Digital Writing, Digital Teaching

Along with the K12Online Conference, here is another unique opportunity for online participation in the month of October. It was sent to me by Jeff from Sparkpr on behalf of The Economist.  Get in there and vote, the check out the debate!

Hi Troy – Jeff here from Sparkpr for The Economist.

I saw your blog, Digital Writing Digital Teaching, and am delighted to invite you and your readers to be part of an extraordinary first for Economist.com. The Economist Debate Series officially kicks off October 15^th and voting is underway now to determine the propositions that will be debated. The first subject being debated is education and we’d love to have you participate in the debate and link to the lively conversation.

The Economist Debate Series is an ongoing community forum where propositions about topical issues will be rigorously debated in the Oxford style by compelling Speakers. The Economist is inviting you and your readers to take part by voting on propositions, sharing views and opinions, and challenging the Speakers.

Five propositions have now been short-listed to address the most far-reaching and divisive aspects of the education debate covering: the place of foreign students in higher education; the position of corporate donors; and the role of technology in today’s classrooms. The highest ranking propositions will be debated, with the first launching on Oct 15th.

Cast your vote now at: http://www.economist.com/debate/?sa_campaign=debateseries/debate1/blog/DigitalWritingDigitalTeaching

Choose the most resonant propositions to be debated from the list below:

Education - The propositions:

1. This house believes that the continuing introduction of new technologies and new media adds little to the quality of most education.

2. This house proposes that governments and universities everywhere should be competing to attract and educate all suitably-qualified students regardless of nationality and residence.

3. This house believes that companies donate to education mainly to win public goodwill and there is nothing wrong with this.

4. This house believes that the “digital divide” is a secondary problem in the educational needs of developing countries.

5. This house believes that social networking technologies will bring large changes to educational methods, in and out of the classroom

Join the Debate

The debate schedule is as follows:

• Sep 17th-Oct 12th - Vote for your favorite proposition and join the open forum to discuss topics
• Oct 15th - Winning proposition is revealed and the Debate begins
• Oct 18th - Rebuttals. Share your comments on issues so far and vote for your winning side
• Oct 23th - Closing arguments by the Speakers. Post any additional comments you would like to share and vote for your winner
• Oct 26th - The debate winner is announced.

To receive debate updates sign up at http://www.economist.com/debate/?sa_campaign=debateseries/debate1/blog/DigitalWritingDigitalTeaching. We will then contact you to announce the winning proposition and details of the debate as it unfolds.

I look forward to you joining us and fellow Economist readers for this lively debate. In the meantime, check the site to track which proposition is winning, and to view guest participants and the announcement of key Speakers at http://www.economist.com/debate/?sa_campaign=debateseries/debate1/blog/DigitalWritingDigitalTeaching.

Today, Kathy Yancey gave the keynote and the MCTE 2007 Fall Conference in Lansing, MI. Here are notes from the session.

Yancey began by asking us to think about what literacy is and a five minute discussion among the audience began the session.

• An image of tectonic plates from the public domain with the idea of continental drift.
• Themes:
  • Choice of technologies depending on rhetorical situation
  • Networked in a way that we have not been before
  • Intrapersonal Knowledge and Reflection in order to navigate this territory
• Much of what we know today began over one hundred years ago
  • When my grandmother learned to write, she learned cursive first and that was a mark of personality
  • Learning to read was important, but writing would empower people in ways that would cause problems
  • Donald Graves didn’t know that there was writing, only handwriting
  • The testing industry was focused on scales for handwriting — testing students was a part of testing teachers
  • The form trumps the content, and this has continued throughout the 20th century
• Now, we see literacy as an interaction of practices and technologies
  • We understand these practices better now because computers have shown us what is avaialable
  • There were also changes in literatur (Jane Austen — print to TV to film to DVD extended version)
  • We are able to understand Pride and Prejudice in completely different ways; hypertext allows us to find things easier
  • All the versions of Jane Austen are good, and we can understand her in many other ways, in print and on many screens

