A year in the life of an 8th grader--A digital end-of-year project

It seems like every year after the first round of EOG testing, the learning community we have created throughout the first 170 days of school begins to lose shape.  Remediation and retesting takes center stage, schedules change, kids get shuffled around, and for many students, particularly those who passed their tests, the time spent in regular content classes becomes and exercise in passing time.

I've never considered such an end to the school year desirable.  After a year's worth of building connections and knowledge, the end of the year should serve as a point to celebrate a year's worth of achievements.  It should be a time to look back and reflect on all that had happened with new eyes, realizing the value of our time together and the effect it will have on the rest of our lives.  

I've been thinking throughout he second semester of school about the idea of doing such a reflective final project, contemplating what it could look like.  One that was was intellectual and reflective, while also flexible and engaging.   One that would enable students to refocus their attention from standardized tests and the summer break around the corner, to celebrating and sharing the the amazing transformations that had occurred within them this year. 

Going into the last week of school, I felt like I had pretty good idea of what this project would be, and I was hopeful that it would be awesome.  So, on Tuesday after my students and I were back together in class after a long weekend, we dug in.

Writing into ideas for our project:

To begin the process, we opened our daybooks, stretched out our hands, and wrote for a few minutes in response to the following questions:

• Describe yourself as a writer at the beginning of the year.  You can talk about your attitude, likes, dislikes. 
• What are some important events that have occurred in your writing this year? 
• How have you noticed your writing change this year?
• How has your writing changed you?
• What other important ways have you changed this year?

With some thinking fresh in our heads, I presented students with three possible directions their projects could take.    Below are the directions I gave:

    

A Year in the Life of an 8th grader--Digital Reflective Project 

         Pick one of the following options for the focus of your project:

1. Show the path of your journey as a writer/reader this year

2. Retell one of your writing pieces with images or other media

3. Explain lessons you learned about life as an 8th grader

        And use one of the following tools to create it:

        Animoto, Glogster, Prezi, Photostory, Movie Maker 

I gave students brief demonstrations of each of the digital tools, adding that if they knew of another tool in they would like to use, they could, and I encouraged them to use one that was new to them for the purpose of learning something new.  I also told students that they were more than welcome to do more than one project option, combine options, or, if they wanted to, come up with their own option for a reflective project.  

Students took the next 10 minutes or so to write in their daybooks about their plans, then took a few minutes to share ideas and get responses from classmates.  I gave students the last 15 minutes to either plan in their daybooks, experiment with possible tools, or dive into their projects.  

From what I could tell, it seemed like just about all left class with a sense of direction and, importantly, motivation. Students seemed excited and engaged, and I could feel a level of energy in the room that, like I had hoped, would make this last week we had together powerful and productive. 

We were all excited to begin. 

The best laid plans.....

My plan for the week was to use the next two days as workshop time, and Friday for presentations.  Two days wasn't a lot of time to work.  I knew it was going to be tight, but if students used their time productively, a couple full class periods should be enough.  Motivated 8th graders can accomplish just about anything. 

Students arrived at class chattering about their projects.  While they logged on to their computes, I reviewed the project they would be working on, explaining that they would have two days to work and that Friday would be our presentation day.  As computers logged on, daybooks opened to yesterday's planning, and the class grew quiet as students eagerly dug into their projects.

Right away, I noticed something wasn't right.  Some students noticed that the internet was slow.  Others began loosing their network connections.  And some were not even able to log on.  I couldn't figure it out.  It wasn't the wireless connection.  I was connected and so were about half of my students.  Not knowing what else to do, I instructed students that if they experienced problems with their computers, they should try restarting, and while they waited should use their time to continue their project planning in their daybooks.  Restarting worked for some, but was incredibly time consuming.  But having more time to work ideas out paper proved to be a good thing, though.

Our first work period wasn't a total loss, but we couldn't afford to lose another day.  Motivation is hard to come by in 8th grade during this time of the year, so I spent my planning period in our technology facilitator's office.  Eventually she figured out the cause of the problem.

It turned out that, while nothing was wrong with our school's network, many other classrooms in the school

were streaming movies and videos from the Internet, using up quite a bit of bandwidth.  

Teachers were instructed to stop streaming, and while our web connection was better the next couple of days, many of my students were still not able to finish their projects.  A few barely had the chance to start. 

Presentation Day

We went ahead and presented projects anyway, even though for many students this presentation consisted of them talking through what they were planning on doing.  It wasn't exactly what I had planned, but even so, what students had made or were wanting to make was pretty impressive.  Here are some examples:

• Jacob created this Prezi, showing how he had transformed as writer this year.  And indeed he has.  Check out his blog to see the amazing work he produced. 
• Diana created this Glog.  It didn't turn out exactly as she wanted it to, with some parts being cut off, but it was an awesome idea.  In it she reflects on her growth as a writing and includes quotes from the writing of her classmates and comments that people left on her writing.  
• Josh created this photostory reflecting on his writing and life as an 8th grader.  In it he includes screenshots of his writing and writing of his classmates that he found particularly powerful.  He ran out of time in class and recorded this presentation from home. 
• Alycia's project took the form of a letter to next year's 8th graders that she posted on her blog here.  In it she addresses subjects such as work, principals, teachers, and cliques, writing in a way that is sure to capture the interest of her audience.
• Weston created a Prezi and embedded it in his blog here.  In it, he describes the growth he experienced as a writer this year. 

