Digital Writing Project: Lake Superior's North Shore

The final project... The unveiling...

Drum roll...

I hope you'll enjoy reading, listening, and watching! Let me know what you think.

At the end of the tunnel...?

Well, at the end of the tunnel there is the proverbial light and I detect a faint glimmer right now. That’s what happens when you try to do waaaaaaay too much! On the positive side, my Voicethread is done, my Smilebox is done, and the PhotoStory project I somehow got talked into doing is also done! Now “all” I have to do is put it together in a Glogster poster that is half started, and cross my fingers hoping all these formats can be uploaded without issues onto the web.

As I was working on all these separate pieces, I kept thinking that I should change my project and do something strictly educational. Should I do a piece about amazing Lake Superior facts? Should I do a PhotoStory about the devastating ice storm of March 2009? How about a “fabulous places to visit on the North Shore” Glogster complete with Google Earth map (don’t laugh: I started the map…)? Yikes! WILL SOMEONE PLEASE KNOCK SOME SENSE INTO ME?

I have enough pieces already. I’m done.

Really.

So what was it like working on all these writing pieces? Well, Glogster has been somewhat challenging; mostly because I tend to be wordy (you didn’t know, did you?) and “posterizing” yourself as Glogster says means using few words. I’m hoping (worried?) that I’ll be able to link Glogster to everything else I have created. With so many formats, that’s the unknown.

PhotoStory was plain FUN! I picked a few pictures from last year’s North Shore vacation and asked my 7 year-old to tell me about his favorite things to do Up North. He talked about the pictures, told me in what order to put them. He decided what he was going to say and I asked a few questions to get more details. We did one recording, ad lib. He did great! A natural storyteller… Then he wanted to add more and more to the Photostory: what about climbing the rocks at Gooseberry Falls and the time his shoes got all wet? What about when Dad taught him how to skip rocks last year? What about…? What about…?

So I asked him to pick his top 5 things to do Up North. We found some videos but couldn’t upload them to Photostory. So with a few additional pictures we settled on the Photostory you’ll see. We recorded narration for the new pictures (twice, since the first time I forgot to replug the microphone…). He helped me choose the music. I said no to the Midnight Sonata: too dramatic. We talked about the mood of the story, the pace of his voice, how music changes everything. It was great! And when it was all saved and done, I realized we didn’t have an end slide or credits. A couple of PowerPoint slides later, bingo! Start to finish: 90 minutes. Fabulous!

I know I will cherish that PhotoStory of Christopher’s North Shore Memories forever: it’s a slice of his life, a glimpse onto his 7 year-old self and what was most important to him. Nothing compares to hearing the voice of the writer, especially when that writer is your baby and is growing up way too fast. Christopher is so excited by the final product that he can’t wait to tell more stories about the time we went to Disney World, the butterflies we raise every summer, on and on and on…

His excited smile is the real light at the end of the tunnel: it makes it all worth it!

People’s Choice

Preface: I misunderstood the directions, thinking my selection for People’s Choice was supposed to go to Candance. Sorry…

I understand that I can’t give three separate awards but indulge me in recognizing my group members for their contributions. If you haven’t read their posts, you have to pay their blogs a visit so you too can enjoy how their unique voices come through so clearly and how their reflections stretch your thinking. Let me introduce you to them:

• Debi’s lighthearted tone and humor always make me chuckle, while her deep caring for students reinforces my conviction that general ed teachers have so much to learn from special ed teachers.
• Janice’s calm and serene tone clarifies issues yet continuously probes deeper, with words always carefully weighted, whether in person or on her blog.
• JoAnn’s strong voice shows her deep convictions: she challenges me and pushes my thinking in amazing ways through her blog and her diligent comments.
• Molly’s cheerful voice celebrates successes yet fearlessly admits doubt even as she keeps looking for the silver lining of this digital endeavor.

They deserve a group award of their own!

Choosing ONE post that shows strong voice, multimedia/multimodal, AND thoughtfulness, was tough because there are so many great examples of EACH of these separately in our cohort’s blogs yet few that have all three elements wrapped up in one… But if I must choose one complete post, it would be Mary’s post about digital literature.

Her voice comes through in the calm thoughtfulness that permeates her post as well as in the personal connections Mary makes with the artistry of digital literature and remixing.

The multimodal/multimedia aspect is evident through the embedded videos and the links.

And Mary’s thoughtfulness comes through in her understanding of the angst felt by many artists who, like us, are people who “want to have their voice heard.” It’s also evident when she explains the value of creating digital literature with students as it involves so many individual choices and “all the choice means everyone can be creative.” Mary’s thinking, here and elsewhere, prompts me to also “see life anew in our lives and our times.” Powerful stuff indeed.