  The history of literacy continues to change, and more and more work is available in digital forms

  • With new literacies today, we think in “new circulations” (print, email, text, etc.)
  • Be aware of Ed08
• While computers have come in schools, we have been using technology to mimic old literacies practices
  • Conversation embedded within a word document, between student and teacher
  • Adaptability and assumptions are a part of how we begin to work with these literacies — we do not teach them in schools.
  • This is the difference between credentials and expertise; they have the expertise in newer literacies, and I have the credentials

  Texts and technologies work in different ways

  • Social technologies succeed when they fit in with the social lives of those who engage with the technology
  • Literacy practices continue to move online
    • Adobe now allows people to mark up what used to be solidified in a PDF file by marking it with post-it style notes and other tools
  • Characters on TV are now blogging, so in addition to watching the TV show you need to stay connected that way, too
• Partnership for 21st Century Skills
  • Core subjects with 21st century themes
  • Creativity
  • Critical Thinking and Problem Solving
  • Collaboration (how do we fit this into school in ways that really matter?)
• Knowledge Frameworks
• Ken Burns, The War
  • He went directly to those inthe war rather than relying on “experts”
  • Getting these personal experiences will become more of the norm
  • Museum of African American History Museum is starting a virtual mueseum, inspired by MySpace
• It will not be all digital, we will also be in both/and (print/digital)
  • We will need new assessment practices to discuss what is working and what is not
  • How does the description of a traditional essay assessment compare to that of a digital portfolio?
  • Prensky’s digital natives — we are going to have to learn from one another
• Production of knowledge as well as consumption of sources, too
  • Digital conversion class — allowing students to only find information from blogs that they could trust
    • By looking at blogs, students were relying on the association of older literacies to find credibility in a source, but in blogs that does not work all the same way
    • Because blogs are informal, that does not mean that “average joes and joann” are prodcuing stuff; they are authored by working professional
    • This is a challenge that we need to take up as we consider 21st century literacies
  • More and more information will be tailored to us and delivered in a personalized way; the incentive to discover things on your own is lessened
    • There are dangers and we need to bring this into the classroom in a critical and informed way
    • Pandora
      • Works to define language for music and selects other songs that are similar to what you are looking for
      • This is online and free, available to all our students and not just the ones who have an iPod
    • Mapping
    • Fundamental to literacies in the 21st century
      • You can see who is networked and figure out ways to help them get networked my creating maps
      • To the extent that we leave all of this outside our classrooms, we make our children more vulnerable than eve
      • We have got to start teaching some of this — evaluating information and people
  • How can we think about teaching and learning in networks?
    • Policy — what policy would we need to change at all levels so this work counts?
    • Professional Development — what can we provide so that the curriculum includes the technology in their learning?
    • Assessment — yesterday’s assessments will not support or reward the new types of learning
      • UConn’s New Literacies Team
    • 21st century literacies are now

A media professor has begun teaching a class on YouTube. Not so unusual that this would happen, given the fact that YouTube has been around for awhile now. In fact, it is kind of cool that it is finally happening.

What I have found more interesting is that as I have been catching up on my RSS reading, I see that two different sources are reporting it in slightly different, yet noticeable ways:

Jobs, News and Views for All of Higher Education - Inside Higher Ed :: YouTube Studies
“It’s a class like I’ve never taught before and a class like I’m not certain has ever been taught before,” Juhasz says during her introductory video.

You’d expect that a professor teaching a class on and about YouTube would be a huge booster of the site. But not Juhasz. She says she is “underwhelmed” and “unsatisfied” by much of the content, which she describes as spoofs of pop culture references that she just doesn’t understand.

Juhasz’s main critique of the site is its architecture. Academics strive to make connections across disciplines, she says, but YouTube makes it difficult to provide context (often in the form of links), and to carry on complex conversations beyond the small space given for comments below the video.