It's rare that a project my students and I take on for the first time goes as planned, and, of course, this one was no exception.  The technology problems that we ran into were out of our control, but with respect to what students could control, the directions they took with the freedom they had was awesome.  They carved out ideas for what they would create based on their own experiences, taking directions that I hadn't considered.  It was fascinating to watch their process as they experimented and worked with different mediums for creating.  Many took me up on my challenge of learning to compose with something new, and many also thought considerably about the possibilities and limitations different tools presented with respect to how their message was conveyed.  

The presentation day, regardless of the projects' stage of completion, was indeed a celebration.   Students were eager to share just how far they had come this year and were supportive of their classmates.  I think I was the most excited though, as many students highlighted elements of  learning and growth they experienced in my class of which I was completely unaware.

This was how the school year should end; it didn't go as planned, but it was exactly what it needed to be. I'm sure that I will build upon this project next year, but without question my students and I will again head in this direction during the wild time that is the final days of school.  


I'm excited to be able to share my experiences here.  Perhaps I will inspire others, and next year bandwith loss will be less of an issue. Perhaps.

*In the meantime, I'd love to hear additional suggestions for end of year projects.  I'm also all about collaboration, so if you're interested in heading down a similar road with your students next year, please get in touch!

Opening New Spaces in the Digital Writing Workshop with Google Docs

 Writing workshop is, and always has been, where some of the most powerful learning has taken place in my classroom.  Last year, I made the move towards a more digital writing workshop, mainly though the incorporation of blogs as a space to compose and publish.  I noticed that this move drastically changed writing instruction as I knew it.  Technology provided a new space and a new way for students to create, share, and develop ideas.
Three weeks ago I added another layer to our digital writing workshop:  I introduced students to Google Docs, and with it learned the power and potential of yet another space that again is changing writing instruction as I know it.

Getting students started with their first Google Doc was easy.  My students already have Google account as they maintain blogs on Blogger, so having them begin their first Google Doc was as simple as directing them to log into Google, click a couple tabs, and begin a new document (if you've never done it before, create an account on Google, visit google.com/docs, and hit the "create" button).


To be honest, my main purpose for getting my students to begin using Google Docs wasn't composing; rather, it was the possibilities presented for collaborative writing and conferencing.  But even so, after a couple days most of my students expressed to me that they preferred typing in docs over the text editor in Blogger. They cited the larger screen and more familiar format, as well as the ability to access previous revisions.  Others mentioned that they liked being able to access their drafts on their phone through the Docs app for Android. I also noticed that I had fewer students coming to me with the problem of loosing work they had previously thought was saved, like would happen on occasion with Blogger.

Getting Collaborative

The transition to using Docs as a drafting space went pretty smooth, and after all of my students seemed to have drafts underway, I introduced them to the Google Doc conference. Google Docs provides users the option of sharing documents, so others can have the ability to edit and add comments to a document in real-time. It is an option that, I've felt for some time, had potential to change the way conferencing is done in writing workshop.  I was pretty excited today to take my first real step into it with my students.


In order to invite collaborators to a document, the user simply clicks the blue "share" button in the top right corner of their document and enters the email addresses of intended collaborators.  Before my students could do this they needed access to each other's email addresses, which we accomplished in about two minutes with a Google Form and a link to resulting spreadsheet posted on my home page (Google Forms is yet another handy feature of Google Docs).

After students had time to fill out and submit the form, I introduced them to the conference they would soon be having.  Students in my class have an established writing group they have been working and sharing with since the beginning of the year, so the idea of a writing conference was not unfamiliar to them.  Actually, the way I framed this conference using Google Docs was with the exact same instructions that we had been following the past two weeks:

1. Students would meet sit together with their group
2. One student would read aloud his or her writing
3. Other students would listen, ask questions in response
4. The group would have a conversation about the piece
5. The author would get any help he or she felt they need
6. Repeat 

Before meeting in their groups, I gave students time to refer to our list of student emails and invite their group members to their document. When the invites were sent, students got with their groups and began their conference, just the same as they usually did, but this time instead of just listening, they would open that author's draft and read along; and in addition to just responding and asking the author questions, students used the insert function to type their comments onto each student's draft. 

Responding to each other's writing in a Google Doc enabled group members to attach comments to specific places in the text, while also leaving the author the option of accessing the feedback on the draft at a later time. These two posibilities alone made writing conferences more engaging and worth while, like I expected they would.  But there were also some things that happened that I didn't expect.    Things that began after the initial conferences had ended.

