Diane's Discoveries

Acquiring a "Readerly" Voice

Here's another excerpt from Konrad Glogowski's blog: blog of proximal development � Blog Archive � On Commenting and Readerly Voice.

...I spent the last three weeks writing about my research findings. It was a great opportunity to carefully analyze all the work that my students have done and also scrutinize my own involvement and development as a teacher. Specifically, it gave me a chance to carefully analyze my personal voice that I used in the class blogosphere when commenting on student work and posting my own entries. It occurred to me that the switch from a teacherly to a personal and writerly voice was crucial in helping me not only create but also sustain my class community of bloggers.

I’ve learned from my study that, in a blogging classroom, students learn when they are allowed the freedom to use their blogs in order to write themselves into existence as individuals. Of course, a teacher can allow that to happen only if he or she is willing to operate at the edge of incompetence, never knowing what the next day or lesson will bring. I haven’t met too many teachers who embrace this sense of uncertainty and enjoy what Marie Jasinski calls “facilitating the unpredictable.” We seem to think that it undermines our authority and that we are paid to know and to dispense that knowledge with confidence. Not surprisingly, giving my students the freedom to become independent writers and researchers presented me with an enormous challenge of having to redefine my own presence and my voice in the classroom. It took a lot of effort to divest myself of the teacher’s voice and acquire a new one, one that helped me function more effectively as a facilitator, learner, and co-participant in the class blogosphere....

A Community of 8th Grade Student Bloggers

I've mentioned before that Konrad Glogowski's blog is well-worth reading. Here's a link to one he wrote in June; the following is an excerpt: blog of proximal development � Blog Archive � Progressive Discourse.

I’m back. I never intended to take a break, but I did. Here’s why:
My community of grade eight student bloggers became so big and so engaging that I spent every spare moment reading and writing within this community. My class community suddenly blossomed and I started seeing myself as an important part of the classroom community and no longer as a teacher who peddles content. I became a participant in a series of dialogues. I witnessed the emergence of a semantic network, one where all links, all interactions were based on meaning. I knew that I had to devote all my energies to documenting it.

So, while I did not have time to contribute to this blog, I learned first hand what it means to be a grade eight teacher who teaches in the context of a community of student bloggers. I thought I knew before how teaching in the contenxt of a blogging community can affect the educator but the last two months have been instrumental in helping me to fully understand what it means to teach students who gradually begin to see themselves as writers, as people with voices, as members of “a community of knowledgeable peers” (Bruffee, 1984). I learned to engage in discussions. I learned to read and listen.

After you read the whole blog, you will want to read a follow up he did on August 10th:
blog of proximal development

The more things change, the more they stay the same

The latest from a favorite blogger, David Warlick; his September 20th blog: 2 Cents Worth � The more things change, the more they stay the same.

The other day, I posted a list of my very first workshops as The Landmark Project (1996), and commented how most of the topics are still among my topics today — evolved, but the concepts are still there.

Chris, at K12 Station commented:
I started training teachers to integrate the web into their classrooms in 1999 … no surprises here in the area of “the more things change, the more they stay the same.” The thing that amazes me is that most teachers use computers for attendance and email with almost no problems whatsoever … but many of those same folks still don’t have an adequate grasp of the key concepts required to deliver online content within instruction.

2 Cents Worth » Hitchhikr Today
Chris, I have always held that teachers (and everyone else) will use technology that solves a problem for them. Teachers do not really see delivering content as a problem. it’s what they were trained to do. It’s what they’ve done for years. There’s no problem there, from their perspective.
However, the problem that they do not yet perceive is that our children DO NOT CONNECT TO LECTURES AND STALE POWERPOINT PRESENTATIONS. They live in a rich, dynamic, and interactive information landscape. If teachers are paying attenntion to this, then they will see a problem and will, as good teachers, try to fix it. That’s when they’ll start “getting” technology.

It will happen when they realize that it isn’t about technology, but about a new information landscape and that only from digital, networked, and overwhelming information will we be able to adequately teach our children.

Why Am I Not Surprised?

One of my favorite bloggers, Will Richardson, reports the following:

It Gets Worse... Seems that the Orange County DOE, overseer of the education of half a million students and teachers, has decided to pull the plug on not just MySpace but all blogspot blogs as well. I got an e-mail this morning from a teacher out there who didn't want to be identified but who did suggest that there were hundreds of teachers using Blogger to communicate and collaborate with kids and students, and now they're basically blog toast. Here's what I want to know. Did anyone in Orange County take the time to investigate the curricular and pedagogical implications of this? Doubtful. Blogs are bad. Scary. Unsafe. (I only had five hours of sleep last night after a horrible trip back from Chicago so please excuse my cynicism.) But is anyone surprised? During our conversation yesterday, David Warlick said that we need to come up with kid safe blogging tools, and I agree to a point. I mean blogspot is already kid safe IF the kid knows what he's doing and has a teacher or a parent mentoring him through it. I'm just wondering if pretty soon the tool will be villified to the point where no one will want to pick it up no matter how safe it is. Would love to hear from some bloggy teachers in California...

