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What we've learned so far this year about blogging
it takes careful, deliberate planning.
despite my best intentions meeting twice a week with struggling writers for a digital photography class, there never seemed enough time to move our drafts in google docs to youth voices Gmail - Re: Teachers Teaching Teachers 01.10.07 - Google Notebook
mail.google.com/mail/?fs=1&tf=1&view=cv&search=all... This school year has been an interesting one in which I have been trying to
experiment more with podcasting my students' voices, through a Youth Radio project (http://youthradio.wordpress.com/) that connects my students with others around the country and through our own classroom Weblog site (http://blogs.writingproject.org/oh/). My aim has been to find ways to showcase my students' writing in different formats, to see how audio and video might intersect with writing for them. Mostly, my students have been game for anything and they are excited when they hear their voices over the Internet or see one of our small movie projects being published on the Web. They are coming to view their work as something to be shared with an audience beyond our classroom and school walls. I would like to see our Youth Radio project really emerge as something more than it is right now, which is a collection of voices, and find ways to integrate all of the schools into some single composition that unites them in a tangible way. But I know that we are all at different technology levels and that our curriculum is not in sync, so my vision is not quite reality. Kevin Hodgson Western Massachusetts Writing Project Sixth Grade teacher Southampton, Massac Start writing in docs.google and edit and write again and only then move to post it to the blog, otherwise working in docs first always seems like an extra step. - Susan Ettenheim
I've been fortunate enough to have had students blogging for three years now. And with each year, my suspicions about our student's technological savvy is confimed. I don't need to be deliberate or overly organized to get my students blogging. All I've done is to provide the resources (the internet and the computer) and a topic...and off they go. Students are originally reluctant, but as relationships are forged, writing fears dwindle; and the level of writing has always improved. This year is no different. Students are still their own best editors; they don't want to sound "dumb", so they are more careful, and more open to soliciting help for others. And our motto, "you are your writing" resounds with each entry they post.- Bob LeVin
The learning curve for most of these tools is fairly steep, and when you first start working with students on these tools it can seem like your identity as a teacher of a given discipline is slipping away. Kids feel like they're just "learning computer" stuff. They ask (rightly): "Why are we doing this?" It's easier to do things the old way.
So ... we have to be clear about what the benefits of this other approach are and how those benefits are worth the cost of learning the new tools. This has to be clear for ourselves, and clearly expressed to students, parents, and administrators. Before less-interested teachers will join this "tech movement," I think two things have to happen. 1) The benefit has to be explained clearly so they can see how the benefit is worth the cost. 2) The "pioneers" in this field need to create some clear, step-by-step "starter" assignments that other teachers can use to take students (and themselves) into this "other" world. - Eric Hoefler I have discovered that beginning the class each day with a journal entry allows students to reflect on previous blogs. They look forward to adding some of those reflections to the stream of ideas going on in the elgg. A super highway of writing with a real person behind the scenes. What have others written, what are the topics right now, how can my blog entry add to that highway and not cause disjointed exits and entries? As the teacher, I have learned to encourage this thinking and how to give them an enriched environment to really focus on their writing. ~Lee Ann Baber
Thoughts about next semester
i'm looking to create a blogging environment for my two sections of my globalization class. this environment will include the use of a varies of web tools to track news feeds, notes as well as reflections. i'm also hoping we can join up with other students who might be studying similar topics.
my challenges will be working hard to keep indiviusual work diverse enoguh between the two classes to prevent 50 struggling writers who are all too accustomed to copying and pasting and writing very little from simiply copying from one another. Gmail - Re: Teachers Teaching Teachers 01.10.07 - Google Notebook
mail.google.com/mail/?fs=1&tf=1&view=cv&search=all... In terms of what is ahead, we are about to launch a pretty significant Kevin Hodgson Western Massachusetts Writing Project Sixth Grade teacher Southampton, Massachusetts Two issues to check - are all the parts connected and are they in the right order... the parts being the lessons that make up the day to day work in the elgg. Just getting them into the curriculum isn't enough. I'm building an order for next semester that makes sense, for instance, open a Google Reader account, subscribe to some feeds and then see first hand the power of rss feeds instead of just talking about the feed of the blog after you are blogging. - Susan Ettenheim
My big plans relate to students reading blogs, finding blogs they are interested about, and writing regularly about the specific posts that sparked their interest/thinking. This is connected to my plans to build blogging as a way into research. Notes and ideas from the last session apply here ... lots of great ideas from other people in that session.
- Eric Hoefler I hope to put my kids into the google docs this year. I want to encourage putting in snippets, cite sources, pictures, and producing multimedia projects to share and define what they are writing. I also hope to have students become very active in their interactive notetaking so they can share audio, video and text information about their core class subjects through the elgg. ~Lee Ann Baber
Why we tell stories
What’s in a Story?How successful we are in transforming education is dependent on the stories we tell. The Vikings may have discovered the New World; but it was Columbus that brought back the stories that stirred imaginations in the courts of Europe. Centuries later, it was the stories of endless, fertile lands lying unclaimed in the mid-west that spurred a westward migration. Later still, stories of gold chunks shimmering in shallow streams pushed many men even farther west. What are the educational technology stories that are resonating in America today? Powerful stories can change the world. When I was a teenager I watched on television as Martin Luther King spoke from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. He told the story of the equality of man. The “I Have a Dream Speech” described a world that did not yet exist. Its prose was so beautiful, the ideals so uplifting, and the delivery so passionate, that it touched something in my soul. Even as a teenager I wanted to help create the world it described so eloquently. So what is your story? If we had a few minutes in an elevator and we were shooting the breeze, or you were standing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, what story would you tell about educational technology in your district?
When you tell the story, is it with conviction? Do the listeners see that you believe it so deeply that you are ready to sacrifice yourself to achieve it? Or are they listening to good ideas that may go nowhere? Transformative narratives can’t be phony. They have to be real because listeners know intuitively whether a story is just words; and when it is alive and filled with possibility. Stories aren’t just the domain of charismatic speakers. Our gifts may not lie in oration or in writing; but we can inspire others with our actions, for they also tell a story. If our actions are oriented to the operational details, the technology itself, or our personal gain; that story is public to all. If we hold a larger story in our hearts that will also be heard by all. Nicholas Negroponte has created the One Laptop Per Child initiative. The story, if told from a technology point of view; is of a low end laptop for children in Third World countries. Nice; but not much juice there. When the story is told from a larger perspective; Negroponte is changing the world by unleashing the potential of every child on earth. He is providing them with the means to learn, commmunicate, and create no matter their econimic or social conditions. A little more juice in that. Given time, we could keep refining the story until the words accurately reflected a vision that we could feel deep within ourselves. A story we could support and to which we could commit. Some of us have crafted a great educational technology story but it isn’t resonating with people. Look to see if the story is “in your head” or coming from your heart. When you have the right story and it is delivered from the right place, the results can be remarkable. The reality is that we are our stories. We don’t tell stories; we live them. If we live them with conviction, they will come to life in our actions and through our gifts. It’s our story. We live it every day. Will it have meaning and impact, or will it be a small story that is ignored by those around us? It’s our choice. What story do you want to tell? pete This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 9th, 2007 at 5:45 pm and is filed under inspiration, learning, teachers, leadership, educational technology, decision making, transformation, leadership development, k-12 education, executive coaching, ed tech planning. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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