Bud the Teacher

    So I often ask my journalism students to read the newspaper in class.  I like newspapers better than books about newspapers, and, frankly, I think the students that I work with could stand to read as much as possible as often as possible.  Okay — all students could stand to do that.  All people, too.
   How could the ever be a problem?  Well, one of my more tech-savvy students began sharing articles from Fark with us one day.  I was excited and ecstatic.  Fark is a site that complies links to the weird and scary news of the day — all stuff that will hook reluctant readers.  I thought it was great and began putting Fark up on the school’s SMARTBoard, searching and reading the best of the weird with my students in class.
    Until I discovered that Fark is occasionally a site that posts links to cute naked people.  Oops.  Can a public school teacher, charged to defend the public good and uphold standards of decency (and keep my job) use a website with such potentially problematic links?
    My school district does have an Internet filter, so the smut can’t get through — or theoretically, it can’t — but can I use the site?  Can I acknowledge its existence?  Can I read from it during class?  Ask my students to? 
    Or should I just pretend that such places don’t exist in my sphere of influence, like so many other teachers out there, and deny a potentially useful resource to my students?
    Help?

UPDATE:  Let me be clear.  I am not advocating for using the website and others like it as core classroom texts with high school students.  What I am asking is this:  Is it okay to acknowledge such sites and to discuss them with students that are already using them?  Can I recommend, with disclaimers, such sites to some students?  I can see arguments on both sides of this. 

    It took all of five minutes to find several places online that offer podcasting tutorials or resources for newbies like me.  That’s good news — the only problem now is this:  who do I trust?

   Found a site by Gary S. Stager that looks pretty interesting.  Chock full of podcasting resources.  My favorite so far?  Audacity, an open source audio recorder.  I used to use a similar program when I worked at a radio station.  It only took a few minutes to figure out that:
            1.  I’m going to need a better microphone, but I can record right now off of my laptop’s built-in.
            2.  This is actually far easier than I thought.  Wow. 
   Off to have some fun . . .

    If you accept that blogging does have lots of potentials in the classroom, it doesn’t take very much to get you to see that podcasting has the same, if not more, potential for students.  When I think about posdcasting, I am thinking about the studnet production of short regular podcasts.  From a pedological perspective, podcasting is alluring for many, many reasons.  But one of the biggest is that I, and every student I have ever had, is scared to death of speech class.
    Can’t podcasting replace the traditional speech classroom as a way for students to both learn how to organize and present information?  I can see students using many, many different "show" formats and presentation styles to produce podcasts that will be authentic — real people will hear and be interested in them. 
    Some of my students, I suspect, will find podcasts like the Sound of the Day interesting and novel.  They’ll want to figure out their own little fun presentations.  That’s fine by me — they’ll have to learn a great deal in the process.  Others will probably want to be the next Adam Curry.

Either way, they’ll be preparing and presenting actual content, content far more interesting than the typical "Argumentative Speech."    They will have to consider their audiences and make decisions that honor those considerations.  Also, they just might begin a conversation with those audiences — which doesn’t always happen at the end of the school day after a student’s "Abortion is Bad" persuasive speech. 
    Again, it all comes back to students participating in real conversations with the real world.  Simple in concept — realistic in application?
    I hope so.  Help me figure it out. 

    So. 

    Now that I’m here in this space, I think it makes sense to declare, both for you and for me, just why I think these new technologies belong in the high school English/language arts classroom.  This post will focus on blogging — the next on podcasting.  I am squeezing these posts in between Saturday chores and baby care. 

    Why blogging?  Because I teach writing to struggling writers.  I want them to approach their writing knowing a few basic things:

1.  They are writing for a real audience.

            At school, students are often writing to the teacher to prove to the teacher that they are learning something.  But what, except how to write to a teacher, are they learning?  Is writing to the teacher a skill that is useful outside of school?  Really? 
            Not in my life.  And, heck, I work in a school.
            Isn’t it more realistic to teach writing by having students engage in writing to a real audience? Yes, I think so.  In fact, that’s why I have taught journalism.  The school newspaper at least creates a school-wide audience that students can write to — which is better than that silly old audience of one.   
            Blogging ups the ante.  By posting online, my students would be writing to the entire world, in theory — about as big an audience as one can get.  And what better audience than everyone and no one at the same time? 

        2.  No writing exists in a vacuum.  Texts are connected.

           Students, and lots of adults, for that matter, don’t seem to understand that texts relate to one another.  The letters to the editor in today’s paper relate to yesterday’s newspaper articles.  (Yes, overly simplistic, but a good place to show a concrete text to text connection.)  The novels written today speak to the novels written in the early 20th Century.  Sylvia Plath relates to Anne Bradstreet.  Kurt Vonnegut has a job because H.G. Wells came first.  You get my point. 
            The convention of hyperlinking text in blog posts is a very concrete way of demonstrating to students how texts speak to one another.  Better still, if students are creating their own blogs with hyperlinks, they’ll be forced to think differently about how texts talk to each other.  I can’t really ask them to do this type of thinking on a piece of loose-leaf paper with a number 2 pencil.

3.  Students today need to understand computers.

             I work  with students who may not have computers in their homes.  But they’ll be looking for jobs in a world where computers are more and more commonplace.  Even the freaking cash-register at McDonald’s has more computing power than the computers I used when I was a kid playing with LOGO Turtles.    I need a way to break my students’ fear of computers, and get them up to speed to navigate in the techno world.  But I don’t want them to simply be consumers of technology — I want them to be producers, to control their own small portion of the Inkernet. 

  More on this later — there are leftovers to heat and a baby to feed.  Interested in your thoughts.