Teaching to reach every single student

I have been using a classroom blog with my 7th and 8th grade science students for the past 5 weeks or so. It seemed to take so long to get started — finding the right blog hosting service, the right way to introduce my students to the idea, designing the right assignments, picking the right template, etc. But from the first post, the experience has been like being fired out of the proverbial cannon.

First, there was the period and a half for each of my 4 classes teaching them how to post to the blog, and what constituted proper etiquette, and how they would be graded. Second, there was the blocks of time doing individual coaching. Third, the excitement of the stack of emails I would receive as the students post their assignments.

It has been just what I wanted — a place where the students could have a conversation outside the classroom setting with me and, more importantly, with each other.

The biggest accomplishment so far: their writing has, as a group, significantly improved since we began. The standard assignment thus far is for them to find a science related article in some reputable publication, and write a summary and reflection on that article. This gets posted to the blog each week. Additionally, they are to read the work of at least 3 other students and to comment constructively on it.

Let’s do the math, each week my 100 students post 1 report and 3 comments. That’s a great deal of discourse from them. And enough from me for now.

In my previous post, I shared what has been happening in the first couple of weeks of having my 7th and 8th grade science students posting assignments and responding to one anothers’ work on my class blog. This has been really exciting and a bit vertigo inducing.

At the same time, I have been going public (at least in my district) with what I have been doing with blogs, wikis, podcasts, and the like.

Last week, during one of our Superintendent’s Conference Days, I was invited to give a workshop for other teachers on using these tools in the classroom. About 15 teachers and administrators participated. It was, of course, an honor to be asked to do this workshop. And it was really good to lay out what I was doing and what I saw as possible to such a large chunk of other partners/colleagues/companions. This part was a relief, frankly, to finally have others participating with me — to expand this community beyond one (namely, me).

As a result of that, I have been asked to do a presentation for the district’s administrators and another for the parents at an upcoming PTA meeting.

I just wanted to make my students more engaged, honest.

Blogged with Flock

I cannot believe I haven’t posted anything new is such a while, but have barely had time to poke my head up as well.

It has been an amazing 2 weeks with my 7th and 8th
graders on the blog. As a group, and as individuals, there work has
really gotten better. Some students have improved dramatically, even
over the traditional paper versions of the assignments that they used
to hand in to me (in those old, old days of last month). Some of them
have really jumped into their responses to the science articles they
are reading, which has always been the point of the assignment.

They are also posting comments to other students’ work as well. There
is still much work to do here. Many comments have been good and
constructive (even if critical). Some are still in IM/text message
speak. I have tried to do little moderating to give them a chance to
connect with each other in this new venue, but this is clearly a place
where I need to add some instruction.

I hadn’t anticipated all of the changes in my thinking and my practice
that this has necessitated. How much (if at all) do I participate in
the conversation? How do I administer the grading? Since the students’
work is anonymous, I could post the grades to the blog directly, but
wasn’t prepared to do this.

I am very interested to hear others are doing.

Blogged with Flock

After all of the churning and roiling about should I move ahead with blogging in the classroom and how to move ahead with blogging in the classroom, I have, at last, moved ahead with blogging in the classroom.

This week, I trained my 7th and 8th grade middle school science classes to use my blog.

I have had a standard (and traditional assignment) for my students to find an article each week that is science related and then to write a brief report on it. The report consists of a citation (the name of the article, who wrote it, who published it and when), a brief summary, and a reflection. In the reflection, I ask them to let me know what they think about the article, whether it was convincing and why, and what suggestions they might have for changing it.

The reports have, for the most part, been really good, but I had begun to notice that the conversation started was pretty limited: the student produces work which I read and then return. The circle is closed immediately.

So, this is the assignment I have moved online to my blog. Now, in addition to posting their weekly report, I have asked the students to read at least 3 others and comment (constructively) on those.

At the moment, the students are at work to get this done by Friday. I have noticed some interesting things already. First, they have started the assignment earlier than when it was just to be done on paper. There has been a buzz of activity from the very beginning of the week. Second, their comments have been good and thoughtful (so far). And I must say that receiving stacks of emails as their comments are posted is such an interesting (and satisfying) experience for me as their teacher.

