Bud the Teacher

        I don’t
know if I’ve just entered the blogging community at the right time or what, but
I sure am seeing lots of convergence between my ideas and what I’m reading
right now. Tom Hoffman is talking about a
school-wide blogging system – and that’s what I am looking for. Unfortunately, he says such a system really
isn’t in place – and might not be for quite some time.
        That’s a
real bummer, because I was hoping to find just such a system when I began this
little odyssey of mine. What I’ve found is slightly different.   
        The tools
are out there – those for creating easy, ad-free blogs, that is – as are free
content enhancement tools (sites like Furl
for storing and showing reading, Flickr for photos), but
I don’t know if there are tools that exist that are a total package – instead
of the piecemeal system that one could create if one wants to (and I do, which
is why I am here).   
        I don’t want
blogging to become an exercise in technology training. That’s why I was excited when I realized that
I didn’t need any HTML background to get a blog up and running. I don’t have any experience coding, and I
don’t have the time to learn right now – my job is to teach language arts, not
computers. Even though my students need those skills, my primary interest is in helping students work with information.  But if my students have to
take a large percentage of their blogging time to find ways to shoehorn these
various content management tools together, is that useful or will that be a
hurdle?  Or a roadblock?  (The optimist in me screams "Opportunity!" but he’s being beaten down today by reminders of past classroom failure.)
        I think
about students that don’t have computers at home, and don’t have hours upon
hours of time to devote to learning how they work. They need to be blogging, not setting up a blog (two very different
skills, I realize, thanks to Will’s gentle reminder).    

        I mentioned that I spent the weekend at a writing retreat.  At the retreat, a couple of my colleagues were curious about blogs and blogging, so I sent them here to take a look around.  I also mentioned that they could get up and blogging very easily by hitting sites like Blogger or Blog-City or LiveJournal.  I should have mentioned sites like this.  But I didn’t. 
        "Go to my blog," I told one colleague, "And I’ll post the links there for you." 
        So, Stan, there you are. 
       Now, I could have sent these links to Stan in an e-mail, but then I couldn’t have told you about the neat-o idea that Stan has (Only one of many neat-o ideas I’ve heard from the guy, which might be why he’s the co-director of the CSUWP.).  Stan is Stan McReynolds,  media specialist at Lincoln Junior High School in Fort Collins, Colorado.  He’s got some students traveling to Europe later this year.  He’s also got some iTalk microphones.  Stan put the two together and is now going to have his students record audio snippets of their trip on their iPods. 
        When he told me about his idea, I suggested that he should have the students blog from Europe to share their experiences as well as some of the audio they collect.  We talked, too about soundseeing tours, popularized by Adam Curry, and how his junior high students could record a tour or two, if they wished.  Flickr, the photo site that I am still experimenting with also came up.    These students, from an Internet cafe, can very quickly and easily update their families and other interested folks as they have their adventure.  Pretty cool travel journal, huh?

        I did a little recording of my own on the retreat.  Do you think there’s an audience for teachers reading their own written work?  That seems like a good educational podcast application if you ask me. 

        I spent my weekend with some of the fine folks from the Colorado State University Writing Project, affectionately known as the CSUWP.  We went up into the mountains on a writing retreat to enjoy some time together spent socializing and writing.  I took the opportunity to begin drafting  some of my thoughts about a blogging policy for my school district.  I also took some time to do some personal writing which had absolutely nothing to do with teaching.  That was a nice break.
        I also managed to develop a full blown cold.  Yuck.  Thankfully, I have Monday off so that I can recover and dig into some of the thinking that I read just before the weekend. 

        In the midst of Will Richardson’s last post, he mentions this one.  Tom Hoffman writes that blogging is in its adolescence.  In an earlier post here, I tried to speak to my frustrations about those bloggers writing as anonymous teachers online.  Hoffman said it better than I could.  He also says a great deal more in a very short space.  My brain’s still spinning.  Read his post. 