And the winner is…

OK, this is really hard… I need to select three winning entries from this blog? It’s so much easier to pick what is great about other blogs! Before the drumroll begins though, I must admit it was fun to re-read the stuff I had written (and forgotten I had written). I see a true evolution from cautious to more deeply reflective, inquisitive, and unafraid to take chances. Cool...

Professional:

To Share or Not to Share was a post that brought forth a real issue for all of us: should digital work be private (and monetarily rewarded) or should be free for all to use? This question has implications that go far beyond the classroom. Because this post was triggered by a blog from “out there” (in the real world) it felt more authentic than a simple “respond to chapter 4” type of assignment. When I read the original article I instantly turned to blogging as a way to process the information while also reaching out to get other’s point of view. I loved the feedback I received through the long string of comments. This exchange of viewpoints helped me make new connections and form new understandings. This post exemplifies all that blogging has to offer. This was truly a full circle post.

Creativity:

Superior View: A Digital Writing Project was the first post where I showed a polished piece of my writing. Beyond the creative process of writing and putting together the Voicethread, it also shows my reflections on the during-writing and post-writing stages. This post shows the learning I experienced through the process of making a Voicethread. It’s the kind of reflection we want to encourage in students as well: reflect not solely on the product but also on the process so the process (and your creativity) improves each time you repeat it.

Design:

I think of design in two ways: the little baby steps I’ve taken in design and the infinite possibilities the digital world offers for design. So I’ll pick two entries.

Smilebox shows my baby steps into design. It started as a fluke: I was exploring Smilebox and thought “I have to create something to show that this is more than an online scrapbooking website: it could really be applied to classroom instruction!” Once I set out to create one, I had to think of content, page topics, the choice of pictures, the order of the pictures, their captions, which personal details to leave in and which ones to take out, etc. It turned out better than I expected on a first try!

I also chose my Digital Literature post because the whole topic made me think about the importance of design. Perusing these resources was like entering a whole new world where the conventional rules had been thrown out the window. There was so much creativity, so many emotions portrayed. I felt that I was barely cracking the door open onto a new world. Design: another thing I have to learn a lot more about!

So, feel free to agree or disagree with me: that's the beauty of blogging!

Glogster as a Teaching Tool

Check out this neat primary-level example of Glogster as a teaching tool! Listen to the songs at the bottom of the Glog then figure out which pictures are part of the -at family. If you're thorough, you'll even find the mouse hiding from the cat. What a great way to practice blending and segmenting onsets! Can you think of other teaching applications for Glogster?

Student Guidelines for Online Collaboration

I was disappointed that Beach didn’t include guidelines for teaching students how to collaborate online. Perhaps it’s not an issue at the secondary level, but if we’re going to use collaborative writing tools K-5, we need to scaffold not only the content but also the behavioral expectations. We can't simply expect that students will know how to do so effectively and respectfully. As Debi’s post reminded me, many of our students don’t even know how to collaborate face-to-face, let alone online! As teachers, how do our expectations change when the collaboration take the form of online writing? How do we communicate these expectations? How do we model and teach students to collaborate online? Our book’s wiki site, usually filled with an overwhelming number of resources, was bare… If Beach buried this topic under a different chapter I wasn’t able to find it. After much searching online, I finally found this resource, a contract for students writing collaboratively through a wiki. It’s a good start but is there anything else out there?

Collaborative Digital Writing

Collaborative digital writing is a no brainer: it possesses all the features that excite kids about writing.
• Working on a preferred platform: the computer.
• Letting the authors’ creativity shine
• Playing an intricate game of tag while bouncing ideas from one student to another
• Adding multimedia content to strengthen the impact of the writing
• Creating a real message for an authentic audience beyond the classroom or the teacher

Beware: without that audience, the whole thing will flop! Sure, kids can write online for the teacher but what kind of an audience is that? What motivates kids to write is what they value in the process. Students value the work they do when they know that someone “out there” is waiting to read their piece. They’ll give you their best effort because someone else cares about what they have to say.

Sure, there will be students who won’t want to work in groups because they think they work better by themselves. That’s where the whole-class modeling recommended by Bledsoe as his step 1 of collaborative digital writing comes in. It can prove to those students that their writing will be enriched by others’ suggestions. It’s the leap-frogging of ideas that leads Bledsoe to reflect that: “Students working independently would unlikely have reached a plot rich with so many twists and turns (p. 55).”