Link:
Weblogg-ed - The Read/Write Web in the Classroom :
.

Tossing Out the Syllabus

Barbara Ganley, a professor from Vermont College, writes about her decision to "toss out the syllabus" and change the way she teaches creative writing. This is just a portion of the blog, click on the link below to read all of it.

...I believe that if we teachers listen hard enough to our students, and we teach them how to listen to themselves, they will guide the teaching and learning process themselves, both on their own as individual learners with differing needs and styles, and peer-to-peer (something they MUST be able to do in the workplace). So I am comfortable viewing the course as a living organism that will often take us places unanticipated at the beginning of the semester or even at the beginning of the class hour. This is an essential characteristic, I believe, of a successful blogging teacher. That being said, I have typically opened the semester with creative nonfiction, moved to fiction and ended with poetry. It made sense. For many many years.

But after being inspired and moved by presentation after presentation at First Person: The International Digital Storytelling Conference....I knew I had to move digital stories and real blogging (versus posting your assignments to the blog) right to the opening days of the semester. The process of creating digital stories fosters a powerful sense of belonging to a community as well as giving participants a sense of their own voices--take a look at the stories from the project Amy Hill from The Center of Digital Storytelling presented out of Silence Speaks; or look at the extraordinary work coming out of the Museum of the Person. What I love about these projects is their focus on the story and the person rather than on the art or the achievement--the urge to share, to communicate, to remember publicly, and the lack of self-consciousness. We need to inject a bit of that urgency of expression into higher ed, a world framed by the need to master material and skills, each ultimately alone in this endeavor to succeed.

College students are told repeatedly to aspire to greatness, to achieve, to excel, to "get it right." They do not pause very often to examine themselves and their own stories and thier imaginations and how they affect those around them. And yet, when they do, they often connect even more deeply with their learning and their life goals--they keep the parts of themselves balanced, in perspective. And so, to place experimentation, imagination, and community right up front in the course, I have plunged us into digital storytelling and blogging from the opening day. I have resisted setting up many guidelines for the stories--I want them to feel their way to their stories from this moment here in time. And right now, many of them are surely thinking that I have lost my mind--they look for the due dates; the detailed, clear instructions for success; and they really wonder why we aren't just sticking to notebooks and keeping their creative writing, for the mostpart, private, between covers where for many of them it has lived since they were children, or slipped to the professor only when absolutely necessary. Ha! I am most fortunate to be able to distribute cameras and iPODS to my students for the semester, which I have done, and they are now drafting 100-200 word scripts--voiceovers--and taking photos and recording sounds. They are moving into image worlds and sound worlds with an alertness and a playfulness, and then we will press image and sound and text up against one another to see what happens. Through this process, they will find themselves growing close to one another, develop their media literacy skills, crack open the imagination and dare not to achieve greatness, but understanding. It's about the process, baby....

Link: bgblogging: Influences on a Vermont College Classroom: An Australian Conference, a Virtual Arts Collaborative coming out of Barcelona, and a Student Blogging from Cambodia .

Kindergarten Teachers Excited About Blogs

Link: Weblogg-ed - The Read/Write Web in the Classroom:

...from a current assistant superintendent:

"Yesterday we had all of our Kindergarten teachers at the Central Office writing assessments. One group was writing an assessment where the students would sort night and day pictures. They were attempting to download clipart to use for this task and were visibly frustrated that they weren't finding what they really needed. I showed them the Flickr site and how they could search using the tag words for pictures. They found exactly what they needed there and were very excited. (Just imagine a room full of Kindergarten teachers discovering a site like this...the possibilities for seasons, holidays, animals, places, etc.) Forget about the assessments, they were searching for bunnies for spring and lake/ ocean/ river pictures for a unit, etc. Compared to using clipart, it was like going from black and white T.V. to color for them.

Our fine arts coordinator was at this meeting. She pulled up the flickr site and shared that she actually subscribes to a site much like it which sends an email to her everyday with pictures. She said that she hates the fact that the files are so big they fill up her mailbox at hotmail. She has no choice but to look at them everyday. I asked her to show me the site and it had an RSS feed. I helped her set up a bloglines account and we brought the site's feed over to it so now she can receive these pictures everyday, but only needs to look at them when it is convenient. She was very pleased."

