Digital Writing, Digital Teaching

Monday, we will be discussing the Writing Next Report, issued by the Alliance for Excellent Education. Here are my thoughts on the prompt, “How has reading the Writing Next Report encouraged you to rethink aspects of your teaching practice?”

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The Writing Next Report, written by Steve Graham and Dolores Perin, issued earlier this year by the Alliance for Excellent Education as a report to the Carnegie Corporation of New York, outlines 11 teaching strategies that improve student achievement in writing. The report is a meta-analysis of dozens of quantitative studies that allow for the calculation of an “effect size,” or “the average difference between a type of instruction and a comparison condition” (p. 13). More on the measurement process and research method in a moment, but first a look at the results of the study.The authors of the report suggest eleven writing strategies that “are supported by rigorous research, but that even when used together, they do not constitute a full writing curriculum” (p.4). This point merits particular attention as one reads the list of strategies and thinks about what good writing teachers do as well as how and why they implement those strategies. That said, the list of strategies reads like a “greatest hits” of instructional techniques that a teacher can implement in his or her classroom (hence the warning not to call this list a curriculum). Here is the list, taken verbatim from the report, pages 4 and 5 (and I have listed the effect sizes at the end, the larger the better):

1. Writing Strategies, which involves teaching students strategies for planning, revising, and editing their compositions (.82)
2. Summarization, which involves explicitly and systematically teaching students how to summarize texts (.82)
3. Collaborative Writing, which uses instructional arrangements in which adolescents work together to plan, draft, revise, and edit their compositions (.75)
4. Specific Product Goals, which assigns students specific, reachable goals for the writing they are to complete (.70)
5. Word Processing, which uses computers and word processors as instructional supports for writing assignments (.55)
6. Sentence Combining, which involves teaching students to construct more complex, sophisticated sentences (.50)
7. Prewriting, which engages students in activities designed to help them generate or organize ideas for their composition (.32)
8. Inquiry Activities, which engages students in analyzing immediate, concrete data to help them develop ideas and content for a particular writing task (.32)
9. Process Writing Approach, which interweaves a number of writing instructional activities in a workshop environment that stresses extended writing opportunities,writing for authentic audiences, personalized instruction, and cycles of writing (.32)
10. Study of Models, which provides students with opportunities to read, analyze, and emulate models of good writing (.25)
11. Writing for Content Learning, which uses writing as a tool for learning content material (.23)

These strategies, as a whole, represent most (if not all) of what I have come to understand comprises good writing instruction. To that end, I am pleased to know that my theoretical orientation towards the field aligns with the experimental evidence about “what works” in good writing instruction. In particular, I am glad to see that writing strategies and collaborative writing rank so high, although it makes me wonder why the process approach ended up toward the bottom of the list. This makes me wonder if they, unlike Katie Wood Ray, are making a distinction between the writing process and writing workshop, and I am guessing that they are not.

Even though Graham and Perin reiterate that this is not a curriculum, I have to wonder if some teachers, schools, districts, and states, could see it as such and “require” teachers to use each of the strategies in a writing program. Like the writing process/workshop distinction above, there are other parts of the report that do not represent the richness of discussions in our field (such as moving beyond word processing into other forms of digital writing or thinking broadly about writing to learn strategies), and I feel that the over reliance on only quantitative data may be limiting some of the implications and, in turn, potentially lead to implementation plans that are not complete.

All that said, the report is useful to me in my teaching in many ways. As a teacher educator, I think that this report can certainly offer evidence of the many practices that I use that stand up, for better or for worse, in a “scientifically-based” study. Thus, when I use these approaches in my teacher education courses and professional development workshops, I can point to the effect size data and suggest that these strategies have been integrated in a variety of contexts, yielding strong results. In other words, it can bring empirical merit to many of my theoretical practices, and the practices I share with other teachers.

As a writing teacher, this report encourages me to reconsider some ideas that I have neglected for some time. I do appreciate that Graham and Perin discussed the negative influence of explicit grammar instruction (p. 21) as it affirms my beliefs and synthesizes a number of good studies that have happened over the years, thus bringing (what we hope might be) a final curtain on the “should we teach grammar in isolation” argument. Also, the processes of summarization and sentence combining remind me — as someone who will be teaching a college writing class this fall — that not all students know how to do these tasks, or do them well. Modeling summary writing and sentence combining could offer some variety to my lessons as well as teach useful writing skills.