My word of caution? Think carefully about your assessment of the students’ work before you even begin. Who will evaluate the work? Bledsoe would recommend having the audience evaluate (at least partially) the students, because “The best evaluation will come from an outsider (p. 64).” Will students earn an individual grade? A group grade? Both? If you are going to assess a group grade, what will be its basis? Participation? Content & quality of the final draft? Self-assessments? My rule of thumb is: For every element you assess, ask yourself: if my own child received a poor grade there, what would I want the teacher to tell me? Be ready to justify your thinking around assessment. As a parent I’ve seen too many collaborative projects where my son’s grade suffered because of issues with the group. For example, someone didn’t do their part of the work and the teacher held the group responsible by lowering their individual grades. Children should not be expected to police each other: that’s the teacher’s job.

As for classroom applications at the elementary level, I certainly agree with Bledsoe that storytelling lends itself perfectly to collaborative digital writing. The same could be said for all genres of writing because they allow for total student creativity. But the process would also work for social studies or science writing, such the state brochures or regions projects we do or explaining the findings of a group’s scientific experiment. To increase the collaborative element of such projects, I would ask other groups to give feedback during the revising stage, asking probing questions that might help deepen the group’s thinking.

Finally, my favorite type of collaborative digital writing is the one done across grade levels, where older students work collaboratively to provide answers to younger students’ questions. For example, an intermediate or middle school class could respond to primary students’ questions about the motivation of literature characters: “Mr. Wolf, how did you blow a house down by puffing? And why did you eat two pigs? Wasn’t one enough?” or “Goldilocks, why did you leave such a mess in the Bears’ house,” etc. Likewise, older students could serve as the experts that younger students turn to explain scientific processes, historical events, etc. Think of it as your own in-house “ask an expert!”

There are so many other ideas! Please share yours!

Smilebox

Smilebox is an online tool that helps you create postcards, slideshows, and scrapbook-like albums. You upload your pictures or videos but there are no voice-over capabilities. Depending on the design, you can add between one line to several paragraphs of text. The slideshows come with a selection of background music that you can choose from.

What I like about Smilebox isthat you end up with a great professional looking product but kids won’t spend hours choosing their background, clipart animations and transitions as they often do with PowerPoints: that’s already embedded in the design they choose. As a teacher, I would pre-select 2-4 background options and let the students choose one. Then classroom time can be devoted to the actual writing and uploading of pictures or scanned drawings.

Some classroom applications could include:
Postcards: A thank you note to a volunteer or speaker; a “who I am” type of project (some postcard designs let you include over 30 pictures); invitations to an authors’ tea or other special event; recipes; etc.
Slideshows: Any project where you would want one line of text with each slide, all with a cool background and music.
Scrapbook: Any project where you want to display several pictures with each text, such as a class book to summarize a field trip, a science experiment, a state or region project, etc.

Oh, and did I mention it’s free? With the free version you upload your finished product to the Smilebox site and you can embed it into a blog or sent it in an email. You have to have the Club Smilebox subscription ($6/month or $40/year) to print it or burn it to a DVD. In between these two options is a sort of “Pay as you go” where you can pay for one premium design at a time: once you own that design you can also print it or save it as a jpg. There is also a Teacher Toolbox Program which gives many of the premium features for free but they are not currently accepting any new applications…

So here is my Smilebox picture album about our vacation to the North Shore.

Make a Smilebox postcard

Digital Storytelling

I can't stop blogging about all this: the wealth of formats and powerful stories are so exciting! I could easily get lost for days at the Center for Digital Storytelling (CDS)! I'm exploring and loving it.

When I think of legacy and history, I don’t think of mainstream social studies textbooks. Growing up and studying on two continents teaches you quickly that one country’s version of events can be very different from another. For example, as a school child, I never knew about the horrors committed by some French troops during the Algerian war or about the US Japanese Internment Camps. Those parts of history didn’t fit the immaculate honorable image these countries wanted to portray so they were swept under the rug. They might still be hidden if people had not told their story and refused to be silenced.

History should not just tell the story of the most powerful. It needs to include the stories that were silenced. Digital storytelling holds the power to give a voice to the voiceless. The intermixing of images, music, and the unique author’s voice creates a compelling vision of a person’s unique story. It draws you into real people’s lives. The empathy that comes from understanding their unique story helps us make sense of the world. It also helps us make deeper connections with different viewpoints and perspectives. To see what I mean, watch the Pralines video by Carol Burch Brown (below), or Breaking Free by Griffin Kinnard on the CDS website.



