Mrs. Halloran, the counselor, at J.H. House now has her own blog, the Counselor’s Corner. Drop by and welcome her to the blogging community. Don’t forget Mrs. Hooper, the principal, who continues to blog about character education at The Principal’s Quest.
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My weblog mission this year is to empower some “blooming webloggers”. Blooming webloggers keep in tune with Bloom’s Taxonomy as they write.
Look at this great group:
Aren’t they a good-looking group? We can’t go wrong. OK here’s the plan that is up-and-going, as of today. Yesterday I began working on a WebQuest, using a template at TeacherWeb.com They’re free there and while you can’t custom design them, they’re quick and you can put together an activity and publish quickly. I have worked with them over the past few years and they are a good company. They work with educators.
My thought was to springboard off of the webquest, Blooming Bloggers, as the students learn to blog. The webquest is a work in progress. I haven’t finished all of it. I will be tweaking it as I go. Today I went over the introduction, task, and got into part 1 & 2 of the process. The discussion was good, students were engaged and it was fun! Hillary, the new ITS at House was in the class with me. She is blogging away at EduBlog Quest and showing all the symptoms of an up-and-coming blogger.
Now I like step 3 and I think I got the steps down fairly well for these elementary students. Their homework today was to write about what we did in class. They will be out all next week so I won’t meet back for two weeks. The school has changed to an extended calendar this year.
Now, I don’t have anything in the evaluation part yet. I would really appreciate input from our weblogging community on this piece. I did take a writing sample first thing when they came in. I can use that. You can see those on my post on The Write Weblog. I could also put together a rubric that is specific to the blogging process I have outlined. I’m still in the think tank mode with this piece of the WebQuest. I may add some other components. The kids will help with that as I proceed.
PLEASE give input on the WebQuest and how I am trying to go with this, this year. This could be a good model for teachers because the students really will be blogging and they’ll be blogging about what they’re learning! Also, maybe this would be helpful for teachers who are trying to figure out just what blogging is. Who knows? Anyway, I’m charged and it’s a great feeling to be back with the kids once again!
A follow-up on my blogging colleague who has had his blogs shut down. Recently, I talked with a reporter from the Wall Street Journal (referred by Will) about weblogs. The reporter had read my post “Blogging voices needed!” and wanted to talk to my colleague. I was unwilling to give him a name because I didn’t want to bring more attention to his situation while his office of technology was looking into the issue. I did tell the reporter that I would email my colleague and have him contact the reporter if he was interested in being interviewed. My colleague had a dilemma, as many of us do in education. He emailed me the following:
“I guess in my situation as an enthusiastic technology leader looking to continue my prof. advancement I am a little afraid of repercussions of negative spin on my comments in his article. What are your thoughts?”
I understand his concerns. I’ve had the same concerns in the past. Here’s my reply to him:
“I totally understand your reservations. I know how school systems can be. If you have qualms or any reservations, you might just want to pass. I would love to say go for it because that’s how I WANT education to be - where we can say what we really feel anytime, anywhere. However, this is not the case in reality. Also, now I am NOT in the school system and I can say what I really think without worrying about repercussions. My heart is still in the classroom though.”
Now this is what is great about my colleague. He did talk to the reporter. Here’s the reason he decided to do the interview even though it might not be in his best professional interests:
“I just feel that my story needed to be heard b/c I feel so strongly about the use of weblogs in education. And if I can help push weblog providers along to more supportive features for educators as well as help start the discussion needed regarding the future possible trend of banning weblogs then all the better.”
You see why I love this fine educational weblogging community. It’s just full of good educators like my colleague.
Nancy tells it like it is……..
President Bush, my fellow americans, parents in our school community… we’re no slackers! We’re working hard. Our days are spent studying about the needs of diverse learners, backward designing around the big ideas to effectively teach the standards through mediated scaffolding/conspicuous strategies/use of direct instruction, collaborating, doing peer observations, reflecting, revising, debriefing lessons, assessing periodically, using the data to drive instruction, planning for differentiation, moving, pushing, pulling, all to nudge along our students, most of whom are english learners struggling within a cycle of poverty, violence, grief, fear, and loss… and none of this seems to be on your timeline… your NCLB timeline!
We know the importance of our work. The urgency. Our kids need a ticket out of the cycle. Our kids are bright. They can achieve. We can achieve. But, you just don’t know what we’re up against. Police chase/helicopter overhead this week. Monday, we arrived to broken windows and stolen computers in the 2nd grade pod. As I was giving a demonstration lesson in a classroom the construction crew arrived, hammering and drilling to replace broken window grills. And the news arrived–we didn’t get the CTAP grant we applied for so no digital cameras, no digital narratives… no one wants to hear our stories.
