A Piece of My Mind

Photo Credit: Behrooz Nobakht

Today, someone posted a question on a list serve I subscribe to. Being a longtime literacy teacher, it struck a cord with me. I’d love to hear your thoughts on both the question posed and my reply.

Her query:

We have a teacher who just started a literature circles blog where her 5th graders will discuss various novels. She mentioned that she is in the process of figuring out how to edit (correct) what they have written before she posts their comments. What do you all think about this? She has encouraged her students – and stated in the rules for the blog – that they are to use correct spelling, capitalization, and punctuation. If they do not, should the teacher make corrections before she publishes their comments? I’d appreciate any input that you can offer. Thanks.

My response:

Like Miguel, I’m a literacy teacher (but I’m not old ). I have extensive training in both New Jersey Writing and National Writing Project. I’ve studied just about every aspect of the writing process you can. While I can care less about state tests, I recall maybe one failure in the 7th grade writing test in my classes over a 10+ years at that the middle school.

All of that to say this: mistakes are an important part of the writing (learning) process. If we cannot let our kids make mistakes safely and learn from them, then we are not doing it correctly. Yes, spelling, grammar, and punctuation are important. No, they should not be the deciding factor between publishing or not. Mini lessons are meant to help in these such events. How do you fix the errors unless the kids recognize them themselves and buy-in to fixing them. 

Agreed, we do not publish the street lingo stuff (unless it directly pertains to the final product for a reason, see this for example: http://sites.google.com/site/bchscivics/unit/2-3-birth-of-a-nation/john-adams—4 ).

Consider that textbook companies publish and sell (with your tax dollars footing the bill) textbooks that are loaded with mistakes. They make it a multi-billion dollar industry. We teach our kids from mistake laden books.

So, remind your teacher that it is okay to let the “kids run with scissors” (credit to Gretchen Bernabei on the quote). Our students publish all of the time. The great thing about a blog is that it allows for editing. We all love to think we are perfect the first time, but we’re not. If it is a genuine effort to reach the publishing stage, then we publish. Anything less is cheating the child out of a learning experience.

Quick anecdote. One of the first collaborative literacy tools we used in class was a wiki. The kids grouped up and studied certain topics to present to the class via the wiki. I subscribed to the wiki so that I would know what was happening on it. One Saturday night, my email box begins loading up with “edit” emails. Someone was messing around on the wiki and changing things left and right. My first thought was a kid was thinking they could mess stuff up without getting caught. So, I went to the wiki to check it all out. It ended up being an Asian ESL student who was correcting spelling and such for my American students…ON A SATURDAY NIGHT. You cannot get them to do it on command, but they’ll do it if they OWN it. He owned it. He realized the errors in the group’s work. He edited it. We all learned from it (including the students who had their work corrected).

So, let them run with scissors.

Feel free to correct, chastise, or educate me.

Slide Credit: Dr. Helen Barrett
I have had several inquiries as to how my poster session went that was centered on using free online tools (Web 2.0) in creating, organizing, and maintaining electronic portfolios for staff and students. Well, in a word, great! I thoroughly enjoyed the opportunity to speak with so many others trying to do the same thing we are. While I am in a better situation than most due to a technology department and curriculum department that plays VERY well together, we still have our struggles. Training is one of them. There is so much to building effective eportfolios that one person relatively new to the concept cannot learn and regurgitate it all back to staff in a productive way.

Thankfully, someone I admire for her knowledge and ability to share and teach stepped up to my session. Dr. Helen Barrett appeared in the corner of my booth. Fortunately, I saw her arrive and noted to everyone there that she was THE one to talk to about all things eportfolios. Anything I have to share about eportfolios would pale in comparison to this wonderfully read and prepared professor.  Another awesome piece of luck was that my curriculum director walked up behind me about the same time. I put the two of them together quickly to schedule some training in our district. If/When we are lucky enough to get Dr. Barrett in White Oak, our staff and students will never be the same again. We will be fully on track to creating portable archives of learning and teaching that all should be proud of. Exporting the eportfolio from the Wordpress blog right to a flash drive will be a common happening for our students in the near future to allow them to take their representative work with them to college interviews, job interviews, competitions, etc. 

Another piece of luck came along when I ran into Sue Waters from Edublogs. After a lengthy conversation with Sue in the Blogger’s Cafe, my chief of technology and I decided it was time to move our entire WPMU blogging system to Edublogs Campus Ultimate where it will get the care and support it deserves. James Farmer, Sue Waters, and company will do more to keep up our system than we ever could. We know that this will now be the Cadillac version of our goals that we have wanted and needed all along. I have already noticed an unprecedented increase in speed in initial loading and navigating within and between blogs. Thank you, Edublogs! Our staff and students are going to be overjoyed when they log back in.

