Bud the Teacher

    Well, due in part to the excitement I’ve felt in the classroom this week, and also in part because I did receive lots of positive feedback on last week’s podcast, I’ve decided to give this another stab.  This week’s podcast is an opportunity to share a bit about my blogging class and what I’m learning so far. 

Links from this week’s podcast:
* Hipteacher’s Xanga comment
* Will’s reaction to Myspace.com
* Bloglines

    Today begins my experiment with blogging in the classroom.  At 3:00 p.m. Mountain, I will hold the first session of my blogfolio course.  In the course, I’ll be experimenting with blogs and blogging and wikis and related technologies.  I’m pretty excited and nervous to see what we can accomplish.  I’ll post more on the first day and my plans for the coming weeks; wish me luck! 

       When I first started this blog, I challenged myself to eventually put a podcast together.  I spent a lot of time figuring out how to do it, technically, but then I drifted on to some other things.  But now I’m back to the podcasting. 
        It took a while.  I needed a little bit of equipment and a big dose of courage.  The more I listened to the really great educational podcasts out there, the more nervous I got.  But a challenge is a challenge.  So, like Jim, I’m taking the podcasting plunge.  We’ll see if I can tread water.
        Here is my first podcast, a brief thoughtstream on identity, anonymity and blogs.  I’ve written about this topic before, but I liked having the opportunity to talk my way through the issue. 
        I sure hope that you do. 

        I added a rough draft of a document that I am building to distribute to students on how to get started blogging to the blogging resources wiki that I have setup.  If you are interested, have a resource to share, or want some feedback on or to workshop something you are creating, come and join the conversation.  I’ve learned a great deal about wikis just through the last couple of days — they’re pretty handy tools.  As always, there’s more to learn, but this work has already been fascinating. 

    This week we’re giving our state test, the CSAP, to the students at my school.  It’s going pretty well — the students, for the most part, are taking the test seriously, as they care about our school and what the test scores can mean for the program.  But something  happened yesterday that really made me frustrated with this sort of assessment. 
    One of my students, a nice young man who has only been with us for a little while, raised his hand during a writing test.  I walked over and he whispered to me, "Can I use a dictionary?"
    The language arts teacher inside of me smiled with glee — here was a student seeking to use a tool to improve his writing.  Hooray!  Questions like his are the ones that start conversations that lead to increased knowledge.  Teachable moments, some call them. 
    Except yesterday wasn’t about teaching.  Yesterday was about taking a test.  Teaching and learning and standardized tests don’t often sit down together at the dinner table of the real world. 
     The CSAP, as standardized tests go, is not a bad test.  But it is a test where you’re not allowed to use resources like the dictionary or a thesaurus.  Or ask the teacher to spell a word for you.  Or read something you wrote out loud to see if it makes sense to a colleague or a classmate.  Or any of a number of tools and strategies that I teach my students and that real people actually use in the standardized testing-free world that exists outside the realm of the public schools. 
    Standardizing a testing experience, like standardizing an educational one, takes away many of the dynamic and social elements of schooling and learning and being in a community of learners.  These tests are artificial assessments — and that’s frustrating. 
    I understand the value of a test score (which isn’t near as valuable as many legislators seem to believe that it is).  Testing can and does provide us with some information about our students that is handy to have.  But I also understand that yesterday, a student who is growing as a writer and a thinker asked to use a dictionary, something that I had never heard him ask to do before.  It was a simple request that should have been immediately granted.  Shouldn’t we be encouraging dictionaries and other tools for learning?  Where on the test is asking for help or reaching out to a new tool honored? 

"I’m sorry, but dictionaries are not allowed.
"Oh."

    I don’t want to make too big a deal about this, but what kind of language arts teacher denies a kid a dictionary?

    The sample policy wiki has been up now for several hours, and I’ve gotten some feedback on access to it.  I’m removing the password protections on the site so that it’s truly open for all to edit and work with.  I’ll keep it that way, hopefully, forever, but I can always go back and add that layer if necessary later. 
    I’d love it if you’d stop by and offer your ideas, feedback, suggestions, etc.  We’re starting from ground zero here — and I think it’ll be lots of fun.  Here’s a post that explains what this is all about.
    Also, just a quick mention — This week’s Education Carnival is up and running — make sure you stop by and check it out.

    Well, based on the almost immediate responses I got from my musing this afternoon, I have gone ahead and created a workshop space for any interested collaborator to play around in/with.  Thanks to the fine folks at JotSpot, I was able to put together a really, really rough wiki setup in a very short time.  Mostly, it’s a convoluted brainstorm at the moment, but over the next couple of days, with your help, perhaps we can create a policy together that I can use in my district and, hopefully, others can use in theirs.  At the very least, I will be learning a great deal about the practical applications of wikis.  I hope you’ll learn something, too.
    If you’re interested in checking out the collaborative wiki, then point your browser here.  The login information is available here. 
    Thank you in advance.  It is beyond exciting to even think about an opportunity to share ideas with those of you here in the edublogosphere. 