This is very exciting.

This month, there were two articles about using Wikipedia in classrooms in two different teacher-oriented publications.

The first was in NEA Today. This one is a general article about Wikipedia, highlighting some of the key issues between the public/democratic goals of Wikipedia (and other wiki projects) against concerns about its reliability and authenticity. Here’s a quote from this article:

But with wiki technology, students can go beyond simply reading sites to helping write them as well, fulfilling the Web’s promise of becoming a fully interactive medium. According to Frey, whether or not Wikipedia is a reliable source is beside the point. Its value, he says, is in its collaborative nature. “It’s an organic product, it’s an interactive product, and it’s a community product,” he says. “You can’t compare it to traditional resources. It encourages us to accept that in today’s world, anyone can be a published author.”

The second was in American Teacher. This one took a point/counterpoint format with an educator taking pro and con views of using Wikipedia with students. Here’s a brief quote from each:

… And teaching students the patience to delve into credible resources is the task and responsibility of the educator. We, as educators, cannot condone lazy techniques or unreliable research tools.

Unlike a more static writing process in which publication marks the end of revisions and the end of the process, wiki writing is instantly published while undergoing infinite revisions. The wiki therefore brings literacy and accountability to a whole new level. Students are not simply skimming for content, they are constantly evaluating from an editor’s point of view in order to improve what they are reading/publishing.

Lastly, an anecdote from my middle school. The technology teacher had been doing a lesson on Wikipedia and how it works and how to assess accuracy in an on line source. During the class, a student went in and edited two entries by deleting what was there and adding nonsense. Since Wikipedia tracks vandalism, it noted the school’s IP address and has prevented anyone from editing any entry for a chunk of time (a week, I think).While I disapprove of the student’s behavior (as did his teacher), I think it serves to highlight the points of these articles as well as what we face as educators bringing this part of the web into our classrooms.

Blogged with Flock

My old friend Ed, who blogs as Big Ed, sent me to this article by King Kaufman, a sports columnist for Salon.

He wrote a short piece when he noticed that he had a one-line entry made in Wikipedia and then discovered this brief entry was marked for deletion.

Then, he wrote this piece, a longer one, describing his experience with the on-line community. Here’s a big of his experience:

I found that one-sentence entry about me, laughed, and wrote a short item about it.

And of course within minutes it started getting updated, filled out. False information came and went. New factoids emerged. I’m from Los Angeles, it turns out. (True.) I once wrote that second base should be eliminated. (False.) Soon the deletion notice went away. Saved! The wisdom of crowds!

Soon there was a notation in the item that I’d written a column on Aug. 10, 2006, bemoaning the fact that my item might be deleted. Whoa, feedback loop! That was removed in short order as a “navel-gazing reference to Wikipedia.”

His discussion, while far afield of using blogs and wikis in classrooms is a good case study of one person’s interaction with the social web.

King Kaufman’s Sports Daily | Salon

Blogged with Flock

Will Richardson (who is single-handedly responsible for nudging me into this world of blogs, wikis, and podcasts) has an article in the October issue of Edutopia. It is called “The New Face of Learning,” and in it does a terrific job explicating the possibilities and challenges for educators of the web as we now know and use it.

Here are some quotes from the piece. First, on learning:

In this new interactive Webworld, I have become a nomadic learner; I graze on knowledge. I find what I need when I need it. There is no linear curriculum to my learning, no formal structure other than the tools I use to connect to the people and sources that point me to what I need to know and learn, the same tools I use to then give back what I have discovered. I have become, at long last, that lifelong learner my teachers always hoped I would become. Unfortunately, it’s about thirty years too late for them to see it.The good news for all of us is that today, anyone can become a lifelong learner. (Yes, even you.) These technologies are user friendly in a way that technologies have not been in the past. You can be up and bloggingin minutes, editing wikis in seconds, making podcasts in, well, less time than you’d think. It’s not difficult at all to be an active contributor in this society of authorship we are building.