Still, as a professor of media studies, she says ignoring the site is impossible. Instead, she wants students to draw their own conclusions after spending a semester working entirely within the framework and constraints of YouTube. She wants them to think about cultural references, what makes a great work of art and how to define a truly democratic medium. Is YouTube the latter? Juhasz says no — in large part because of its corporate ownership.

An academic take, to be sure. But also a balanced one. Here is the take from my local paper:

YouTube goes academic: Calif. college offers class about video-sharing site
CLAREMONT, Calif. - Here’s a dream-come-true for Web addicts: college credit for watching YouTube.

Pitzer College this fall began offering what may be the first course about the video-sharing site. About 35 students meet in a classroom but work mostly online, where they view YouTube content and post their comments.

Class lessons also are posted and students are encouraged to post videos. One class member, for instance, posted a 1:36-minute video of himself juggling.

Alexandra Juhasz, a media studies professor at the liberal arts college, said she was “underwhelmed” by the content on YouTube but set up the course, “Learning from YouTube,” to explore the role of the popular site.

So, what’s better for students? “A dream come true?” Or, “working entirely within the framework and constraints of YouTube?”

The different approaches don’t surprise me, as media has always shown its biases based on the publication, the audience, and the goals the editors have in relation to the two. As I saw the two drastically different introductions to this story from the two publications, it made me doubly aware of how critical media studies can be portrayed in the popular media.

And, given Michigan’s budgetary crisis this fall, how teaching anything beyond the “basics” could be up for criticism (much like other topics such as film, gender studies, and the like have been in the past) make me wonder:

• Will we be able to design courses in digital writing that aren’t seen as frivolous?
• Do students see digital writing as a kind of fun add-on to (or replacement for) the types of writing that we expect in traditional academic settings?
• Will composition classes be able to invite students to create digital videos as a means of argumentative writing, or will people only worry more because some students are posting clips of themselves juggling (which could have been a legitimate part of the professor’s first “getting-to-know-you and learn-how-to-post-to-YouTube type of assignment)?

This is an interesting pair of articles that I might share with my students next week, since our next assignment is a critical text analysis (and I have yet to share anything on YouTube…).

Of the many great things happening at the CEE Summit, I have had many opportunities to talk to other English Educators and find out about their online lives.

As we prepare for the second panel discussion to start, I am sitting with Carl Young, editor of the CITE Journal and blogger of the SITE blog and Rick Beach, blogger and writer of a new book/wiki, Engaging Students in Digital Writing.

Lots of new ideas and RSS feeds to keep up with here!

Notes from another CCCC session that I found engaging. In this session, the presenter spent a good deal of time thinking about design from the standpoint of a writing teacher, and I found her angle on it informative. In particular, I found her categories of balance, unity, gestalt, and hierarchy a more nuanced way of talking about the Robin Williams principles of contrast, repetition, alignment, and proximity. I hadn’t really thought about using Homestar Runner for a writing assignment, but now I might.

Here are some notes:

Chandra Lewis-Qualls - “Identity Interface: Rhetorical Analysis, Graphic Design, and Comics”

• Intro
• How is identity created in online comics, analyzing with graphic design theories
• Her subject position: I am a feminist rhetorician interested in visual design and communication, deeply immersed in gaming
• Graphic Design
• Mildred Friedman — “Graphic design is an art form that depends for its efficacy on the degree to which words and images communicate a coherent message.”
• You get the effect of the intent based on what isn’t explicitly evident
• Why Use Graphic Design?
• By focusing on design strategies, we can discern alternate ways to shape idetity online
• Graphic design has a longer history that visual rhetoric and insights from the field could prove valuable
• It opens up conversations between academics and designers
• 1964 “The First Things First Manifesto”
• Graphic design has a long history of critique and wanted to point out the fact that design is not neutral and has value; they were pushing against the consumer and material aspects of graphic design and wanted to share their thoughts on it
• New Media Analysis
• Cheryl Ball has suggested that we need to analyze “the semiotic elements [of new media]“
• New Media critics often look at five major design features and ignores the sub-texts of design
• Graphic Design Components
• Balance — controlling the negative space, creating visual interest
• How are the elements arranged?
• What effect does this have on the composition as a whole?
• Unity — creating harmony with a color, shape, or typeface
• What are the elements that create unity in this piece?
• Gestalt — the combination of elements create an idea or message that isn’t explicit, but is an underlying argument in the design
• What is the opinion underlying the design
• Hierarchy — dominant element in the design of various levels of interest
• How to create interest
• Branding and Identity
• Multiple experience with the product
• Created through advertising, design, and media
• A symbolic embodiment of the product
• Creates associations and expectations
• Includes explicit logo, fonts, color schemes, etc
• Focus on web comics
• Try to create an embodied experience for the characters
• Homestar Runner.com
• Irreverent surreal humor
• Strongbad’s identity
• Types answers to visitors and is very sarcastic
• Using these concepts in class
• How do you visually convey your identity online (ethos)
• Freshmen create a MySpace page
• Upper level students create a digital portfolio to represent their work