In sum, the Writing Next Report was useful to read as it confirmed many of my beliefs about teaching writing with statistical evidence while reminding me of the other aspects that I need to reintroduce into my practice. It also is encouraging to see these practices as the ones held up as “good” for writing instruction because, perhaps, those who works with assessment of writing might be able to think about how to measure these aspects of writing, not just the final product, which is so valued right now.

While there are many things on which I could comment in this article, I want to focus solely on the image that readers see when they first view it. Take a look at this for a moment, and then think about the implications of this image on school laptop programs, regardless of the discussion following it in the article.

Seeing No Progress, Some Schools Drop Laptops - New York Times

So, there are at least two reactions that I could have to this. One reading could be to look at it the way in which it was intended. The second gives me more pause.
The first reactions is, of course, to just look at the headline, read the article, and say, “yup, laptops are a waste of time.” Any kid who is more worried about drinking and Godsmack must be doing something bad with his laptop, right? These kids are having too much fun with this laptop to be “learning” anything (at least, what most of us envision “learning” to be, as associated with school). Also, the young lady in the picture has the look of “Oh, what are they doing now?” Combined, the composition of this pictures suggests lewd and, if not illegal, at least immoral activity going on with these two boys and their laptop escapades.
Granted, the caption of the picture does mention the fact that these students are at lunch, which implies that that should be on free time that they can use in their own way. But does that really matter? Given the headline, it is clear that the rhetorical affect of this image supports the conclusion that laptops are a worthless investment.

The other reaction is to simply, “Yes, you are right. The laptops are a waste of time indeed.” Now, what makes me say that. Well, despite the interview with Mark Warschauer, author of “Laptops and Literacy: Learning in the Wireless Classroom” that shows up on page two of this article — and all the potential positive effects that laptops could have, the article ends on a disappointing note.

But in many other classrooms, there was nary a laptop in sight as teachers read from textbooks and scribbled on chalkboards. Some teachers said they had felt compelled to teach with laptops in the beginning, but stopped because they found they were spending so much time coping with technical glitches that they were unable to finish their lessons.

So, concluding that school hasn’t really changed much in the past 150 to 200 years, and that laptops are bound to have technical glitches that keep them from being used as tools in the classroom, we conclude that they are worthless. Beyond the issues of teacher professional development related to technology that I could talk about (and is mentioned in the article), what I want to suggest here is that part of the problem is that the reason so many computers are broke is because students aren’t expected to take care of them.

Could it be that the reason they are being broken is because the students aren’t taught how to download, install, and update virus and spyware protection? Could the reason that they are being broken is because students are leaving them in their lockers and book bags more than they need them in class? Could the reason that they are being broken stem from the fact that kids try (and succeed) to do everything to subvert filters and locks that they ruin the computers in the process, rather than be put in charge of properly maintaining them?

I feel that this article — as well as the issue of laptops in schools — is being explored from a one-dimensional model of schooling where the teachers/administrators are supposed to prevent all disruptive behavior before it starts and that kids, essentially, don’t have to take responsibility for their learning. These are issues bigger than just professional development and advocating for School 2.0, although those are definitely part of the discussion.
Instead, I think that we need to consider talking to students about how to take care of the technology that is supposed to sustain them in school. We don’t like gum under desks or scribbles in textbooks, and we teach students not to do that (and, if appropriate, discipline them when they break those rules). Is it possible that we are not teaching students the ethos of computer ownership, from taking care of hardware to being a good online citizen? Perhaps that is a side of the issue that we could look into more fully in future research.

Blogged with Flock

Doug Fisher’s “Improving Adolescent Literacy: Strategies at Work”

Fisher outlined a program that he and teachers at their high school (he has been on loan from SDSU) use for literacy achievement.

Some Foundations

• Reading time every day — practice makes permanent as it relates to SSR
• Rationale for choosing strategies:
• Is it research based?
• Is it transferable across content areas?
• Will these strategies have high utility in college?

