The first week, August 4th, we are engaging 40 teachers from Project WRITE in an immerse, inquiry-driven study of adolescent literacy and technology. Much like Bud’s CyberCamp, we are planning to structure this workshop for teachers to make maximum use of the time, access to computers, and collegial support. For the portion of each day that I am planning, I intend to make the first hour a work/collaboration time, with the explicit goal that teachers will produce anything from one lesson to a whole unit, somehow using read/write web technology, by the end of the week. On Thursday, they will share their work with a group of cross-grade, cross-school colleagues to get feedback.

During the other half of each afternoon, I am taking a move from Tech Matters and creating “birds of a feather” groups. Want to brush up on blogs? Go to this room with this teacher leader. Want to find out about photo sharing, which we haven’t discussed yet as a group, but you want to learn something new? Come to this room with this other teacher leader. And so on. Or, keep working on your unit. Throughout the week, I hope to offer anywhere from 3-6 different experiences for people to sample from, all leading to the presentation of their final lessons.

This will be one of the last major pushes with Project WRITE. In September, we will do one of our sessions completely online. Then, we have two full day sessions on Saturdays — one in October, one in November. I am looking forward to seeing what people pull together for our August session, and to seeing what unfolds for them in the year to come as they more fully integrate technology into their teaching of adolescent literacy.

For the second week, August, 11, we are putting on our own version of Tech Matters for the RCWP leadership team. This will involve myself as a lead facilitator, four additional RCWP teacher leaders as facilitators and presenters of their own classroom case studies, and then a number of participants from the RCWP leadership team. Again, the goal is to collaborate and offer people time and space to work, this time focusing more on the work of our writing project site. Each of the case studies will provide us with a situated look at how one teacher employs technology in his/her classroom, and that will open up conversations for the leadership team about how and why we might employ similar technologies at our site for the summer institute, professional development, continuity programs, and youth programs.

Then, in the afternoon, we will have lots of playtime, where we too can do birds of a feather groupings, allow people time to play with tools introduced in the morning, and continue conversations about the future of our site’s work with technology. In some sense, this is kind of the culminating moment of our work with NWP’s technology initiative, as we are now trying to distribute the knowledge of a few key teacher leaders at our site into the larger leadership team and day-to-day work of the site.

I just wanted to capture my initial thinking on these two workshops as we finalize the SB-CEU applications and get ready to move through the month of July in a haze of firework smoke, BBQs, and long, warm summer afternoons. It is good to be thinking ahead to these events and all the great work that teachers will be engaging in this year as a result of them.

This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

At any rate, I received an email from Eric Kunh, a staff member at the CBS Evening News with Katie Couric, and he suggested that some segments from this week’s “Eye on Education: What works?” might be of interest. I haven’t watched these yet, but agree that they sound engaging:

Tuesday, June 10
In Dallas, some students are now wearing GPS type devices to help keep them in school. It’s an unusual approach that has so far yielded great results. Students click on their GPS device when they get to school and it tracks their every movement throughout the day, also giving them a 9pm curfew to be home. The device also gives the student an “out” if his buddies want him to break the rules – he can say, “I can’t, I have this device on and I will get busted.” We profile a student who has turned his life around as a result.

Wednesday, June 11
The Esperanza Academy in Lawrence, Mass. is instilling a new sense of hope and future in 82 minority girls with the mission of making them tomorrow’s leaders. It has an 11 hour school day 11 months of the year, 3 meals are eaten there, all homework done there and a variety of extracurricular activities including equestrian classes, art, music, computer classes. Further, all parents have to volunteer 2 hours a week at the school. We meet the inspirational founder and head of the school, the teachers who have given up higher-paying jobs to invest in this mission and students whose lives have been dramatically changed since joining the school.

Thursday, June 12
Washington, D.C. Principal - one year into the job and the new Chancellor of the DC schools spent her first year throwing bombs and cleaning house. She’s fired a fourth of the system’s principals and central office staff, closed 23 schools, offered buyouts or fired an estimated 1000 teachers and is bringing outside management to take over 10 high schools. Principals who were retained have had to promise immediate increases in test scores. Her basic philosophy is that all children can succeed when teachers and the principal take personal responsibility for results. She’s implementing a “teach them or find another job” ethic. Further, she is a 38 year old Korean American running a school system that’s 95 per cent African American. CBS will look at these results in a school system where two thirds of all students did not have grade level reading and math skills, 74% of 8th graders lacked even basic math skills and of the 43% of students who did graduate a DC high school, only 9% had the skills to graduate college (all stats way below national averages).

