On the Edge?

What follows is my response to a teacher named Paul, who posted on the English Companion Ning, and expressed the feelings that he was "losing his edge" to teaching with technology, to students learning with technology.  As becomes obvious, he strikes with me a chord, a kindred sense of handling the need for clarity in what makes "21st century learning" relevant. Perhaps you, too, feel as if you are losing your edge, a bit out of touch, as Flip cams, document cams, PowerPoints and Prezis, blogs and wikis, netbooks and iPads join our worlds. If so, take heart.

You are not alone. And you're not out of touch. Just the reverse. You're ahead of the pack with regard to sensing the urgency of finding the right balance. Yes, education is embracing technology, at a somewhat slower pace than general culture even, and we need address the whole host of 21st century learning skills and knowledge (by which I mean 90% of what we've known education to be for past twenty centuries).

Keep those strategies of working with words on paper as well as texting on iPads, of looking into students eyes sans webcams, of asking students to talk with note cards as well as with a slide show, of reciting a poem with emotion and meaning in a circle, of improvising a scene of process drama to find out how people might get on in a real-world situation instead of a virtual gaming scenario, of drawing a map or illustrating a episode with paints as well as with video cams, of reading aloud and reading silently, sustained, and deeply, besides browsing a search and clicking through a web reference.

I try technology in my teaching as quickly as the next teacher. I'm chairing the "21st Century Learning Committee" in our K-12 district. I know I'm "perpetual beta." But, I as we move forward with technology, our students will be served with our humanity. Indeed, English class may be one of its last (and first!) reserves. In any case it never becomes irrelevant.

Perhaps you not losing your last edge as much as finding your next groove.

Image credit: "The Edge of My World." By Eye of Einstein. 21 Feb. 2008. Flickr.

Wallisher: Student Response in a Jiffy

Although it seems to have been around for a few years, I just discovered Wallwisher.com this past week and put it to the test in my English classroom with happy results.

Wallwisher allows you to create a wall (a.k.a. webpage that takes stickynotes by the click of a mouse). Students need not register or login, so you can do this on the fly. Set up your wall with a title, subtitle (maybe a special instruction or focus prompt), graphic, and pick a color design. Name its URL extension and you are ready to have your students point their browsers to it. You may also designate whether comments will be moderated or not (recommended).

It's soooo easy! No need to register students or fuss with passwords.

Since students don't register, they need to type in their names (we use first names and last initials only). Of course, their might be some unwanted guests and students could pose as each other, so I moderated comments. They still have the thrill of seeing their posts immediately, but no one else does until you approve. In addition to 160 character text posts, the stickies will also host images from the web, video, audio, and other media, making this an exciting way for students to collaborate, research, and share information. Conversely, you may embed your wall into a class website, wiki, or Facebook page.

My first go at it was as an asynchronous dialogue of questions and answers related to Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Take a peek here.

I look forward to trying it out when the students have each have a laptop and we can have in class responses to questions as a discussion starter.

After posting the above blog on the English Companion Ning I got plenty of other great tips from colleagues, such as:

• Brainstorming
• Student response
• Polling
• Reflection
• Feedback
• Presentation notes (only 160 characters!)
• Play scripting/Improvisation

The response from the English teachers has been enthusiastic. If you figure out other ways to use it, I'd be happy to hear.

Blended Schools: A Topsy-Turvy Mix of Real and Virtual

This year I am using blogs and wikis more and more not only for student interaction, but also for instructional delivery and presentation of assignments and activities.  As I look toward a blended schools model, I envision that much of what has been traditional homework may become classwork and vice versa.  Here's what I mean.

Where now I might present a slideshow in PowerPoint in class, soon students may view it on SlideShare as homework.  Where now I might assign a chapter of a novel to read as homework (with dwindling responses), I may require 40 minutes sustained silent reading in class and post a discussion in response to the reading on a blog for homework.

It sounds a bit topsy-turvy, but it will be based on students' needs.

I'm reflecting on recent studies by researchers at Stanford University, and anecdotal reports in the PBS Frontline documentary Digital Nation, that point out the needs of 21st century learners to not only work with technology, but also to abstain from it.  In a Digital Nation interview clip, Todd Oppeheimer, author of The Flickering Mind, (click here for a review) reminds us that the school is a sort of sanctuary from the busi-ness of the world and instant gratification of popular culture; rather the academy has always been  "a place of  discipline and perserverance," where holding a thought, not just scanning data is a valuable activity.

This past summer I studied at the University of Ghana at Legon. Although much more verdant and necessarily tropical in contrast to my other graduate school haunts of NYU's Washington Square or Oxford's Trinity College, I instantly felt that sense of the academy--that sense that I was in the company of scholars, walking about in converstations, hushed or exhuberant, on topics of intellectual importance.

