or paragraph organization. In other cases, it almost appears that writers change little or even revert, but upon looking at previous posts, it is evident that the student is experimenting with new styles and types of writing, thus indicating a growing confidence with taking risks as a writer and a developing writer's repertoire.

I know my students are engaged in meaningful learning because I watch and talk with them.

My students are far from a uniform group. They all have unique interest, backgrounds, and abilities. As such, I understand that their needs as learners are as individual as they are. For this reason, I build in plenty of time during class to conference with students, focusing on addressing their individual needs. Here, I use technology as well to record annotations of what my students are learning and the skills I focus on with them. Using a Google spreadsheet, I take notes on each child after we talk. I may work with one student on punctuating his writing, and another on editing html code. With each conference, I refer back to previous annotations I have taken on that student, so that I can see their growth and the areas where they still need to develop.

And even without the data in front of me, when I watch my students undertake a digital assignment in my class today, what I see is in stark contrast to what transpired at the beginning of the year. When the year began, most of my students struggled to navigate the directions on a web page to create an account on a given web tool without assistance. Fast forward to this week when I gave my students the assignment of creating a digital story using a new web tool from a list, and then embedding the final project on a blog post. Other than a brief overview of the purpose of each tool and a link to it, I gave my students NO instructions whatsoever....they didn't need it.  They dove into the project without hesitation, and learned themselves how to use web tools that, for most, were completely unfamiliar with little, if any, help needed from me.

Final thoughts on digital teaching

Without question, technology needs to play a role in creating learning experiences that adequately prepare our students for the future. In my class, as I've described above, technology has had an incredible impact on my students learning. But there is one point that I feel like I have to make before I end this post: appropriate and effective instruction that integrates technology is complicated. It's about more than just the tools. It involves not only having teachers who have a degree of tech-savyness, but have adopted a pedagogy that uses technology to meet learning needs and develop skills that are relevant to life and learning in our modern society.

I by no means claim to posses mastery of this knowledge. Honestly, I'd question anyone who claims that they do. The field is too new and changing too rapidly to have it all figured out for anyone to be the authority. In a sense, this reality of there not existing a single authority over information underlies how I understand this new pedagogy and perceive our responsibilities as educators in teaching our students to learn. The past traditional paradigm where the teacher is the master of the content which he or she distributes to students is quickly becoming irrelevant. With a reality where anyone can find just about any information any time, anywhere, there is less of a need for us to be designators of subject matter content in a traditional sense. Rather, what our students need of us is guidance and support in using the digital tools at their disposal to find content on their own, evaluate and organize the information they find, make meaning of it through collaboration and composition, and contribute their own ideas to this vast and ever-growing collective authority.

This is what I'm coming to see being a 21st century educator entails, and while my teaching approach this year was far from perfect, I feel that the points that I mentioned above are all steps in the right direction. I hope that this helps you Josh, and of course if you (or any other reader of this blog) want to get in touch with me to continue this conversation, hit me up on Twitter @steve8071.

Take care and good luck at your meeting,

Steve

Diigo for Digital Writing Reflection

2011-04-15T15:03:00.000-07:00

As I've written about in past posts, I feel quite strongly about the role of educators in equipping students with the skills they need for both life and learning in an increasingly digital world. With respect to the essential skill of organizing web content, I've been having my students use the social bookmarking site Diigo since the start of the school year. They've used it to keep track of information they find on the web, to share information with our class group, and also to respond to digital texts they read. And even though the bookmarklet, Diigolet, is significantly less convenient than the Diigo toolbar (which can't be installed on our school computers), most of my students are now are at a point where they have seamlessly integrated this bookmarking tool into their web browsing.

It was because of their proficiency with it that when an idea came to me today 5 minutes before the start of class of a new purpose for which I could have my students use Diigo, I didn't hesitate to throw out the plan I had in place and give it a try. It went amazingly well. So well, in fact, that I have resolved to finish writing this post before I leave school today and officially start my spring break.

It seems like most of the posts in this blog have been in some way or another focused around my students using digital tools to compose.   Presently, the writing my 8th grade students are doing has taken the form of a fairly open writing workshop, where students write across various genres about about topics of importance to them, publishing these pieces to their blogs every couple of weeks. Here are some of the pieces they've done recently.

The purpose of such writing is for students to develop as writers and thinkers, while also establishing their presence in a global community of learners. Assessment of how students meet these goals is done by the students themselves, as for each piece they publish they write a reflection where they identify and explain aspects of their piece that show the following:

   -evidence of themselves as thinkers
   -evidence of using revision to improve their writing
   -evidence of how they worked through challenges

I love using this method as a way to assess my students' writing, which I was introduced to last summer at the UNC Charlotte Writing Project. It focuses students attention on their own process, encourages them to try new ideas and approaches, respects their diversity, and guides students in being better able to talk about their own thinking and learning.

Up until today, I've been having my students complete this reflective/metacognitive assignment by responding to these directions on their own sheet of paper, which they then would turn in to me.

But this morning while I was preparing my class for the day, it occurred to me that Diigo's web highlighter and sticky note tools would allow students to carry out that same assignment without paper. In addition, it would also take students less time to complete, let others read the reflections they wrote, and make it easier for me to access and assess their work.

Student blog with Diigo highlights and sticky notes

If you are not familiar with Diigo, it is a free social bookmarking tool. With it, users can bookmark web pages to their online library from any computer, highlight text on web pages and include sticky notes with their own typed messages, and share these sites and annotations with others. Diigo also allows users to create groups, which I have done for my students, so that in addition to saving bookmarks to their own libraries, they can also save them to the group.

Since all of my students publish their writing on their individual blogs, they can use Diigo to bookmark their posts, highlight parts that demonstrate their thinking, revisions, and challenges, and include sticky notes on the page to include their written explanations and reflections. Click here to see the full assignment.

Student's highlights and sticky notes as seen in our class Diigo group library

Students would also select the option that allowed the page and its annotations to be shared with our class Diigo group, so when I or any other student visited our class Diigo library they could see each students' bookmarked blog post, and beneath that post, a display of the excerpts highlighted and the sticky note responses that had been recorded.

For grading, I only needed to visit our Diigo page and use this rubric to assess my students' work. Alternatively, I could also visit the student's blog post, and so long as I had Diigo open on my computer, I could see the annotations on their post. If I wanted to respond to any part of my students' reflections, I could use Diigo to type in my comments and they would then show up in my students' libraries. Though I have not done so yet, I also see potential for students to respond to each other's assessments in the same way.

Now that I'm starting to rethink my uses of Diigo, I'm sure that some other new possible applications will come to me when as I start reading through these posts and pages of self assessments. Honestly, I am excited to do so, but outside my window the empty parking lot and setting sun are telling me that grading can wait. I'm sure my family would agree.

Hello Spring Break!

Writing into the Student Blogging Challenge

2011-04-06T06:27:00.000-07:00

I first heard about the Student Blogging Challenge last year. The event is hosted semi-annually in the fall and spring, each lasting for a period of 10 weeks. Each week, Miss W, the teacher/organizer of the event, posts a new challenge consisting of activities intended to guide students in learning about blogging, develping thier own blogs, and connecting with other bloggers from around the world. Ever since I first learned about it, I had an interest in working it into my classroom, but it's taken me some time to figure out how.

When the 2010 Fall Challenge rolled around, I decided I just wasn't yet ready to have my students dive in. At that time, I was uncertain about how the event should best fit into the writing my students were already doing and the direction I envisioned in taking them as writers, thinkers, and bloggers. To be honest, though, at that point, I was only just beginning to figure that direction out for myself, as I discussed in my September post, Rethinking Student Blogging, For Real.

As we have had some time to forge our identies as digital writers and learners (and teacher), mainly thanks to our Digital Inquiry Project, I decided that it was the right time to jump in to the March Student Challenge. Now, about five weeks in to it, I feel like it's a pretty good time to write about it, sharing the expectations I had developed for the role it would play in my class, how I went about working it in to the writing we were already doing, how I approached assessing student learning, and also how it is all actually turning out.
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The Student Blogging Challenge seemed like a pretty cool idea, but being cool alone didn't seem like enough of a reason for me to ask my students to devote a chunk of the valuable time for learning that we have together each week. I asked my school's literacy coach, Cara, about what she thought of my students getting involved with this event. Like me, she thought it sounded pretty cool, and though we didn't spend a lot of time talking or planning, she did ask me one important question that I would need to answer before I had my students move forward. What did I want my students to get out of the process?

It's a simple question that any teacher should ask before designing any learning activity. And after quite a bit of thought, I arrived at an equally simple answer: I wanted my students' participation in the Student Blogging Challenge to facilitate my students growth as writers, thinkers, and members of a global learning community.

Figuring out ensure this experience would send my students down such a path was far from simple, however, and after much thought, I settled on the following expectations that would guide what I would ask my students to do:

1. The Student Blogging Challenge would be Meaningful

Sure, this sounds like a no-brainer, but when I first looked over the format of the Student Blogging Challenge, I saw potential for it to be seen through students eyes as being "just another thing the teacher is making us do."

I didn't want to just tell my students each week to read Miss W's post and complete all the challenges by Friday. It had to be more than a weekly to-do list. Even though the challenges seemed to me pretty cool and engaging, and they did guide students in developing the blogs they were already using, I wanted my students to have a personal reason for doing them.

I wrote earlier in the year about wanting to give my students the opprotunity to blog like real bloggers do. To a large extent, I feel like the regular, semi-unrestrained writing they have been composing in workshop and publishing to thier blogs has placed them well on thier way to actualizing this initial vision.

My students are at a point where they are starting to like writing. They are engaged with blogging because they are discovering that they have something important to say, can compose on new levles with digital tools, and publish in an online space where they can be heard by the world. Blogging has empowered my students. If what I asked my students to do in the Blogging Challenge encroached on this freedom, they'd resent the activity and me. This is the last thing I wanted to happen after comming so far, but if I set it up right, it didn't have to be that way.