Literacy Strategies

• Seven literacy strategies that teachers use in every class, all day, from K-12, that all the staff members agreed to:
• Writing to learn
• Not process writing like in ELA
• Helps clarify students’ thinking and used as a daily assessment
• Kids are only expected to write 6.5 minutes each day, on average, in high school content area classes
• Read aloud/shared reading
• These happen in every class, every day (5-7 minutes in a block of 90 minutes, and the teachers shares/models his/her thinking). Comprehension modeling happens in every classroom and kids can apply these ideas to all their other classes.
• Good selections
• Connected to the class
• Access to the text?
• Four categories of read alouds
• Comprehension only
• Vocabulary — thinking through it and getting contextual clues to solve word parts and meaning or access other resources. Thus, we should never tell students to “skip it” when they come across a difficult word. We would never model skipping; we model solving.
• Text structures — teachers noticed and explained when they noticed certain text structures like cause and effect, problem and solution, etc. This works for both informational texts and narratives, too.
• Text features — what do you add as a writer to improve comprehension? Graphics, titles, headers, fonts, etc.
• Anticipatory activities (building background)
• KWL
• In 1998 when this began, high school teachers didn’t really know about this strategy. Fisher talked about a teacher who did the KWL for his students and thought that “the students don’t know anything.” He talked about how this is a shift in teachers’ thinking, not just implementing a strategy.
• Discovery
• Anticipation guides
• Questions
• Quick writes
• Discrepant events
• Demonstrations
• Vocabulary development
• General words used in everyday language with agreed meaning across contexts
• Specialized (academic) vvocabulary are words with multiple meanings in different content areas
• Technical, discipline-specific vocabulary that is dependent to field of study (photosynthesis)
• Reciprocal teaching
• Built by a class to class habit
• Graphic organizers — students must do this work. Teachers shouldn’t just make a Venn Diagram and then expect students to fill it out.
• Concept maps
• Diagrams
• Text structure charts (cause/effect, temporal sequence, problem/solution)
• Students’ #1 choice — most helpful for remembering information
• Cornell note-taking
• Every class uses this note-taking structure with a major column, minor column, summary space at the bottom of the page
• Note-taking is the single greatest predictor of college success
• They teach this starting in kindergarten

Model of Instruction
One of the things that is very absent from school is a “gradual release of responsibility” from teacher to student.

• Focus lesson - “I do it”
• Guided Instruction - “We do it”
• Collaborative - “You do it together”
• Independent - “You do it alone”

We can not have the “do it yourself” model where teachers give a few instructions and turn kids loose. We also need to consider time for kids to collaborate with one another so that they can consolidate what they are learning. We need to increase the amount of time that students are using academic language with one another. Fisher gave a great example of learning how to work with his cell phone and how the sales person led him through “guided instruction” so that he could learn how to do it. Everything that I have learned how to do, he explained, has come from this gradual release model.

He is worried that reading strategies are becoming “curricularized” for large chunks of time (for a four week unit, for instance). He talked about how a student read “Stone Fox,” and how the kids had been predicting “everything, man.” The student will necer mobilize predicting on his own because it has always been a teacher-driven aspect of his learning.

You have to do this work with interesting and engaging text. For instance, see Phineas Gage.

Jim Burke’s “Teaching: The First Ten Minutes”
Presentation at MRA 2007

Jim Burke began by inviting participants to think about the actions that students must engage in to be successful in their core academic work. He then talked about how students need to continue a number of academic skills in classes that have traditionally not been heavily focused on those skills. for instance in health.

He showed us a matrix of “academic essentials” that he invites students to use as they analyze texts. He discussed how this matrix can be used as a kind of mental weightlifting in which students push beyond what they initially are able to do into harder tasks. They move beyond what they are typically able to do in order to build up mental muscle.

Then, he shared a “time use evaluation” model, asking us to think about how we divide up our class periods and how many “teaching moves” we make in a period. The goal for the first ten minutes, then, is to consider what you do, how you do it, and why so that the initial class time is purposeful and focused. We don’t want to do “drive by literacy instruction,” where we are so focused on checking off the standards that we forget what good teaching consists of. It is not a model of responsive instruction. Burke suggests that kids work well with about three instructional moves per class.

Some examples that he shared came from the Academic Workout series that he has created for First Choice Publishers. One example is a “types of questions” overhead. The four types of questions that readers can ask of texts are:

• Right there — factual questions that use the same wording from the passage
• Think and search - interpretive questions that require searching and skimming
• Author and you - answers to these questions are not directly in the texts and require inferential thinking
• On your own - answers here are based on your own experience

As a lesson, he would have the overhead up for students at the beginning of class and give them three minutes to take notes on the types of questions. Then, he shows a model and works with the class to generate a question about that text at each level. Finally, he moves from the first ten minutes into the rest of the lesson where students would do their own independent reading and develop their own questions. Through this process, students develop academic language.

For another example, Burke showed an image from Cameron Clapp’s website and asks students to create a list of nouns, verbs, and adjectives describing what is going on, and then develops that into a full paragraph. He gives another example of a painting of a soldier with a number of elements that inspire thought and discussion. Questions could include:

• Who is this? Where is he?
• Why is he carring a gun different from the bullets he has over his shoulder?
• Why is he wearing three dog tags?