The link to this video, “Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us” has been the hit of the day on a number of listservs that I am on. Watch it, and you will see why.

Today, Andrea and I are presenting at the annual MSU Tech Conference, and we are both sitting here in the kiva, Macs at the ready, to listen to the following panel discussion:

All Things Google: Thinking Across Software Modules

Google recently released a number of powerful, free tools that are very useful for classroom teachers. This presentation will showcase some of these tools, in particular: Calendar, Blogger, Reader, and Personalized Home Page. Panelists will provide brief overviews of each tool separately and its implication for educational practice. In addition, we will look across all four tools and envision how they might be used collaboratively for teaching purposes. There will be a follow up workshop on this topic presented during the afternoon session.

CTT > Center for Teaching & Technology

So, here are some notes and thoughts on the session…

Intro: Two Learning Tasks

1. A new framework for evaluating technology
2. Four particular tools that are important for your work

Key Principles for Evaluating New Technology

• Free — we are looking for technologies that are freely available to anyone
• Having a hard time getting technologies that cost money
• Parents and students can use these technologies outside of school
• State funding is dropping for K-12 education
• Paying for a site license is expensive, whereas web-based tools are usually free
• This will be important as students apply technologies in their lives outside of schools
• Given the number of computers that are available in home and school, free web-based tools are critical
  
• Future — what are the prospects that the tools that we are looking at will be around for the long haul
• Technologies change rapidly, so knowing whether a tool will be around is important
• Does the company or tool have a history that suggests it will be around?
• For instance, Google has a high future potential in terms of stock, for sure, but the fact is that almost everyone is using it in some way, shape, or form
• If you can find tools from good companies that are free, then they are likely to be around for a long time
• Also, what support is available? For instance, Google has help centers for each of its tools.
  
• Friendliness — how does the tool work on its own and how does it partner with other technologies
• Traditionally, when we pick a tool it does one thing well. Now, we need to have technologies that synthesize and expand its purpose and functionality
• Technology report card:
• Works to capacity
• Works well with others — does it add value as a tool in your life?
  
• Does it work across populations that we serve: teachers, students, and parents?
• The more it works across these populations, the better the tool

Four Google Tools for Educators

• Calendar
• What happens when your calendar can talk to other calendars and the people that you serve?
• OK… I got off on a tangent trying to install “Spanning Sync” for awhile…
  
• Blogger
• What are blogs and why do they matter?
• 50 million blogs worldwide
• That number is doubling every 200 days (6.5 months)
• Over 100 times bigger than just 3 years ago
• Approximately 1.6 million posts per day
• 11 of top 90 news sites are blogs
• Tool for education that enables reflection, activism, and social transformation
• Blogs allow for easy linking to other websites, blogs, pictures, and other content
• They differ from basic websites because they allow comments
• Tagging and allowing readers to go back through and look at themes that develop over time
• Profiles allow students to fill out information, safely, to share info about themselves
• We can create a class profile and highlight personal interests with tags
  