No, I’m not making excuses. I can learn new strategies, change, take risks, stand up to scrutiny. But… the stuff of school is people… students and teachers… human beings, not robots… and we do bleed…
Yes, the stuff of schools is people. Nancy has an excellent post about what can happen when evaluation of our teachers and schools is totally based on the results of one test. I have written about this several times before. I see the grave consequences every day when I walk in the schools….
Yes, we teachers want accountability but by multiple measures and a whole lot of common sense about developmental stages in children. I hate this skill a day mentality. We need time to talk, discuss, reflect and connect in our classrooms so we can share the joy of learning. If not, the consequences are indeed grave.
Frontline has a comprehensive website, Testing Our Schools, that really hones in on the issues here.
I had the pleasure of participating in a video conference with Bernie Dodge’s EDTEC 700: Blogging in the Classroom this past Saturday morning. There are links to the student blogs on the class blog. This class was part of a Saturday Seminars for Teaching with Technology.Now wouldn’t that be a fun class to teach. Here’s his syllabus for Motivating Student Writing with Weblogs. I like the way he has structured the class and I really enjoyed talking with the teachers in the class. Bernie posted my links that I shared with the class. Here are some of the ideas I shared with them:
To sum it up, Bernie asked a tough question. What did I think weblogs would evolve to? I said it was impossible to imagine but right now they were opening up doors for us in the classroom so we can communicate and write effectively for others. It’s a place to learn and a place to be heard. It is a stepping stone full of all sorts of possibilities. It blows my mind but my hope is that it will make us a more global community. We need to be a responsible nation, get dialogue going and see the importance of building extended learning communities.
I came across an interesting site about weblogs and Superhighway Safety. It ties in with the post I just made about my blogging colleague whose blogs have been placed on “inactive status.” It details what a blog is, the benefits, the risks, using weblogs in schools and sources of further information and advice.
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I have a blogging colleague (an instructional technology specialist) who did some great work with weblogs in his elementary school last year. He had a blog, he had a tech committee blog, and what was best of all was that he had gotten many of his elementary teachers blogging with their students. This year all of his blogs have been placed on “inactive” status because they violate the county’s outdated telecommunications policy that bans student messaging. Now he is right in the middle of working with the office of technology in this process. They had him review several weblog services and the administrative controls. The county office wants them to be able to filter everything BEFORE it appears on the web. So as it stands, he cannot continue his good work with weblogs now. He has even had to change the name of his weblog so it won’t be associated with the school. The only reason he is allowed to have it up is because he has turned off comments. He and the office of technology are looking for research that supports the use of weblogs instructionally, the online safety of them and other relative research so they can go to the school board and attempt to change this policy. Needless, to say, my blogging colleague is frustrated with the whole situation and all his great plans for this year for weblogs are on hold.
Now, I’m not mentioning my colleague’s name simply because schools, especially elementary schools, don’t do well if things like this blow up into a big issue. Then we could all lose out with way too restrictive policies being implemented. The good thing is that the office of technology is looking with him to find relative research. The bad thing is that there is really not any research out there for elementary schools. This is something many of us have been thinking about but we still don’t have data that is needed. I know research is beginning to emerge but it is mostly at the university level with those who are involved in publishing. I do wish I had more knowledge here but you know in public schools we’ve not had the training nor the luxury of time to do this. I suspect educational improvement would be much further down the road if we had been more involved. I’ve dabbled in action research but still don’t know enough to be productive. I think recording our experiences is great and we know we are on to some good thinking about how to become more aligned with the 21st century. We know weblogs can be a wonderful tool that has countless possibilities for great academic use.. Our kids are in the middle of all this technology and we could be at the forefront teaching wise and appropriate use to kids. We can get them to think about how writing can be a tool for them to effect change and make things better. All this usually just scares schools though. They seldom give educators credit for having the ability to responsbibly oversee projects like this. I think a lot of fear exists among administrators to take a risk when “taking a responsible risk” is exactly what is needed to push learning forward.
I know also that when I started my weblog project at my former elementary school we were following the AUP policy and only had kids involved whose parents had signed those papers. I also met with the parents and explained exactly what I was doing and told them that there was the possibility of an inappropriate comment coming through but that if it did that would be handled in a responsible way with the kids. It could be a good teaching moment. They trusted me. Luckily, nothing ever happened but it could have. I monitored all the blogs and talked directly with my kids about responsible use. On the other hand, I do suspect that if I had gone further and asked the county office for permission to do this project, it probably would have been a no - based on lack of knowledge and not wanting to take a risk. The principal OK’d the project and trusted me to explore possibilities responsibly. I have to admit at the same time that I did not spend a lot of time talking about blogs directly inside that county. Deep inside I knew that the powers that be could have shut them down at any time. Now, I’ve shown the value, gotten good results with kids, and others are beginning to use them. But isn’t it a shame that I couldn’t have been a little more vocal right from the beginning.. My blogging colleague shared his vision and enthusiasm and is now shut down. Why can’t his good work count for more? Can’t that be a part of the “research”? He was doing good things with weblogs and getting his teachers right in the mix. That’s something that is hard to accomplish.