       Two days ago, I was blogging my understanding of blogs and what and how they can operate.  I have noticed that I write something like this every few days — I think partly because I get excited and the synapses begin to fire and I need a way to unload that excitement while I attempt to understand my thinking.  Actually, that’s one of the main reasons for this blog.
        Anyway, something I said caught the eye of Will Richardson and his response made a lot of sense — and sent my synapses firing all over again.   You should read his post before you attempt to read the rest of this one — it’ll be a whole lot easier on all of us. 
        I said: 

Student blogging provides a
showcase for their best work, a playground for working with new ideas,
and a place to collaborate with other students, teachers and schools.
The more I work with and discover about blogs, the more I realize that
they are an entirely new way of thinking — something like the Swiss
Army Knife of the Internet.  A student blogger could be a podcaster, an
artist, a political scientist, a technophile, a poet, a chemist or
whatever.  The blog is the management, not the content.

        Will writes:

To me, the true power and potential of Weblogs is the act that it
facilitates, the blogging, not the structure it provides. That is not
to say the structure isn’t a good thing. But it’s not the best thing,
and I guess I’m not seeing very many new people using it in that best
way. Barbara and Anne
win gold medals, and there are a handful of others out there who are
teaching kids the act of blogging that will serve them well into their
adult lives. But much of what I’m seeing from the teachers who are
starting to explore the tool goes the way of management, not content.

And:

But the one thing the blog allows me to do that I could not do easily
in my classroom before is to link, to connect ideas, to make
transparent my thinking about those ideas, and to have others link to
them and do the same. I’ve been down this road before, I know, many
times in fact. But it is the essential piece of Weblogs to me: blogs
allow me to create content in ways I could not before, not just
post what I could create otherwise in a different form. And in the
essence of that creation I use and learn all of those skills that will
serve me in my lifelong learning that were (I think) much more difficult for me to learn before:
close reading, critical thinking about information, clear and concise
writing for a real audience, editing, and reflection, all of it
understanding that whatever truth I may put forth will continue to be
negotiated by readers and more reading. This, by the very nature of the
process, develops reading, writing, information, collaboration and
computing literacies, literacies which I think most of us would agree
are going to be crucial in navigating what’s ahead.

And he’s exactly right, of course.  He’s stretching my brain — and hopefully, the brain of lots of other people.  See, I think that I need to lay out here several words and their definitions, as suggested by Will’s post, and I need to start using them in this way.  There is a "blog," a noun, which is what this space is called.  It’s composed of my links, my posts, the silly picture of me playing the guitar in the corner, etc.  The blog is the management tool that I’m thinking about and have previously discussed.
         There’s also "blogging" the verb, which is where I think Will’s mind is, and mine’s still catching up.  Blogging is that set of skills that he talks about.  It’s the reason why I want the students that I work with to use blogs — in the end.  But I don’t think that many of them will start with that skill.
        If I want my kids to begin blogging, they need to establish a blog, the space in which they can create and think, the thought lab that these spaces should be.  Then, as they get their feet wet in the blogosphere,  they can, with some instruction and some reading (okay, maybe lots of both) dig into blogging, the way of thinking.  By that way of thinking, it might be that many students create blogs, but never grasp blogging.  Of course, the same is true now of students in my writing classes.  They might complete a research paper, but never grasp that the texts they quoted are speaking to each other, just as the text the student writes is speaking back to them. 
        The blog, then is the scaffold, or perhaps even the actual Vygotskian Zone of Proximal Development, that can lead to blogging  (the set of thinking skills). 
        So, yes, for me, at least in these beginning stages, the blog will be the content management system, to some degree.  But the end product, I hope, will be the set of thinking and learning skills hiding inside "blogging."  Blogs are management, blogging is content.
         An example.  One of my main goals for using blogs with my students is the creation of an online portfolio of student work.  My students currently keeps portfolios in manila folders on teachers’ desks, and each quarter they write a reflective piece that explains why they are proud of their work and what they’ve learned from it.  Yes, some of this online portfolio will consist of students posting their previous schoolwork onto a blog.  But that’s really the first step.  I want the students to use the blog to record their reflections on their work over time.  I want them to use links to begin to point out how their different assignments and projects speak to one another.  I want them to discover what others have written or thought about the ideas they are working with and to include that information in their reflections.  I think that’s the blogging that Will is talking about, and it’s where I’m hoping to get to.  I just need the blogs to manage it all.
        This is all still draft thinking.  I’ll probably refine and/or change my mind several more times.  Actually, I’ll definitely do that.  The exciting thing is that this space exists for me to have this conversation. 