• Blogrolls allow you to create links to other blogs that you are reading
• Can use blogs for multiple purposes
• Personal reflections
• Taking notes
• Class blog
  
• Students posting their own work
• Blogs can engage students in particularly powerful ways
• A student who is writing about a tree in his backyard and how that can expand into other areas of science and inquiry
• They can become engaged in the aesthetics of the work
• They can become creatively invested in the work
• They are engaged in a shared experience that contributes to the classroom community
• RSS Feeds (Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary)
• You can choose what continuous information to receive in your RSS feeder, for instance, from your students
• But, can my students do that?
• Yes, the interface of Blogger is very clean and highly usable
• It is highly customizable
• Blogger also allows you to make things as public or private as you want
  
• Reader
• Google Reader works as a friend to some of the technologies that we have discussed already
• If you go to a web page that doesn’t have an RSS feed, what do you do to find out if there is new information?
• You can look for a “last updated” note, but you don’t always know what is exactly updated
• One of the things that an aggregator allows us to do is to pool information from multiple feeds
• It pulls in content that you haven’t read so that you do not have to go back to each individual page to figure out what you have, or haven’t, read
• What does Google Reader look like?
• It shows you all of your feeds, what you have read, what you haven’t
• All of this is based on RSS
• My note: for a great resource guide, check out TeachingHacks‘ RSS Guide for Educators
• You can connect to students’ and teachers’ blogs, link to news sites, calendars, and anything else that is RSS subscribable (sp?)
• Students might have a number of things that they can bring into their Google Reader, some related to official academic or news sites, other blogs (including the teachers’), items of personal interest, and friends
  
• Personal Homepage
• Ran out of time to talk about this

As I think about this session and the few times that Joe and Cherice asked the audience, “Have you heard of __?” or “Are you using ___?” — and see how many people were, and were not, using certain tools, I realize that the amount of knowledge that teachers need to have to be able to stay connected. It is a different mindset, and I think that for all the technology professional development sessions that I have done and how starting with a conversation about that mindset (and how it changes literacy) makes the most sense for educators who might ask, “Why should I do this?”

That is the question that I hope Andrea and I can speak to in the sessions that we have coming up next.

Blogged with Flock

Bonnie asks a good (and loaded) question here:

How could I bring the podcasts onto the team blog?

Well, a few of you noticed that I tried to test a podcast through my blog/feed the other day. I did that to help Bonnie from HVWP to do a podcast for her tech team. Then, Karen challenged her to write up what she did here. Hooray, Bonnie!

I think that what her experience shows is that there are multiple (sometimes overlapping, sometimes conflicting) ways in which we can post podcasts. And, the technical fact of the matter is that you will get a podcast up doing any one of them.

However, the aspect of this that I am interested in is the critical/rhetorical one. Does it matter where we post our podcasts? What service we use? Whether it is on Archive.org or through a site like Odeo? How does that change the “instructions,” especially if you hit a snag? How does it change our understandings of what a podcast is and what it does?

We have struggled with this issue of creating tech guides at RCWP for a long time. I have often been asked to write “how to” guides, and I have only done one. Why? Because the set of instructions that I wrote was out-of-date by the time I did the workshop that night due to a technical change in the site we were using. Sigh… My “how to” guides are usually very fluid and, as of lately, always on a wiki so people in the workshop can help me co-construct the guide as we go along. Here is the pre-NWP trip guide.

To me, learning to be digitally literate is not only about the technical aspects, but about knowing enough to troubleshoot along the way (perhaps choosing a different hosting site because the one you want isn’t working at the time you want to post the podcast) and think about the critical/rhetorical aspects of that choice. Does it matter, for instance, that I post something on Archive.org or Odeo? In a technical sense, no, because the podcast will be delivered if you create the enclosure in your blog post.

However, I think that there is more to it and would answer, yes, it does matter, because the type of license that you can choose for copyright on these sites is different. How the file gets saved (and perhaps streamed) is different, and you need to know where to get the permanent URL if you really want it to be a podcast that is downloadable. Whether and how you “own” your podcast is based on where it is stored, from a critical and rhetorical sense, an important issue. Thus, any “how to” guide that we create has to be tempered with these discussions.