Despite the arrival of cyber schooling, I believe for most students that a real, in-world place called school will have a vital role to play in learning, creating, and demonstrating a world of ideas long into the future. Although I know my students and I will be collaborating more and more in virtual spaces--and what's thought of as homework and classwork might get topsy-turvy, I also know  what schools can offer offline is irreplaceable.  Schools that genuinely blending the virtual, digital technology with thoughtful purpose will be able to offer that real, traditional sense of  belonging, focus, calm, and rigor that can only come at the discipline of school.

Image credit:  "Home Row." Detail. By Matt Hurst. 14 Oct. 2008. Uploaded 15 Mar. 2009. Flickr. Web. 3 Mar. 2010. Used by permission via Creative Commons Licensing.

The Vegas Principle

In the ever-changing world of the Web, there is one constant.  I call it the Vegas Principle:  What happens here, stays here.  Despite the public service announcements warning teens to "Think before you post" and my senior students not recalling a world without the Internet, I found this week that I needed to remind them of this simple principle. They may be digital natives, but yet do not know the lay of the land.

The lesson became very clear when I introduced students to Etherpad, a web-based word processor that allows people to work together in real-time simultaneously.  In hindsight my introduction was a poor one. I might have demonstrated all of the features of the site first, including the timeline feature that replays all of the versions and revisions--every keystroke participants make. Rather I went with the let's dive in method.

My plan was to have students type in their answers to their homework all at once and we could see them all projected on the interactive white board in the Etherpad.

Before I knew it a couple of students profaned the pad.  One girl, apparently not realizing that her text was going to be visible to the entire class typed "f*** this class."  And her friend across the room started with "m***** f*****." The next line was a lewd reference to male anatomy and appeared just as the projector bulb warmed up the screen.  A quick reprimand and the type disappeared--and not.

What students did not realize was that Etherpad was recording all of the keystrokes and who made what contributions every second.  Not wanting to encourage a replaying frenzy I left out instruction on this feature till I could see it for myself and divine who said what.

Disappointed to find my two honors girls used such language recklessly, but even more so to find these were the very first words they used with a technology of which they had no familiarity. I do not believe they meant any of what they said but was disturbed at the disregard for context. The next class got the pre-demonstration and I got no mishaps; rather I captured a new timeline to demonstrate the feature the next day, complete with lecture on my two-fold concerns: profanity and the archival nature of electronic data.

Sounding the alarm and warning that electronic media does not ever completely delete information, that it is likely to be found by others whom we might want to impress (referencing cautionary tales of grad school denials and job recruiters), and that as much as we must embrace technology, we must do so with our best selves.  "So if you can't imagine doing this with your mom, grandma, priest, employer, and future children (or the 'creepers' out there) looking over your shoulder and being proud, it's probably an indication that you ought not." I had the impression that such was some new information for these students. (Refer to the Ad Council for educational materials on "Think Before You Post": Bulletin Board, Everyone Knows Your Name.)

I continued in the mantles of both school master and literacy coach to question my students' use of profanity, to spend such low and practical words haphazardly as first utterances and with no good use.  I chastised them for the "mal-or" of their tongues and implored them to save such "gold" inherited from the Old English for a time and place that called up a worthy purpose.  This view took off some edge of my prudishness, as they considered my idea of saving such words for something apropos.

The lesson came home for the errant class, and especially for the recreant girls, who saw the other class' timeline play out every keystroke the next day. Whoops!

In retrospect, I'm glad we dove in and picked up an important lesson, more salient than the answers to the homework.

As for Etherpad?  It is a helpful tool in the classroom as designed.  Students can work simultaneously in a workspace and then convert their work into a printable, publishable document.  The timeline feature offers a record of process and notes who contributes what. The only downside is only sixteen users can contribute at a time.  And there is no delete button, per se; you can revert to a previous time, deleting all subsequent revisions. But this is all likely to improve as Google has purchased Etherpad with the intention of incorporating it into Google Wave. 

You just might want to have a talk about the Vegas principle pre-use.

Image credit: "Vegas Principle of the Web" created with ImageChef. "Etherpad Screenshot." By Charles Youngs. Creative Commons License: Non-commercial reuse allowed with attribution.

Respect, Kindess, and Empathy in Social Media

Can social-networking technology actually be social? I've worried, not just about anti-social behavior like bullying and ranting, but about people substituting face-to-face, or ear-to-ear, and hand-in-hand communication. Much is lost in the media.

Will the next generation be burrowed in their own niches, texting in syllables, with only like-minded fbfs--completely incable of geniune social skills?* No tubs of ice cream in this picture.

