Bud the Teacher

I read banned books

Originally uploaded by Bud the Teacher

I wonder if there’s a button with the slogan “I surf an unfiltered Internet,” or “I read filtered blogs.” Maybe “I read blocked blogs,” is better - more alliterative.

Along another line, perhaps a button with the message “I’d trust my kids in Al Upton’s classroom,” would be a good slogan, too.
Any graphic artists out there? I’ll buy in bulk.

    Mary asked a question the other day that I thought was worth pulling into a main post.  She wrote:

Bud (and others), how do you envision students using CoverItLive for anything related to citizen journalism?
-Mary

I replied:

Mary,

What a great question. I’ve got a longer post that I’d like to write about how we might start thinking about student citizen journalism, but I think it makes almost immediate sense to descend upon a city or school district meeting with a few computers. The teacher can moderate and students can post about the meeting taking place. Later on, the video of the meeting can be combined with the transcript to make for an excellent reflective opportunity.

I think tools like these are perfect for citizen journalists - students or otherwise.

Your turn. Is that a good idea?  Do you promote student citizen journalism in your classes?  If so, what do you do? If not, why not?

It was about a year ago that I wrote a piece for English Journal on teaching “blogging” vs. “writing with blogs” that was pretty much a re-hash of some blog posts that I thought were saying something. The trouble is, I wasn’t sure what they were saying. I’ve been fumbling at this one for a while.

I’ve always found something particularly special about writing online, or at least I’ve learned that there’re more options, more possibilities, and plenty of challenges that make writing online much more complicated than cutting and pasting a Word file into a text box and hitting “submit.”

But most folks that I see beginning to use digital writing spaces aren’t treating them any differently. And I can’t quite figure out why. I also can’t quite figure out how to articulate the differences, even though I think I get some, if not several, of them. And if I can’t articulate them, perhaps I can’t teach them. (Not sure about that, actually - but work with me.)

I think one good way to articulate some of the differences is to tell you a story. Here goes.

Tonight, I’m sitting in a local cafe, enjoying a cup of wicked sweet coffee and some tunes. As I wrote that last sentence, and added the links in, I wondered how you would read it. Are you someone who clicks on any link you see in a blog post? Or are you more like me? I use a browser that shows me the URL of the link I’m pointing to, saving me the trouble of traveling here if, after reading the URL, I see that I don’t need to follow the link, perhaps because I already know the site, or I don’t want to go to the site, because I’m worried about pop-ups, or a virus, or something that I don’t actually want to see. I love that browser, except when it leaks memory.

I could continue, but I think (hope) I’m making my point. I could have written that paragraph without the links - but I would’ve need an awful lot more details to tell you as much as I did with the links. And you each will have worked your way through that paragraph differently. Some of you read and clicked and fiddled. Others of you read differently. (Oh - and here’s a minor nit - but how many of you, in that last sentence, read, ahem, “read” in the past tense? Present tense? Language is hard. But anyway.)

I don’t know what my students do/did when they see blocks of text with links. And I’m 98 percent sure that there wasn’t another teacher in my school who was thinking about how to explain that to students, much less about how they read that text themselves.

Digital texts have the potential to make a big, juicy mess of a linear experience. Or to turn a so-so piece of writing into a masterful collection of references, linktributions, and pointers to other good stuff. My hunch, a rough one, but one I’ve held for a while, is that reading and writing that way makes you (ultimately) a better reader and writer. I just don’t really think I know how to teach that way yet, or at least, I don’t know how to teach other people to think about teaching that way.

Will Richardson asked me recently (well, it was two weeks ago - but that counts as recent if you forgive me the week I spent sick. And I do.) about connective writing, and what a course on it might look like. I blame him for the frustrated typing that I’m up to right now. And the posts that I suspect are forthcoming. (And I’m thankful, too. I needed a push.)

What would such a course look like? What would it cover? How would it differ from a “regular” (I know - bogus term.) 9th or 10th grade high school writing course? How would it be the same? (Why wait until high school? I’ve been thinking through blogs as science or inquiry notebooks at the elementary school level.) What happens when we add video(s)? Pictures? Embedded widgets? I’ve got to believe that some analysis of what links do and how they do it would be a necessary piece of any such course. So, too, would be copious quoting and linking to others, building a network of classroom texts that would be added to the greater networks of the world.

I’d kill to teach that class.

Perhaps I’ve stumbled across another thesis idea. Again. Nuts.

_______
Postscript - I had thought that perhaps I’d dig into the research on hypertextual writing a bit before I started down this post. I know these ideas aren’t new. But I couldn’t help myself. I made it four pages into this fascinating article before I started writing. Worth a read, I think.

    Tomorrow, I’m going to begin working with the 7-year-old winner of an XO computer.  She won the computer in a drawing at our school district’s technology fair. We’ll be documenting her progress and our learning on a new blog.  But as I am getting ready to create her blog, and populate the sidebar with lots of good resources, I’m wondering who else is out there in Colorado using XO’s.  Know anyone?

UPDATE (2/16/08): The new blog’s up.  Come join us!

    About a week ago, Brian posted:

Paul Hamilton  left this comment on my last post:

This week, I did a workshop for
classroom teachers on using blogging in the classroom as one UDL
approach for ALL learners. There were questions about the quality of
posted student writing. So, here are my questions to you. Do you
approve and/or edit every student post? How much editing do you do? How
time consuming is the process? (I notice that you were working at it on
a Friday evening!) Do you have any related tips for teachers who are
holding back out of concerns in this area?

Since I’m not sure about the statute of limitations on blog responses, I’m going to answer now, as I was asked at the end of the post. 