Second, on educators using these technologies in their classrooms:

When you read this, blogs and wikis and podcasts (and much more) may be things that students (and teachers) can access and create only from off-campus. And so they might never learn to podcast like the third and fourth graders creating the podcasts in Bob Sprankle’s class at Wells Elementary School, in Wells, Maine. They might therefore never publish a local museum tour, an interview with a local celebrity, or an oral history about their town that a billion people could listen to. Nor will they ever get the chance to collaborate in a blog with U.S. soldiers in Iraq, like April Chamberlain’s students at Paine Intermediate School, in Trussville, Alabama, and learn firsthand what it’s like to be a Screaming Eagle. Or share stories about the places they live at Wikiville.org.uk, where hundreds of kids from around the world have started writing and connecting. Or teach calculus to thousands of interested readers from around the world, as do the Canadian students in Darren Kuropatwa’s math class at Daniel McIntyre Collegiate Institute, in Winnipeg, Manitoba.

And, lastly, for the big picture:

But I wonder whether, twenty-five or fifty years from now, when four or five billion people are connecting online, the real story of these times won’t be the more global tests and transformations these technologies offered. How, as educators and learners, did we respond? Did we embrace the potentials of a connected, collaborative world and put our creative imaginations to work to reenvision our classrooms? Did we use these new tools to develop passionate, fearless, lifelong learners? Did we ourselves become those learners? Or did we cling to old ideas, old models, and old habits and drift more fully into irrelevance in our students’ eyes?

The New Face of Learning

Yesterday’s New York Times had a review of a new book by Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture. The book apparently traces the impact between  counterculture (as typified by The Whole Earth Catalog) and the development of the internet.

The reviewer, Edward Rothstein makes a terrific point:

It might be argued that so prevalent was the counterculture, and so experimental and energetic were its most vocal proponents, that it would have been surprising had many of them not found their way to the computer revolution.

But Mr. Turner demonstrates something more essential in the continuity.First, he suggests, we are mistaken in thinking that the postwar technological world was dominated by hierarchies and rigid categories. Under the influence of the mathematician Norbert Wiener, it became increasingly common to think of humans and machines as interacting elements of “cybernetic systems” — organisms through which information flowed. This also led to a different way of thinking about living organisms and their networks of interaction.

This struck me as so right in line with what some of us are hoping for by using the Read/Write web in our classrooms.

Fred Turner - From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism - - New York Times

Blogged with Flock

I have been working for the past couple of months to get myself set up to use blogs and wikis with my 7th and 8th grade science students.

First, I tried to get clear about what my objectives were. Ultimately, I decided they were teaching literacy and fostering collaboration. To open up the conversation beyond that of a one-to-one teacher-student exchange. Fine.

Then, I worked on the technical pieces. I started my own blog (this one). I experimented with various blogs for use with students, especially edublogs, learnerblogs, and classblogmeister. I set up wiki spaces with PBWiki and JotSpot. Etc., etc..

I have received enthusiastic support from my administrators and fellow teachers.

It never even occurred to me to include the students before I was “ready for prime-time.”

This week, however, I realized I had gone as far as I could without really involving students, so I arranged to meet with a couple of small groups of students during lunch a couple of times this week. I walked them through my goals and plans and asked for (and really wanted) their feedback. Their enthusiasm was immediate; their suggestions valuable.

Shame on me for trying to teach collaboration in somewhat of a vacuum.

The first class blog will go live this week.

B minus 5 days…

Blogged with Flock

This blog is used by Crystal, a computer science teacher. She is using her blog as a place where students can have access to assignments; as a place for their responses to various class readings; and as a place where they can register progress or questions about projects.

Here is what she has said elsewhere about her vision:

My goal is to teach computer science, and for my students to have a place to share ideas on problem solving techniques. Part of problem solving is doing a little research, and I’ve made them lazy about this research. They have just turned to me to “fill them up”. Now, I’m asking them to fill eachother up with ideas.
G-Town talks » Why are we using blogging in the classroom?

I have been trying to make this whole process less complicated. She has helped me do this.
JCC CSC 1590 Computing Fundamentals I

Blogged with Flock