Bud the Teacher

    On today’s podcast, I make a pun that isn’t really a pun while discussing the issue of teachers reading students’ personal online journals.  I’m curious to know what others think about the issue, so nicely framed by this post from Barbara Ganley.  Some say that teachers should stay away from students’ online spaces — I disagree.  Please let me know what you think, both on the issue and on the podcast. 

Links from the show:

• Barbara Ganley’s Post — Includes links to the anonymous blogger and lurking professor story
• Nancy @ Random Thoughts — The Iowa Xanga blocking incident

    Books Mentioned:

• Ways with Words by Shirley Brice Heath
• Just Girls: Hidden Literacies in Life and Junior High by Margaret J. Finders

    We’re fiddling with text and other media hosting over at our school’s blogging experiment.  Stop on by and give us a hand or take a look.  There are wikis to help create, after all!

    ACT Day is today in Colorado.  The test is given to all juniors in the state.  They haven’t yet invented a standardized measure of passion and enthusiasm.  Have they?

    Recently, Clarence over at Remote Access wrote:

I posted last week on the fact that a lot of teachers are writing and keeping blogs; which is great.

I also posted about how a lot of these blogs are not about teachers
at work in their classrooms. They are not blogs where teachers reflect
on their practice and use their blog as a tool to improve their
practice.

I have received a few emails since then from people in agreement with
me. To that end, I am looking to collect a list of teacher blogs that
are reflective; spaces where teachers write about their practices, and
attempt to improve.

Anyone with the address of a blog that matches this description, can
send it to me and we can begin a list of reflective practice blogs.

Send him your links, folks.  If you fit the bill, of course.  I’d be interested to see the list that develops.

    My blogging students and I got to work today on our portfolios.  The end goal is to create a school-wide electronic portfolio system.  We’re the pilot.  Before we could get too far, we had to figure out some basics — pretty essential stuff like where we will host stuff and how we will put the portfolios together.  If you’re interested in that discussion, it’s occurring over at my classroom blog.  Please feel free to chime in. 
    We’re compiling a collection of links on how and where to  host media over on our wiki — please feel free to join us there and add to the list.  Right now, a couple of us are going to start a new blog dedicated to portfolio entries, and the rest of us are going to host stuff in multiple places and use our current blogs to link to and reflect on our entries.  We’ll see which portfolio makes the most sense when we’ve got something put together.
    I know that there’s probably a really wonderful content management system out there somewhere that would be just perfect for hosting student portfolios.  There are a couple of fine educational technologists that I’ve asked to help me out in that area.  But I don’t have any money or a server of my own — so we’re going to push forward with the free resources on the web and see how much we can accomplish. 
    I think we’re going to be just fine — I am learning about some great places to host content, and my students know lots, too. 

    I’ve been wondering an awful lot about the educational uses of online journals.  This thinking has come from our recent foray into the blogging/journaling differences.
    It seems like online journals are getting a bad rap.    And perhaps while they don’t have a place within the content of my language arts classes, they may very well have an educational purpose or two.  Students, it seems, are willing to share an awful lot of themselves in their online journals, perhaps because the freedom of hiding behind an online "identity" is helpful.  Or maybe because sometimes it’s easier to "talk" to a keyboard than it is to talk to someone standing in the same room. 
    Such sharing, particularly from teenagers, has a great deal of value.  For multiple reasons. Nancy suggests that online journals, with their frightening posts, are worthy of study because: 

What I find disturbing is that the emphasis seems to be on limiting
students’ ability to read these "frightening" posts. I wonder what is
being done to try to get at the reason WHY
students are posting such things in the first place. Am I just out of
touch? Am I worrying about something that everyone else knows can’t be
solved?   If so, that is more frightening to me than the posts themselves.

Chris Lott mentions another reason when he writes:

If a student is just being exposed to the medium {of blogging}, they are like
students in their first creative writing class. I am less concerned
with what they are writing than with getting them to write, and to do so regularly.