The Blogging Challenge, as I see it, gives students guidance in developing aspectes of this online space where they post thier writing, as well as a chance to connect to a greater global audience. The Blogging Challenge would be an excellent compliment to how my students were already using thier blogs, but it's predetermined tasks should by no means substitute for the meaningfull writing my students were already doing.

The key, I decided, to make The Student Blogging Challenge meaningful, would be to allow my students to engage in it while also giving them the space and support to continue the real writing that has become so important to them.

2. The Student Blogging Challenge will engage my students as readers.

Every week, the activities that Miss W posts for the student challenge are completed by students in elementary through high school. The directions of the challenge are clear and text based, and they are not written at a level that is beyond my 8th grade students' abilities.

However, I had a feeling that completing these tasks would indeed be a challenge for my students because they would be presented with a new type of reading. How often are students just given directions in text form for an assignment they are expected to complete? Unless they are taking an online course, the answer is most likey never. We want our students to understand, so we present to multiple learning styles, model, and demonstrate. We repeat directions when nececssary and answer endless questions.

I am not saying that such support is necessarily a bad thing, but I have noticed that students can grow to rely on it. In addition to challenging them to blog (the slogan of the Student Blogging Challenge) I also wanted to challenge them to read carefully for information and follow directions. Yes, I will model and demonstrate for them, but as for figuring out how to complete the tasks, they will be on thier own. I'm sure that I'll be asked plenty of questions, the help I give will most often take on the form of redirecting them to the text. I've taken this approach of other aspects of my teaching, like I wrote about here, and while I'm sure I'll encounter some pockets of resistence, I'm pretty sure my students will end up being suprised at just how much they can do on their own.

3. The Student Blogging Challenge would be student-paced

I teach an incredibly diverse group of students with a wide range in reading ability and technological literacy. I didn't want any of my students, particularly those who struggle with reading and writing, to feel that the Blogging Challenge was a task they were going to fail before they even began. To ensure all of my students were included, I told them that they didn't have to complete every activity in each week's Challenge. Rather, they could choose the tasks they wanted to complete and work on on their own to get them done.

If they got stuck on a particular task, they were to revist the directions and work through the problem, even if this meant they would only get a fraction of that week's challenge done.

4. Assessment of The Student Blogging Challenge would be about learning, process, and metacognition.

If you're still reading this post, I'd like to thank you for not giving up after reading #3 above. I promise, I'm not completely out of touch with teaching middle school students. I just have come to conclude that if I want The Blogging Challenge to make my students better readers, thinkers, and learners, than the environment in which students engaged in it needed to also faciliate that type of problem solving...a process they would surely shy away from if I emphasized primarily the product over the process.

So, to guide my students in embracing the process of thinking and learning through the Blogging Challenge, I made students' assessment a metacognitive one. After each week of the challenge, my students would complete an assessment that required them to think about their own thinking over the course of the week while they worked through whichever parts of the Blogging Challenge they decided to undertake. The most current version of the self assessment can be seen by clicking here. Each week, students, with their notes (I'll explain this later) out and blogs open, would have time to write their reflections in response to each item listed on it.

5. Commenting on the blog posts of others was non-negotiable.

Sometimes, as part of the Student Blogging Challenge, Miss W would include an activity involving visiting and commenting on the blogs of other students participating in the Student Challenge. This is one area I did not want to leave as "optional." Each of my students would have time to visit other blogs, read what others are writing, and post thoughtful comments in response.

Responding to the writing of others is not a new area for my students. We established guidelines for composing quality comments at the start of the year (thanks to the help of this video published by Ms. Yollis), and students have read and commented on the writings their classmates have posted throughout the year. I feel like now they see value in getting thoughtfull responses from readers, but the importance having space for commenting in The Blogging Challenge goes beyond reading and responding.

The Blogging Challenge provides students the opprotunity to connect with students outside of our school's walls. They become introduced to new writers and exposed to new ideas. They encounter different points of view, topics for writing, and possibilities for composing. And through connecting with other bloggers, students broaden the audience for thier own writing, as after recieving a comment, students often visit the blog of the student who left it.

Bringing It All Together

With only seeing each of my classes for 55 minutes, five times a week, I realized that organizing lesson plans which met my above expectations was going to be pretty tight on time. Add to it that I also needed to make time throughout the week for students to read and discuss thier novels (which students had began before the start of The Student Blogging Challenge), I honestly didn't know if the vision I had would actually work.

Even so, I went ahead with it anyway, breaking up my week something like this:

Monday:

Reflect our thinking and learning throughout the previous week of the Student Challenge by completing the self assessment.
Preview the activities of the current week, and begin working on them.
With 5 minutes left in the class, students would write a few reflective notes in their daybook discussing the activities they had worked on and how the process went, being sure to point out any frustrations they were feeling or problems they were trying to work through. *Each day after working on part of the Student Blogging Challenge, students would add another entry onto this page, to which they would refer next Monday when completing the previous week's reflection.

Tuesday

Begin brainstorming, drafting upcomming writing piece, and have time to share ideas and get feedback from writing group. We would only be doing this on every other week, as students would be required to publish a piece of writing to thier blog every two weeks. This time next week would just be spent as an individual writing/conferencing period.

Wednesday/Thursday

Students would have the option on these days of either working on thier own writing pieces or continuing with the Student Blogging Challenge. It was for them to decide how their time was spent, but they are expected to spend some time on both.

Friday

Fridays are comment days.
On the weeks when students had to have completed their own writing pieces, about half of the class will be devoted to reading and commenting on the posts of their peers. At any time during the commenting period, a student can come to the board and write down an author and title on our "Most Awesome Blogs of the Week" list. Students also keep thier daybooks open on their desks, so they can write down any ideas they find for writing pieces of their own they will compose in the future. The last 20 minutes of the class, students turn their attention to thier own piece that they had published, and complete this self assessment.
On the weeks when students are not commenting on each other's published posts, they are given time to visit and post comments on the blogs of students participating the Students Blogging Challenge, who are not from our school. For one of the comments they post, they complete this form, which I use for assessment and share with the students so they can see their classmates' responses to the blog posts their classmates have visited. The latter reason is why a rating is included on the form.

So Far, So Good

If the schedule that I described above sounds impossible when considering that I'm also having my students do literature circles, you're partially right. My students don't have near as much class time that they need to complete both thier writing and the Student Blogging Challenge. Good thing that both can be done at home, too.

While I haven't formally assigned my students specific homework tasks, I've told them throughout to take what time is necessary outside of class to ensure they are doing quality writing and participating thoughtfully in the Blogging Challenge. Many are putting this extra time in...more so than what I typically see with homework I assign. And overall, the work that my students are doing is incredible.

Though my students are participating at different levels in the Blogging Challenge, they all seem to be finding it challenging. For most, the level of difficulty is just right, while for others, there is a pretty high level of frustration. These latter students, I've concluded, are those who are most used to having directions explained for them.

But regardless of the level of frustration, all of my students are enagaged and participating. Just last week several students had commented to me that they noticed themselves having an easier time reading and completing the directions for the weekly activities. And even for my more frustrated students, I've noticed that they are making progress too, both in their abilities figure out text directions on thier own and articulate the areas where they are finding themselves stuck. For these students especially, not having the requirement of completing all tasks has facilitated their willingness to engage in the problem solving process and put forth the extra time they need to develop this neglected set of reading skills.

The response to the actual activities of the Blogging Challenge has also been mixed....much more so than I had anticipated. I've heard a suprinsing number of complaints.

No, it's not the fact that my students are complaining that suprises me....I'm no stranger to second semester 8thGraderitis (the middle school version of Senioritis.) What suprised me is that the majority of the complaints had to do with that the time they spent working on the Blogging Challenge took time away from the writing pieces. For this reason, I'm really glad that I left the writing component in, Click here to see some of the top student posts from last week.

But I also have no regrets about keeping the Blogging Challenge component in either. Though my students may have complained when, for example, they had to take the large part of a week to create a comment avatar and link it to thier blog, they all loved seeing avatars appear next to the comments posted and how much easier the link made it to visit people's blogs who posted comments on thiers. On Friday, a few even complained that some of comments made on thier blogs didn't have an avatar linked to the commenter's blog.

That's pretty much how it went for all of the other aspects of the Student Challenge that my students initially disliked. After they had completed the tasks and saw the purpose, they were glad they did it.

I feel like my students are seeing this too, and I'm hearing less complaints.....at least those related to the Student Blogging Challenge.

Most Recommended Student Blog Posts

2011-04-05T18:21:00.000-07:00

Last week my students published pieces of their writing to their blogs, and on Friday, students took some class time to read what their peers have published. During this time, when students came accross a piece of writing that they particularlly liked, they would write that post title down on our class Awesome Blog Post list. photo © 2010 MailChimp® | more info (via: Wylio)
If that post was already on the list, students put a check next to it to indicate they also "liked" it.   Below are the nominated posts from last week, sorted by the times that they have been "liked" by their peers.

These pieces reflect a wide range in topics, genres, and writing abilities.   They are as diverse as the 8th graders who wrote them, discussing topics from adolescent angst to world events. Many are absolutely amazing, particularly so if you also look at the pieces that the blogger had published earlier in the year. Check them out....I'm sure these student authors would love to recieve a comment from you. And if there is a piece that you particularly "like," feel free to share that in a comment on this post!
Likes Author      Title

8       Cristian       Song
8      Allison        Burried Alive!
7      Jerry           The Final Four
6      Ta-Layza    The Mistake
5      Erin             The First Story of Alice Jacobs
5      Kirsten        For You
5      Tania          Never Fail
4      Alexus        I thought I could trust you
4      Alyssa        My Bestfriend Kiki
4      Heather      Gone but Never Forgotten
3     Claudia      Issmo
3     Lorenzo     Burried Alive in Japan
3      Marshall    What's Going Through My Mind
2      Antwanette Gone From Me
2      Candace    Last Tear
2      Crystal      Finding your way around my community
2      Kris          The Secrets Zone
2      Nathan      Current Event
2      Nereida     I love you
2      Tamera     How Not to Bug Me
1      Jordan      Family

Getting Ready for Social Justice LIVE

2011-02-18T10:50:00.000-08:00

     There's a lot I've used the web for with my students this year, but come Monday we'll be participating in an event unlike any other we have before, one hosted live on the web.