We, all of us, are the history writers of this generation. The collective sum of our stories becomes history. We still have a long way to go towards a truly equitable society. Why not use first account primary-source stories to get young people thinking about the reality of the world in order to figure out how to make it better for everyone? How powerful this could be, linking understanding, analysis, and social justice through service learning!

I hope we will give younger children a voice through digital storytelling. Broken friendships, conflicts, intolerance, family crisis such as divorce or job loss deeply affect our children. To ignore their voice is to ignore the impact of those events on their lives.

Digital LiteraTURE

Digital literature—not to be confused with digital literacy nor with traditional literature that has been uploaded online—sits in a realm of its own: the world of digital-born text. It’s the text that will never see a layout page spread, a printing press, or a bookstore shelf. It will never be marred by a coffee mug stain, get its jacket torn, acquire that musty old book smell, or be rudely discarded from a library’s collection. It was born, it breathes, and it lives entirely online in a myriad of formats, each more dizzying than the last. As long as the technology exists and electricity abounds, it will never get old. It will never disappear. Or will it?

I had never given much thought to a digital-born form of literature. My mind was more focused on the literature which, like me, immigrated to the digital world. But this concept of literature written solely for an online audience breaks all the publishing and marketing rules. So I asked myself the same old questions about “how can you make a living if you give everything away?” (see my October post “To share or not to share”). I guess notoriety must be accompanied by some sort of financial reward if people keep writing online (contributing to a textbook on digital tools comes to mind…). Or is it simply enough, as expressed in Thom Swiss’ poem Self Portrait as Drums and Crowd Noise, to ascend to “the hallowed realm of collective experience and memory?”

From the lurker’s standpoint, it was fascinating to see how this form of literature is completely freed to be truly interactive and multimodal. Thom Swiss’ digital compositions left me wondering at times “how the heck do I make this work?” I can just see him smirking as he created his poems, thinking “we’ll see who is smart enough to figure this out…” After the first few confusing seconds of “how am I supposed to see this?” his Narrative You Anticipate was a complete riot! The text doesn’t fully appear unless you mouse over it and the pages arrange themselves at random each time you “draw” it. I re-did it three times: it felt familiar yet fresh and novel each time.

I also really enjoyed the multimodalities of sound, pictures, voice, video. Forgetfulness by Billy Collins rang so true to my ever more frequent “senior moments” (see video below). The calm voice of the author added a reassuring yet inescapable element that drew me in all the way to the inevitable conclusion. It reminded me of listening to my writing group partners read their pieces: Voice comes through so much better when the author reads aloud. This poem was full of humor and bittersweet irony. Every time I try to help my 8th grader with his math homework I am indeed reminded that I too “have watched the quadratic equation pack its bag.” This is brain research in action: information devoid of meaning will not be retained. Alas, for many of us the downward spiral of forgetfulness will expand into a vortex of doom…

Digital literature… Using it as a teaching tool would open up the world of writing to students who may not think of themselves as writer. They would be drawn in by the multimodalities they have already embraced outside of class. But how do we--poor digital immigrants fresh off the boat--find school-appropriate digital literature without feeling overwhelmed by the sheer number of sites? Where do we begin? Are there any e-Caldecott or Newbery 2.0 e-awards to separate the great works from the so-so efforts?

Multigenre Writing

This is how our class described our very first collective multigenre writing experience.

Wordle transforms any text you copy & paste into a word cloud, with the most frequently used words in the largest font. You can select the orientation, color scheme & font. It's a powerful way to visually represent ideas, opinions, events, stories, etc. How could you use Wordle in your classroom?

Superior View: A Digital Writing Project

Lake Superior... A cherished place in my heart that is the subject of my Voicethread digital writing project. I first wrote this piece during the 2009 Minnesota Writing Project Summer Institute and I polished it with the help of my fabulous writing group, the Superior Scribes. I hope you'll feel like you are there too.

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I played with Voicethread a couple of years ago but I was only lurking, searching for great examples to send to teachers and incorporating Voicethread in my Tech Camp class on Web 2.0 applications for the immersion classroom. Now it was time to jump in!

I had thought about doing a Voicethread with this piece ever since the MWP Summer Institute. I wrote the first draft right after the MWP Summer Institute retreat (before the 3-week class). As I was writing on the deck, I remembered how we had discussed the power of pictures to not only evoke emotions and trigger writing but also to document and illustrate our writing. So I ran back into the cabin, grabbed my camera, and started documenting all the things I was writing about. Except for the picture of the water, I was somewhat disappointed by the washed out colors on my pictures. The day was truly magnificent. It deserved to be preserved in both words and pictures.