Photo Credit: AJC1 (Hartnell-Young, E. et al. (2007) Impact study of e-portfolios on learning partners.)
Another advantage for me in the move to Edublogs Campus Ultimate is the ability to batch create blogs and users. This was a headache when our system was at SiteGround because having a class or two of kids hitting the server at the same time never ended with anything but timeouts and 404 errors. It was what pushed us into seeking out a better host of our system. Considering we went from a Gig of traffic a month to over a Gig a day by the end of the year, we had to do something proactive before it all crashed down around us. You can go read for yourself all the benefits of making the move to Edublogs Campus Ultimate, but I can see this relationship being a very good one for all of us in White Oak ISD.

Stay tuned as we ramp up our electronic portfolio process with training by Dr. Helen Barrett and implementation by our staff and students this school year.

I have a tab opened in my Firefox browser that I have not been able to close for several weeks because it keeps drawing me back to it. I figured I would post it here for my teachers to see as well in the hope that it will allow them to stop and ponder at the same time. The list is “20 Uses for Our Classroom Blog,” and it comes from Sheryl Forsman via Miguel Guhlin in San Antonio ISD. Thanks to you both. It is a great list that gives both wonderful ideas for immediate use and the opportunity to extend to newer ones.

20 Uses for Our Classroom Blog

Why did we create a classroom blog and how will we use it?
1. document our growth across the year
2. inform families of what we are doing
3. expand our audience
4. collaborate with other first grade bloggers
5. use another form of writing
6. learn about writing for an audience
7. learn about digital literacy
8. document favorite events of this year
9. integrate writing with other subjects
10. write book reviews
11. write journal entries
12. respond to class assignments
13. free choice writing
14. develop keyboard skills
15. communicate with each other
16. collaborate with reading buddies from other classrooms
17. collaborate with teachers from the university as blogging buddies
18.post pictures of our work
19. learn about visual literacy through the design of our pages
20. to have fun!

Now maybe I can finally close that tab.

Nope. That’s not my title. It is the title of a site by Mark Warner (picked up via Kevin Jarrett). This is a great site to visit when you are trying to find ideas for instruction to engage your students.

Mark has done a nice job of categorizing the ideas by either subject area (core and elective areas) or possible Web 2.0 tool that you are considering using. He has also provided nice, shared Google Presentations to walk you through them. Each slide is an idea. This makes it easy to just keep adding more as they come in.

If you don’t find exactly what you are looking for, there are enough ideas there to inspire something new in your mind. Then you can go back and share your idea with him so it can be added and maybe help the next person looking. That is what the collaborative web is all about.

Visit Ideas to Inspire today. In the meantime, consider these science ideas:

For the last few years, one of the items I had on my list of things to do was to get published in a national publication. While it was on the list, I had not spent a lot of time focusing on achieving it. Besides, I was too busy blogging.

Well, it seems as though blogging was what I should have been doing. Back in May I got an email from one of the editors at ISTE’s publication Learning & Leading with Technology. She had read some of my blog posts and was interested in publishing one of my posts in the magazine. Needless to say, I agreed. Woot! Above is a photo of the page in all of its half-page glory. Feel free to read the original post HERE.

Since Learning & Leading is an international magazine and not just a national one, I guess I get bonus points for that goal. Sweet.  Another goal accomplished. What’s next on the list? (No sarcastic comments on that rhetorical question Tim Holt, Miguel Guhlin, Paul R. Wood, Brian Grenier, Kyle Stevens, Dean Shareski, Mike Gras, ……..)

Note to my teachers: See. Blogging has added benefits. Imagine what your kiddos would do with a little notice of their writing outside your classroom. Just imagine.

Photo Credit: scragz

My wife and I are very fortunate to have such a wonderful second grade teacher for our son this year. She, Mrs. Richeson,  finds great ways to bring the parents into the classroom via technology. We have had the chance to watch our son retell stories through readers theater video podcasts. Now, she stretches their writing abilities and has them share them with everyone in audio podcasts.

During our parent conference the other day, my wife (a 6th grade language arts teacher) commented how she was not sure how Mrs. Richeson was able to do all of the things she does getting the recordings made and posted. She just smiled and said it was no big deal with the MacBook. As the instructional technologist for the district, it was a good confirmation for me that we are headed in the right direction with the right tools. I taught first grade myself. Everything extra is a big deal. To hear her share how easy she found it was affirming. 