     For the past several weeks, my students have been delving issues related to fairness and equity. We've researched, wrote, and debated. We've begun to identify what issues most plague our society today, and are moving towards solutions and actions. Through this live event, organized with the help of Michael Fisher, my students will move our conversation from a classroom level to a global one and will take what we find to determine how we should best translate ideas into actions.

     It's sure to be an awesome learning experience. I can't wait to see how it goes and blog about it afterwards.

Below is the post directly from Mr. Fisher's blog. In it, he describes the event a bit more in detail, and also includes links to spaces in which will be working and the live video feed. Check it out, contribute your ideas, or even better, have your students add theirs!

-Steve

Social Justice LIVE!

Social Justice LIVE! is a global action research project where 8th Grade Students in a North Carolina school collect and interact with information from multiple people, as they seek solutions to problems of justice.

Participants, anywhere in the world, can contribute their thoughts anytime between now and Tuesday, and can also join us for the live classroom event on Monday. In order to participate,

CLICK THIS LINK to go to the LiveBinder of resources.

Inside the Binder, you can choose a particular Social Justice issue by clicking on the relevant tab, each of which has subtabs for different ways to interact. You can choose to pose a question/answer in the Today’s Meet subtab. You can choose to leave a comment, relevant image, or response to others’ comments/images on the Wallwisher subtab. Or, you can choose to write a comment or leave a web resource link in the Google Doc subtab.

You can participate in any way, at any level, at any time between now and next Tuesday.

Students will be responding to, interacting with, communicating and collaborating during the LIVE event on Monday, February 21st between 12:00 and 1:00 PM. (EST) The event will be USTREAMED Live (click the link here or in the Binder...) and students will be able to interact with the world audience through live streaming chat and video.

Social Justice LIVE! is open to all...individuals, classrooms, both local and international, kids, adults, EVERYONE! The comments, questions, responses, resources--all interactions, will be data that these students (and anyone else who wants to use it!) will organize and write about in the days after the LIVE event. You can access the students’ blogs by CLICKING ON THIS LINK.

We hope you can join us for this Global Event, as we engage 21st Century Fluencies, New Forms of instruction, and unlimited opportunities for learning!

DigiGogy: Social Justice LIVE!

2011-02-18T10:18:00.000-08:00

DigiGogy: Social Justice LIVE!: "Social Justice LIVE! is a global action research project where 8th Grade Students in a North Carolina school collect and interact with infor..."

Research Writing 101, 2.0!

2011-02-16T19:15:00.000-08:00

     This week my class moved into our next thematic unit, the Justice Unit. It's one of my favorites, too. In it, students get the chance to explore issues of social justice, both present and past, and interact with each other to develop their own perspectives and voices.

     I have units already made from last year, and all sorts of thought-provoking resources. The only problem is after having going so long with letting my students direct the course of their own learning, I felt like my dictating the content we would be studying would be a step backwards. So, I didn't.

    We began with a discussion and debate attempting to come to some level of understanding of just what exactly "Justice" is. From here, I led my students through a series of quick-writes in response to the images on the following slide show:

    As we wrote and discussed, we also kept a list running of any topics that came to students' minds that they felt fell under the broad category of Justice. The topics on the list were pretty similar to those I had brought into the unit in the past. In place of taking any structured approach to teaching them, though I continued in the spirit of our Inquiry Project, and let students pick what they wanted to learn more about, taking advantage of the wealth of information on the web and some essential web tools.

    Of course, this process began with daybook brainstorming and writing, then once students had a topic and a sense of what they wanted to learn about it, they scoured the web to see what they could find. As for instructions, I told them to base the start of their search on the questions they had written in their daybooks, but by no means should they be limited to those questions.

   "Right now, you don't know what you don't know," I said to them. "And as you learn more about your topic, your going to think of new questions you'd like to know about it. Make note of those new questions, and think of new ones as you discover the answers."

    I didn't want to place limitations on their learning. But one direction that I did put in place, in no uncertain terms, was that Diigo needed to continue to be their partner in the process., but not just for bookmarking. As students came across sites with relevant information, they were to use Diigo's highlighting feature to capture what they had found, as well as post sticky notes summarizing key points and responses to what they have read.

A screenshot from a student's Diigo library

    My students are no strangers to Diigo. They've been using throughout the past couple of months as they've engaged in their Inquiry Projects, where they searched the web for information of interest to them, bookmarked their findings, and used what they learned to inform a piece of writing that they would eventually publish to their blog. The writing for the inquiry project was always creative or personal, and I forbid my students from writing reports or research papers. I didn't want them venturing into this genre until they knew how to write research the right way.

   Now seemed like a good time to cross that bridge.

   The Three Day Research Paper

   Every year my students write research papers....and every year they seem to drag out for weeks on end. It's a time-consuming process, and one that I never look forward to. This year I decided that Diigo, along with my abbreviation of the writing assignment, would enable me to guide my students through the toughest parts of writing research in just a few days.

   These tough parts that I mention are teaching students how to paraphrase, synthesize ideas from multiple sources, make internal and bibliographic citations correctly. In the past, I gave students organizers for recording information they found on the web, along with the information from the sites that they'd later use for citing. Diigo took the place of this organizer, allowing students to keep all of their annotations in one place, while also keeping this information connected to the site where they found it.

   As for the creating the bibliography, this used to be an entire class period in itself, giving students handouts with the rules for writing source information in the proper format. I'm sure that there is value of knowing the basics of this format, but the last several years I've had my students use Son of a Citation Machine or even the citation feature of Microsoft Word to do the work for them after they entered in the information on their sources.

    This week, the process became even more simplified as students created their bibliographies with the help of either Easybib or Bibme. With these web tools, all students had to to was copy and paste the URLs of the sources they used, and the bibliography would be created for them in seconds (though not necessarily fully complete or correct).

     The web tools that I described above expedited the process of organizing and formatting written research.  Add to it that instead of writing research paper, I only asked my students to write a paragraph or two focused upon drawing in several sources to answer a single question, this week was the quickest, and perhaps one of the most productive, written research project I've ever had my students carried out.

The full requirements that I gave my students for the assignment can be seen here.

And a list of all of their writing that they published to their blogs can be seen here.

-----
     I think that I'd like to preface my reflections on how this all turned out by saying that in no way do I feel that  what my students were engaged with this week could replace the writing of a real research paper; in about a month we'll be revisiting the process with the purpose of doing just that. Nor do I believe that such a quick and limited experience is enough to teach my students all they should know about writing research at an 8th grade level. A quick glance over some of their writings reveals plenty of rough edges.

But....

   This assignment was an awesome introduction to the process. In just these few days, students learned about strengthening their writing with others ideas, using the work of others fairly, the purpose of organizing web content for future use, and even a little about website evaluation (I plan to discuss this in a later post).   And this all took place while students learned about a multitide of relevant and important topics.

    I think that this week was an important step in the right direction. While chances are that when we take on a larger scale research paper in a few weeks that my students' writing still won't be worthy of publication in a scholarly journal, I feel pretty good about what they will be able to do as they build upon the foundation this mini project has set in place. Now that I'm not going to have to spend as much time introducing my students to the concepts of citing, we can focus more on the actual writing. I'm already getting excited thinking about the chance to be able to talk more with students about writing than incorrectly written citations....though I'm sure I'll have plenty of these conversations, too.

   One step at a time, I guess. Tomorrow, when my students come in, they're going to have the the chance to learn from the research and writing of their classmates. Their assignment tomorrow is to take time reading the Justice Research pieces that their peers have published on their blogs, leave some comments, and take some notes on the reactions they have to the what they learn. After engaging with this process for 30 minutes or so, they'll then refer to their notes and compose a post discussing their thoughts on the most significant social justice related matters confronting our society. Within these posts, they'll link to the research written and published by their classmates, building their learning upon the learning of others, and laying the framework to take future collective action. At least, that's what I hope will happen.

   Either way, I'll be sure to write about it.

   As always, feel free to contact me with any questions or comments you may have. I'm sure my students would love to hear the thoughts on what they've been up to as well  Check out thier work and feel free to leave them some constructive feedback!

The Digital Inquiry Project and "The New Culture of Learning"

2011-01-17T16:12:00.000-08:00

      In Will Richardson's last blog post, he discussed a recently published book written by John Seely Brown and Douglas Thomas, titled, A New Culture of Learning.   I haven’t read the book, but from what I have gathered through Richardson’s post, it addresses how the web and social media have made possible a new type of learning, one that schools will not be able to accommodate until they move away from the mechanized approach of distributing content, and toward teaching students the skills they need to learn in today’s social and information-rich web environment.

       In my post, Teaching Digital Learners to Learn Digitally, I discussed what I felt was a need very similar to that identified by Richardson. I wrote about how I wanted to rethink my responsibilities and place as an educator who is teaching students to live and learn in a society that is so rich with information, where knowledge can be both consumed and produced by anyone, anywhere. I wanted to teach my students how to use the web to learn, creating a culture that enables them to, as Brown and Thomas describe, “embrace what we don’t know, come up with better questions about it, and continue asking those questions in order to learn more and more, both incrementally and exponentially.”

       So, about five weeks ago I unveiled to my students what I called (uncreatively) the Digital Inquiry Project. It entailed students scouring the web to learn about a topic of interest to them, then using what they learn to inform a piece of writing, which they would publish on their blog.

      The project would be ongoing, individualized, and would continually build upon the learning that students were doing. It would, I hoped, teach students how to use digital tools to facilitate their own inquiry, while guiding them in becoming better learners, thinkers, readers, and writers. It would make them players in the “new culture of learning” and set them on the path that they'll continue down for the rest of their lives.  So far, it’s going pretty well. There have been plenty of learning experiences for us all along the way, and though by nature this project will always be a work in progress, I feel like things have shaped up enough now for me to sit down and write about it.