Personal responsibility needed when blogging

Amanda LaBonar wrote an article about "personal responsibility"; for the whole article: Marquette Tribune:: Online Edition:: Chit Chat.

Everything you post represents you. Sure Weblogs and wall messages can be controversial and funny, but at the same time can walk a thin line to inappropriate. A rant or venting session online could poorly reflect someone else's image along with your own. When you post anything you're displaying it for potentially the entire world - or at least school - to see. How do you want people to perceive you?

I don't post anything I wouldn't be comfortable with anyone, from my parents to potential employers, viewing. If I publicly wrote inappropriate and crude comments about students and teachers, I wouldn't be proud of demonstrating that embarrassing level of immaturity. Also, if I took pictures of a night out I might post a few images. However, if a few were a little crazy and my guy friends were wearing thongs I might hang on to the images to use as future blackmail (just kidding of course), but I would not share them with all of cyberspace.

We complain about free speech being taken away, but we are giving away our privacy without a second thought.

I'm not bowing to the administration or running scared that something I might post will get me more then a slap on the wrist. I'm being realistic. These posts reflect you, and you never know who is looking at them.

We can't just point at the administration and scream foul play without also examining and owning up to our own personal responsibility.

Introducing Second Graders to Blogs

Link: EduBlog Insights : EduBlog Insights.

The goal today was to introduce the kids to blogs and then teach them how to comment. When they comment, we use bogus emails. Those of you in schools know how hard it is to get emails for students. Not having an email is OK because we really don't want anyone emailing them, at least not until we have had lots more opportunities to provide guidance. So I told the one...that asked about emails that for now we were just going to use bogus emails. Of course, I had to explain bogus - they got it and they understood why.

Blogging Is Not Just for High School Students

Read this from Anne Davis:

Hillary Meeler featured in Education World!

...Education World in ''Writing with Weblogs'  features Hillary Meeler of BlogWrite. It spotlights the good work that Hillary and the students are doing with blogging. Just listen to her words in the opening paragraph:

"The best part of blogging for students is receiving the comments [from others]," says Hillary Meeler. "Every week, my students are filled with anticipation and excitement as they open their blogs to read the new comments. Having an audience encourages them to focus on their writing. They realize that people are reading their posts, and that they do have a voice. They enjoy being heard."

Hillary describes the weekly sessions with her fifth-graders and explains the selection process, the learning connections they are making and her observations on the blogging experience.

We all know how hard it is to get other teachers involved in the many benefits of blogging so if I were asked what I was most grateful for in 2005 as pertains to blogging, Hillary Meeler would be top on my list. She is continuing the blogging experience at J.H. House and getting many voices heard, as the article most aptly states here:

"The blogging experience has convinced Meeler that even elementary level students can participate successfully in blogging. She believes that every student has a voice that can be heard through the instant publication of a post, and that everyone can learn something from the different voices of children."...

Link: EduBlog Insights : EduBlog Insights

Wow! This Is A Really Exciting Development!

One of my first "discoveries" was last June...a blog written by Konrad Glogowski...and I've been impressed with what he has accomplished with his eighth graders. This is the latest:

One of my very recent discoveries is that my students started using categories to organize their posts. The software we’re using now allows each post to be tagged with a specific, user-generated category. I was so focused on making sure that all of my students transferred their blogs successfully to the new system that it never occured to me to mention to them the fact that they can create and assign categories. Imagine my surprise when I noticed that most of them had already started using them! Yes, most of the entries in the new blogs have been categorized by the students themselves without any prompts or encouragement from me. Quite honestly, I simply forgot about this feature.

So, my grade eight bloggers are now assigning categories. This is a great development because it seems to me that it shows just how much they care about their work. I think they are beginning to see their entries as extensions of their own selves (echoes of McLuhan?). In addition to categories such as “general” or “English,” I’ve noticed the following:

Things/events that I feel strongly about
Poetry
Quotes
Extra Responses for Class
Novel Study
Mr.G’s Optional Response Posts
Life….And other totally unrelated things
Stuff i want to discuss with you

Maybe I’m reading too much into these categories but it seems to me that these students want to immerse themselves in writing and, through writing, in thinking. These categories also show that the students see their work as something more than just class work, as something more (dare I say “important”?) than school assignments. I hear voices here, genuine student voices. I see students who are beginning to adapt to the “pull” model. I see the beginning of conversations that happen within and among my students.

I see that my students are beginning to see their own blogs as places where thinking happens. Some of these categories suggest a need to converse, to engage readers or record one’s thoughts as a networked creator, not a passive recipient of whatever I might “push” at them. I see a genuine need to both initiate and participate in conversations.

Some of these categories suggest that the students know that they have an audience, that they can write and think with their peers.

Link: blog of proximal development » Blog Archive » Categories