    What if I were to put a sample blogging acceptable use policy on a wiki and ask the kind folks out there in the blogosphere to help me cobble something together?  Would anyone play along?  Or does everyone else already have this stuff figured out, and I’m the only one who doesn’t yet?

    Almost forgot to tell you one thing about my conference experience.  During one of my sessions, I was talking about how great it was to have a discussion board as a place where students could go to talk about literature.  I said something like "I think that we need to create more opportunities for students to talk to one another." 
    With that, I just explained why I’m so fascinated by educational technologies right now.  They’re not about geekiness (although some of my teacher friends are beginning to consider that I am, or have been for quite some time, a geek).  They’re about opportunity.  A place to think and learn together.  Something much more fun than learning alone.  And, a great deal more authentic than writing for a teacher. 
    Anyway, just a reminder to myself that I like that line of thinking — I’m not covering content, I’m creating opportunities for interaction.      

    Jim is a kind and faithful reader, and he works to provide blogs to teachers in his area.  (Check out what he’s doing here.)  To my recent mention of attending the CLAS Conference, he comments:

I’d be interested in hearing what you think is a successful
conference for you. I think if I find one new thing I can use in my
professional life and can use it for several years, the conference is
successful. The second thing I look for is did I meet someone I can
work with or partner with in the future. The third is did someone make
me think about what I do in a new way. So networking, concepts, and
practical use are three things that make a conference successful for me.

 

Your opinion? I’ll be interested to see what you write when you get back.

Jim’s list of what makes a conference successful is a list that I can agree with.  I’d add one more.  His comment is a great way to kick off my report on what I learned and was thinking about this weekend.  The conference was a successful one — here are the highlights:
 
    I attended a session on art in the classroom conducted by a colleague of mine from the writing project.  Her session reminded me of the power of drawing and painting in the language arts classroom.  So many of my students respond to the world through their artwork — and I can barely scribble a stick figure.  Her session was helpful as a way to think about some ways to put artwork back into my classes. 
    Another session I attended was by Brannon Hertel and Ed Walsh, two teachers who are team planning for multiple reasons.  Their session was about some strategies that you can use to help maximize time efficiency, something that I could certainly use help with.  One tool that they use in their classroom is SchoolNotes.com, a free resource that they use to share lesson plans with their students and parents.  That’s a handy tool, and I like that they are planning a week out so that their students know that if they miss class, there’s somewhere they can go to begin catching up (or, in some cases, to get ahead.)  Their work shows another advantage of being more transparent in our practice, as I’ve been reading about here in the blogosphere.
    Transparency in practice seems more and more important to me, and it can be as simple as placing some lesson plans on the Internet.  (Of course, putting grades out there is an entirely different issue — one worth discussing later.) 
    Both of my sessions went well.  Both dealt with collaboration, which seemed to be a theme of this year’s conference for me.  The session on my work with a middle school teacher and the collaboration between our students in an online discussion board went exceptionally well.  The attendees were very interested in what we were doing and, more importantly, had some good suggestions and feedback for us.  At the end of the session, I mentioned blogging and I could see the increase in interest.  I think next year I’ll do a session on blogging — I don’t feel like I have that much knowledge yet — but I can help folks get started.
    The conference was definitely a success for me.  I did learn a thing or two, discovered some avenues for future partnerships, and reaffirmed that my current collaborations should continue.  Most importantly, I left excited about what it is that I do — teaching.    I feel inspired and excited to return to my school and hunker down for the last quarter of the year.  That might be the main reason for attending a spring conference — to be inspired and recharged.
    Barry Lane, a writer in Vermont, was one of the keynote speakers.  He spoke about needing humor in the classroom, and how real humor is humor that doesn’t tear people down.  One thing he said, and I don’t know if it was his idea or not, was that one "does not need to blow out others’ candles to make their own shine brighter."  I liked that approach very much.    I also liked a song that he performed about a teacher that made a difference for him — there’s a video of him performing it here.  I won’t lie — he made me cry.  But it also fired me up to get back to work. 
    So, too, did my attendance at the Celebration of Young Writers, an event held to honor the winners of various writing contests affiliated with CLAS.  I helped with this year’s High School Writing Contest, and it was a joy and an honor to hear the work of the amazing young writers in attendance. 
    Inspiration is what our students need.  But we need it, too.  That’s why I attend conferences — to learn, to collaborate, to discover, and to be inspired.  Jim, did I answer your question?