Getting Started

       I knew better than to just kick off the project by telling students to turn to the web and learn about whatever they want; I had found out recently that many of my students wouldn't know where to start. So we had to do some brainstorming first. Students took time to do some quick-writes, to share ideas, and hear the ideas of others. After a day of thinking about what they wanted to learn, most had enough direction to begin.

Marking the path

      With topics in mind, students' next step was to turn to turn to the web to seek out information.

       Before they dove in, however, I wanted to be sure my students were able to stay organized as they navigated the vast and sometimes choppy waters of the World Wide Web. For this, I required that they use a web tool that would enable them to keep track of content AND the thoughts they had while reading it, so that they could later access it when they needed to. This necessity for any digital learner is social bookmarking, and for it, we used Diigo.

    So, the directions for the web inquiry part of the project looked like this:

Search the web for information on your topic
Bookmark web pages that had information they found to be important AND
Highlight relevant text and insert sticky-notes of thoughts and ideas on those web page

     That was it. Students were free to follow their own curiosities as they inquired about their topic, so long as they bookmarked their findings, marking their path along their way.

    The process went surprisingly well, too. Many of my students took on topics that were complex and relevant, such as conflicts overseas, religion, bullying, and abuse. Other students dug into topics that I would have considered weak or frivolous for the direction I envisioned for this project, but I stayed fairly hands-off. Some of those students eventually took it upon themselves to change their inquiry topics, but others stuck it out....and surprised me when they uncovered information and conversations that I never would have expected.

Writing to learn (and learning digital writing)

     Of participating in this new learning community, Thomas and Brown wrote that, “the goal is for each of us to take the world in and make it part of ourselves. In doing so, it turns out, we can re-create it.”

     The Internet has transformed knowledge into a much more dynamic entity, one that is continuously evolving as individuals build upon it. In order for the Digital Inquiry Project to direct students toward the goal Thomas and Brown describe above, it had to ask more of students than simply asking questions and bookmarking sites with the answers.

    Which is why writing needed to fit in.

     Students were to write a piece that was informed by the learning of their inquiry. They could compose in any genre, and integrate their new-found learning in any way. Doing so, they would make meaning of, and build upon, the new information they learned, and when they published their writing on their blog, they would then establish their roles as participants and contributors in the learning community.

    But that’s not exactly what happened....at least not at first.

    I expected, given the choice that was afforded to them, that the genres of writing they began drafting would be equally as varied as the topics they had selected to research. But shortly after students started writing their first piece, I realized that this wasn’t the case. Just about every one of my students decided that the genre of "report" would be the shape their piece would take.

     Now, I am not opposed to students writing reports or research papers; after all, as an 8th grade teacher I am required by the state to have my students write them. That’s not what I wanted for this project, though. I wanted writing to be more personal, more meaningful and creative. If students were going make meaning from their learning and build upon it, they needed to go beyond regurgitating what they had found on the web.

     And besides, who likes writing reports? I was fairly certain my students didn't, and when I asked them why they had all chosen to write in this same genre, they had no explanation.

        The best explanation, I decided, was that using new learning to inform more creative types of writing was just plain hard....harder than writing a report, and that this path of least resistance, combined with the fact that students weren't used to such free range in writing, led many to decide to fall back upon what they knew.

      At this point, about two weeks in to the Digital Inquiry Project, I changed the writing requirement to the following:

Use your inquiry learning to inform a piece of writing, written in any genre...except a report or essay.

    Without question, this change has been the most important revision the project has underwent thus far. It’s upped the rigor and has opened the flood gate of my students' creative juices.

      In the short time where my students have been using this aspect of the project to write creatively, I’ve seen them want to know more about their topics, ask new questions, and make personal connections to their research. But it’s not just thinking and learning my students are getting better at through writing....they’re growing as writers too. They are playing with new styles, finding their voice, and forging their identities as writers.

      The written aspect of Digital Inquiry project as taken on a form very similar to the writing workshop I’ve done with my students in years past. Students have choice about what they write, engage in writing as a process, interact with others over their writing, and eventually publish and share their work with a wider audience. I teach through modeling exemplar texts, I teach mini-lessons on craft, and I address individual needs through conferences.

        Where it differs, though, is not only the fact that the Digital Inquiry writing it is informed by learning. The most significant difference is that students' writing for their Digital Inquiries is done digitally.

I’ve taught students about tags, hyperlinks, and Creative Commons. I’ve introduced them to html, widgets, and Google Forms, and guided them in creating and embedding digital posters, videos, animations, and comics. Helping my students become digital writers has required me to learn and teach a new set of skills. It's been exciting for me, but this change in my instruction is hardly the most significant of the transformations that this project has initiated in my class.

Digital writing has afforded my students a new level of meaning in their compositions. I'm seeing my students think beyond just words, and with having additional outlets for their expression and an audience of the world, few, if any, are ever not engaged.

I've written about my desire to get my students blogging in past posts, like this one and this one, but I had trouble deciding on the right role that student blogs would play in the writing we did in class. Turns out The Digital Inquiry Project provided just the spot.

Managing a Digital Inquiry

Requirements

Creating the requirements for this project was a bit of a balancing act. If I made them too tight and specific, then some would only work to meet the minimum, while others would be stifled by the tight parameters. On the other hand, if my guidelines were too loose.....well, anyone who knows middle school could tell you how that would turn out.

What I tried to do is put guidelines in place that gave direction but facilitated student ownership and creativity.

First, I told students that the expectations I had of them while engaged in this project was that they were always thinking, continuously learning, and publishing excellent writing.

Then, to provide a sense of direction, I gave the following specific guidelines:

Use Diigo to bookmark, highlight, and annotate web pages
Use your learning to inform writing pieces that you publish on your blog.
Submit at least one published blog post every two weeks
Upon publishing a piece of writing, immediately begin the inquiry process again

I then gave students additional guidelines specific to their published blog posts. These requirements I’ve built upon each week as I’ve taught mini-lessons on various digital writing topics. I expect that they will continue to remain fluid, but as of now, the guidelines for students' published posts are that they:

are thoughtful and polished, reflecting significant time spent revising and editing.
have a minimum of two relevant hyperlinks
contain tags
have at least one image, Creative Commons properly attributed

Assessment

The tangible, objective requirements of the inquiry project that I mentioned above factor into student assessment, but focusing completely on areas such as proper use of images and spelling and grammar would send students a message about the focus of this project contrary to where it ought to be. What is most important, and what I want to focus the assessment upon, are the three objectives that I had initially told students were in place for this project: that through their inquiry, they would be continuously thinking, learning, and developing as writers.

Because of the enormous variation among students not only in topics researched and genres written, but also learning styles and writing abilities, there is no objective way for me to determine and assess students’ thinking, learning, and writing process. The only honest way to know the degree to which students were meeting the objectives I had set for this project would be if they showed me how they went about meeting them. The best assessment would have to be self-assessment.

Keeping their published blog posts on their computer screens and this handout in front of them, students wrote reflections on how their writing demonstrated thinking and learning, the challenges they encountered, and how their writing has evolved.

-----------

Like most things "school," guidelines, expectations, requirements, and deadlines did exist for this project, but I want to emphasize that the focus is not on an end product. The Digital Inquiry Project is about a process. One where students are continually reading, writing, thinking, and learning. It embraces the idea of "not knowing," and empowers students to use free digital tools to find answers on their own, answers that will invite new questions and curiosities, thereby perpetuating process.

I've included some descriptions and links to blog posts my students have written through their Digital Inquiries. I'm sure they'd love to get some responses to their writing!

Carol, interested in myths and legends, began the Dragon Diaries, where she is developing her own fictional narrative told from the point of view of one of the mythical creatures.
Tania, motivated by the food see sees being wasted, wrote about the issue through the eyes of a homeless man.
Crystal, interested in urban legends and ghost stories, wrote her own version of the Blair Witch Project.
Erin, who began her research trying to uncover answers about religion, surveyed her peers with a Google Form on her blog and wrote this report of her findings.
Talazya wanting people to know about gymnastics safety, composed a rap and performed it in this popular podcast.
Nathan has taken on the stance of a news reporter, writing about the conflict between North and South Korea
This student, interested in what makes a successful relationship, wrote a script, which she later intends to record and publish as a podcast.

What I've Found on the Web This Week (weekly)

2011-01-15T16:37:00.001-08:00

Yong Zhao » Blog Archive » A True Wake-up Call for Arne Duncan: The Real Reason Behind Chinese Students Top PISA Performance

tags: china education testing standardizedtests politics
National Middle School Association - the association for middle level education

tags: nmsa resources middleschool
Digizen - Home

tags: digitalcitizenship safety socialmedia resources parents cyberbullying
- The Digizen website provides information for educators, parents, carers, and young people. It is used to strengthen their awareness and understanding of what digital citizenship is and encourages users of technology to be and become responsible DIGItal citiZENS. It shares specific advice and resources on issues such as social networking and cyberbullying and how these relate to and affect their own and other people's online experiences and behaviours.
Typing Test WPM Typing Test

tags: typing test keyboarding wpm typingtest
Writing Links in Comments | The Edublogger

tags: edublogger comments links blogging bloggingchallenge
WebSlides - Turning bookmarks and feeds into interactive slideshows…

An awesome way to make feeds into slideshows

tags: slideshow web2.0 tools webslides bookmarking socialbookmarking rss widgets
Free Technology for Teachers: 11 Things You Should Know About Blogging

From a blogger on blogging.

tags: technology blogging richardbyrne resources
Please Stop Thinking About Tomorrow : Stager-to-Go

A blog countering the narrative taking place about teaching for the future

tags: change thinking blog technology
Have Students Sketch to Kill the Prewriting Jitters | Edutopia

tags: sketch edutopia students prewriting writing
http://teacherchallenge.edublogs.org/

30 day guide to getting started with blogging--for teachers

tags: blogging edublogs challenge teacher technology web2.0 education teacherchallenge
http://weblogg-ed.com/2011/a-new-culture-of-learning/