        This comes via engadget:

  We know that small-town libraries have shed their image as fusty repositories of moldering encyclopedias and are now
high-tech temples of e-learning, but we were still impressed to find out that at least one library has come up with a
novel way to get teens into libraries: put audiobooks onto iPod Shuffles. We have it on good word that the South
Huntington Public Library in Suffolk County, New York, is doing just that. They apparently have a handful of Shuffles,
pre-loaded with books, and are planning to add more. Given the ongoing
Shuffle shortage (even Apple’s online store has a
two-week delay on shipping them), we’re surprised that the library has any at all to share; let’s hope for their sake
that borrowers don’t “forget” to return them.

Somebody at that library is thinking.  One of my students came to school yesterday with a brand new iPod Shuffle.  How cool would it be if I had audio content that I could give to her to check out?  What if she were in one of my classes and was a struggling reader?  If I could just take her over to my computer and upload the audio version of the book we were reading, that would be really handy. 
        It might also be a violation of copyright — but it’d still be a great tool if I could get around that somehow.  Probably, someone out there already knows how.  If so, could you share that info?

        I’ve been corresponding (does one e-mail full of questions count as corresponding?  for our purposes here, it does) with Hipteacher, an anonymous teacher blogger.  She recently sent me some information about how she uses blogging with her students, and it was very helpful.  What was "dreamy" though, to borrow a phrase, was the following paragraph that she added to her reply when she decided to post said reply to her own blog:

I forgot to mention one long-term positive I recently had the
pleasure of experiencing. I helped Taiwanese Superhero set up a blog
and showed her some student blogs during an intensely boring meeting
before the school year started. She loved the medium right away and
started using blogs with both her general and remedial classes. All of
our 9th graders did their research "papers" on blogs. So this semester,
I got several of her students, and she got several of mine. The first
day we went in the lab to learn about blogs and get set up, her
students from last semester proudly proclaimed their expertise, showed
off their lengthy blog writing to the class and helped assist other
students with starting their blogs.

If every teacher used blogs, our kids could really have a kick-butt
record of their progress in writing and in high school. Maybe they
would continue to comment on the work of kids who aren’t in their
classes anymore. Maybe it could be common ground between teachers and
subjects. Maybe it could be dreamy.

 Her description of  blogging over several years and different teachers is exactly what I am hoping to do with the blogs at our school.  Here’s my basic idea, which I may or may not have posted here:  I’d like to give each student a blog when they enter high school.  They’ll be required to use the blog for some portfolio postings that the entire school will do (and which can be, using RSS, siphoned off onto a school portfolio page — something like an online student work showcase).  The students are also free to use the blogs for other uses — some personal, some perhaps suggested or required by their other teachers.  When the student leaves, we keep the blog active for a year or so and then we ask a hosting company, or perhaps even our school district, to take over the hosting of the blog, and at that point, maybe the student is charged a subscription fee, much like using Typepad or Hosted Manila.  The blog would then split off of the school hosted site and become a tool that a student can use in whatever new pursuit that they might have.  But, the blog could still be a link back to the high school — a virtual reunion waiting to happen the moment anyone hit "aggregate" on their aggregators. 
        Student blogging provides a showcase for their best work, a playground for working with new ideas, and a place to collaborate with other students, teachers and schools.  The more I work with and discover about blogs, the more I realize that they are an entirely new way of thinking — something like the Swiss Army Knife of the Internet.  A student blogger could be a podcaster, an artist, a political scientist, a technophile, a poet, a chemist or whatever.  The blog is the management, not the content.  Eureka!
        Dreamy, indeed. 