    I’ve run blogs where I approve everything and others where my students had all the control of what got published and when.  I always approved material for our student newspaper (now defunct, sigh), in part because I wanted an opportunity to do revision and editing with each student, and in part because I thought the professional nature of the newspaper made sense for such controls.  When I taught speech via blogs, I was willing to let my students decide what they published and when.  We discussed appropriate behavior as well as that if they weren’t sure about whether or not to publish , they could certainly seek the advice of their fellow students or their teacher.  Since their blogs were more for reporting research than they were for formal presentation, I tended to cut the students some leeway when it came to the "rules."  If it was readable, and approaching formal English (or, if you prefer, "acceptable public voice,"), then I let it go. 
    In two years of blogging with students, I asked one student to change a piece, once, and even he agreed, after re-reading, that he shouldn’t have hit "publish" in the first place - but that he was frustrated when he made the post.
    The time involved with editing is much the same as with not editing.  I think it’s irresponsible for a teacher to require writing and then to not read that writing.  (I don’t mean read every word; teachers, though, should at least skim every post a student makes, for a number of reasons.)  So whether or not a teacher is editing prior to publication, or is reading after publication, the time factor is still there.  I would argue for making the time spent editing a student’s work with a student a learning experience, akin to a writing conference.
     The trick, when editing, is to help the writer to become a better writer - and not to mask their student voice with your own teacher voice.  I struggle with that one every time I work with a student in a conference. I don’t think we should edit every word or sentence for grammar and proper punctuation - but we should attend to egregious errors.  Your own judgment will help you to determine what "egregious" means for your students. 
    I hope this is helpful, even if it’s a bit late.  You asked a great set of questions, Paul.  Thanks, Brian, for allowing me to take a crack at them. 

    My friend and colleague Jason is beginning some new blogging work with his students.  You might be interested, particularly if you teach IB Theory of Knowledge.  (One great thing about the IB Diploma pPogramme is that all students must take an epistemology course.  I wish that everyone took a class about how we know what we know. Here’s more info on IB’s course.)  Here’s a bit of info:

I’m having the students each host the blog for a week in an attempt to
get them to record for me how people are responding on the blog. All of
my expectations, including my "Blog Log", are found here.

Now that my students are thinking, writing, and recording for me… it all begins.  Now we’ll just see where it takes me.

In other classroom blogging news…
In
2 weeks or so, a new TOK blog will be set up for an international
audience. Schools from Colorado, Chicago, Munich, Singapore, the UK,
and Equador will be talking to each other. I’m still in the process of
formalizing how that will look but I’ll post more info. when I know.

As a plus and an aside, here’s a teaching resource for one IB TOK teacher’s courses, an online community for IB students and graduates, as well as a weblog ring of IB students.  Interesting stuff.

    The district just north south of where I live and just south north of where I work is going to begin offering e-mail accounts to many of its students if a vote goes well at a board meeting tomorrow night.  That’s not a super big deal.  What is is the reason why they’re considering it:

The district’s Technology Advisory committee members recommended the accounts so that students in middle and high schools could “communicate and collaborate locally and globally, and participate in and contribute to learning communities through e-mail,” according to a report detailing the e-mail account plan.

Under the plan, students could create school-related online journals and blogs, design Web pages, work on projects in teacher-created Internet spaces and produce podcasts.

    Pretty cool, huh? 

    Ben shares a frustrating experience he’s having with a collaborative partnership torn asunder by parental concerns in a different state.  Lots to think about here, amidst the perceived parental overreaction, but I’m particularly interested in the comments from students on their collaborative wiki about the issue.  They’re frustrated — but are communicating, too, the value of their learning via wiki.  One comment in particular struck me as very astute:

Seriously, I never even got a chance to talk to them, and   
do you know why? Because I was working and learning and writing! What
does that tell you! That tells you that by them not being on here they
are being deprived of something they could have learned from. I just
hope whoever the parent is that called that attorney something
knows how much they have affected.  And that they have deprived an entire class of kids of some of the learning they needed!

Another student is a bit more practical about the situation:

.  .  .  we can still use wikimail and make our own wikispace.

    Hmm.  After school wiki work?

Ben concludes his post with several excellent questions for moving forward:

The question I kept thinking about after reading this e-mail is,
“Who failed?” Was it the teacher who didn’t set up enough rules and
guidelines for the students that were written down? Was it the parent
who failed to work with the teacher and understand the nature of the
collaboration? Or, was it the students who couldn’t grasp the public
nature of the internet?

Because of one or a combination of these factors, these students are
being shut out of an avenue for self expression and learning. What can
we do so that this doesn’t happen to us?

    Head on over to his place and share your thoughts.

    I’m working with a teacher that would like to take his students online for a short time.   Quick.  And there’s a rule in place that he cannot expose his students’ e-mails to public scrutiny, presumably because the IT folks in his area don’t want students to be left open to strangers contacting them.  I’ll argue that point another day. 
    Most tools require a student have an e-mail to create an account for a blog.  But not all.  And those that do also don’t necessarily expose that e-mail to the world.  If you were me, what would you recommend?
    Seems like Blogger’s an option, as is Elgg.  So, too, is Moodle.  For that matter, what tools actually display an e-mail right up front?  Or don’t require one at all?  (I know Elgg’s a candidate here, too.)  Does Wordpress MU require all users to have an e-mail address, or can the administrator set folks up without?
    Your suggestions?

Good news from my hometown school district.  Jason writes:

I’m actually sitting at my computer at school writing this post.

My district FINALLY decided to unblock Blogger for educational purposes.  They used my TOK blog as
evidence for its usefulness and they finally agreed… so now you are
free as PSD teachers to utilize it in your classroom… and please do.
The more of us that stand up and show how we can properly use blogger
for students and teachers alike, the more likely that they will see it
as a step forward in our use of technology.

   Congratulations, Jason.  Well done.