He begins his teaching with the idea in mind, “What do I need to do to help kids be successful?” He gives another example of a structured conversation that happens in the first ten minutes that can then help students structure the next task. For instance, having students talk about a text before they begin writing an essay. He then moved in to possible examples based on his current teaching with Crime and Punishment.

Possible Beginnings for Your Class

• Open with a question: “What is a crime?”
• Post a quotation: “THe past is not dead; it’s not even the past” William Faulkner
• Visual: painting, photo, ad, video, infographic
• Text: Nietzsche, poem, article, excerpt
• Bring one powerful paragraph back over and over again through the course of a unit so students can track their thoughts and opinions about it over time
• Opinionaire: “When is an action a crime?”
• 4Rs: Read, retell, respond, relate
• Mini-Lesson: summarizing, questioning, compare/contrast writing
• Discussion: share and compare
• Generate: types and examples of punsihment
• Priming the mind: questions to consider and background
• Write: compare similarities and differences
• Quiz: explain a line from the chapter
• Reflective reading quiz: generate five words about tone, character, etc and choose the best word to describe tone/character/etc and why it’s the best
• This embeds the language of testing (”choose the one that best describes”) in the context of an authentic lesson

He also mentioned the Linda Darling-Hammond article about making homework purposeful, such that students want to do homework so they can come to class engaged and ready to work. Other research:

• Nystrand in RTE (2005): Nothing has more significant benefits in comprehension and engagement than structured use of classroom conversation
• The average teacher only allows for one minute of conversation in class per week, although even that one minute makes a difference
• Wilhelm (2006): talks about organizing your class around an inquiry. Rather than just reading Romeo and Juliet, ask “What makes a good relationship?”
• Reading Next (2004): teaching for meaning, not just to get through things

The past week or so has been crazy. Yes, busy crazy for me personally, for sure.

But, I am talking about another kind of craziness.

I am talking about the number of teachers that I have talked to who have been fighting filters, trying to get equipment to work, and generally trying to make meaningful use of technology in their classrooms.

After last week’s Teachers Teaching Teachers about infrastructure, and being invited to talk with the group again this week, there are two stories that I feel I need to tell. The first comes from a research project about blogging and podcasting in which I am collaborating with an RCWP colleague, Dawn Reed. The second, from another RCWP colleague, Stacy Schuh who was trying to figure out who to get colleagues in her school to use blogs.

First, Dawn and I have been working for the past few months to create an opportunity for students in her speech class to blog, podcast, and offer peer response to one another. In so doing, she has run into multiple layers of complications in regards to allowing audio content over her school network, having the appropriate equipment in her classroom for students to listen to podcasts, getting technical support, and having parents sign off on a consent form for students to post their work online (or, perhaps, getting students to take the consent form home for parents to sign…). In short, she feels that:

Basically, I need help to get around what our technology is set up not to do.

Now, this is not a matter of Dawn throwing up her arms in frustration at the first sign of a problem. Instead, I feel that this comment speaks to the deep and sometimes unseen forces that school infrastructure — both social and physical — can have on a teacher’s ability (and willingness) to engage in technology-based work with her students. These roadblocks that she has encountered are indcative of how we refuse to change what Tyack and Cuban would call the “grammar of schooling”: the ways in which the traditional school day, quarters, semesters, and years are structured as well as the generally restrictive and skill-and-drill ways in which we view using technology in school. These visisons continue to propel our decision making processes about why and how to use technology, even though the changes are happening faster than we can keep up with if we are willing to innovate, let alone if we are not.

Second, Stacy a teacher at RCWP — who works at a public charter school — has essentially become the webmaster for her school because she was able to get the free Lunar Pages account for K-12 educators. The school didn’t have a website, nor did teachers have email, until she set up the site a year ago. She has had her students blogging this year on a Word Press blog that she installed on the site.

Recently, she wanted to create a blog for her colleagues but everything in her school is filtered (Blogger, Edublogs, etc) except for the domain that she created through Lunar Pages because it is, essentially, the school website. So, as she and I were trying to think through all the options, I just suggested that she install another Word Press blog. She did. And they are blogging now.

As I think about these two teachers and the infrastructure problems that they are encountering, I think that someone needs to help out. Perhaps NWP — or at least local sites — could team with a hosting company like Lunar Pages to make things easily available to teachers that can help them do their work better and empower them to make their own decisions related to technology. Then, teachers would have control over their domains, both classroom and web-based ones.