That’s about it for tonight. My hope is to get back in the blogging habit really soon, as I have an NWP tech matters retreat coming up next week, and I need to get back in the swing of things.

Again, thanks for keeping me in your RSS feeds. Take care.

I appreciate her invitation to record this podcast and it was wonderful to have Lynette’s voice in there, too, as a pre-service teacher who is thinking about incorporating digital writing into her classroom.

You can get the podcast through CMU’s channel in iTunes.

Here is an overview from the MSU LARC site:

Steve Graham, Vanderbilt University

Evidence-Based Practice in Writing – Drawing on Experimental, Qualitative, and Single Subject Design Research for Answers

Wednesday, April 16, 2008
11:30am – 1:00pm
Room 133F Erickson Hall, Michigan State University

This presentation will examine what we know about effective writing instruction, drawing on three recent reviews of the literature. One of the reviews (Writing Next) was a meta-analysis of experimental and quasi-experimental writing intervention research. Another review was a meta-analysis of single-subject design writing intervention research. The third review was a meta-synthesis of qualitative research conducted with outstanding literacy teachers, designed to identify common practices across studies. Advantages and disadvantages to the use of evidence-based practices in writing will also be explored.

About the Speaker:

Steve Graham is the Currey Ingram Professor of Special Education and Literacy, a chair he shares with Karen R. Harris. His research interests include learning disabilities, writing instruction and writing development, and the development of self-regulation. Graham is the editor of Exceptional Children and the former editor of Contemporary Educational Psychology. He is the co-author of the Handbook of Writing Research, Handbook of Learning Disabilities, Writing Better, and Making the Writing Process Work. In 2001, Graham was elected a fellow of the International Academy for Research in Learning Disabilities. He is the recipient of career research awards from the Council for Exceptional Children and Special Education Research Interest Group in the American Educational Research Association.

And, here are some notes from the session:

• Opening quote: “Kids know the most interesting things” - Mark Twain
  • “It hurt, the way your tongue hurts when you accidentally staple it to the wall.”
• Writing is nowhere in terms of the educational reform movement in this country
  • The things that drive the educational reform movement are reading and math
  • Now, STEM - science, technology, engineering/economics,math
  • Why is writing out in the cold?
    • This is not always bad, as it sometimes results in school practices that are not good
    • But, we need to make the case that writing is important
      • 1. One of the reasons that people are not paying attention to writing is that there is a general perception that we do not know how to teach writing. Policy makers want evidence, and they want particular kinds of evidence.
        • We do know that there are some things that work for all students 4-12 and younger
        • People don’t think that writing is important. So, we have to look at the effects of writing on content area learning. We make the case that writing can be helpful in terms of the STEM skills
        • Reading gets more play in the literacy discussion. We need to look at the effects of writing on reading. How does writing affect reading?
          2. What are the practices going on in elementary and secondary schools
          • Limitations: survey data that could be rosy, but the data is still not good
          • ELA teachers are doing less than one extended writing assignment a month
          • You don’t wan to go into policy making without good research to make recommendations