When it came to putting the Voicethread together, the software itself was easy to use and once I was home I was able to upload all my pictures at once within 20 seconds. The school’s network is definitely encountering some filtering issues: we are “under attack” as a recent network email stated… The most intimidating part of the process was the recording: I don’t have an external microphone and it wasn’t until the day after I was all done that I actually saw where the microphone is on my laptop (serves me well for doing this in dimly lit conditions late at night…). You should have seen me balancing the half-folded laptop on my lap, trying various sentences to figure out if it sounded best when I spoke close to the mousepad, or close to the keyboard… when in fact the blasted mikes are on each side of the web cam! Duh… I also found myself becoming very nitpicky about the exact intonation of my voice. Should I let it go way low at the end of this sentence or should I bring it up just a tad? Every little inflection became SO important!

Now that I’ve done it once, I would absolutely do another Voicethread. It’s such an easy tool to use. I have a myriad of classroom applications dancing in my head: teachers doing demos or mini-lessons for kids; kids reading pages of a class book; kids explaining their digital portfolio; kids explaining their metacognition in solving math or science problems; teachers posting a visual and kids calling in their interpretation/answer as comments, etc, etc… The possibilities are amazing!

Online Role-Play Reflection

One week of role-playing online... How quickly time flies! I must admit at first I was leery: What will I say? Where will I find research? Who do I respond to? I was unsure how to start. But, like Debi said, once your toes are in the water, it doesn’t feel so bad and it becomes easier.

On the positive side, I enjoyed speaking from the point of view of a different persona, which allowed me to try on a different voice. This must be how writers who use “un nom de plume” feel. Cool! The only bummer is that none of the discussions got heated enough for me to use my “demanding parent” voice (art imitating reality)… I also enjoyed learning from what others had researched. Some of us found the same (timely published) articles, which gave us something to blog about. There were a few resources that I actually bookmarked so I can use them later.

On the negative side—aside from the initial “what the heck am I doing here?”—the one drawback was feeling overwhelmed at times. There were too many discussions going on at once. Which one do I read first? Am I supposed to respond to each one? Yikes! Maybe it would help to brainstorm a few discussion topics and keep the conversations within those. Also, since we’re all so good at finding and posting resources, I felt overwhelmed by the amount of outside sources to read in order to understand a post. Frankly there are some sources I didn’t bother to read if the topic summary in the post didn’t grab me: I simply went on to another discussion. Now that we’re at the end of this role-play, I wish I’d have more time to go back and re-read more carefully what was posted.

Because I was slow on the uptake, I now wish we could keep going for another week so I could respond to more people. By the way, since we started this Ning project, everywhere I look I see articles and blog posts about digital writing, digital literacy, online game simulations, etc. I’m having some serious Twilight Zone moments…

As far as using online role-play with students, this would work with middle school students and maybe fifth graders. To do this well, students need to know how to type, how to adapt their voice for their audience, how to research a point of view and how to organize their thoughts. A few years ago when I lead the French Language Arts curriculum review in middle school, we listed an online simulation as one strategy for 7th graders. 7th graders were studying fairy tales. Primary students also read fairy tales (since they know the story in English it helps to develop and anchor French vocabulary). The idea was to have the primary students do a shared writing of questions they would like to ask the fairy tale characters. Think of something along the lines of “Why did you eat the second little pig Mr. Wolf? Weren’t you full?” The middle schoolers would then respond to their questions from the character’s point of view. Such an activity gives both younger and older students an authentic audience for their writing, which is so difficult to achieve in an immersion setting.

To share or not to share?

A post on the Writing Everyday Works blog I follow intrigued me because of its title: What generation are you? What generation are your co-workers? Does it influence your point of view?
Baby boomers, Gen X’ers, Digital natives, or generations in between (like mine) all have a different view of the world. So I went on to read the post, which takes you to this interesting article from the Walls Street Journal, The Facebook Generation vs. the Fortune 500. In a nutshell: how do corporations need to change in order to attract and retain workers from the Facebook Generation?

It lists 12 “work-relevant characteristics of online life.” I find some of it interesting, some of it right on, and some of it downright scary (hackers are heroes?)! The one characteristic that has fascinated me in recent years is that “power comes from sharing information, not hoarding it.” With the Creative Commons and all, so much is shared on the web, for free, that it often makes me wonder “How can these people make a living if they give away all their thinking and work?” I suppose they use their noteriety to sell bigger and better ideas?

