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.

Most Recommended Student Blog Posts

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

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

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

Getting Ready for Social Justice LIVE

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

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

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

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

-Steve

Social Justice LIVE!

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

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

CLICK THIS LINK to go to the LiveBinder of resources.

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

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

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

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

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

DigiGogy: Social Justice LIVE!

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

Research Writing 101, 2.0!

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

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

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




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

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

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

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

A screenshot from a student's Diigo library

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

   Now seemed like a good time to cross that bridge.

   The Three Day Research Paper

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

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

   As for the creating the bibliography, this used to be an entire class period in itself, giving students handouts with the rules for writing source information in the proper format. I'm sure that there is value of knowing the basics of this format, but the last several years I've had my students use  Son of a Citation Machine or even the citation feature of Microsoft Word to do the work for them after they entered in the information on their sources.
   
    This week, the process became even more simplified as students created their bibliographies with the help of either Easybib or Bibme.  With these web tools, all students had to to was copy and paste the URLs of the sources they used, and the bibliography would be created for them in seconds (though not necessarily fully complete or correct).

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

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

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

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

But....

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

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

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

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

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

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

      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.