Here are notes from a talk today:

Timothy Shanahan, Current President of the International Reading Association

Tim Shanahan is a professor of urban education at the University of Illinois at Chicago and the director of the UIC Center for Literacy. He has played a leadership role at the federal level in making connections between literacy research and educational policy. Dr. Shanahan served on the National Reading Panel, chaired the National Literacy Panel on Language and Minority Children and Youth, and chairs the National Early Literacy Panel. His research interests include: the relationship between reading and writing, the assessment of reading ability, family literacy, and school improvement. Dr. Shanahan has published numerous research articles and written and/or edited several books including Teachers Thinking, Teachers Knowing (1994) and Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Literacy Research (1992).

Notes from the session, “The Role of Research in US Reading Policy”:

• Understanding reading in the context of US policy; having become a combatant in the “reading wars”
• I had been invited to be a part of the National Reading Panel and served on it for two years trying to synthesize research through a meta-study
• The real upswing of all this is that it led to $5 billion infused into reading education
• An Ideological History Lesson
• Governmental role in education
• 1600s: MA, CT, and NH establish public schools for religious reasons
• 1788: US Constitution ratified, no mention of education
• 1791: Amendment X for state’s rights
• 1791: 7 states make constitutional provision for public education (e.g., establish school boards)
• 1800s: Freedmans‘ act for curriculum for freed slaves
• First time that feds intervened in local schools at such a large and systematic level
  
• 1900s: Increased centralization, immigration
• 1950s and 60s: ESEA and focus on science and technology
• Current: More centralized curriculum
• Current forces in education
• Explosive growth in informational technology
  
• Internationalization of economic markets
  
• Changes in the relationship of literacy attainment and well being
• Current changes in the economy
• Growth of service sector and decline of manufacturing
• Transformation of low education blue collar work into skilled labor
• Free trade movember of low-paying jobs and workers
• Outsourcing of middle-income jobs and immigration of high-income workers
• Changes have led to:
• More jobs that require reading
• Increased correlation of reading achievement and economic success
• Current status of education
• Since “A Nation at Risk,” US education is continually in “reform” mode
• From 1971 to 1994, there has been no improvement in reading for 4th graders
• Cost of education has risen in real terms
• Public dissatisfaction is still there because the fundamental problems have not changed
• Educators have not been sure footed (neither convinced of the need for reform nor clear on how to make things work better)
• Where are the experts at the table in most of these debates?
• What’s the Point?
• The politicians aren’t crazy — reading has to improve
• Their “solutions” are frequently wrong, but they deserve credit for making serious attempts to solve a real problem
• They are deeply frustrated by educators who don’t seem to recognize the problem (or who want to respond with the union shop kinds of solutions)
• Context for NCLB
• Low NAEP scores and the reading wars in the 1990s
• As it got bigger and bigger, politicians decided to do something that they hadn’t done in education before: appoint an expert panel
• I had become a member of the National Reading Panel
• They didn’t want our opinions; they didn’t want opinions, they wanted a determination of fact
• We can’t make recommendations except for recommendations on more research
• Can’t tell how well we thought things would work, or not
  
• Changes during the Clinton administration
• focusing Title I money on poorest schools
• This hadn’t happened before, and the dollars were focused a little bit more on poor districts
  
• Reading Excellence Act (SBRR)
• Some direct money is given to states for reading education, given on a grant basis, although this was done before the NRP was finished
• Every state was able to decide what they wanted to call; “research” and there were no standards on it at all
  
• Pushing adoption of proven curriculum
• Move from professional development to volunteers
• Big fight on money for teachers vs. volunteer tutors
• National Reading Panel
• Appointment process began in 1997
• How do you build authority and trust?
• Took 300 nominations and the Secretary of Education created the panel
  
• Open meetings with transcripts
• Public hearings around the country
  
• Explicit methodology: replicable searcher, pre-established inclusion criteria, research had to be consistent with questions, meta-analysis
• Some things we were not able to find conclusive evidence about things, so we didn’t include it
  
• Findings on phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, comprehension, vocabulary, professional development
• Controversy
• There was a very real chance that this would have all ended up on a shelf, but we had a new president come in and he made it the cornerstone of federal literacy policy
• No Child Left Behind
• 2001 reauthorization of ESEA
• More Title I funding, but more accountability
• Reading First ($1 billion a year for K-3 PD, curricula, materials)
• This allows Congress a way out of the unholy bargain. We can control quality without being a part of local decision making since the NRP did it
• Congress keeps its hands clean of the controversy
• Results of all of this…
• Higher 4th grade achievement on both the NAEP and the NAEP trend items (reduction of achievement gap, sizable gains, highest trend performance ever)
• What’s indisputable is that 4th graders are reading better now than they were 12 years ago, despite how you spin the politics on how the gains have been made and by whom
• With all the state and federal focus on K-3, there has been some improvement at 4th grade. But…
  