The author, Gary Hamel, explains that “to gain influence and status, you have to give away your expertise and content. And you must do it quickly; if you don’t, someone else will beat you to the punch—and garner the credit that might have been yours. Online, there are a lot of incentives to share, and few incentives to hoard.” As a teacher, I see in this the promise of cooperative learning we try to teach children: by working together we can help each other reach larger goals. On the teacher front, we are also (for the most part) great at sharing lessons and strategies with new teachers on our teams, and increasingly, we share across the web. But we’re not all ready to say: “Sure take my stuff--which took me hours of work to create--and use it!”

On Thursday, I organized a workshop for 90 teachers. One of the presenters reluctantly agreed to sharing her PowerPoint on our website but only after adding a copyright warning on every slide, basically asking people to not share her work. On the other hand, another presenter sent me every single file and example shown to post on the web so others could adapt her work as they see fit. Quite a striking difference! Some are in it to make money (the first presenter mentioned is starting her own company) while others reap different benefits. Which generation do you think these two teachers belonged to?

Update on Internet Searches

This post came from the Technology in the Middle blog that I follow. It's about how to teach effective strategies for searching the vast Web to older kids. I liked this visual from Information Fluency:

Role-Play & Simulations

In what ways have I used role-play and simulations in the classroom?

When Australia was part of the Social Studies curriculum, I would have my second graders role-play various positions in an academic controversy about the endangered habitat of koalas. This was a culminating activity after having studied marsupials, the Australian habitats, and the concepts of perspective and points of view. The question was: should a direct road be built to link a remote yet growing settlement to a main city, even though the road would cut through a grove of trees where koalas lived? Each student had an assigned role and prepared a position statement with other students who had the same role (groups of 2-3 total). Students used simple language but they felt passionate about their positions.

After they argued their individual positions in their discussion groups I gave them a chance to reverse their position so that they could all get to defend their favorite perspective. Switching roles helped students understand the opposite perspective, empathize with both sides, and—in the end—realize that complex issues don’t have clear cut answers: rather they require compromises. This came out of the post-activity discussion we would have after the role-play.

With second graders learning in an immersion setting, I would still do this role-play activity face-to-face rather than online: speaking remains these students' strongest productive language skill. By 5th grade, they could possibly engage in an online role-play during some of the social studies units?

As a second grade teacher, the science curriculum lent itself well to simulations. For example, students had to create boats out of various materials after predicting which materials would float and which ones would sink. They also had to create various shapes of foil boats and simulate loading them with cargo to figure out which designs were the best ones and why. In fourth grade, the electricity unit is largely as simulation unit. In the new science standards, the engineering standards are really all about simulations. However, those are hands-on simulations, not complex online models as those described by Jenkins.

Math games also seem to ideal for simulations. This video from Teacher Tube describes a variety of Math games, some of which could be described as simulations:




In the current curriculum I would like to see an online simulation element to some of the Social Studies’ Storypaths. For example, in the Main Street Storypath, students could create their ideal community online. I haven't seen anything online from the publisher. Has this been done by others at the elementary level? If so, how did teachers structure the simulation for younger students’ limited skills in reading, writing, and typing?

iGoogle & RSS Feeds

In some of our blog conversations we talked about RSS feeds as a way to organize and keep up with information on the web. I use RSS feeds within my iGoogle home page. Here are some videos that explain what iGoogle looks like and how to add RSS feeds:

iGoogle: short, sweet and wordless!


RSS feeds: a short and to the point explanation by the famous guys of In Plain English.


iGoogle details: how to create an iGoogle page The resolution isn't great but the content is detailed. Part two shows how to subscribe to an RSS feed.

(If anyone knows how to make those links open in a new window, please let me know!)

Cool Multi Grade Blog

Did you see what I added to the Check This Out! feature? Duck Diaries is a really cute science inquiry blog about Daisy, the mother duck who built her nest on a school playground. With a narrow focus, a real purpose, a clear audience, and a finite "life," this blog serves as a great example of using technology to serve an authentic purpose. It won an Edublog Award a couple of years ago.

Digital Tools Galore!

Chapter 2 of Beach's book was exciting and frustrating at the same time. I find myself wanting to know more about digital notetaking, mapping, storing, etc. I'd like spend days immersed in the latest ideas and resources contained in the book's wiki. At the same time, I am frustrated by the frantic pace of life and how each week comes so quickly that I have barely started chewing on one topic before we move on to the next one.

Digital Notetaking
In this chapter, the digital notetaking intrigues me because I like to take notes on my computer, using plain old Word. I’ve used Google Docs to collaborate on minutes and notes from meetings. Now I’d like to try Google Notebook to be able to capture and link websites to my notes.