Yet I saw a glimmer of hope in the words of Himanshu Nigam, chief security officer at News Corp. and MySpace. In an article posted by Cnet, Nigam made the following points about the potential of social networking sites to promote certain social behaviors:

Post with respect: photos are a great way to share wonderful experiences. If you're posting a photo of you and your friends, put yourself in your friends' shoes and ask would your friends want that photo to be public to everyone. If yes, then you're uploading photos with respect.

Comment with kindness: compliments are like smiles, they're contagious. When you comment on a profile, share a kind word, others will too.

Update with empathy: sharing updates lets us tell people what we think. When you give an opinion on your status updates, show empathy towards your friends and help them see the world with understanding eyes.

So with lessons in media literacy can come lessons of social literacy. What an engaging and unsexpected arena to teach caring for ourselves and others! Conversations about fair, just, generous, and kind dealings naturally can be reasoned out as we teach our students how to best interact on the web. Alas, maybe with media can be geniunely social, even if the ice cream must be served separately.

_____________________

*fbfs - Facebook friends

Image credit: "Goat Milk Ice Cream." By Stu Spivak. 29 May 2007. Flickr. Licensed under Creative Commons: BY, SA.

Perpetual Beta: Does It Mean Mediocrity?

It's been quite a while now that I've resigned to the concept of perpetual beta, the idea that technological change is occuring so consitently and with such frequency that resistance if futile or at least frustrating to getting on with teaching and learning.

Though I can't resist rapid change, I wonder if I must resign myself to mediocrity. Working through problems--such as trying to get all of my students on our classroom wireless at one time, or logging on to an essential site for instruction only to find it is blocked by our school's filter or wracking my brain to remember the control "switches" between PC and Mac--and thus taking twice as long to get to the nugget of learning seems counterproductive.

It not limited to lack of competence in using all of the latest tools in the planned course. This month I've noticed systemic breakdowns in websites, rental car stores, retail chains, and don't get me started about my Sprint Instinct mobile phone. Companies and institutions gleefully brag about their twenty-somethings running the technology. Yes, what the geek squad can do is wonderful, but what "the kids" as Apple, calls these uber-underlings, all to often don't have is experience, people-to-people diplomacy, and a "customer is always" right mentality.

So I'm wondering if I am colluding with society that accepts a shoulder shrugged "system's down" excuse for how things are. I have been compelled to accept papers late because of the technical glitches ad nauseam at the nexus of student user and online paper submission system. My "dog ate it" has morphed into a parental note "please excuse this because our computer was not working last night." Hmmmmm. I think I liked the dog excuse better, for the lessons I'm afraid we are teaching our students as we "hang in there" till we're back online.

Image credit: Vingette of "Bulldog." By Pleple2000. June 2007. Wikimedia Commons. 25 Jan. 2009 <http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Buldog_angielski_000pl.jpg>.

Mapping English Skills in the New Millennium

The Partnership for 21st Century Skills has forged alliances with key national organizations that represent the core academic subjects, including Social Studies, English, Math, Science and Geography. As a result of these collaborations, the Partnership has developed this map to illustrate the intersection between 21st Century Skills and English. The maps will enable educators, administrators and policymakers to gain concrete examples of how 21st Century Skills can be integrated into core subjects.

As this map was announced earlier last week, Kylene Beers, president of the National Council of Teachers of English pointed out that the English map includes interdisciplinary themes, outcomes, and examples from best classroom practices when it comes to integrating 21st Century Skills.

Cross-cultural themes of this curriculum are:

Creativity & Innovation
Critical Thinking & Problem Solving
Communication
Collaboration
Information Literacy
Media Literacy
Information & Communication Technology (ICT) Literacy
Flexibility & Adaptability
Initiative & Self-Direction
Social & Cross-Cultural Skills
Productivity & Accountability
Leadership & Responsibility

Very exciting stuff as we see curricular revolution brought on by the contemporary technological advance that determines our disciplines work in tandem and in service to such life skills

At any rate this map will help we educators wrap our minds around what and how 21st Century skills might be best addressed, reassuring to progressive teachers and motivating to ones ready to get up to speed as we head to the first decade milestone of the millennium.

When Tech Works, It Works Wonders

My previous post was as close to a rant as I plan to get in this blog. Rants usually have an audience of one. Let me make amends, dear reader, by noting some of my wonder when it comes to technology working that pulls me through. I've had several parallel experiences of dealing with online technology-in-education; here I share three.

After six-to-eight hours of reloading my students usernames and passwords to our Edublogs-based blog and then getting my students in successfully, I'm reaping the rewards of the power of scholarly dialogue in our literary discussions. You can take a look for yourself at our English 12 Honors Blog (if you are reading this post within 6 months of its posting). These are great first attempts of students finding their ideas and their audience online. I'm most impressed by the quality not only of the posts but also the comments that go beyond "way to go!" and "I agree." Next I hope to see bloggers bring research and links into support and extend their findings and support their claims.

