Today, I am at Fordham University, presenting at their summer literacy institute focusing on 21st Century Literacies. I am honored to have the opportunity to present with Kathi Yancey, and she is currently in the middle of her session about “Blogging Alive,” asking participants to think about the purposes and audiences for blogging. She began [...]

Today, I will be introducing my ENG 315 pre-service teachers to the idea of developing their “digital teaching persona” and thinking critically about why and how to use technology in their personal technology learning and to become better teachers of writing. Each semester, I face the act of balancing the introduction of a number of [...]

Been trying to get focused on writing for the books again tonight, but catching up on RSS reading and some recent posts from Andrea, Aram, and Sara reminded me to take some time with family and catch up on some personal reading (besides RSS feeds). So, I figured I would reflect on a few things [...]

The second in a series of workshops from NWPM colleagues at MRA 2008, these are notes from Portland Middle School teachers Amanda and Garth Cornwell’s session on “Partnering Students, Parents, and Teachers Through Technology.” Begin with questions from the audience: How to get younger students to access technology on their own? How do parents react, [...]

Here are notes from my Crossroads Writing Project colleagues, Lavon Jonson and Sonja Mack: “Blogging — Maximizing Writer’s Notebooks with a 21st Century Dimension.” Background Bringing blogging into the traditional process of using a writers notebook Writing with your students encourages them to write (Graves, etc.) Blog Growth In April 2007, 70 million blogs, 90% [...]

January has been a busy month for me as I have been coordinating field placements for my ENG 315 students and we have begun exploring the use of blogs, wikis, podcasts, and RSS in our teaching lives. When we began this work a few short weeks ago, only a handful of these pre-service teachers had [...]

And, finally for tonight, a quick shout out to my friend and RCWP colleague, Aram Kabodian, who is getting back into the blogging business this holiday season. Mr. Kabodian’s Blog Well, I took the plunge and let people know I’m playing with pageflakes and bustin’ out this blog. And people actually responded! It was nice [...]

My colleague Rob Rozema from GVSU has invited my students and I to participate in a new Ning social network, Teach English. I am very excited about the opportunity to be involved in this project, and we will also have students from Allen Webb‘s course at WMU join in, too. As we consider what we [...]

Today, I had the chance to attend an educational technology session at MSU featuring Nicole Ellison, Department of Telecommunication, Information Studies & Media, MSU College of Communication Arts and Sciences, and Leigh Graves Wolf, Learning Technology and Culture Programs, MSU College of Education. Their topic is “Educational Blogging: What, Where, Why and How.” Here are [...]

It’s been about a year since I’ve seen an article like this pop up — perhaps it has to do with going back to school and all the negative ideas that technology can bring in relation to the state of our language and culture: The walls between the school and the cellphone or computer screen [...]