          3. Theoretical framework — from Patricia Alexander from moving from knowledge about discourse and enhancing motivation

• What are three primary resources we can draw from?
  • Professional writers
    • Unfortunately, the advice can be simplistic and only moves confident writers to expert writers; it doesn’t help other writers
  • Effective practices from experienced teachers
    • Talk to effective teachers or observe good teachers in practice and study them
      • Problem: if I go in looking for one thing, I will likely see it (difficult to separate the wheat from the shaft”
      • Problem: Donald Graves and the example that works. Yet, there are times when this doesn’t work.
      • Problem: generalizability. Evidence is often selective.
      • With scientific studies, we collect evidence, presents findings for all participants, replicability, strength of impact — all this leads to something that should be more trustworthy than insight and experience.
• This presentation, thus, will draw on three sources: experimental, single subject, and teacher practice
  • Other criteria:
    • Four replications
    • Converging evidence (the sun, the moon and the stars align)
    • Recommendations based on higher quality studies are superior
      • Process writing has very poor research, so you need to be cautious about this
      • The more studies, the merrier
  • Effect size:
    • .8 is large
    • .5 is moderate
    • .25 is small, but significant
  • Writing Next looks at overall quality of writing
    • Strategy instruction (planning, revising, editing, and regulating the writing process; 20 studies, .82 effect size (particularly helpful for kids who find writing difficult)
      • Don’t just PEE (post, explain, and expect) students need repeated modeling
      • For instance, the STOP strategy (Suspend judgment, Take a side, Organize ideas, Plan more as you go)
    • Teaching Summarization (systematic and explicit teaching of how to summarize texts); 4 studies, ? (missed it) effect size
      • Teach the six rules of summarization
    • Peer assistance (working together to plan draft and revise); 7 studies, .75 effect size
      • Needs to be a structured in a positive way — having students add questions marks and carats in their peers’ papers
    • Setting product goals (specific goals for the written product to be completed); 5 studies, .70 effect size
      • Need to tell students what you expect without limiting them
      • Product goals and revising
    • Word Processing (using word processing); 18 studies, .55 effect size
      • Some are short studies, but some are up to a year
      • Using the technology which is widely available is important, but it is used infrequently in schools or, when it is used, it is only used for final draft/publication
    • Sentence combining (constructing more complex sentences by combining shorter kernel sentences); 5 studies, .5 effect
      • Work on this together with students, then invite them to apply it back in their own writing
    • Process Approach (extended opportunities for writing, student ownership); 21 studies, . 32 effect size
      • Inviting students to engage in planning and revising is good
      • Bad news: the effect size is scattered all over the place
      • Receiving training from NWP is about a .46 effect, and is insignificant if you did not get that training
      • You can do this in a very poor way, and not get a good effect; this is compatible with a strategy approach that makes the writing more visible
    • Pre-Writing (have students engage in activities such as brainstorming; 5 studies, .32 effect
      • STOP strategy, for instance
    • Inquiry (old research); 5 studies, .32 effect
      • No pre-test done, so these studies may underestimate the effect size
        • Example: set a goal, analyze the data, look at specific strategies, and apply what you learned
          • A student in elementary school looking at conflict on the playground
    • Study of Models
      • Examines examples of specific writers and types of text; 6 studies, .25 effect
        • Model from good readings
    • Writing as a Tool for Learning (writing in the content areas); small but positive effect
      • 26 studies, but I think that it is more effective in science and math than ELA and social studies based on the effect sizes that we see
    • Grammar (explicit teaching of grammar); 11 studies, -.32 effect size
      • Quality of writing is not affected by grammar instruction
      • What this traditionally looks like is that you give a definition, example, and then is used in decontextualized works
      • If we expect it, but do not help students use grammar then it will likely not work
        • Take the kernel sentence: Dog bit mailman

      Recommendations for Struggling Writers (teaching handwriting, spelling, and typing to struggling writers — teaching transcription skills towards automaticity), small positive effect

• Single Subject Design Recommendations
  • Explicitly teach students strategies to construct paragraph; strong positive impact
    • Showing parts of a paragraph to the point that students understand the goals of writing a paragraph
  • Explicitly teaching students how to capitalize, punctuate, etc. helped
  • Reinforce positive aspects of students writing — social praise, tangible reinforcement or both as a means to increasing specific writing behaviors (small positive effect)
    • Traditional means of grading papers doesn’t work — “we get more with honey than we do with vinegar”
    • Couldn’t draw the summary effect from this, however
    • Need to move the feedback beyond the specific paper and help the student move forward in his/her writing
  • Self-monitoring (students asked to count how many errors they made); might be effective for some struggling writers
• Individual Teachers
  • Study exceptional teachers and schools
    • Practice had to be applied by the majority of schools or teachers
    • 10 Practices that might make a differences (had to occur in four or more studies)
    • Dedicate time to writing and writing instruction, with writing occuring across the curriculum
      • Get kids in the game of writing
      • Increasing writing by itself is not enough, it also needs to be motivating and give kids tools to be effective
    • Involve students in various forms of writing over time
    • Treat writing as a process
    • Keep students engaged by involving them in thoughtful acticvities such as planning compositions
    • Vary individual, small, and large group instruction
    • Mode, explain, and provide guided assistance when teaching
      • Teachers need to relinquish control
    • Provide just enough supprt so that students can make progress or carry out writing tasks and processes, but encourage students to act in a self-regulated manner as much as possible
    • Be enthusiastic about writing and create a positive environment where students are constantly encouraged to try hard, believe that the skills and strategies that they are learning will help them write well
    • Set high expectations
    • Adapt writing assignments to meet the needs of students
• Caveats
  • We should not order these practices hierarchically in terms of one being more effective thananother
    • Instead we should order them in a way that we see them working well for us
  • The database is thin
  • Just because a practice has been studied, it does not mean that it will be effective for all teachers in all classrooms.
    • Pay attention and see if it works in your classroom, with your students
  • Little data on those students who are most at-risk: ELL, learning disabilities, struggling writers
  • Lack of data on maintenance and generalization
  • Don’t really know best how best to put all of these things together
    • Think about trying to integrate some of these ideas as part of an overall approach rather than try to fit it into an existing approach
  • Teachers’ views on acceptability of these practices will clearly influence their use — this will include the issue of domain specificity
    • If you don’t accept it as a reasonable practice for you in your classroom it will not work
  • Just because a practices is effective in a study or was used by an exceptional teacher does not mean that it will always work
• Questions
  • 6 traits
    • Most studies were pre- and post-tests with no control
    • Look at journal article on Writing Next
    • 6 plus 1 looked pretty good for what was there
  • In-Service
    • When we asked ELA, science, and social studies teachers about how well their program taught them to teach writing, 70% said it was inadequate
    • We also asked about in-service preparation — you personally, school, conferences — ELA said that 70% were adequate, but 30% were inadequate
    • Most science and other content teachers didn’t feel prepared to do so
    • Not doing it at pre-service level because most states do not require a course in teaching writing
  • We have been doing this work for nearly 25 years and we have not delivered our work in terms of learning strategies approach and outreach
    • We have a distribution problem — we are not providing what we know in pre-service and in-service ed
  • A lot of this is very complicated, so we did the best practice book to give something for teachers to look at
    • We need to have support materials showing teachers how to do this — if you can see it, you can do it

