Glogging into the School Year with Mixed Media Poetry Projects

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

*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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Diigo for Digital Writing Reflection

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

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.

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

      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:

1.   Search the web for information on your topic
2.   Bookmark web pages that had information they found to be important AND
3.   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:

1. Use Diigo to bookmark, highlight, and annotate web pages
2. Use your learning to inform writing pieces that you publish on your blog.
3. Submit at least one published blog post every two weeks
4. 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.

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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.