Opening New Spaces
Well, maybe "ended" isn't the right word to use.  Because, what I noticed was that after students moved back to their seats and continued their writing quietly, many of the conferences didn't end.

A student collaborates with several others on a Google Doc

Rather, I saw right away that many students took it upon themselves to continue to post comments on each others drafts, reply to those comments, and in some cases, carry on conversations about their writing using the chat feature on Google Docs.  This, I didn't expect (especially since I didn't mention anything to students  about the chat feature).  Yes, I planned on later giving students the option of having Google Doc conferences during workshop time, but I had not figured it was something they would just begin doing on their own.  Clearly, they were ahead of me.  So, I decided to just get out of the way, watch, and learn.

In the writing workshop sessions that followed it became clear that Google Docs was opening spaces for writing in my classroom that I didn't know existed. Spaces, that I wasn't aware of until I saw students carve them out before me:

• Jacob, Luis, and Cody shared a common interest in wanting to write science fiction.  While in different  writing groups, each invited the other to their Doc where they were drafting the next piece.  During class workshop time, each had three documents open.  Each spent the majority of the time working on his own writing, but would also pop in and out of the chat side bar of the others' Docs asking for help or a response to part of their writing.  The three would chat briefly about the part under consideration, then move back to work in their own Doc, every so often checking in on each other to see how their stories were progressing. 
• After it was received well by the class at our Friday Open Mic, David decided to create a sequel to the first part of his sci-fi piece.  Josh, inspired by David's piece, decided to write the sequel as well, but from the perspective of a different character. Each invited the other to their drafts, and collaborated
• Isaac, wanting to get new ideas for his writing, whispered to Jhonny, asking him to send an invite to his draft.  Jhonny did, and while Jhonny continued to revise his writing, Isaac chatted with him about parts of it that he liked and ideas it was giving him for his next piece. 

Above are highlighted a few specific examples of how students adapted the features of Google Docs to meet their needs as writers. In each case, I didn't instruct students to confer or collaborate.  They just did.  They recognized the need, were aware of the value that collaboration had on their writing, and used the tools and space afforded to them to carry it out.

I feel it's important for me to point out the the examples I shared above were not the exception to how writing was being done in my classroom.  After having now used Google Docs in my classroom writing workshop for three weeks, frequent collaboration while writing has become the norm.  It has become increasingly difficult to draw the line between writing time and collaboration time.  And this collaboration, which seemed to be taking place at any given time between pairs and groups of writers, looked different in each case, dependant upon on the needs of the writer.
In just this short period of time, with Docs in the mix, I've seen a significant change in my students writing and identities as writers.  Not only are they coming to see themselves as writers on an extent to which I had never before seen, but they are also developing an appreciation and understand of the writing process and  the nature of writing that I had not considered possible with 8th graders.

This is the most engaged and creative group of writers that has ever been inside my classroom walls.
I say this every year, and I always mean it.
Writing is going well, and there are a number of variables that explain why. The workshop model is part of it, my students are part of it, my teaching is part of it, and the technology is part of it.  I'm sure that there is a really interesting explanation in the intersection of it all.   But with respect to the technology,  specifically Docs, I'm pretty sure that the difference is being made in the space the technology creates.

Google Docs creates a space where writers can move seamlessly and more effectively through the steps of writing.  Regardless of how it often gets taught, as straight-forward and rigid, the process that real writers use is anything but linear.  With Docs being cloud based, students can write whenever they are inspired on whatever device they have with them.  With the collaborative features, students can give and receive feedback quickly and quietly (which is pretty important when 30 students are writing in a classroom) at any given time, as well as write collaboratively.  And with the ability to access past revisions, it's easier to try out different approaches and take risks in writing without fear of irreversible damage.

The space of Docs is also highly conducive to the development of new and better ideas for writers. It is a space where ideas can move as quickly (or slowly) as they need to, collide with other ideas, and give rise to new ones.  It is a space that is a catalyst for creativity and innovation. It's one that affords opportunities not possible in physical space alone, and one that fits in pretty well with the digital and physical elements present in our workshop already: daybooks and blogs, conversations with me and between students, and mini-lessons and mentor texts. 

Adding this new layer to our workshop has redefined the act of writing for my students.  It's changed me, too.  I've noticed that I've developed a new awareness of and appreciation for my both the workshop model and my role as a teacher of writing.  I'm pretty sure that I haven't seen all of what is possible through Google Docs in the few weeks we have been using it, but I've seen enough to know that it's a place significant enough to be permanent.  And I also know that my students, so long as they are allowed to take the lead, will gladly continue to carve out new possibilities for composing and collaborating within the space of our Digital Writing Workshop.

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

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)

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.  

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Say Something 2.0 (beta)

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:

1.    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).
2. 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. 
3. While we read the story together, all computers were left closed.
4. 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.
5. 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

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!

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.