In addition, for the past few months to I've also been beta-testing an online writing, grammar and research program from Pearson Education. The product is called MyCompLab. It's a poweful, comprehensive web-based resource in grammar, writing, and research and features a dynamic, interactive, collaborative place for composition, peer-review, tutorial, and assessment. We've had some hurdles to surmount with such a rich and complex project. This summer the new MCL was launched and my colleagues and I have been trying to get started with the program, not without several hiccups. Nothing more frustrating than being ready to work in a writing center (after pulling favors and making deals with other teachers for the scheduled time) to not have the students be able to log in. "Okay, class back to the regular classroom!" But in the past week, obstacles flattened, it's been exciting to see students engaging with the media, each other, and me in this online environment.

A particular labor of love has been working with the education department of Carnegie Museum of Art, located in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, especially during the current exhibition of the 55th Carnegie International "Life on Mars" (now until January 2009). My pet project has been to help teachers with online resources for school visits to the museum, or virtual visits. Again, collaborating with web developers, IT departments, artists, curators, funders, and fellow educators can resemble a instructional technology tower of babel; we all have a common goal but speaking a variety of languages. Sometimes it seemed like that we had aliens-among-us, some sort of educational end users encountering technicians from a different world who we depend upon us launch us into the blogosphere. (I'm sure this resonates with many teachers and IT departments throughout the universe.) After more than a year in the making. the International's online complement is offering unprecedent resources to reach out to students, teachers, and the general public via the Web.

Not only is Carnegie Museum of Art inaugurating it's first blog for this exhibition, which celebrates the finest contemporary art from around the world, but also it has no fewer than five! Museum staff sends its Signals blog to an general public audience who can send back blog posts in Soundings. A group of teen interns offers Zero Gravity blog. Teachers share ideas for the classroom and the exhibition on Ideas & Updates blog. And finally, teachers and students can augment their school visits with private or public blogs devoted to their own school group.

With this many opportunities for writing and reading online in response to one of the world's most significant and historical art traditions--the Carnegie International--it's been worth sweating the details of how to tweak the tech to make it work. My students are gearing up for their visit later this month. We use school-museum visits to inspire narrative writing and other compositions. Stay tuned for their posts.

I invite teachers from around the world to virtually visit the Carnegie International and the works of forty of today's top artists, the "old Masters of Tomorrow," with their students. And if you are in the Western Pennsylvania region, plan a school visit. Leave your teaching suggestions in Ideas & Updates and create a classroom blog with your students via the Classroom Resources. They'll be sharing their ideas on the art of their age for audiences now and in the future.

You know the cliche about "teachers touch the future." Well, when it comes to instructional technology, it's great when the future taps you back.

Image: View from inside Richard Serra's cor-ten steel scupture Carnegie, located in front of the entrance to Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh. (cc) 2007 Charles Youngs. Some rights reserved: BY-NC-SA.

How Cool is That!

Pardon my youthful burst of enthusiasm but I'm at PBwiki Summer Camp for Educators. Blame it on the fact that as a kid I never when to real summer camp. Maybe it was a fear of mountain lions. Maybe a fear of three-legged races.

This is Week Two of PBwiki's six-week event and I haven't had the need for mosquito netting. You see, it's all virtual. About 1,000 teachers interested in wikis and learning how they can be jazzed for the classroom are logging on and collaborating in what is turning out to be an awesome learning experience. There is weekly homework though that comes with this camp. Think of it as "arts and crafts" or more like "survival training." Hey, there's extra credit, too.

Always up for trying out the next Web 2.0 gizmo to engage my students ever-demanding attention spans, I'm wowed at the list of mostly free resources available to teachers. Well, today I'm jazzed about a new application at Animoto.com. Animoto makes mini-movies with rockin' appeal. All I had to do is create an account, upload some images (in the public domain or my own), select from some great music available on the site, and Animoto takes it from there. About 10 minutes later they send me a link and embed code for this >>









Now, how cool is that!

Almost as cool as the educational possibilities . . .(stay tuned).

Give It Up For, Not On Technology

Teachers are control freaks. It's true. It comes with the territory. Everytime we walk into a classroom we know someone is going to set the agenda. And it better be me. It's all we know.

Enter technology. Ever have a projector that wouldn't sync with a DVD player? How about an online video presentation scheduled for a day the school server goes down? Or your blog site is 404?

Just the idea that we are outsourcing our content to a third-party makes us squeamish. And there are concerns about copyright, propriety of documents uploaded to Google, sites that link, remixed media, ad nauseum. Control?