• No improvement for older students
• 8th graders are not moving up, so we are losing the gains between 4th and 8th grade
• What you see in the whole body of ed research is that Reading Recovery, Head Start, and other programs is that we know how to raise achievement early but that we don’t know how to sustain it
• For instance, the difference between kindergarten full and half days had their gains erased by the end of first grade because all the same students did all the typical first grade curriculum.
• We need to reform the system at all levels from the ground up. We need to keep all day kindergarten and then do PD for teachers in first grade to work with these higher achieving students.
• NCLB/RF Problems
• Accountability of goals of NCLB are unreachable and fail to reward success
• The costs of testing are burgeoning in terms of lower morale, corruption, mistrust, etc.
• States are encouraged to reduce standards
• Peculiar corruption of Reading First
• Subtle shift of NRP to WWC
• Problems with the newer panels (NELP, NLP)
• What is needed to make research-based policy work?
• Substantial public support for research
• Open way of determining specific research priorities
• Benefits for researchers who choose to do this work
  
• Is this likely? No:
  
• We don’t see evidence so public support for research.
  
• The feds are maintaining power over priorities.
  
• There is no real infrastructure for carrying out recommendations for policy into practice.
  
• There is likely to be evidence soon of the effectiveness of the Reading First policy.
  
• There is no increase in university commitment.
• Question and answer session
• Shifts in thinking: Clinton and the Democrats wanted national testing in the 1990s, but the conservatives didn’t want to lose local control; now it is vice versa because all the states have their own standards.
• Reading First: There is survey data to show that Reading First teachers actually feel better now that they “know how to teach reading” and have books in their classrooms. Part of the reason for this success is the Reading Excellence Act.
• What is dividing the field is not methods, but thinking about the social and cultural aspects of what counts as evidence.
• What grad students need to do is set aside the rhetoric of whether things are “good” or “bad,” and look at the field as a whole. It doesn’t mean that there are times when different questions demand different kinds of evidence, especially as it relates to policy.
• There are people in medicine who do anthropology, but they don’t move into the policy debate.
  

Blogged with Flock

Before the NWP Annual meeting, I had three separate conversations (one by email, one by phone, and one in person) with colleagues from the local, state, and national level about why and how to use digital reading and writing in their classrooms and for professional development. I had many more of these conversations at the NWP Annual Meeting and the ACE Workshop. What I will try to capture here is a basic outline of my response to them, and why I feel that these are critical literacy skills.

I hope to return to this post and update it, both because it is very rough right now and it will always be able to grow. Please feel free to help me out if you have ideas I should add, OK?

Frameworks

First, to conceptually frame digital reading and writing, there are a few places to begin:

• “Digital Immigrants and Digital Natives” is an interesting one, although not my favorite. I think that we have to look past the simple dichotomy that Prensky proposes and discuss what it means to be a critical digital citizen, native or immigrant. It is a good place to start the discussion, however, and to get teachers thinking about the differences between the ways that they approach technology and how students do it. You could also look at Tapscott’s site: Growing Up Digital
• Janet and some other English Ed folks just published an article about how to prepare English teachers and the technologies that they will encounter. Another classic from CITE is Pope and Golub’s piece.
• Why Teach Digital Writing is a great resource that practices what it preaches in terms of integrating hyperlinks and multimedia.
• Also a good one, Toward a Theory of New Literacies Emerging From the Internet and Other Information and Communication Technologies
• You could also look at NCTE’s resource page on Multimodal resources. There are many interesting things there to take a look at.
• Or, look at IRA’s position statement on literacy and technology.
• The new site from the MacArthur Foundation, “Building the Field of Digital Media and Learning” looks to be a good resource.
• The Pew Internet and American Life Project always has interesting and new stats.
• Looking at the MI state tech standards and the many literacies embedded within them.
• And, perhaps my favorite, the New London Group’s Pedagogy of Multiliteracies.