In that same section of the chapter, the Tablet PC example where students take simultaneous notes reminded me of an incident that happened this week during a workshop on equity. The presenter asked everyone to close their computers because she didn’t want people doing emails or hiding their face behind a screen during uncomfortable conversations about race. A group of administrators challenged her thinking and explained that they were using their three Tablet PCs to take notes for the other administrators who stayed at their building but were following the workshop through these notes. They were exchanging information and opinions in real time, while collaborating on a synthesized version of their notes on Google Docs. Wow! They were extending learning outside the workshop. The presenter highlighted their work as a great example of opening up communication within their team. The computers stayed on.

My Favorite Survey Tool!
In this same chapter, Beach talks about collecting research data through surveys and polls. Tools like SurveyMonkey lend themselves well to multi-question surveys. But these tools are not free and the surveys can get quite lengthy. For elementary kids, there is a one-question survey feature on the student blogs of Think.com but those can only be accessed by people in the class.

If you want to extend a question to those outside the class, my favorite tool is Doodle. Doodle lets you create a poll (the survey question) in any of 21 languages. There is a yes/no/maybe option called making a choice that works very well for a quick survey. You enter a possible answer and, for each potential answer, people tell you if they agree (yes), disagree (no), or are neutral (maybe). You could use it to ask kids what their favorite fruit is, to check if they understood the meaning of a vocabulary word, or to find out who is working on pre-writing, drafting, revising, editing, and who needs to conference with you. Students could answer the survey by rotating through 1-2 computers at school. Families could be polled by emailing them the link to a particular survey. I’ve used it to figure out what toppings people wanted on the pizza we ordered for our CoP, as well as finding a meeting date & time for people around the metro area. It’s super easy to use!

Blogging Resources on the R: Drive

Molly S. and Mike W. have put some great blogging resources on the R: drive:

• Blogging Do's and Don'ts for students
• Web 2.0 permission letter for parents
• Blog Overview (includes ideas for classroom and individual blogs)
• Cheat sheets for using various blogging sites

Check it out on R:\Technology\Blogs!

Take Aways from HOT Blogging Article

Let me preface this by stating that my struggle with blogging is keeping the posts short! So I decided to write my reflections in a Word document and only post small snippets. Here are two paragraphs from my 2-page thinking process...

There are two pieces from the Zawilinski article that I want to act upon. They are both from the HOT blogging stages. In the “Prime the pump” stage, students prepare for a class discussion by reading others’ posts and comments. Then, during the discussion, they share others’ posted comments, not theirs. This year for LINKS—our monthly course for new teachers—we’re trying individual blogs. I would like to structure our face-to-face conversation about the online discussions using a similar format. It would ensure "better listening" of what others are saying (i.e. deeper reading) and I also think it would help the online communication remain at an excellent level.

The second quote that resonated with me came from the “Make multiplicity explicit” stage:
“Students read their classmates’ responses, noting which are similar and different and in what ways, and these responses show students how diverse perspectives can further deepen and enrich one’s own thinking (p. 658).” My ah-ha moment was connecting this with the equity work we are all engaged in. Digital writing is a way to give every student a voice, even the ELL who has difficulty producing perfectly edited text but can record a podcast. By sharing perspectives and experiences and by asking students to focus their thinking on understanding the other person’s point of view won’t we build a more tolerant, more equitable community? It’s a win-win situation!


P.S. Did you know that the International Reading Association has an ongoing "Blogging in the classroom" discussion on Facebook? Check it out!

Elements of Successful Blogs

While reading Beach’s chapter on “Using blogs in the classroom” two things stood out.

1. The most successful blogs are the ones where students take full ownership for the blogs: they have individual blogs and they interact continuously through their blogs, using each other as both audience and resource. These blogs “created a sense of community where students were free to exchange ideas and anxieties, protest and receive feedback, without fear of reprisal or a lower grade (p. 118).” I'd like to get there someday. I think the first step to getting there is being crystal clear on the purpose for blogging.
   
2. The five stages of blog entry (below) helped me label the various blogs I have read, some effective and interesting, while others seemed superficial and incomplete. The stages helped me think about blogging on a continuum: it's OK to not have the perfect blog right away. It's about the journey. As the teacher, that journey is also about how to set up the blog to encourage those higher levels.

