for all those files to transfer, I thought I’d elaborate on what I’m thinking about in regards to creating a school social network, or at least one that I might use in my classes. Basically, everything that I think about right now as a teacher passes through the lens of me being a language arts teacher who needs to expose his students to as many authentic reading and writing activities as I possibly can, while struggling to meet the requirements of my state standards, benchmarks, and standardized test questions.
They need to read, read, read and write, write, write. I’ve got to help my students master grammar, vocabulary, and all of the detail parts of writing, too. But mostly, I’ve got to create literate students out of people who, for one reason or another, have not had success in previous schools. And I’ve got to do that in nine week chunks with very little continuity from quarter to quarter, as students are constantly coming and going from our program for a multitude of legitimate and, occasionally, quite bogus reasons.
Can a social network, centered around reading and writing, help me to do that?
Well, maybe. What if there was a member of our network (and by "our" here I’m referring to the students currently enrolled in my classes) named "Word of the Day" or "Wordsmith." (I really wish her name was "NYTimes.com Word of the Day," but she doesn’t have an RSS feed.) If every student read the posts from "Word of the Day," and wrote their own posts discussing the word or how it’s used or even writing about how it’s not a word they’ll ever need to know, then I’m accomplishing two things:
1. My students are being exposed to some new vocabulary.
2. They’re writing about the words, which is one of the best ways that I know of to put a word into your active vocabulary — actually use it. (Of course, I’m also using technology as a shoehorn to integrate some more traditional vocabulary instruction into my teaching — which might be a good thing, and it might not be.
Maybe it’s late at night, and maybe I’m reaching here, but I’m just beginning to explore this idea some — I’d sure be eager to hear your responses. Another thought — isn’t a book club a community of readers who are reading and discussing the same book? So within our network, our book clubs can co-exist — with their conversations being accessible to the entire class when and if necessary. And everything comes to me, the teacher, who is often simply a more experienced member of the learning community. And the software will/can/should reflect that.
Am I heading out into LaLaland? Are you already using a social network to build a community of learners?
My wheels are turning. I hope for good reason.
Sounds good to me Bud! I’m following your thinking on creating these social networks. There has to be ways to use it. The EdBloggerNews site that Will Richardson set up to follow Edbloggers in a digg like format got me thinking of setting up a site like that for my students. Not only could students write on their blog, but then they could vote for who they thought had the most in-depth, thought provoking writing and promote that to the top of the list. Just another way to make these social-networks flourish. You can read my Lala post here:
http://jeff.scofer.com/thinkingstick/?p=269
Hello, Bud,
One way to accomplish this exact goal using Elgg:
1. Create a “Word of the Day” community.
2. One person in the class is assigned the responsibility of creating an initial post that gives the word of the day — this could be a standard word/part of speech/definition/sentence structure, or something as simple as a hyperlink to the definition.
3. At a specified time during the class, students respond to the word, either with their own blog post or as comments on the original post. I like doing an exercise like this to start a class, as I’ve found it helps focus students on the start of class.
4. Every two weeks (or so), instead of getting a new word, students write a flash fiction assignment incorporating all the words from the last two weeks.
Over time, this will generate some good work with vocabulary, and with students being exposed to the words in different contexts.
Cheers,
Bill
I think you’re definitely onto something really good. I love your idea of the book club discussion. In my social studies class I want to give students the opportunity to read a book like Amistad when we are talking about slavery, and yet I don’t have all the time I need in class to do this. Having a wiki discussion group, or forum or someother social network opportunity, the students could have some meaningful dialogue with each other. I’m just getting started in all of this conversation of learning/Web2.0, please write/link about what you end up doing.
by the way, I followed your link. Great wiki for how you are doing blogging in your classroom.
Bud, I like your intent here; vocabulary is clearly important to reading and writing. Your approach, however, has some inherent limitations:
1) Even if you use three links, the students are still only learning three words a day.
2) The words may be completely irrelevant; for example, the last two words at Wordsmith.org were bibliomancy and arithmancy. These are probably not the most useful words for your students to acquire.
3) The words may be already known to some of your students, in which case, the lesson may be of little value.
If you’re really trying to “shoehorn” technology into the project, another approach would be to create a database (it could be as simple as an Excel file) of vocabulary that is appropriately challenging to your audience. It would be trivial to use this database to create hyperlinks to related words, to a Google define: operation, to dictionary.reference.com, or to all of the above.
Students could build and maintain this database, augmenting it with definitions and usage samples as time allowed.
I’ve got a starter database of a few thousand words that I’ve created; if you want it, it’s yours.
Depending upon the maturity of your students’ reading levels, but you could set up a literature blog asking questions about setting, characters, themes, and conflicts.I had my students work in literature circles and also blog the answers to some similiar questions. The longer the project went on, the more indepth the comments to each other’s blogs became. “Read/Write web”
Thanks for the feedback, y’all. Lots of interesting points, specifically from Brad. Brad, I’m not sure that I even want to do this, was mostly thinking out loud — although if I did, your approach of building a database is probably a good way to go.
I don’t think students will “learn” three words a day — probably, they’ll see four or five a week and will retain those that they use. One concern I have, like you, is that I don’t see a really super database of words — the right words, words that others have found to be the “essentials” that exists online in a way that would be importable into an online school community. If you’re offering your database, perhaps that’s a place to start. I don’t really know that I want my students to be spending lots of time with database management, though. I was simply thinking about ways to expose them to new words on a regular basis in a way that might engage them.
Still thinking.