Teaching tips and things to do

• To start for tips, I would suggest that you look at Paul and friend’s “Things to do with Google Docs” doc.
• Here is Wes Fryer’s summary of one site that outlines many ideas for how to use podcasting: KidsCast: Exciting Podcasting Activities to Promote Research and Learning.
• Also, here is a site where some 3rd/4th graders used to be podcasting Room 208. Interesting to note that when Bob Sprankle moved on to another job, the podcast seems to have faded out, although he still does Bit by Bit.
• Paul’s Pedagogy of Podcasting and Be a Blogger Matrix.
• Agenda for our summer workshop on new internet writing toolsl.
• Our collaborative writing session agenda.
• The RCWP wiki, where we seem to gather some of this stuff.

I know that this is not the most organized or coherent list of stuff. Also, I am thinking of turning it into a page on this site so it remains static. But, for now, I think that it is the beginning of something worth capturing and beginning to build as a more comprehensive resource about how and why we want to teach with these technologies.

Thanks to the team at MSU’s Blogs for Learning for featuring my blog under their “User Submitted Blogs” list. This looks like it can become a great resource based on what they have described here:

What is Blogs for Learning?

Welcome to Blogs for Learning, an online resource about instructional blogging. The site provides students and instructors with information and resources about the technical and pedagogical aspects of blogging in the classroom.

Blogs for Learning

Just this past week, I have had three different conversations with educators about how and why to integrate technology - especially read/write web tools - into projects that they are doing. A site like this can serve as a clearinghouse for information that teachers can use to justify blogs in their classrooms. They already have some great articles and tutorials about blogging, and I think that this will grow into a very helpful site.

One thing that is curious to me is the fact that you can’t get the RSS feed for the site off of the main page (I don’t get a chicklet in the address bar of Firefox or Flock). Rather, you have to click on their “Feeds” page and grab it from there. I would have figured it would be easier to get the feed than that.

At any rate, I hope to blog more about these conversations that I had this week - as well as submit a few of the great NWP blogs that I know about to the Blogs for Learning site - but we have to get to the cider mill and pumpkin patch before snow threatens to ruin our day. Ah, Michigan weather…

Blogged with Flock

Another great talk on campus from a leading scholar in English Education and Composition…

Notes from George Hillocks’ talk, “Procedural Knowledge and Writing Instruction”