        I’m enjoying the day off today with family — although I’m using the day to catch up on a variety of projects — so it’s not really a day "off."  Oh well.
        Started the President’s Day holiday with two ex-presidents — George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton — they were talking about their tsunami tour.  I wish more politicians could sit down together like that — too bad a world tragedy had to occur for that to happen.
        I’m catching up on e-mail today, too.  Got some responses from some inquiries I made to teachers using blogs with student s– more on that to come.

        I added Future Tense, a short technology program, to my ipodder client the other day.  I’ve been enjoying the three minutes or so of tech news.  Monday’s edition of the show really caught my ear — so much so that I played it for some students at school yesterday.  Here’s the summary from the website:

 

A recent study of European school children found that students who
use computers extensively perform worse in math and reading.

The study, conducted by the CESifo economic research group in Munich,
contradicts some earlier work which suggests computers boost grades.
Critics of classroom tech say the new research does a better job of
controlling for demographic factors. Researchers took into account that
computer-using students tend to come from more affluent,
better-educated families, and those students tend to do better on tests.

The question this study immediately brings to mind is what were these students doing with computers?  If they were simply typing papers on them, then it makes perfect sense that there were no testing benefits.  A computer used simply as a typewriter is not much of a writing tool.  Nor is a computer used solely for web browsing — which far too many people — and some teachers — call "research."   
        This piece was an eye-opener, and a good reminder.  Since I’ve begun my career (only two and a half years ago, mind you), I have been certain that one of the keys to student achievement is access to technology.  Computers and the Internet are where our society is heading.  I know that students who are taught how to access, evaluate and analyze information from a variety of sources are going to be well prepared for life after school, whether they go on to college or they attend trade school or they jump right into the job market.  But sitting them down in front of a computer is not enough.  Their learning has to be focused.  This short radio program reminded me of that.

    Also, the show got me thinking again about what I do with computers in the classroom.  I’ve made some mistakes.  I remember thinking at one point that if only my students read a few good newspaper stories, they could write their own.  Of course, it’s not that simple.  I think that my curriculum involving computers is a solid one.  Mostly.   But you can bet I’m headed over to read that study to see what improvements I can make.  I’m also headed off to check out Thomas Oppenheimer’s book, The Flickering Mind: Saving Education from the False Promise of Technology.  Oppenheimer was the guest on the program.  More on what I discover later.

        I’ve been thinking about what a school district policy on blogs would look like — and what I might want to ensure does not end up in the policy.  One or two thoughts on this follow.
        One thing that I think is essential with students and blogging is that the students have an open forum for conversation and publishing their work.  The meat of blogging is the ability to express.  I do not think that we can offer blogging and then put a tight leash on what students can and cannot say.  Seems to me that blogs are more like student publications than they are school district websites.  But, if the school district owns the "press," then can the student still have those freedoms?
        The answer is, I think, that yes, they can have those freedoms, so long as the blogs are considered forums and not websites.  Such freedom to express and speak and define some maybe even most) of their content on a blog is essential. 
        But — that does not mean that a student blog can become a place where a kid can trash another kid, or make racially offensive comments, or threaten violence.  Either someone in the district needs to have the ability to delete blatantly offensive posts or all posts might need a place to filter through before getting published.  However, either idea strikes me as censorship.  There must be a third or a fourth option that I haven’t yet figured out.  There must be a way to balance the  rights of students and the responsibilities of the school district in such a way that everyone wins and the students don’t feel like they are only playing at publishing.   Maybe one way to do this is by allowing — or even downright assisting — students in the creation of personal blogs outside of the sphere of the school.  These personal blogs can be used for venting or other types of writing that could get tricky in school.  Teaching students when to talk/write one way and when to talk/write another is an important task — maybe multiple blogs is part of the answer. 
        On top of my concerns about "appropriateness" (I really, really hate that term, by the way — it seems an artificial way of approaching student expression), I worry, too, about student safety.  I think, though, that a little time spent in a classroom on how to protect yourself online can minimize this concern.   
        I am currently searching the web for school districts using blogs and any policy language that exists to regulate such activity.  If you know of any policies, or have any suggestions, feel free to drop me a line.