I like this post....it captures how I'm trying to rethink the teaching I do in my own classroom with the digital inquiry project.

tags: learning culture WillRichardson teaching digital-literacy
Free Technology for Teachers: A Party for 7 Billion

Cool video...could be used as a writing prompt or an intro to ecoconservitism

tags: population nationalgeographic youtube richardbyrne partyfor7billion

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

What I've Found on the Web This Week (weekly)

2011-01-08T16:39:00.001-08:00

How Handwriting Boosts the Brain - WSJ.com

Even in the world of digital technology, handwriting still has a place in education.

tags: handwriting brain articles digital-writing resources daybook
Free Technology for Teachers: 11 Language Arts Resources to Try in 2011

A blog post by Richard Byrne featuring web tools to be used in the ELA classroom.

tags: resources languagearts english technology web2.0 tools
http://snipsnip.it/

If you show videos in your classroom, SnipSnip.it could be useful for skipping over the parts of a video you don't need students to watch. Another benefit of SnipSnip.it is that when the videos playback they are displayed on a blank canvas devoid of the distracting and sometimes inappropriate "related videos" that appear on YouTube. -Richard Byrne

tags: youtube snipsnip tools share cut editing video videoediting
FutureMe.org: letters to the future

When I learned about Future Me my first thought was that it would be great to have students use Future Me at the beginning of a school year. Students could write about what they hope to learn that year, what they do or don't like about school, and goals that they have for themselves. Then at the end of the school year students can read their letters and see how they've changed over the year.--Richard Byrne

tags: futureme tool cool writing lettertoself
Instructify » Blog Archive » Teach Parents Tech care packages help parents learn computers

tags: parents technology instructify resources
The Power of Educational Technology: Ten Flashcard Apps for Tuesday

tags: technology flashcards tools applications top10 richardbyrne
http://sync.in/

An etherpad alternative for collaborative writing online.

tags: collaboration writing tools web2.0 etherpad sharing
So You Want To Be a Writer?

tags: writing richardbyrne blog blogging publishing
Photosynth - Use your camera to stitch the world.

tags: photography photos visualization photosynth web2.0 tools
Instructify » Blog Archive » Turn an explanatory writing assignment into a podcast

There’s a real spry energy to the podcasts, which are certainly informative. The site could easily be a model for students developing their own podcasts on how to do something, which not only taps into 21st Century skills, but also gives them a chance to be the class expert on something

tags: blog instructify podcast podcasting howto
Free Technology for Teachers: 11 Language Arts Resources to Try in 2011

tags: technology blogging ela resources
100 Seriously Cool Classroom Blogs for Teaching Ideas & Inspiration | Online Classes

tags: blogs blogging education teachers resources
Learn It In 5 - Irony

tags: irony videos blogs lessonplans resources
Pollmo Polls - The simplest polls on the web

Pollmo is the world's simplest polling application. Find out what you want to know today! No account or sign up required - Create a new poll in just three easy steps:

tags: polls survey poll web2.0 pollmo tools
Instructify » Blog Archive » GoAnimate goes to school

With GoAnimate for Schools, teachers can sign up for a free classroom account that provides up to 100 student accounts

tags: blog instructify goanimate
ToonDoo - World's fastest way to create cartoons!

tags: comics web2.0 animation cartoon tools toondoo comiccreator
LinkWithin - Related Posts with Thumbnails

Link Within is a free plugin (widget) for Blogger, WordPress, and Type Pad that will post a short list of related posts below each of your blog posts. The related posts come from your blog's archives. Each item in the list is displayed with text and a small image from your previous posts (if you used an image).--richard byrne

tags: wordpress blog widget blogging tools
"The Future of Privacy: How Privacy Norms Can Inform Regulation"

tags: privacy socialmedia safety
The Best Alternatives to iMovie for PC Users

•iMovie is a powerful, yet simple to use, video editor for Apple computers. Unfortunately, it is only available for Macs. There are, however, some great Windows programs that offer just as many features, and are equally intuitive. This article explores the best alternatives to iMovie for PC users. - jonathanwylie

tags: imovie PC alternatives windows tools
http://www.lucidchart.com/

Creating flow charts or mind maps can be a valuable process for visual learners. The process of creating a chart can help students visualize and process the parts of multifaceted problem or concept. Lucid Chart makes it easy for students to create charts and share their charts.--Richard Byrne

tags: flowchart tools collaboration web2.0 visualization chart tool lucidchart
Upload and Share PDF ebook

tags: pdf share web2.0 tools upload ebook
- share your PDF files on the Web as a unique link (URL) to send via e-mail, or embed them in your blogs or websites.
Free Technology for Teachers: Cartoonize Yourself with Convert to Cartoon

"Convert to Cartoon is an easy way for students to create cartoonized versions of themselves, their classmates, their pets, or anything else to use in creating a comic strip or perhaps in a video service like Animoto."

tags: technology cartoon richardbyrne
http://sqworl.com/

Sqworl could be useful for sharing a collection of links that your students might need to complete a lesson. If students are using Sqworl, the visual aspect of Sqworl provides a helpful reminder of why a site was bookmarked and what that site is about.

tags: socialbookmarking bookmarking web2.0 tools orginization collaboration visual
A New Year’s Benediction from Neil Gaiman | Open Culture

tags: neilgaiman benediction newyear video
- - Could be great to write in response to this video when we get back from the Christmas break.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

The return from my (unplanned) blogging hiatus

2011-01-08T09:41:00.000-08:00

I forgot how busy life was as a teacher and sports coach. When I agreed to coach wrestling this year, I was completely taken aback by the little free time that remained in my life. It's been since the end of October that I have written in my blog, but my middle school class has continued to move forward, making progress with what I feel are leaps and bounds.

So, now, with wrestling season over (and a championship won!), and a full head of steam on technology fueled lessons, I'm getting back to my blog. I've just about finished with a piece on the Digital Inquiry Project, a class project that emerged out of my my desire to teach my digital learners how to learn digitally, which I wrote about this blog post. This project is different than anything I've done in my eight years of teaching and, I feel, is significant for both my practice and my students' learning; I can't wait to share it sometime in the next couple of days.
It feels great to be writing again, and I look forward to resuming the publishing of my ideas, successes, and failures in this quest (in which I am not alone!) to figure out where technology best fits in my middle school classroom.

Cheers!
-Steve

What I've Found on the Web This Week (weekly)

2011-01-01T16:37:00.001-08:00

The Official FlatStanley Project

tags: project flatstanley
Pixton for Fun - fultons

A simple site that allows for creating and sharing comics.

tags: pixon comics comiccreator embedable blogging digital-writing
FoldingStory | The Group Storytelling Game

tags: Foldingstory collaboration writing tools web2.0
Free Technology for Teachers: Folding Story - Collaborative Fiction Writing

tags: Foldingstory collaboration writing prompts tools web2.0

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

What I've Found on the Web This Week (weekly)

2010-12-25T16:38:00.001-08:00

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

What I've Found on the Web This Week (weekly)

2010-12-18T16:37:00.001-08:00

Vimeo Video School

tags: vimeo school video tutorials
- Welcome to Vimeo Video School
  Vimeo Video School is a fun place for anyone to learn how to make better videos. Start by browsing our Vimeo Lessons, or find specific video tutorials created by other members.
Participatory Media | Digital Is ...
Online Stickies - lino

lino is a free sticky & canvas service that requires nothing but a Web browser." -Alternative to Wallwisher - Cheska Lorena
Offers some project management tools that Wallwisher doesn't and lets you pan around your canvas. - Dianne Rees

tags: stickies web2.0 notes collaboration tools postit
Comments4Kids

Network of classroom and student blogs organized to help promote the commenting on and sharing of student writing and learning. Gives educators a good audience of commentators for their students

tags: blogging comments4kids blog comments digital-writing
Teach Parents Tech

tags: google parents teachparentstech howto technology resources
Top 10 sites for Creating Digital Magazines and Newspapers by David Kapuler

While creating digital magazines or newspapers can be done in a word processor, there are dedicated sites that elevate this art to a whole new level.

tags: magazines digital publishing digital_magazines tools
Students: Win $10,000 with 100 words | tweentribune.com

"100 words could win you $100 – or $500 – with a 100-word essay about technology."

tags: contest writing students technology tweentribune
Slide

tags: slide slideshow web2.0

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

What I've Found on the Web This Week (weekly)

2010-12-11T16:37:00.001-08:00

Free Technology for Teachers: 10 Ways to Create Comics Online

tags: comics blog richardbyrne comiccreator cartoon
Sequence of Inquiry Cycle | Digital Is ...
- I really like the sequence you presented. It will be helpful as
Group Conversations Around Images, Documents, and Videos | Digital Is ...
- The first step is the play step. And I believe that play is an essential step for students learning new technologies. This step gives students free rein to explore the new tools without having "serious" work to accomplish. This stage allows for students' natural curiosity to take over and test the limits of the technology in a really low-risk setting. And I found out that when I skipped this step or moved through it too quickly, I noticed students will still want to play when I actually want them to do the serious work.
Googlios

Welcome to "Googlios" where free Google tools meet ePortfolios.
This site is intended to be a collection of resources for those interested in using ePortfolios in Education.

tags: eportfolio google portfolio googleapps technology
Digital storytelling from soup to nuts

"many digital stories are personal narratives used for sharing with friends and family, others can be created to offer insight and knowledge about a cause, a topic or a memorable figure. Communicating a message through story can be a powerful way to educate, encourage thought and initiate change"

tags: storytelling digital digitalstorytelling writing digital-writing socialjustice critical-literacy

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

What I've Found on the Web This Week (weekly)