My Reflections

In thinking about Dr. Graham’s talk, there are a number of salient points that I want to consider. First, he went over the 11 strategies from Writing Next and, even though there is evidence to show that all these strategies are effective, it is the individual teacher that makes the difference in writing instruction.

Second, he talked about how students can use word processing to write and revise, and that is very effective for their growth as writers; however, most of the opportunities that students have to write with the computer only involve typing in a “final draft” of something else that has been written out beforehand.

Next, he talked about peer editing and how students must be scaffolded into the process of giving feedback; just having them give comments to one another is not enough as they must use the language of writing in that talk.

Finally, he talked about the writing process approach and having an authentic purpose and audience for students should happen more often than what it is. Typically, the audience is only within the classroom walls, and students don’t share beyond their friends. Yet, he described a project in his children’s school in which students shared their work more widely and that it could be a goal for many, although not all of our assignments.

Overview Announcement:

Dr. Hedstrom is an archivist who is on the faculty of the School of Information at U of M. Her research interest is digital information. She has done some interesting cross cultural empirical research on user response to various methods of archiving digital files. (e.g. “The Old Version Flickers More:” Digital Preservation from the User Perspective. American Archivist http://www.ils.unc.edu/callee/dig-pres_users-perspective.pdf) Not just ease of use but also reliability of stored electronic files.

She is also a member of the American Council of Learned Societies Commission on Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities and Social Sciences. (Their report available at http://er.lib.msu.edu/item.cfm?item=050123)

Notes from the session:

• Intro
  • Recent feature story from NYT on archiving digital materials
  • We are trying to build networks, facilities, and human capital that takes advantage of the burgeoning world of digital information
  • There are archival questions in every discipline, problems that we encounter in humanities and social sciences, as well as other sciences
  • Today’s talk will be to reflect back on the ACLS Commission’s thoughts on infrastructure for education and the humanities
  • What is the vision and potential of this, as well as the challenges that we experience on a daily basis and others that we can anticipate; then discuss some paths that we can use to move towards this vision
• The Vision
  • The potential for cyber infrastructure allows for transformative research that were not possible for people to address in the past as well as open scholarship
    • This is the big goal for research cyber infrastrucure
  • Looking from the humanities and social science perspective at a report from science and engineering report on cyber infrastructure
    • What could we do if we had massive amounts of digital data, easy-to-use analytical tools, and networks of repositories, and well-trained people to use it?
  • There must be money out there for the scientists, and the humanists could ride on their coat tails, right? Well… it turns out that when you talk to scientists there are problems with funding for research, and competition is intense, too.
    • Many of us from outside of these science communities think that they are networked and forward-thinking, but there are many questions about what makes legitimate science, peer review, qualifications of researchers, etc.
• More thoughts on the vision
  • What do we mean by infrastructure?
    • It is about the protocols for moving data, for sure
    • But, it is also about the people who know how to approach these new resources
      • Archivists who are getting data into shape so others can use it
        • There is a lot of technical work in adding metadata that goes unnoticed and, consequently, is different from what has been done in the physical world
      • To take advantage of this potential, we need to learn how to teach and research in different ways, and these are the bigger stumbling blocks that we need to get over
• There are new ways of addressing research that are happening in a parallel with a move towards interdisciplinarity
  • How do you take ideas that have been historically separated by institutional boundaries that are now coming back together again in a digital convergence?
  • How does an interest in cyber-enabled learning happen in conjunction with this? Is there a dissastisfaction with the compartmentalized visions of scholarship?
  • A goal for cyber infrastructure shifts your way of thinking about research and looking at problems that allows for a new way to think about problems.
• What would “big” humanities (transformative research) mean?
  • Because of the way that humanities research has been done in the past (single investigator, deep problem, specific set of data resources) — the problems have been scaled down to fit within the scope of work for one human being.
  • Now, we can scale the work across a team of people and apply knowledge to much bigger questions
  • Changing the culture is partly a generational change and partly thinking about not trying to convince those who do not want to change their ideas.
  • Some of the big issues with the humanities is that the early attempts to do quantitative research didn’t fit in with the paradigm of what people were trying to look at.
    • What has happened since then is that the kind of resources available to, say, historians, are richer and more vast.
      • You can get census data, yes, but you can also get images, primary texts, and other items more easily
    • UM and Google’s library project — how does a historian go about mining that data?
• Resistance
  • You can enable other kinds of cyber science, but don’t take away from my current budget.
  • Is the work empirical? Does it have rigorous tests of validity? What happens when you triangulate it with other kinds of research?
• Openness in Scholarship
  • Open in both the sense that it is making contributions to research as well as have access to the results
    • The raw materials for the research (documents, data, and even people) are networked and widely accessible
      • In this area, she gives librarians lots of credit for moving forward in this area
      • There are formidable monetary and intellectual property issues to overcome here, though
    • Research becomes much more collaborative
      • It doesn’t mean that the idea of the lone investigator goes out the window
      • Expertise is shared, however, and scholarship is open to new audiences and perspectives
        • Universities have done a disservice by trying to have “quality” through exclusivity
        • What is the line between a free-for-all and a very rich dialogue about the research questions we are trying to pursue?
      • Also, could we engage younger people with a degree of fun? Have we dismissed something that people might find engaging by dismissing it as frivolous?

Challenges

• Where do you start with all of this?
  • There is a complex set of interdependent variables here.
    • How do we do research without a critical mass of resources and tools?
  • There have been some areas in the humanities where things have changed.
    • For instance, in the classics, you find many early adopters because the primary resources are finite (there are only so many original Greek texts) and you can get it online; it is the base of data that everyone draws there conclusions from the ancient world
    • On the other hand, what happens when you look at 20th century history and the endless amounts of content that are out there?
    • What happens when all the volumes in the world are digitized? Of all the primary sources out there, we only have so much money to digitize though…
      • What do we bring out that is trapped?
    • Within the disciplines, there is lots of room for advice from scholars on this
      • Someday, can we help make decisions about what is important in the field and what needs to be digitized?
      • Can we help develop the analytical tools to look at the data?
        • Can we do massive text mining?
        • Visualizations?
      • What about stimulating the demand for this new kind of scholarship?
        • Who wants to take a risk as a young scholar when it could fall flat on deaf ears or it could be the greatest thing since sliced bread?
        • Is there an in-between space that we can translate the goals of that vision on a reasonable scale?
      • Where does the money come from?
        • Most of the physical infrastructure in this country came in the early part of this century. The point is that we do no, as a country, invest in maintaining infrastructure. Universities do a little better at this, but there is more to do to mobilize these resources.

        How do we build an ethos of openness and the public good, when the culture and legal structure locks data up and attaches ownership to them?

• Social and cultural challenges
  • Institutional Roles
    • Incentives and rewards for scholars who take the risk to do research in these new ways
    • There are challenges to the ways of doing this work
      • Conservative, traditional modes of funding
      • Finding others to collaborate with
      • Tenure and what counts as legitimate contributions to scholarship
    • These are all ways of thinking in institutions that are deeply held and may not be antithetical to these newer notions, but certainly don’t jive with them either
      • Everyone’s work will change as a consequence of this shift
    • The role of the brick and mortar university will still attract students from a variety of backgrounds and these interactions will not go away
      • But, what is it that distinguishes one place from another, especially with this notion of openness?
      • What are universities doing to attract faculty?
      • What physical resources does the university have (librar, facilities)?
        • What happens when anyone can get access to these materials? What is the value added by the institution?
      • One of the questions also becomes whether or not we are willing to do something different as well as what we were doing before?
        • Can we teach as much and do elaborate research projects?
          • In libraries, for instance, if we are out there cataloging every web page like we do every book, then there are certain things we can and can not do with every resource.