First, a little background to my son’s story. La Cucaracha is “cockroach” in Spanish.  He has loved that Spanish word ever since he heard Phillips, Craig, and Dean in concert in Tyler.  They had a children’s CD that he wanted. Needless to say, the song about the bug is his favorite.  So, according to his teacher, Christian took a long time to write his story. She wondered what was slowing him up, but she also was glad that he was writing. A lot. It wasn’t until the end of the story being recorded that it all made sense. He was writing a story around a song with the internal goal of getting the song into the story as the closing and it make sense.  Pretty high level, if I do say so myself.  Yes, I’m proud of him.  So have a listen to his creation. Make sure you hang in there long enough to hear him sing in the end. About a roach.  

Listen to the podcast of the story “The Rock Boy” by Christian.

One of my favorite literacy lessons with kids is exploding their writing. I tell them that if they want it to pop with the reader, they have to explode it. Telescopic Text is a great example of that. This one little website does a nice job of turning a three word sentence into a story worth hearing. It is a wonderful visual for the kids to see up on the projector. Keep clicking on the grayed out words to see just how far you can blow that baby up.

Consider letting them start this in a Google Doc or a wiki and watch it grow.

Paul R. Wood at the historic Rutt’s Hut in Clifton, New Jersey

From the Flickr site:

The key goals of The Commons on Flickr are to firstly show you hidden treasures in the world’s public photography archives, and secondly to show how your input and knowledge can help make these collections even richer.

You’re invited to help describe the photographs you discover in The Commons on Flickr, either by adding tags or leaving comments.*

You are going to find photos from some really awesome resources. How about:

• Powerhouse Museum Collection
• Smithsonian Institution
• The Library of Congress
• Brooklyn Museum
• George Eastman House
• Bibliothèque de Toulouse

Flickr invites you to be a part of the experience by adding descriptions to images that you are familiar with. Some photos that have previously been listed with no information have had the back stories filled in by either the person in the picture or family members who were familiar with the history of the photo. This could prove valuable to those studying writing, art, history, humanities, or geography. I am sure there are many more content ties than that.

In case you are wondering what the above pic has to do with this post, only two people would know the back story (and a colorful one it is) about this image shot at the world famous Rutt’s Hut. An 80 year old historic location like that wants the stories to live on. Flickr is allowing just that through the photo history offerings from these museums. We should take advantage of the first person narratives many of them offer. I would say many or all of them would make for great story starters for young writers who are stuck or just like the challenge of creating their own back stories.

Having used wikis with my middle school students, I can say the transition is not a difficult one. They enjoy the opportunity to use technology, but they really appreciate the opportunity to work on a document from anywhere with the help of others regardless of being together or separate.

I remember a recent project. I specifically told this curious bunch of students I had in certain class that I was subscribed to the wiki via RSS and received all updates and changes. Furthermore, the wiki would tell me who changed what and when and also allow me to revert to previous versions. Anyone caught defacing others pages would be using School 1.0 to get his or her project finished. I had not seen any issues with the wiki through the first week, so I thought I was home free and the world was a happy place (my world anyway).

Then late Saturday night happened. I started getting notifications hand over fist about edits occurring on one certain site. Instead of looking at the changes in the feed window, I quickly navigated over to the wiki to shut down access to whatever terrible thing was taking apart one of my group’s hard work. I knew the offender had logged in with a student ID, and I was sure to confront him/her about it on Monday. So, I get to the wiki and start looking around the pages being reported as edited. Nothing. They looked fine to me. I could not see the difference from what I would have expected at this point.

So I went into the history to see what the kid was up to. And then it hit me. Editing. He was editing. This ESL, only in the country three years, never talks in class, speaks broken English kid was editing the work of his peers (one of which was one of my top students). He cared enough about his group’s work and its appearance to the public that he wanted it right. Were all of his corrections accurate? No. But most were, and he was doing English VOLUNTARILY on a SATURDAY night. That is what wikis and collaborative work is all about. I shut my machine down to go to bed knowing that my work had been a success. Even if he was the only one who chose to go the extra mile, he CHOSE to do it. That made it all worth it.

My students used the wiki to aide each other in weak areas. They found missing parts in their own work and asked others to help them by adding to it. Some took the initiative, others did not. But they all favored the Web 2.0 version over the School 1.0.

Online collaborative word processing sites (wikis, Google Docs, etc) allow people to share and mold and create and recreate information and ideas. It is an awesome opportunity. These people may never meet, but their ideas will. Their intellect will collide and combine in a virtual environment that will change the real world. This is powerful. Our students deserve to at least learn how to harness this power on a local basis, because after high school they will run into it on a global basis.

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