The five stages of blog entries move from least to most sophisticated:

• Discover: looking at blogs to define a topic of interest
• Define: post entries to begin sharing ideas; much like this blog right now
• Immerse: research a topic through links & RSS feeds
• Build: posts show new learning and interaction with others
• Contribute: create resources for others that show thorough understanding of the topic

Blogging for all

I embrace the idea of using blogs in the classroom. In the words of Will Richardson, "Writing stops; blogging continues. Writing is inside; blogging is outside. Writing is monologue; blogging is conversation. Writing is thesis; blogging is synthesis." (From Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms (Corwin Press, 2nd Ed, July 2008).

While reading Beach’s book, I found myself excited at the examples he showcased while feeling disappointed that there was no connection made for elementary teachers. That is really lacking in this book so far. Implying “you the reader can make the leap and tweak this to fit your teaching world” is disrespectful of K-5 teachers. In Chapter 6, the classroom blog vs. individual blogs part should have considered an elementary level audience. There are some great examples of blogs at the elementary level, most of which are classroom blogs.

What is digital writing?

What does digital writing mean to me as a writer? As a teacher?

As a writer, I find digital writing fun. It’s more than just my words: I can choose to make my message joyful, vivid, dreary, or mysterious. I can personalize my writing even more to convey emotions, moods, or capture the reader’s interest. You and I could say basically the same thing but what we add to the words—visually or through music—as well as the format we choose to share our writing could lead to two completely different messages. I’ve always been an aspiring techie so I find it fun to learn new tools, new ways of doing things. I could play with a new software or website for days! So as a writer, I’d like to learn more cool ways to write digitally. What else is out there that I haven’t yet played with?

As a writer, I also like the instantaneous nature of digital writing: once I click on that save/send/upload button my writing is “out there” for all to read: no need for stamps or multiple copies; no long wait for feedback. More importantly, as a writer I can choose my audience. I can restrict to share my thoughts with only a chosen few or I can voice my opinions for the whole world to hear. Regardless of the scope of my audience, it’s an authentic audience and the fact that I chose it gives purpose to my writing. I’d like to learn how to better guide teachers’ thinking in order to broaden the scope of their students’ audience.

The same things that excite me as a writer concern me as a teacher. Students need thoughtful guidance and structure to choose the right format, the right tools, and to not get lost in the glitz of multimodal writing. The danger is there: think PowerPoint slide transitions overload to the tenth power! How do we help teachers and students think clearly about their purpose to choose the right tools?

Also, being an aspiring techie is a dangerous state. I’m enthusiastic so I go deeper but it’s when I reach an impasse that I realize there’s so much I still don’t know… It’s the “how did I get here?” syndrome. Add to that a class full of young elementary students depending on you to be “all knowing” and we’re all stuck. Kind of like when the server goes down in the middle of your lesson… The ever-changing technology can be daunting. If teachers try to do too much, they will crash and burn in frustration. And if we ask students to do too much, we will “wiki them to death” to use the expression of a colleague. I’d like to spend time thinking about how digital writing stays manageable for teachers and students. Along the same lines is the reality that digital writing can’t be an add-on: it has to replace paper-pencil writing tasks.

As a teacher, the instantaneous nature of digital writing also worries me. First of all, it encourages too much short-answer, one-liner type of writing. While that might be exactly what a primary student or an ELL need, but it’s no way to foster deep thinking through writing. How much depth can there be in 140 characters? Secondly, the instant nature of digital writing encourages us to upload writing before it’s polished. We wouldn’t publish an article in a newspaper that wasn’t properly revised, edited and fixed. Likewise, we shouldn’t publish digital writing that isn’t “perfect” (I know there is no such thing). It’s no different in the digital world than it is in the paper-pencil world: we need to insist on following the writing process for digital writing before it is shared. How do we structure instructional time so digital writing works within the writer’s workshop but isn’t the last publishing step in the process (and an add-on)?

One of the greatest benefits of digital writing is the real audience it provides students. Who cares about writing a description of the monarch butterfly’s development for the teacher? But using pictures, videos, interviews to describe the monarch’s life cycle and its incredible journey to Mexico for a class halfway across the world that has never seen a live monarch... now that’s cool! Or maybe it’s sharing the daily observations of the monarch’s development with a local school that is studying monarchs but can’t afford to raise them, while exchanging hypothesis and research. Or maybe it’s sharing the same information with a school in Mexico where students wonder how far north the monarchs fly and how long it takes them to get there each spring. Each task, geared to a different audience, takes on a different purpose. As a teacher I have two concerns. First, are we finding truly authentic audiences for students’ writing? Secondly, are the needs of that audience surpassing our primary purpose: fulfilling our state standards? Sometimes projects with the best intentions become huge. Yes, they really motivate students. But are they truly what we need to teach?

Lots of thoughts… Lots of questions… I can’t wait to dig into digital writing!