This is not to say that what Bonnie has produced isn’t valuable, because it is for her, her tech team, the TL network, and other readers of her blog. Like the RCWP TCs who created some podcasting instructions a few months ago, these guides are important for our own learning about the technical aspects of posting a podcast. And, despite the many, many help guides that are out there, figuring it out with one-to-one help is always useful. Moreover, we know that these guides will change over time, and it is important that we understand what little changes in the overall process will do to that process.

I just want us to remember that there are a number of choices that we make in any act of digital writing, and many of them have ethical considerations that we should keep in mind as we do it. Thanks again to Bonnie for helping me think through some of these issues this week.

powered by performancing firefox

Although I wasn’t really able to join the conversation tonight through Skype, the Teachers Teaching Teachers crew asked a great question tonight:

Do our blogs have a student-sponsored life of their own? Have our blog sites moved beyond Fisher’s “new literacy practices as sugar” to allowing students to “combine their concerns and self interest with the common good?” Sometimes, and it remains a goal to make our elgg spaces — our students blogs in social networking sites — into places online where they can truly express, question, explore and research subjects that matter to them.

Teachers Teaching Teachers

One of the ideas that I wanted to take up in this conversation was that of genre. It seems to me that Paul, Susan, Teb, and the rest of the TTT crew are getting at the idea that blogging and social networking could be seen as appropriating online teen culture, as Clarence Fisher seems to be arguing here. I feel that blogging, social networking, and podcasting don’t so much appropriate teen culture as they represent new genres and, because of that, the ways that we think about teaching them in school matter a great deal as to how much, if at all, students learn how to utilize these genres.

In thinking about teaching new media genres, then, I want to share a quick example of how this is, perhaps, a very difficult concept to even wrap one’s head around, let alone teach, if you are not a part of the edublogger community. I had the good fortune of working with a class of pre-service teachers the other day, and we were talking about new literacies and technologies. One section of the article that we read discussed the five-paragraph essay as the typical model of school literacy and how technology threatens to change that genre. This caused a great deal of discontent. Suffice it to say that the pre-service teachers with whom I work came up with a question that essentially boiled down to this: if not a five-paragraph essay, then what else instead? I was taught the five-paragraph essay, I succeeded, I know that kids need to know it (or, at least that is what I believe because I haven’t seen convincing evidence to the contradict my own personal experience), and that is what I will teach them. It is a hard cycle to break.

So, how are blogging, wikiing, podcasting, and other new media writing — and the genres that they enable — different? Paul wrote extensively about what blogging can be in the TTT post, so I won’t reiterate it here. What I do want to say, however, is that I think we need to help our colleagues and those that we mentor to understand how writing on a blog or wiki, or creating a podcast, is still writing at its core (creating a text for a specific purpose and audience), but the affordances of the media and the genres that you can create with that media are very different from what we have traditionally conceived as writing. We can move beyond the five-paragraph essay because we can now talk about — and in compelling new media deliver — texts like we never have before. I don’t think we can give up the old genres, but we also have to think about how to compose with the new ones, too.

Do I want to see students’ five-paragraph essays on a blog? No. But, I think that we need to help our colleague envision what is possible in these new media. Is that appropriation? I don’t think it is. If we ask students to collaboratively write with a wiki and only one student does all the work, then we are reinscribing all the bad practices of that genre for teaching writing. Appropriation gone bad. If we ask students to post a book report to a blog and then offer feedback to others, not allowing for uses of hypertext and the natural conversations that will bubble up, then we are reinscribing all the bad practices of that genre, too. Appropriation gone bad, again.

Instead, we need to help teachers see the potentials of these new media and the genres they allow. Then we won’t need to worry about appropriating. We will need to think more about invention, discovery, and creativity, traits that we would wish on all our writers.

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.