2010-12-04T16:37:00.001-08:00

Tools and Resources Supporting Effective Search - CPS TechTalk

Google Certified Teacher Lucy Gray recently published the slides from her presentation Tools and Resources Supporting Effective Search. The slides offer some great tips about using many of Google's lesser-used search tools. View the presentation below

tags: tools resources search lucygray
http://writecomics.com/

A really simple site for creating comics

tags: comics writing tools writecomics digital-writing
Free Technology for Teachers: Google Teacher Academy Sydney

tags: googleteacheracademy richardbyrne blog applications
Media - KMS Coaches' Corner
Free Technology for Teachers: Animate Text with Wondersay

tags: technology wordsay animation blogs
- Wondersay is a simple tool for creating animated text displays. The animated text displays you create with Wondersay can be embedded into a blog post or wiki page.
An East Oakland Odyssey--Literature Circles

A teacher made site as a literature circle resource

tags: litcircles resources
YouTube - Viral Education 2.0

tags: education youtube web2.0 viral learning videos
DigiGogy: BLOG SLAM! (Another update to "Is Anybody Asking the Kids?")

tags: blog digigogy blogslam
Welcome to Aviary--an image editor that can be embedded on a website

Aviary, a free image editing and sound editing service that I've featured on Free Technology for Teachers a number of times in the past, recently launched a free image editing tool that you can put into your own website. Aviary's HTML5 Photo Editor can be embedded into your own website.

tags: tools aviary web 2.0 design web2.0 audio images photos
PHRAS.IN - Say this or say that?

tags: writing proofreading grammar phras
Free Technology for Teachers: Seven Ways to Build Your Own Educational Games

There are hundreds of places to find educational games and quizzes on the Internet. That said, sometimes you still cannot find quite what you're looking for. In those cases you're better off creating your own games. Here are seven good tools you and your students can use for creating games.

tags: technology web2.0 tools blog games
35+ Free online Image and Photo Editing Tools @ Techie Blogger

35+ Free online Image and Photo Editing

tags: tools image photos resources photoshop editing
Hate PowerPoint? Here Are 5 Web-based Alternatives

tags: powerpoint web2.0 tools resources

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

What I've Found on the Web This Week (weekly)

2010-11-27T16:36:00.001-08:00

Creative Commons
A livebinders collection of creative commons resources. It's Awesome!

tags: creativecommons livebinders
Education Reform is Re-establishing, Redefining and Retooling : 2¢ Worth

tags: education reform technology warlick blog
Free Technology for Teachers: Three Ways to Cut, Mix, & Mash YouTube Videos

tags: technology youtube mashup videoediting
Growing Up Digital, Wired for Distraction - NYTimes.com
"Students have always faced distractions and time-wasters. But computers and cellphones, and the constant stream of stimuli they offer, pose a profound new challenge to focusing and learning."

tags: nytimes growingupdigital teens
Teaching the Ten Steps to Better Web Research
A slideshow demonstrating students' limited understanding of how to search the web, with links to articles and strategies for teaching students how to research the web.

tags: research teaching sweetsearch wikipedia tools resources website-evaluation digital-literacy
The Top 10 Reasons Students Cannot Cite or Rely On Wikipedia
Includes important info anyone should know when using Wikipedia as a resource. Also contains info on how the site should be used.

tags: wikipedia research education
Worlds End, Worlds Begin: Living in a Story-Rich, Idea-Poor Universe
Comments:

Thought-provoking ideas regarding education, information "delivery," and the role of teacher. - Debby Smith

Highlights and Sticky Notes:

significance of the move from a time of information scarcity to a time of information superfluity.

stories served, from the outset, as a primitive storage device

writing is a prosthesis for memory,

What we don't do naturally--and what we need teachers for--is to turn outward and become residents of a universe that does not revolve around the individual.

tags: education youtube blog

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

What I've Found on the Web This Week (weekly)

2010-11-20T16:37:00.001-08:00

Windows : Premium Laptops - BestBuy - Annotated

tags: windows laptops
- Entertain yourself with this laptop that features MediaSmart software for
  instant access to music and movies. The high-definition 14.5" LED BrightView
  display and Dolby Advanced Audio let you do it all with stunning visuals and
  immersive sound. One year of security software included
CITE Journal - Language Arts

tags: copyright journal language fairuse articles digitalcitizenship
Dan Pink on the surprising science of motivation | Video on TED.com

tags: motivation dan_pink
http://techhappy.wordpress.com/sites-for-kids-2/

tags: resources games_ed teachers reading web2.0 technology lists
Wordnik: All the Words

tags: dictionary reference vocabulary words wordnik language
Reactions to Some Tweeted Statistics : 2¢ Worth
Freeplay Music, Broadcast Production Music Library, Free and Mp3 Music Downloads, See Usage Terms.

tags: music audio mp3 podcast sound resources creativecommons podcasting
Challenge Yourself to Blog
The site of the student blogging challenge

tags: bloggingchallenge blogging web2.0
Sept. Students 2010 | Challenge Yourself to Blog
a list of students who are registered for the student blogging challenge this fall

tags: students blogging blog 2010 bloggingchallenge
20-free-screen-recording-tools-for-creating-tutorials-and-presentations/

tags: screencapture screencasting tools web2.0 designbeep

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

What I've Found on the Web This Week (weekly)

2010-11-13T16:37:00.001-08:00

Web 2.0 in the Classroom: Using Blogs to Promote Authentic Learning in the Classroom
Resources for those educators wishing to learn more about blogging for themselves and/or their students.

tags: blogging web2.0 education blog digital-writing
http://digitalis.nwp.org/
"The NWP Digital Is website is a collection of ideas, reflections, and stories about what it means to teach writing in our digital, interconnected world. Read, discuss, and share ideas about teaching writing today"

tags: writing digital nwp digitalstorytelling literacy
http://grapholite.com/
Grapholite features a drag and drop interface for creating flowcharts, organization charts, and more. You can create new diagrams from scratch or use the sample templates provided by Grapholite

tags: diagramming mindmapping brainstorming grapholite tools
Road To Grammar - Your Road to Better Grammar
365 interactive grammar quizzes

tags: grammar english interactive writing quizzes resources literacy
Modules - Learning Telecollaboratively
"Teaching and Learning with Web 2.0Tutorials and Resources for Teachers"

tags: web2.0 learning teaching technology pd cliffmims resources
https://sites.google.com/site/richardbyrnepdsite/
"Technology alone is not going to rehabilitate our lesson plans. However, when used correctly technology can improve our lesson plans and in turn our students' learning experiences.The pages in the left-hand column will take you to free technology tools and resources that have been reviewed onFree Technology for Teachers."

tags: resources tools teachers education pd richardbyrne web2.0
Teaching with Technology
An awesome wiki of an organized list of web 2.0 tools for educators.

tags: technology web2.0 resources edtech teaching
Using SchoolTube to View YouTube Videos

tags: schooltube videos youtube howto
Teaching students about Creative Commons and appropriate use of images | The Edublogger

tags: teaching creativecommons edublogs resources edublogger blogging images fairuse
Creative Commons Search
A sites that allows for searching several search engines for creative commons multimedia...images, videos, music, media

tags: creativecommons search copyright photos media reference blogging videos music
Creating a Blogging Scope and Sequence | always learning - Annotated

tags: blogging blog digitalclassroom digital-writing creating kimcofino
- - Links with analysis and synthesis that articulate a deeper understanding or
    relationship to the content being linked and written with potential audience in
    mind. (Real blogging).
  - Extended analysis and synthesis over a longer period of time that builds on
    previous posts, links, and comments. (Complex blogging).
- It’s not like blogging is something new anymore…
  
  Of course, this would be much easier if we had a scope and sequence for
  writing to begin with – just a standard format to follow that we could embed
  digital literacy skills into at each level (something like this). But, since we don’t have one already in
  place, I figure we can start with a basic overview for blogging. Considering I
  couldn’t find one to build on when I did a simple Google search, it seems like
  something that might be useful to more teachers than just us at YIS.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

DigiGogy: BLOG SLAM!

2010-11-05T05:32:00.000-07:00

DigiGogy: BLOG SLAM!

What I've Found on the Web This Week (weekly)

2010-10-30T17:37:00.001-07:00

http://www.cloud-canvas.com/index.php/
Canvas is a powerful in-browser drawing program that allows users to utilize layers, filters, clip art and other graphics, brushes, textures, and many other features normally found in Photoshop-like programs. You save directly into your Google Docs account or you can export as a .png file onto your computer from the drawing.

tags: paint tools graphics cloudcanvas photoshop image web2.0
http://mashable.com/2010/10/24/create-your-own-comics/

tags: comics tools create web2.0 comiccreator
Stripgenerator.com - Comic Creating Community
Strip Generator allows anyone, even people who claim they can't draw, to create a good-looking black and white comic strip. To create a comic strip all you need to do is select the number of frames you want then drag characters and objects into those frames. The menus for characters and objects are fairly extensive.

tags: tools comics web2.0 comiccreator stripgenerator resources
100+ Google Tricks for Teachers
"From super-effective search tricks to Google tools specifically for education to tricks and tips for using Gmail, Google Docs, and Google Calendar, these tricks will surely save you some precious time"

tags: google teachers tricks 100 web2.0 list
60 Educational Game Sites That You’ve Probably Never Seen « Tech:-)Happy

tags: educational game sites list
http://www.knowcase.com/
"Fast and easy capture.Save your ideas, notes, tasks, you name it. It's simple.Access anywhere.Knowcase works on your desktop, phone and other mobile devices.Collaborate with ease.Simple sharing and collaborative editing makes it perfect for teams."

tags: brainstorming outline knowcase writing collaboration web2.0
100+ Language Learning Sites

tags: languages learning language foreignlanguage resources websites list education
10 Best And Free Online Video Editing Software
"Free online Video Editing Tools work within your browser to cut and edit videos without having too much knowledge of video editing. They are really very easy to learn and simple to use."

tags: editing software tools videoediting web2.0
http://www.oercommons.org/
"Learning is Sharing Find Free-to-Use Teaching and Learning Content from aroundthe World. Organize K-12 Lessons, College Courses, and more."