If we are going to be moving (with our students) to the 21st Century we've got to give it up. I have found that my students understand completely. Whereas in years past, if something didn't go quite right, they'd panic and look at me like it was some kind of crime, nowadays they are cool with it. They know what it's like to be out of control with technology. It's a temporary setback. In a few minutes or the next day, the power will come up, the site will be online, the bug will be patched, and all will be good. Learning will go on.

The Outsourcing of Knowledge

Our ability to learn what we need for tomorrow is more important than what
we know today. A real challenge for any learning theory is to actuate known
knowledge at the point of application. When knowledge, however, is needed, but
not known, the ability to plug into sources to meet the requirements becomes a
vital skill. As knowledge continues to grow and evolve, access to what is needed
is more important than what the learner currently possesses.
-- George Siemens, 2004

A couple of years ago my students scoffed when I told them I didn't want a cell phone. Their chins dropped when I pointed out that "there are times when I don't want to be able to be reached."

I guess I am literally "out of touch." Well, not quite. It's been just over a year that I have a cell phone. I use it basically for long-distance calls (that are included in my plan) and for emergency calls (in stores: do we need milk?) I only agreed to get one to have in case of emergency on the highways and for travel. Still, I am not a phone-talker. Never was, probably never will be, brought up in the age of party lines and only using the phone for a dire purpose.

After reading George Siemens article on connectivism, I'm wondering if I'm cutting my phone to spite by future. Maybe my students are just practicing the skill of a lifelong learner. They are preparing themselves for the age when it's not what you know but who you know who knows it. Knowledge is outsourced to their friends in a lifetime of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire--Is that your final answer?

Networking surpasses Boolean searches. In fact, my students, despite all their tech savvy, seem to have no interest in learning how to do advanced Google searches, let alone learn Boolean techniques. Perhaps they are just waiting for the technology to catch up with their incompetence with technology. Futurist Ian Pearson predicts that by 2040 nanotechnology will be providing brain-machine connections. As we will think, we will know--heck, we won't have to think, just know. (As a reader of Orwell, I don't like the sound of that.) At any rate, our students for their ignorance, not despite it, turn out to be more savvy than un- after all.

Surely search engine engineers are going to figure out how to sidestep a researchers misteps. They already know whether we've misspelled a word, rite? But I digress.

In the interim, as a teacher I am muddling about the best ways to teach students ways to use technology that they think they already know but don't. They know some tricks, like how to turn a monitor's display upside down, how to switch between on-task and off-task websites as I circulate through the lab, and shortkeys. (Oh the sighs! as they watch me go step-by-step.) Yet they not nonplussed to find they haven't a clue as to how to save to a flashdrive, surf for websites from university sources, or cite a source. Rather, they can wait till there's an application that can do it for them. The wait may not be long. If they can't wait, they'll just text a friend.

Struggles of Trying to Be Tech Competent

Not sure I'd call myself a technology-in-the-classroom vanguard, I am at least a risk-taker, but this week I can see why more teachers aren't. The frustrations of scarcity of equipment, equipment failure, system failures, and professional development learning curve can be daunting.

As a team leader, I've spent this week in mind-boggling discussions that have included litanies of why teachers need technology and why they can't expect to get it, and I've spent class periods working with ninth graders struggling to learn creative processes for researching multi-media, remixing, and documenting information for a series of documentaries on Shakespeare's life, times, and works we are creating with Photo Story video and will broadcast on the Web. (Stay tuned.)

I'm struggling along with my students. We are learning together. From some perspectives that is the best way to learn. But for many teachers, and at times myself, the confusion and frustration makes the ole halcyon days of book-learning look like a welcome retreat. I'm rather comfortable with trying the new technologies and feel that they offer great relevancy and motivation for today's learners--and yet I'm frustrated and confused at times with my wanting tech savvy and lack of tech support.

Atop this, I'm finding great disparities in what some students know and what others do not. Even wider are the gaps in what parents are able to know and do and provide in terms of everything from understanding, encouragement, and support, to hardware, and software.

Yesterday as I walked down the hall I heard a cry of desperation from young teacher. This teacher, one from the digital generation, couldn't get a laptop signal to jibe with an LCD projector that is shared from room-to-room screamed "That's it! I'm done with this hassle. I get it all ready and then it goes down in class." I hope this is just a momentary fit and she'll gather her nerve another day.

I understand. I have to gather mine for tomorrow.

Every generation of good teachers take their stripes. These are ours, while we don't delay media literacy to our students despite a lacking critical mass of support from the learning community at large. Not only must we take the risk of trying emergent instructional technologies, develop reflective pedagogy to guide our continued practices with them, and work in a state of "perpetual beta," but also must we advocate with administrations, parents, students, and communities for the changes in school and system design needed to support, fund, equip. and sustain the sort of progress that will allow our students to gain competencies and remain competitive (as governments and schools around the world move ahead with greater celerity than we).