• Statement about effectiveness of grammar instruction that Mary mentioned– often cited and often ignored
• The more time that students spend on grammar leads to a negative correlation in writing scores
• Teachers think it is important to teach grammar and kids get worse as writers as a result
• Pedagogical content knowledge for teaching English and critical thinking
• Last English Education was a report on the Summit, focusing on “The State of English Education and a Vision for its Future: A Call to Arms”
• Goal 1: critical thought, dialogue, and a circumspect and vigilant American citizenry
• The English teacher should be second to none in this goal
• It is hard to argue with these goals, but there is no indication about how the authors would go about meeting these goals
• Let’s assume that this is, indeed, one of the major goals of English Education — if so, we need to know what counts as critical thought and literacy
• How do you know if someone is doing this?
• How do you teach it?
• How do you know if it has been taught?
• We are entering into what I would call a task analysis.
• What kind of knowledge, declarative and procedural, to write an argument?
• At the very least, it involves a sense of what words are and how they work. At another level, it involves propositions and how they are supported with warrants. It separates fact from fiction, and this is the beginning of understanding argument.
• Nussbaum, Cultivating Humanity — looks at how argument plays a role in civic freedom
• We need to be able to look at all kinds of arguments, not just the antagonistic ones. We need to understand a cultural of critique in which argument is a Socratic inquiry, not just shouting the loudest.
• As we listen to the arguments about the US in Iraq, we need to listen more carefully and understand the Arc of Rhetoric
• Rhetoric is the argument of probability
• for Aristotle, it was important to bring many arguments to bear in deliberation so that one can consider if it is “holy” (just)
• These are dependent on warrants being tied to the claims
• We can’t call something a good movie, without defining what a good movie is
• Forensics — arguments about the facts of a case
• There were no forensic arguments in the lead up to the war in Iraq
• But, where was the evidence? It turns out that even the administration admits that the claims are now untrue.
• In Aristotelean terms, we can persuade, negotiate, or judge (epideictic)
• Oedipus as an epic hero and having the right to brag - this is one of the rights of heroes
• Summary of argumentative forms
• Fact
• Judgment
• Policy
• The Uses of Arguments - Toulmin
• One of the criticisms of this text is that you have to keep attacking the warrants and the arguer needs to respond to the arguments
• Warrants depend on the situation
• Forensics - based on scientific facts and the situation
• Epideictic - based on judgment
• Deliberative - based on ethics
• Example from a teacher in a Chicago high school, Sara Rose Laveen
• Students were studying argument over the course of the whole year
• They had been studying forensic and epidectic and were working on deliberative
• They were discussing a gang ordinance in Chicago and took different roles (community members, police officers, gang members, those falsely arrested, etc.)
• Teacher had students working in pairs of two or three and she provided a number of resources for the students, including articles and information from the ACLU
• Since many had had encounters with loitering gang members and the police, they wrote about their experiences and shared them in their arguments
• When students prepared and peer reviewed their arguments, they shared them with a panel of Hillocks, a lawyer, police officer, etc.
• They had three hour presentations where they debated and rebutted one another to discuss the policy
• Then, they wrote extended papers supporting or opposing the policy.
• Students operated the entire session and thinking was at a very high level.
• 1986 metanalysis looking at experimental studies on sentence combining, grammar, and other foci
• Computing the effect size for the gain the the experimental group divided by the gain for the control group
• Study of sentencing combining and other tasks of procedural knowledge were the ones that showed the most gains
• The difference between inquiry and other effects sizes is significant because it focuses on content.
• Free writing is in the zone of what students can do without help, while inquiry is in the zone of proximal development and pushes them beyond what they can already do. This is a better model than inserting info into something like the five paragraph theme.
• Trying to get beyond the apprenticeship of observation and move into a more robust model
• First, we have teacher led lessons
• Then, we have naturalistic inquiry where development precedes learning (student-centered instruction). This is opposed to Vygotsky’s notion that student develop as they learn.
• Meeting with students had a low effect size
• The treatment that had some kind of balance with student-led small group work focusing on a challenging task where they had to interpret or analyze information to come up with something new.
• Students in the environmental groups out performed student in the natural process group.
• With students in my masters of teaching degree program, I assumed that they were committed to helping children learn.
• Certainly, no teacher would deny that they care.
• But, making consistent manifestation of caring can only come out if the teacher understands her students, content, and the interactions between them.
• It entails not only the ability to analyze existing teaching materials, but to create and critique new ideas
• I wanted my students to develop ideas and lessons for active learning in their classrooms with most students on task most of the time and engaged in inquiry and constructing knowledge for themselves.
• So, what is pedagogical content knowledge for an English teacher?
• Example activity to help students pay attention to evidence
• Queenie mystery
• One warrant is that people fall forward down stairs, and that can lead to one claim about her guilt.
• Another warrant is about the glass being in his left hand, and he should have been grabbing the banister.
• The warrant ties the evidence to a claim — generally when people fall downstairs, they raise their hands to protect themselves.
• There is something on the stove cooking — so what?
• We have at least two or three pieces of evidence that lead us to believe that there are warrants to support the claim
• His clothes are looking quite neat, the items on the wall are still straight, jacket is fastened right over left, there is something cooking in the kitchen
• This activity takes two 45 minute class periods, and then they write on a third day, and we move on to the next topic
• They were using more evidence at the end on the post-test as compared to what they had done in the pre-test
• Engaging students in classroom discussions
• Giving them the skills to take up discussions and interact with one another

Given the discussion that the Critical Studies had earlier this week about Morville and folksonomies — and what counts when doing background reading for research — this article from Wired makes me rethink how the research gets done in the first place.

Scientists frustrated by the iron grip that academic journals hold over their research can now pursue another path to fame by taking their research straight to the public online.

Instead of having a group of hand-picked scholars review research in secret before publication, a growing number of internet-based journals are publishing studies with little or no scrutiny by the authors’ peers. It’s then up to rank-and-file researchers to debate the value of the work in cyberspace.

The web journals are threatening to turn the traditional peer-review system on its head. Peer review for decades has been the established way to pick apart research before it’s made public.

Wired News: Web Journals Take On Peer Review

The entire notion of what and how academics write is being turned inside out. In the past, the process of peer review supposedly meant that everyone got a fair reading and constructive criticism for revision, all in an anonymous fashion.

Of course, that is not exactly how reading and writing in the academy actually happens, but that is beside the point. Now, with blogs and wikis, it is easy to publish and collaborate on our writing and research in ways that makes peer review more transparent and immediate.

In many ways, I think that this makes us more accountable, in a good way, to get ideas out there faster. I was talking with a fellow grad student earlier this week and we were sharing how it is tough to get articles related to technology “out” in a timely manner given peer review processes. Maybe these online journals are the way for writers like her and I to share our work.

Blogged with Flock