tags: education resources opensource curriculum learning lessonplans
Using Technology with Writing - Annotated

tags: technology writing firstdraft
- Word Processing enables students to write
  freely with the confidence that they will be able to make changes at a later
  date easily and quickly.
  - Word processing with technology...great!
Study: Half of high school students admit to bullying - CNN.com - Annotated
Voki Handout
A how-to guide for how to use Voki and embed it on your blog

tags: voki handout
10-great-blogging-service-free-host-your-blog

tags: technology honeytechblog blog blogging
Nude photos and cruel messages, teen digital dating abuse grows - CNN.com

tags: teens digitalcitizenship safety parents cyberbullying cyberethics cybersafety
update: is anybody asking the kids

tags: teens

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

What I've Found on the Web This Week (weekly)

2010-10-23T17:38:00.001-07:00

Voki Home
now add free for educational use!

tags: avatar web2.0 animation voki tools audio blog
Teaching Digital Learners to Learn Digitally

tags: technology teaching inquiry middleschool
http://www.digiteen.org/
"The Digiteen™ Project is a global hands-on project for middle and early high school students, (typically Grade 6-9, 11-15 year old) which was founded by Julie Lindsay (now in Beijing, China) and Vicki Davis (Camilla, GA USA) in 2008. This project studies digital citizenship with students researching current topics, writing a collaborative report on a wiki, and performing and documenting offline action educational projects to promote effective digital citizenship at their local schools. The purpose of the project is to educate on and promote effective Digital Citizenship and responsible online choices as well as immersing students into an educational community for learning and collaborating."

tags: citizenship collaboration education digiteen global
Cacoo - Create diagrams online Real time collaboration
Cacoo allows you to draw shapes, type, and drag and drop elements of your diagram. One of the unique aspects of Cacoo is that you can also upload images to include in your diagrams. The collaborative aspect of Cacoo is that you can invite other people to contribute to your diagrams. Cacoo allows you to chat with your collaborators in real-time while you work on your diagrams.

tags: collaboration diagram mindmap web2.0 diagrams tools cacoo
Technology in the Classroom

tags: technology classroom infographic edtech
Book Trailer Resources

tags: resources booktrailer livebinders
Memoov - Animation Studio online
Soundation - Annotated

tags: music audio editor web2.0 garageband soundation
- Whether you are an amateur or a pro you will be able to satisfy all your needs
  with Soundation — a powerful online sequencer with real time effects, virtual
  instruments and a fully integrated Sound Shop
Braineos | Flash card quizzes to make your brain happy!
Braineos is a newer entry into that market that you might want to take a look at. Braineos provides users with a platform to create their own flashcards or study flashcards created by others. Braineos provides users with four ways to study their flashcards' contents

tags: flashcards web2.0 flash tools quizzes
BlogBooker - Blog Book
What is this ?

BlogBooker produces a high-quality PDF Blog Book from all your blog's entries and comments.
Archives can be generated from any blog running on WordPress, LiveJournal (and derivatives) or Blogger.

The whole process takes about 3-4 minutes, depending on the size of your blog.

tags: blog book pdf blogbooker publishing blogging tools digital-writing

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Teaching Digital Learners to Learn Digitally

2010-10-21T15:03:00.000-07:00

        I've been quite the learner these days, thanks to technology. With the web never far away, I have not only a place to find immediate answers to questions, but also free tools that enable me to navigate the sea of digital information with ease. I use web tools like Diigo (social bookmarking), RSS, iGoogle (web portal) and Google Reader (feed aggregator) to bring the content I want to my computer and organize it in a way that's easily accessible.  Having such control over information has turned me into an absolute learning machine. I ask a question, find an answer, overhear new conversations, think of new questions, and start over again. The process continues indefinitely, as the number of questions I ask and the knowledge I own grows exponentially.

     Technology is the performance enhancing substance of my learning, even though the process is as natural as it gets.   My own curiosity is what drives me. No goals, standards, or objectives. There is no final product I intend to produce, and no intended stopping place for my inquiry.   I'm experiencing learning in its most raw of states:  learning for the sake of learning. I don't think I've been this engaged in the process since I was five.

-----

       I was standing in the hallway with my students the other day during the middle of fourth block, the time when I take the class to the restroom and stand quietly in the hall while I wait for students to come out. Like most other days, I was using this quiet time to think. I was contemplating the way I go about learning in my own life conflicts with how learning is done in school.   Considering if, why, and how I could teach my students to learn like I've been, and also wondering if they, perhaps, already were.

     The first students came out of the bathroom and leaned against the lockers across from me, and I let my curiosity break the silence. "If you could learn about anything, what would it be?" I asked one of of the girls.

        She looked up at me. "Huh?" she asked.

        "Absolutely anything," I told her.  "If you had complete freedom to learn about anything in the world. Anything that you were interested in and wanted to know more about....what would it be?"

       She was silent for a moment, a perplexed look growing across her face. "I don't know," she said hesitantly.

       She looked at the ground, and I could tell that she was still thinking, so I waited. Looking back at me, she said again, "I don't know....I guess that I've never really thought about that before."

       By this time the rest of the class had joined us. I walked my students back to our room and resumed class, but I couldn't help but keep thinking about the exchange I just had with this student.  Her response to me, I decided, was completely unacceptable.

-----

      We live in a society of immediate and instant access to just about any information, anytime, anywhere.   As I've seen first-hand, this reality changes the face of learning dramatically, and I'd say it's for the better. Discovering how to learn with digital tools has sent me down a path where I have been able to grow as a learner on a scale I had never before experienced. If I were asked the same question I asked my student in the hall the other day, one that addressed what I would like to learn about, I would have more to say in response than my questioner would have time to listen.

        But when I asked my student this question, she didn't quite know how to respond. And she wasn't the only one. The group of students around her looked equally baffled by what I had asked.  I'd bet that none of them had really thought much about the their own learning.

      To me, this just didn't seem right.  As a teacher, I want to cultivate in my students love for learning and the skills they need to continue to grow as learners long after leaving the walls of formal education. Actualizing this vision, of course, comes with challenges, but the digital world today provides a tremendous opportunity to make this happen.

      In his last post, David Warlick identified a "vast chasm between the world that we are preparing our children for, and where we are preparing them." I can see this, too. The 13 and 14 year olds I teach have seamlessly integrated technology into their own lives. Many have amassed hundreds of friends on social networks and can engage in simultaneous conversations through texting. They are, as characterized by many, digital learners, and we are preparing them for a life in a digital word.  Technology must play a role in how we teach them. But, if enabling students to become life-long learners is also the goal, then it's not enough for the focus to only be on integrating it into learning. Students also need the chance to learn how to learn with it.

       So, that's what I'm going to teach them to do.

      Next week, my students will be starting what I will tell them is their Digital Inquiry Project. I've spent quite a few hours thinking about and planning it out, and while this project most likely won't go as I've planned (new lessons seldom do with 8th graders....for better or for worse), I know that we're on the brink of something incredibly important. I'll speak more about this plan in greater depth in a later post, and of course, I'll be blogging about the lessons we are all learning along the way.

What I've Found on the Web This Week (weekly)

2010-10-16T17:37:00.001-07:00

PBS Teachers — Resources For The Classroom
HIP-HOP: Beyond Beats and Rhymes is a groundbreaking 60-minute documentary that examines representations of manhood, sexism, and homophobia in hip-hop culture. It is a “loving critique” of certain disturbing developments in rap music culture from the point of view of a fan who challenges the art form’s representations of masculinity.

tags: pbs resources teachers hiphop justice video documentary rap masculinity homophobia culture
Channeling the Flow : 2¢ Worth - Annotated

tags: warlick learning pedagogy
- But in thinking about a recent post if mine, comparing students to learners, it
  seems difficult (to impossible) to be a learner in a learning
  environment that virtually ignores the information flow.
- We teach in closed environments, from stale textbooks, and too often we seem
  more focused on what we can block with our networks than what we can light up
  our classrooms with. Our curriculum is paced and pixelated, and based on
  pedagogies that may well be increasingly irrelevant to today’s learners.
- However learning culture can lead to teachers who are engaged in personal
  learning adventures.
Cedar Grove looks at one district's use of uniforms - NorthJersey.com

tags: dresscode cedargrove uniforms
Technology in our classroom
The site of the Great Blogging Challenge

tags: blogging classroom edublogs web2.0 bloggingchallenge
Interactive Folio: Romeo and Juliet - Annotated

tags: shakespeare romeoandjuliet interactive reading
- Here you’ll find quite simply the most interactive and sophisticated version of
  Romeo and Juliet ever created: use it as a study guide and teaching
  tool. Read the play, read its English source texts, read critical materials on
  the play, explore Shakespeare's vocabulary, and experience a full range of
  multi-media associated with the play.
YouTube - Enter Kazoo Man: Metallica Enter Sandman performed on KAZOO by Mister Tim (multitrack)
Just because it's funny.....

tags: youtube kazoo entersandman
Lori Gracey’s 60 Websites: Information - Annotated
- here is a list of the 60 sites that I scarfed off the Twitter feed hashtag
  #TECSIG. I highlighted in red the ones I think are a little more interesting
  than the run of the mill:
The Answer Sheet - A different vision from a different superintendent

tags: washingtonpost editorial schoolreform
Incredibox
To use Incredibox just head over to the website, select the English or French version, then start mixing sounds by dragging from the menu to the "people field." Every time you add a new sound a new person appears in the screen. Click a person to delete the sound he represents.Thanks to David Kapuler for sharing this link. Applications for EducationUnfortunately, there does not appear to be a way to download the sound loops you create on Incredibox. That said, it could still be a good resource for students to use to experiment with rhythms and sounds in an introduction to music course.