Students new to blogging can use personal writing to familiarize themselves with the format.  That’s a good point.  But I think that there’s something more important that these journals can be useful for in schools.  But not all schools — only those schools that are interested in students   as human beings instead of products to be completed or vessels to be filled. 
    Can you imagine the power of a school counselor getting an update or status check on a hundred students via a single mouse click?  For those counselors willing to pay attention, and those students willing to share, online journals can be a valuable tool for assessing the well-being of students. 
    I’m thinking specifically here of a recent exchange between two of my blogging students in our weekly all-school meeting.  We have a section of that meeting devoted to sharing "I Appreciates" — moments of sharing positive things that that have occurred in the school community.  One student was thanking another because someone offered some reassuring words in a comment on his Xanga site.  Those words helped him get through the day — and they came from a student that he didn’t really know.   The community was strengthened via  Xanga.
    Of course, there are probably plenty of reasons why getting involved with the personal writing of students  is  problematic.  Here’s one.   I’m sure that you can think of more.
    Our students are making their writing public through these sites.  Instead of running from these journals and their "frightening" posts, let’s figure out how to work with them. 
    Right?

    The wiki for our Blogfolio course is now up and online.  There are only two pages so far — one for Student Blogging Rules and one for Student Blogging Questions.  Feel free to check out the pages and to add your ideas or comments.
    I was going to introduce a wiki in the classroom eventually, but David provided the perfect reason to do so when he said:

hey
bud we should start having a giant list that we can all enter and add
new rules and all they said was no last names and no saying the name of
our school and school apropiate correct.
i think that we need to
leave it open and flexable so that we can just deal with it when we
start to see problems instead of makeing them so defenite and trapping
ourselves in and it also allows us to be more open and have really cool
stuff going on without much boundaries except the necessary ones that
we have to set

    Sure sounded like a wiki to me.  Thanks, David.

    We were looking at wikis in Blogfolio today.  I finally had a chance to show somebody the Heavy Metal Umlaut video that I discovered in February.  The video, called a screencast by the author, Jon Udell, consists of audio played over a moving screenshot of someone else’s computer.  The short movie explains how a Wikipedia entry changes over time.  It’s a good intro to wikis.
    Movies like this are also a pretty handy way to do computer tutorials, as one can see and hear useful information at the same time. 
    Udell writes:

 

In the software world, we spend a lot of time describing how things work. To
echo Michael Kinsley’s lament about music and film, why should those
descriptions use only text, possibly augmented with screenshots? Why don’t we
present, and quote from, live experiences?

It’s way easier to do that than you might think. Tools that capture
screen video, along with voiceover, can produce compelling software
demonstrations. It’s true that many of these tools are commercial, but
some highly capable ones–including Windows Media Encoder–are free.

    I can see several uses for such technology here in my school.  Creating a screencast of how to create and use a Bloglines account would be nice.  So, too, would be a screencast showing interested individuals how to download, install and use a tool like iPodder.  How about a movie about how to use Blogger?  I’m sure you can think of other uses. 
    In this post, Udell has a screencast where he shows how to use Windows Media Encoder to make a screencast.  I don’t have time right now, but soon, I will be teaching myself how to do so.  Next up would be a good place to host those screencasts and a neat and tidy index that is user friendly.  There are services that sell this type of training, but why do we need to buy what we can make for free? (And can personalize for our unique contexts and preferences.)
    If you beat me to it, and you probably will, be sure to share your tips and ideas.
   

    Well, I promised that I would put up a link to my students’ blogs at the end of the school day today in a podcast and post on Wednesday.  But Will Richardson
beat me to it.  That’s actually much better — his curiosity led to
an afternoon of excitement for us as we read our words on his site.  His post is a reminder that we’re really out there
for people to see.  As I have told my students — people are watching. Do good work.
    I can think of no better introduction to my students’ and their new experiments than Will’s  Rather than reprint it here, go take a look .

    Today was a big day for my school blogging project.  Light bulbs went on as the students began to realize just what they were getting into.  More on that later.
    On Thursday, I’ll be sharing the URL’s of my students public blogs.  Until then, here’s a short podcast on how today’s class went and a breakthrough that we had yesterday.  Of course, you can read about some of what we discussed here.