Image created with NGA Collage Machine

Novice to Expert in a Few Clicks

It's my understanding--not my experience-- that in terms of snowboarding, the difference between a novice and an expert is two weeks. That may not be true--and I'm sure for those who are "extreme" it is not. We all know the when it comes to making a PowerPoint slideshow the difference is 15 minutes (just to make one) and 15 hours (to make a really good one).

So what does it take to be a Teacher 2.0, a poweruser of Web 2.0 tools in the classroom?

Well, at the BOSSAC 2007 In-service Day, I witnessed 30 teachers go from novice to expert in under 5 hours. Where the were only two teachers who could define seven out of twenty-five Web 2.0 terms at the start of the day, everyone was creating their own blogs, wikis, and podcasts by day's end. It was great witness.

Two perceptions (of many) I took away from the day. One: how easy Web 2.0 technology really is, even for digital immigrants like our "shift happens" generation. And two: how powerful just a few Quick Starts can be to making that shift happen for the willing. I have no doubt that that Monday won't make a difference that shows up in the classrooms of our region. Here's my challenge to those of you who were part of the workshop and learned something new: Pass it along to at least one other teacher.

Now that you know, pay it forward.

For those of you who weren't at the workshop but are interested in learning about a few ways to use contemporary Web tools in your classrooms, find the handouts and Quick Starts at http://www.charlesyoungs.com/ under Media for Educators. Soon you, too, will be "catching some air."

Image credit: Smith, Jonathan. "Snowboard Air." Dziner. 10 Jan 2007 flickr.com.

Press on Our Classroom Blogging

We were delighted to receive some local press coverage for our work with blogs at our school. And I'm not using the editorial or royal "we" here--down the hall from my classroom Mike Bellini and Nicole Roth have been blogging with their students as well. While I've been having my English 12 Honors students blog, Mike has been working with English 9-1 classes, and Nikki has been working with English 9-2 students. The article appears in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Most notable are some of Nikki's findings in her doctoral work on the effects of blogging on her students' writing proficiency. Yes, bloggers seemed to not only write more, but better. The article made for a nice ending of the school year.

Really Simple

I've seen several RSS explanations in the past months (and I have to admit sometimes I still am confused about how to create subscriptions). I guess it is so easy to do that I think it should have more steps to learn. Mark Wagner at The Infinite Thinking Machine has just posted one of the simplest intros to Really Simple Syndication for teachers.

And now the Google has iGoogle with widgets with which I can subscribe to everything right down to my own podcasts (just to make sure they are getting through the blogosphere), RSS makes even more sense. Before I'd forget to go look in my "favorites" folder. Now they just appear everytime I open my homepage to iGoogle. Now that's really simple.

So as a teacher I have my students subscribe to daily homework updates I send as podcasts through Gcast. They think it is really cool that when they synch their iPods afterschool, they don't have to do anything but listen. Er, well listen, and then DO their homework.

Always Have a Backup Plan

Always have a backup plan. I was about to say "what teacher doesn't," but I find that many of my colleagues simply don't. The fall back plan is "study hall." After reading Karl Fisch's blog on "Customer Service," I am imagining what if the computer techs just said, "too bad." (Although I have had two recent out-sourced service reps from Verizon DSL ("Eric" from India, and "Chris" from the Phillipines) give really bad service--one said it was my problem and the other said there was no problem! Anyway, throwing up our hands and saying "study hall" or "talk amongst yourselves quietly" is rather the same.

Still, in my last post I mentioned I was to by in San Francisco at this time. Last-minute change of plans. Trip postponed till September. So this week I am working on another blog for the Carnegie Museum of Art and students at my school. We are going to be taking visits to CMA over the next year and blogging about our experiences. And as I was flipping between blog accounts on another server, I accidently deleted not just a blog, but my entire account and all blogs on it! I couldn't believe it. I was numb to the realization. All of the HTML code!--gone!

Then I realized that although the year's English 12 Honors blog was history, the CMA blog was actually under another account, and this morning, by a stroke of good luck, copied the code of the English 12 Honors page to another account for next year's class. I was able to retrieve it and set up my previous account. The year's work is now only on hard copies, and the students' most recent work is lost, but at least we can get up an running for the last two weeks of school. I could say "chuck it," but my blog's not out-sourced yet, and there'll be no "study hall."

Blogosphere, San Francisco Calling

I'm looking forward to visiting San Francisco to present a session on Weblog Literacy to a conference of teachers later this week. After being in the blogosphere it's nice to put one's feet on terra firma and talk with teachers about blogging, share challenges and inspirations.