tags: sound web2.0 tools music
Miss W. | Challenge Yourself to Blog
Tasks for the Great Blogging Challenge

tags: blog challenge missw
Draw on any webpage. Share your ideas. - MarkUp
Markup.io is a free service that enables you to quickly draw and write on any webpage. Markup.io operates as a bookmarklet in your browser's bookmarks bar or toolbar. Once you have Markup.io installed just click it anytime you're viewing a webpage to start drawing and commenting on that page. When you're done marking a page you can share it with others by clicking publish

tags: markup draw web2.0 share tools collaboration
10 ways to encourage good questions… « What Ed Said

tags: questioning questions
adflip.com ^ Ads archive, greeting cards of automobile, celebrity, audio magazines advertising and more!
Adflip provides one avenue for examining the rhetoric of ads from across the last 50 to 60 years in the United States. This might be done by choosing a general topic, such as automobiles, and picking apart the use of image, word choices, and other advertising strategies that also connect to the zeitgeist of the times

tags: advertising media adflip
Taking the Mystery Out of Copyright (Library of Congress)

tags: technology copyright education libraryofcongress congress comics media

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

What I've Found on the Web This Week (weekly)

2010-10-09T17:37:00.001-07:00

Open Culture

tags: Poe telltaleheart
Yoyo Games Free Online Games

tags: Games yoyo
ideas for using Google Notebook in the K-12 classroom
CEO Whitman flunks home economics - CNN.com - Annotated

tags: technology flunks ceo whitman
- Now that she has cluttered a controversy over an undocumented housekeeper by
  making excuses, refusing to admit mistakes and blaming opponents for her
Here’s My First Five Tips For Writing Better Blog Posts — What Are Yours? | The Edublogger

tags: edublogger blogging writing blog
Copyright and Using Images in Blog Posts | The Edublogger

tags: copyright edublogger blog
http://www.vistazoo.com/
is a Google Map featuring 3D panoramic tours of more than 1400 locations around the globe. The Vista name comes from the 3DVista products used to construct the 3D panoramic images shown on the map. Click on any placemark on the map to be taken to a collection of 3D panoramic images of that location. In some cases there is sound to accompany the panoramas.

tags: web2.0 tours presentation map vistazoo socialstudies
http://www.gotbrainy.com/
features two sections; Brainy Flix and Brainy Pics. Brainy Pics is comprised of images that demonstrate the meaning of a word. Most of the pictures are submitted by students. Brainy Flix is comprised of short videos that illustrate the meaning of words. Just like with Brainy Pics, most of the videos are submitted by students

tags: vocabulary english gotbrainy resources tools web2.0 education
http://www.wordia.com/
"Bring Words to Life! Wordia - the authorative online textual dictionary, where you bring words to life through video!"

tags: dictionary vocabulary web2.0 english reference resources wordia words
http://www.snappywords.com/
"Free Online Visual English Dictionary and Thesaurus!"

tags: dictionary thesaurus vocabulary visual english visualization words Reference
Stupeflix Studio - Video creation made easy
Create
Remix
Share
Impress
Make a video

tags: web2.0 stupeflix remix create digitalstorytelling tools
http://edutecher.com/
Cool site for teacher and student web resources.

tags: education technology web edutecher web2.0
In Digital Age, Does Handwriting Still Matter? - The Juggle - WSJ

tags: handwriting technology digital-writing professionalpiece
Teaching with Technology in the Middle: Rethinking Student Blogging, For Real
Blog post about my latest attempt to bring blogging into my classroom.

tags: technology teaching blogging blog Blogger
Learn It In 5 - Diigo
"How-to video: Diigo -- the social bookmarking Web 2.0 application" One of the best diigo overviews/tutorials that I've seen

tags: diigo howto tutorial resources

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Headfirst into Blogging

2010-10-06T15:37:00.000-07:00

As I mentioned in my last blog post, my students were excited to get started with blogging.  I was too.  With only loose long-terms plans, we dove right into it this week.

For their first post, I gave students some direction, instructing them that their post in some way needed to reflect an opinion they now had or were forming about our latest topic of investigation: teens' self-image, and the media.

I know, I know....with all the talk in my last post about giving students free reign over the direction of their blog, leading with such a teacher-directed assignment seems a bit contradictory, but I wanted students to have  a simple place to start....a place where I knew they would have something to say and would be able to explore the ideas our class had generated in a format that was new to them.

So yes, this first assignment didn't necessarily conform to the ideal I envisioned for blogging in my classroom, but it got us off the ground and had enough going for it to be meaningful. The fact that students were genuinely interested in the topic, combined with the freedom with which they could direct their writing within it, and the digital composition tools available to them (hyperlinking, embedding images and videos), kept their engagement pretty high.

Click here or here to check out the blogs of a couple students who agreed to let me share their work.

Experiential Learning

For our blog site, I had students use Blogger. I rationalized that having them use this site, rather than an education blogging site created for classroom use like Class Blogmeister, Edublogs, or Kidblogs, would enable them to feel more like actual bloggers and would be convenient since most of them already had Google accounts. Was this a good decision?....I'm not totally sure. I've been looking at (and impressed by) other classroom blogs on Edublogs like this one from Ms. W. in Tasmania, one of the teachers who have taken the lead in the Great Blogging Challenge.   For now, however, I'm still sold on Blogger. It's public, fairly simple to use, and completely free.

As I'm coming to see, using a site not specifically directed toward teachers and students does present obstacles to overcome. The first we encountered when getting students' blogs set up, and the second which we would have to encounter this week before we could create anything that would resemble a blogging community. Each of the 80 blogs my students created was floating around in cyberspace on its own. Before students could read and comment on the ideas of their fellow class blog-mates, they needed to be able to find them.

Thanks to digital tools, making this happen only took a few minutes.   I put a link to a Google form that I had created on my homepage for students to enter their names and blog URLs. I then embedded the resulting spreadsheet with students' blog information on my home page, allowing students to access classmates' blogs by clicking on the link next to their names. Easy.

Before turning them loose to read and comment, I gave students a few guidelines on how to respond thoughtfully, and instructed them to read and respond to the blogs of the peers in their writing groups before continuing on to other student's blogs. The task was simple, but during this process, I saw some pretty cool things happen.

Blogging and Learning

Over the next 30 minutes, students were genuinely engaged with reading, writing, thinking, and viewing. They were exposed to different ideas and perspectives on a topic that we had been discussing in class, but in a way not possible through discussion alone. Students were able to hear the voices of classmates who don't otherwise speak up in class, see ideas more complex that some typically articulate through words, and were able to experience how digital writing tools could add a depth to composition not possible with pen and pencil alone--on more than one occasion I had to shush conversations across the room that would begin with, "hey, on your blog, how did you....".

I wouldn't necessarily nominate this activity for lesson-of-the-year,  but it solidified the place I thought I might find for blogging in my classroom. My students learned and were engaged. They used the strands of of Language Arts to express and understand, and  they connected with the ideas of others. I saw that blogging could guide my students in developing their identities as writers and members of our classroom community......seeing this, I'm ready to let the real work begin.

The Construction Zone
Now that I've started my students blogging, I have no intention of turning back....even though the specifics of my plans are drafts in progress.   The base off of which I will build these plans....the role that blogging will play in my class......I DO, however, have figured out. These principles look something like this:
1. The blog as a daybook extension

Our daybooks are a place for students to gather and grow ideas...and I don't want this to change. The physical daybook serves a need that couldn't be fulfilled with pencil and paper.  In addition to the fact that act of writing by hand is a tool that all writers need, the daybook serves as an easy storage place that can be accessed anytime, anywhere....It's even the place where students can write badly, where they can work through the mess of thinking and trying out ideas.

Out of this messes will grow blog posts, and with them students will have a dated and organized digital portfolio of their writing pieces this year.

2. The blogs will serve as a space for students to interact in their writing group.

The blogs my students write are all public, but gaining a wide audience is not going to be our primary concern (although this may still happen). Students should know, though, that what they write on their blogs will be read by individuals besides just the teacher. Students, while they are free to follow any blog that they like, are required to follow the blogs of those in their writing group and to expected to respond to any post made by a member of their group....a task that Blogger makes easy, as new posts will show up as they are published in each student's reading list.  In receiving responses to all of their posts, students will be assured that they are indeed writing for an audience, also learning first-hand the value to writers of reader-response and continuing to develop their small writing community.

3. All students will be authors and followers of our "Community Blog"

One drawback to not having students follow of all of their classmates is that unless a classmate visits their blog, the student's writing is not readily accessible to the entire team.  For this reason, I created another blog titled "The Community Space" and invited all of my students to be authors of it (Blogger allows up to 100 authors to a blog for free...not the case with Edublogs).   When students have a polished piece of writing or something they would like everyone to see, students can post it on our Community Blog, knowing it will show up on the reading list of every student I teach.
      My next post, which I am presently drafting, will discuss our first use of this new space.
----
*A note from the author before publishing this post:

I feel like moving forward on the principles above will result in some amazing learning experiences for my students. I won't lie....it has taken a lot of time to get here. I've spent hours racking my brain trying to figure out how to best align the features of Blogger with the vision I have for my students. In getting students' to set up their blogs (as I mentioned in my last post), we encountered some unforeseen obstacles, ones that required additional time before students could start their first post. And, of course, the task of composing this first post took longer than expected because I underestimated the time students would need to become familiar with Blogger's features.

And the payoff of this time investment....there will be one, but I'm going to have to revisit it at a later point.

Two days before posting this, something on the network end at my school changed, preventing students to blog on Blogger. They can still access the site.....just not compose. I'm not sure what to make of this one......However,  my students and I are no strangers to technology roadblocks, so we'll suck it up and move on to Plan B. And once I figure out what that plan is, I'll write about it in my blog.

Teaching with Technology in the Middle

Learning Showcase Reflection Posts--just another reason why blogging is awesome

Finding new hope for research papers (and a new use for Diigo)

Say Something 2.0 (beta)

Blogging to get myself blogging

Hunger Games Blog-Out!

Glogging into the School Year with Mixed Media Poetry Projects

Revisioned Student Blogging

Reflections on Digital Teaching

Diigo for Digital Writing Reflection

Writing into the Student Blogging Challenge

Most Recommended Student Blog Posts

Getting Ready for Social Justice LIVE

Social Justice LIVE!

DigiGogy: Social Justice LIVE!

Research Writing 101, 2.0!

The Digital Inquiry Project and "The New Culture of Learning"

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Headfirst into Blogging