Bud the Teacher

    Spent a good chunk of our first quarter putting together a website for our new and improved student newspaper.  The paper will be formally unveiled on Wednesday, but enough students and others know about it already that I don’t feel bad sharing it with you.  Enjoy.  Share your thoughts.  We’re just getting started — but I’m pretty impressed with their work so far. 
    I have a whole new class of student journalists (five of them) this quarter, and we’ll be continuing to improve the site, adding pictures and, hopefully, creating a community of writing for our school.      A note about student safety:  All of the writers are using screennames, and all of our student sources are only identified by first name and last initial.  How do you cite student sources in your online publications?

Casey was one of my students my first year of teaching.  I always learned more from her than she from me.  Today was no exception.  In response to a rather lengthy and angsty moment of doubt, she commented:

I think I know how you feel. It can be difficult to continue what we do
when we let our fears become too great. I’m a generally shy person to
begin with, so it can be doubly difficult for me. The issues I struggle
to educate others on can be very frustrating at times. I’ve had mixed
receptions, but enough lack of understanding or willingness to learn
that I wonder if it’s worth it. But fights were never won by giving up
and hiding. I just keep reminding myself that. Nothing will change,
expand, or get better if people shut up.

The lines are so good, they’re worth repeating:

But fights were never won by giving up
and hiding. I just keep reminding myself that. Nothing will change,
expand, or get better if people shut up.

Back to work.  Pardon the interruption.

    Do you ever get nervous and consider abandoning any form of public writing whatsoever?  Does the fear and nervousness over what others might say about what you have to say get you all wrapped up and twisted and debating whether or not it was ever worth it in the first place?  Do you ever fear that the censors, either the ones in our own heads or the ones lurking out there somewhere, just might win?
    I do; it does, and I do.
    How about you? 

    Customer service like this is why I’m sticking with Typepad as my blogging service, even though I successfully installed Wordpress a couple of months back:

Over the next week you should see significant improvement in
performance as we get extra equipment on line and finish moving data
off of heavily loaded servers. By the end of the move we will have five
times the bandwidth we had before, as well as hundreds of thousands of
dollars of new equipment, and room and power to add more equipment as
needed.

We apologize for the poor service you’ve experienced over the past
couple of weeks, and also for the lack of official communication on
Mena’s Corner or Everything TypePad. At the same time, I know that an
apology sounds hollow until we’ve fixed these issues and the service is
stable once again.

We’re going to do a better job of giving you updates on our status
as we work to improve the service. Thank you for your loyalty, and
we’re working very hard to earn back your trust.

    I’ve been enjoying the Edtechtalk podcasts for a few weeks now, ever since I stumbled on to them quite by accident.  My favorites are the brainstorms, where different crews of folks get together to shoot the proverbial breeze about the tech and projects that they are working on.  The shows have no set agenda, and the hosts are very good at letting everyone into the conversation.  Pretty much everyone is welcome, very reflective and conversational — an awful lot like this blog.
    Thursday night, I had the pleasure of joining in on the conversation.  What great fun, and how cool to do, via Skype, a conversation with other educators from all over the place.
    I learned a lot.  Hope I didn’t overstay my welcome.  Oh — as a bonus, I was doing a search for one of my favorite podcasters and discovered that the guys from Edtechtalk did an interview with him back in May.  The podcast is very informative if you’re interesting in the history of radio and where podcasting might be going.

Open Source will be doing an episode this week on graphic novels.  Should be good — they’ve got a great lineup of guests, as always.

    I’m working on a presentation on technology integration I’m giving for a group of language arts methods students tomorrow.  As I was putting together a section on the definition of technology, I noticed that Wikipedia’s article on technology is pretty thorough, except that the word "education" doesn’t appear.  Once.
    Anyone want to take a swing at it?

    I wish I’d had this experience in elementary school.

    A regular helping of podcast Shakespeare.  Very cool.

 Derrall works with elementary students and has been thinking about recent publications about blogs in the mainstream media (Go, Clarence!).  I have been, too, as we’re wrapping up a quarter and I have some student work that we’d like to publish and a new portal through which to do it.  (I’m not sharing a link yet because I’m awaiting administrative approval on one minor issue on which I’ll post later.)

    He wrote a post today discussing the dilemma between letting kids publish and making sure they’re "ready" before they do.  He writes that he’s:

Locked in this quandary of being the freedom seeking, enlightened
classroom facilitator, and the hunched over, anal, cackling dictator
smashing down rulers on the hands of students . . .

I know how he feels.  I want my students to be judged on the quality of their ideas, but I know that some readers, like this one, will judge them on their semi-colon usage.  That’s a risk of publishing with students that Jim has mentioned before (several months ago, in fact):

One of my fears about students publishing on-line is that the public
will judge struggling writers and outstanding writers the same. I
afraid that community members will be critical of writing errors or
writing skills when a struggling writer publishes a piece of writing
that is their best at that time. I hope we can all put away our red
pencils long enough to value the struggle to become a writer. It takes
brave teachers to open their classroom doors and share what their
students are doing.

  Anyway, Derrall  mentions an idea that is a real gem:

Perhaps what is needed is for students to have essentially two parts
to their weblogs. One part would be for sharing their writing with
invited students to read and comment, and the second part would be for
the publishing of work for a larger audience (parents, teachers, world)
to read.

  His words are tickling the part of my brain that says I’ve heard someone else thinking along those lines lately — are there tools that we can use to do this already?  To set up multiple levels of view-ability?  I’ve been playing with Drupal and am thinking that we can do that with a student’s blog there by only allowing registered users to view.   Of course, I’m using Drupal right now to take a look at posts before they go public, but I’m thinking, like Derrall, that maybe students should have multiple levels of publishing  available to them that don’t necessarily involve teacher approval as the only step.  They already do in LiveJournal, where they can make posts available to friends only.  Why not in the good and academic software?
    It seems essential to me that if we want to create strong writers, then our students need tools that allow them to collaborate through drafts in a simple format.  How cool would it be if a student could share a blog post with four or five trusted readers(students, cyber-mentors, parents, or what have you), get feedback, make changes, and then publish the post to the Internet, all using one system and without necessarily involving the teacher?  I think it’s the one system piece that would be tricky — but would make such writing and revision and workshopping more about the writing and less about the technology.  You can certainly do this sort of thing with e-mail right now — but you’ve got to leave time for formatting, transferring from one tool to the other, etc.  A one-stop shopping situation would improve the process.
    Is anybody doing this? 
    Thanks, Derrall, for getting me thinking again.  My blogging parts were getting stiff.