Sort of like the experience politicians must feel inside the beltway and losing track of reality, being in the blogosphere and surfing the Net one can get a rarified view of technology in education and loose track of what's really happening in classrooms across the country. To only read the tech-savvy blogger-educators can leave one with the impression that everyone else is way ahead of the game.

As far behind in learning about how to integrate Web 2.0 tools into my own teaching in comparison to others in my blogroll, I feel I am even more arears to getting colleagues and students and parents up to speed. It's easy to feel overwhelmed at how much there is to learn, and then to think about how what I'm trying to learn today is already being usurped by the "what's next." It will be good to find out what educators in silicone valley are thinking, tooling, and teaching.

Comparing my practice to some of the pioneers out here in the blogosphere, or even Californians on the ground may miss the point. As my uncle who used to take me and my belongings to college once told me on one of those sojourns said, "You'll always be better than somebody and somebody else will always be better than you."

Maybe that's where the paradigm of collaboration begins, and the spirit of competition peters out. Reading and writing blogs and web pages with colleagues and mentors, as well as with students, has enriched my teaching practice in a few short months and years--a grand self-paced professional development, it's like grad school, only without the federal loans and without the Act 48 (PA re-ceritification credits). As I figure out what I have to offer my students and my colleagues, I find benefits of what they offer in return.

Image credit: 14 May 2007 San Francisco, CA, USA. Google Maps

How To Podcast and Screencast

Inspired to find out more about podcasting from a podcast posted by TeachersTeachingTeachers.org from January (post TT 35 1_10_07) that was on the topic , I attended the TeachersTeachingTeachers.com (no relation) conference held in Cranberry, PA in March. (How's that for the DNA replication and network of Web 2.0!)

Anyway, as frustrated as I was in finding the how-tos to podcast, I am delighted to find at how easy it is to podcast. Many thanks to Christopher Coole, a seventh grade math teacher from Franklin Regional School District (PA) who led the workshop I attended. Each week I'm discovering ways to do incorporate podcasts into my classroom and website. Granted I needed to buy a digital recorder. With the free download of iTunes and Audacity, and a free membership to Gcast. I've been on my way--recording assignment updates on the fly. My students are amazed that they can stay in the know on by syncing their iPods at home. Sure editing longer pieces can be more time consuming to do--a weekend project, but again, once they are in the can, I can refer students to them and save the chops. Students can listen to other class periods' Socratic Circle discussions.

I feel a bit like NPR's Lost and Found Sound team, noticing audible events to record for podcast. Not to have my recorder with me has become like being out for a walk, noticing an incredible sunset and being without a camera. Suddenly I'll be in the midst of what would make an interesting recording, only to discover didn't think to bring my recorder along--who knew there'd be great sounds here! To fill the void on how-to podcast, for the uninitiated I've published on my web site a five-page Quick Start Guide to Podcasting for Educators details the steps I've learned. Certainily there are other ways of going about it (and differences for Apple users). I only know what I know today and happy to share that. There will be a new way tomorrow. And ways exist to enhance the process with purchasable software, but this will suffice if you just want to give it a go on the cheap.

Screencasts, real-time presentations of audio and video capture of a computer screen, are ridiculously easy to make with free software from Microsoft--Microsoft Encoder--if you have a microphone. The Encoder wizard will teach you the rest. This weekend I tried my hand at a couple and couldn't believe the plug-n-play ease of the application. I see my summer projects lining up for next year's tutorials on Internet research, among other things. I posted a couple screencast tutorials to my website for students. One is on how to add links and images to our class blog. My students can get the tutorial when they need it and watch it as many times as they need.

The application of such technology to accommodate the myriad and sundry needs and paces of student learning will be far reaching indeed. In the blog roll I'm reading of oodles of innovations educators are developing. I invite all comers to comment on how you are using podcasts and screencasts to add to this post.

Publishing Le Blogue, La Raison d'Etre

A colleague with whom I've been working on student blogs, Nicole Roth, recently finished her doctoral research on blogging and its effects on high school writing. Her study indicates that despite an initial drop in proficiency that we guess might be accounted for by the newness of the experience, a learning curve of how-to use blog technology, or perhaps a hesitancy to write for a real audience after writing for "just to get it done" across so many years of schooling, soon the students were surpassing their peers whether they were writing in long-hand or via word processors. So our hunches about students writing more and writing for publication--and instant publication at that--leading to greater proficiency are confirmed. More on that and Nicole's study in a future blog.

What got me thinking about this was something I heard in a screencast from Elizabeth Perry's blog. Elizabeth Perry is a fellow educator, blogger, author, artist, and last but not least fellow Pittsburgher. In her screencast she eloquently describes the process of how she came to blog her daily sketches in the Carnegie Museum of Art in the aesthetically-tuned museum drawing project. It's worth some time spent in mulling over her work. Lovely drawings. For those folks who know the museum, will be the recognition that she has caught the familiar, natural order of the place in her sketches. Perry comments on a motivation of her blogging that I think is integral to why it might works so well. She reflects:

"Once I started, the public and shared nature of that process made me want to keep going. The response has been encouraging."