We need help! Anyone know of good research out there that I am missing? Got any thoughts on the best way to proceed in this area? I suspect that a lot of educators who are jumping on the blog bandwagon may inadvertently cause more shutdown on us if they don’t really think through what they are doing. We can’t just turn our kids loose on the web. We have to oversee and guide them. Weblogs can open up doors for us in the classroom. It truly is a stepping stone to all sorts of possibilities. I want to keep exploring and we desparately need good webloggers like my colleague who is facing a situation all by himself.
Let’s get a dialogue going on this subject. We need data, a plan, ideas, thoughts because I have a feeling that his shutdown may just be the beginning of many as we move forward.
If you’re not on elearnspace’s twice-weekly blog summary email you need to subscribe. It is ALWAYS chock-full of interesting information.
George Siemens directs us to Dr. Chris Dede’s article, “Enabling Distributed Learning Communities Via Emerging Technolies- Part One. His six assumptiona about educational improvement are right on target and should be required reading for our current President and every other government official who are in decision-making roles for education. Hear the first one….The most important challenge the U.S. education system faces is not preparing students to do well on high-stakes tests, but rather fostering 21st century skills and knowledge in learners so that they are prepared to participate in our global, knowledge-based civilization. The author gives a couple of good examples of distributed learning strategies for teacher education, induction and professional development. There will be a second part to this article in the October issue of The Journal Online. I look forward to reading it.
All of the articles were good reading but The New Literacy by Sara Armstrong and David Warlick. The authors make the point that learning to learn is an essential skill for a lifetime of self-directed learning. They say that our 3R’s have to evolve into 4 Es to define literacy in an increasingly, and soon to be exclusively, digital and networked world.
Reading -> Exposing Knowledge
Arithmetic -> Employing Information
Writing -> Expressing Ideas Compellingly
Ethics -> Ethics: Right and Wrong on the Information Highway
The authors give some action items for administrators. One that struck me was “When evaluating teacher performance, document evidence that students are learning to find, decode, evaluate inforamtion. Also document evidence that students are employing information to construct new knowledge and communicating what they have learned to authentic audiences.”
My thought here - that’s exactly what we’re trying do to with blogs. We need to start documenting this aspect. This is the piece we need to shape to prove the worth of blogging. I’ve got to think some more on this……….
Scott Rogers is using a blog, English 3840, in his “Writing Center Tutor Training” course. On one of his posts he followed up on the class discussion. Many of his students had disagreed with some of Murray’s approach to teaching writing. He asked them to write about how they were taught to write essays in college or high school and then connect it to what they think about Murray’s approach. I really like blogs like this because we can learn so much from them. Hearing what the students had to say about how they were taught is discouraging because their posts mostly centered around the “lack” of writing instruction from their teachers. This student made some good observations:
Writing needs to be guided and nursed by teachers that will ask you questions that will make you think. New writers need questions asked that will help them understand why they are writing and will guide their purpose to have greater clarity for them and others.
Teachers need to be taught to help their students find a purpose in writing not give them hours and hours to find their own. They need guidance not time. They need to feel a teacher‚s excitement for writing instead of a teachers dread at reading their papers.
This is where I think blogs could really shine. It is a way for us to show them the excitement and joy you can feel from writing. It’s a way to give them ownership and a place where others can respond to their writing. But what the student said above needs to be a part of the blogging/writing instruction from the teacher. We need to guide them and make them think, see purposes for writing, and see that they get responses.
Scott Rogers’ most recent post The Question goes like this:
So here’s the question: while considering all this material we’ve read on writing theory, I’d like to see you all talk about how you learned to write at the university. Did you come here knowing how to do it? Did a teacher teach you? Did you learn from a friend?
I can’t wait to read those answers. What good prompts and things to think about are being discussed on this blog for these students who are going to be tutors at a writing center.
I do wish all blogs had a clearly marked ‘About’ section so we could quickly read that. That’s one feature of Manila I really like (when the authors fill it out, that is!)
Anyway, I’m going to follow this interesting discussion. More and more I think we have much to learn about the teaching of writing and the pressing need in schools to make time for students to write (with guidance from teachers).
The Internet Public Library has a special collection section on blogs. Blogs on books, food, history, Iraq War, sports, education photoblogs, movies, travel, law, science and technology and more. It has sites about blogs, blog hosts and providers, blog directories and search, and engines. Check it out. You can make suggestions and add to it. They even have other special collections that look interesting.