I find myself connecting with this sentiment with regard to my own and my students' blogging experiences. I've blogged now for a month and I feel a sense of small, quiet accomplishment every time I put my two cents in. My sense is that this feeling comes not from the reflection inherent in writing, and the thinking at the point of utterance, but also because it is not just for myself. I don't know if will always be so. But I know it is good for today. My first motivation to blog was to find out if I could hack it. There I was asking students to do something I had not attempted, other than what comments I had offered in our class blog. Whether or not I have an audience or am rattling on in an empty room seems to matter not. My keypad needs the exercise. Wait! someone lurked in from London this week! There's the adrenaline rush and I'm good for another 7 days.

I can remember as a kid I would spend all day making art projects. I had piles of drawings, pastings, cutouts, paintings--you name it, if it could be made with construction paper, markers, paste, crayons, pencils, cotton, pipe cleaners, ad infinitum, it was in my pile. I created one or several art pieces a day. Yet, I still remember having the realization one day at age 4 that I was wasting my time because no one was going to see the pile. I gave up the practice and tossed most of it away. And although I continued to dabble with graphics on through the rest of my life, and copped an job at an ad agency because of it, and have a strong appreciation for art, as a boy I never imagined an audience. I stopped for lack of a public. So maybe would not have become an artist. After all, artists claim they create for themselves, right?

And I at 4 concluded an audience was my art's raison d'etre and mostly ceased to create. For this post, I pulled out a drawing from kindergarten. (Note my teacher Mrs. Pullings' encouragement at the bottom.) Like a chronically ill patient that manages to live to see the cure, it's a survivor to the day of personal, global publication. What if I could have published my pile in 1968! Who knows? Maybe my art would have continued. Ah, well, not meant to be.

Yet, I consider the empowering nature of Internet publishing to our students and how it contributes to the depth of literary analysis, synthesis, and composition as they make their own voices known on our class blogs (By the way, the reason there is no hyperlink to the class blogs is that for the time being anyway, they are closed-forums, for security concerns, and therefore I am unable to share). But rest assured, for all their groaning about "having to blog," my students are gaining in their writing and thinking because of the practice and even more so because of the publishing, not to me, but to each other. They have a public that matters to them and I have the wisdom of a 4 year-old boy telling me so.

Please Stand Back

I remember when I was a grad student in England, standing on the Britrail platform in Reading, waiting for the next train back to Oxford, when an official announced the imminent arrival of a high-speed train:

"The next train arriving at Platform 2 is a high-speed train. It will not be stopping at this station. Please stand back."

What a rush to see this train arriving seemingly at first coming toward the station at a pace no different than any other until it reached the platform--blur, wind,
sound--and then it was gone in a few seconds just as beningly.

The events of this week have reminded me of that instant. I was fortunate enough to attend the Teachers Teaching Teachers 2007 Conference in Cranberry, Pennsylvania and to discover new ways to use podcasting in the classroom (more about that in future posts) and seeing the store of educational content(including audios, videos, handouts, images), available freely from iTunes. (That was the rush.) The rub is all this will have to be done at home (at least for awhile) and copied onto players and CDs since my school doesn't have iTunes software. That's the "Please Stand Back."

Right now, it's a point of discussion at my school as to how much of the information highway should be accessible. We have a filtering system designed to keep oooh content (offensive, objectionable, obscene) away from students and staff. Daily, the most frequent screenshot on my computer at my desk tends to be the filter "access denied" screen as I either try to show students to sites valuable to literary research or to my own queries in preparation for lessons(educational blogs, professorial websites, images, videos, archive.org).

Indeed, we don't want anything from cyberbullying to stalking occuring online at school not to mention elsewhere. But like dolphins in the tuna, good content is prohibited everyday from getting to teachers and students that is not only appropriate for the classroom, but free, interesting, and relevant. An addition to my afterwork hours of planning and prep. Of course, we want to protect our children from harm, but to ignore potential and necessary good that will come from technology and its instruction is also something of which I'd like not to be culpable. Preparing our students to succeed in a global economy that will have a digital infrastructure must needs begin here.

So, we are "standing back" today to ponder the best policy, we might not be going backward literally, yet to stand still can mean so. The high-speed train of technology is a blur. In the meantime, I along with colleagues and students wait for the local and work out the kinks of blogging, podcasting, and the "next." No doubt, it will take some perseverance, and courage to get on board and stay on track, but the destination is tomorrow.