• Conceptual Challenges

• If we want to draw a variety of perspectives into looking at the problems, then how do we maintain scientific rigor and have inclusion at the same time?
  • The wisdom of crowds argument
  • What if everyone in the crowd is wrong?
  • How far can we push this from opinion to educated judgment
  • Universities that have resources as compared to those who do not
  • Digital ivory tower

• How do we convince skeptics of the potential without solid evidence?
• Avoiding the “trust me” syndrome and making a case for how to spend money

Where to start?

• Starting in the schools, doing things in a connected way is good, but they are doing things on a superficial level and we have not done a good job of packaging this information
  • For instance, American Memory Project from LOC

• Getting info from 19th century and putting it out there for people to gobble up

• Getting the next generation of scholars being more insistent on this kind of work
• Encourage the convinced to talk to those who “don’t get it”
  • Don’t want to be dismissive, but there are some who need to at least not stand in the way for others to bring this work forward
  • There are those who place lots of value in traditional kinds of work and we need to convince them that there are ways to do otherwise
• Look at pockets of innovation and support that work rather than spread things too thin
  • There are things that people are doing, but don’t contribute to the infrastructure
• We can stop doing some things if they don’t seem important
  • The world won’t come to an end if the pre-prints don’t come to the mailbox
• Some kinds of work that might seem frivolous might come to be valuable in the end
  • The gaming metaphor and how there is something profound there
  • If you can learn by doing something with a game, we need to embrace that kind of shift in thinking

My Reflections

As I prepare materials for CMU’s online repository, CONDOR, I have been considering many of these same issues. What “counts” for me in terms of creating blog posts, wikis for my class, opening up content that has been published in “locked” journals? I want to be a young scholar who pushes these issues in my department, college, and university, yet I want tenure, too. I think that I am striking a good balance in doing the types of scholarship that is considered as legitimate by my colleagues and publishing in these types of open forums, yet there are still the nagging concerns that my work will not be understood. So, I continue with the both/and philosophy (publish in books and peer reviewed journals as well as in digital formats such as blogs, podcasts, and other forums).

Certainly, these will be issues that I wrestle with for years to come, if not my entire career, so hearing her talk today helped me see my concerns in a larger educational context.

OK, enough of that.

My purpose tonight is to just capture some thinking on a presentation that Rob Rozema and I will give at the Bright Ideas Conference this weekend: Social Networking, Teacher Education, and the English Language Arts.

My main contribution to the presentation will be an annotated bibliography of sources on social networking in education. Here is what I have so far and I welcome any insights that you may have to add to this list. Feel free to comment here or jump right in and add something on the wiki:

• Resources by Educators
  • Teachers Teaching Teachers: A weekly webcast that focuses on teaching writing with newer technologies, often related to social networking
    • ELGG Plans: The wiki that these teachers use to collaboratively compose curriculum
    • Youth Voices: The site for these teachers’ high school students
    • Youth Twitter: Another site for these teachers’ students, focused on the idea of microblogging
  • Ning in Education
  • Steve Hargadon’s post about Social Networking in Education on the Infinite Thinking Machine blog
  • Social Networks in Education Wiki
  • Wesley Fryer’s Moving at the Speed of Creativity blog: Fryer blogs regularly about social networking in K-12 schools
    • Fryer’s del.icio.us bookmarks on social networking
• Research, Scholarship, and Policy Briefs
  • danah boyd’s publications: boyd is a scholar from the University of California-Berkeley, who researches social networking
  • Educause’s 7 Things You Should Know about Series: Clear and concise overviews of a number of technologies, including social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and Flickr
  • Pew Internet and American Life Project
  • MacArthur Foundation’s Digital Media and Learning Site
• News and Media
  • TechCrunch’s Nine Ways to Build Your Own Social Networking
  • PBS’s Frontline: Growing Up Online

Also, I am trying to think about how to discuss the idea of social networking. What I have found with my experiences in using any social technology is that the teacher really is key to making it work. Be it a discussion board, a blog, a wiki, or a social network, if the teacher talks the talk about using technology, yet doesn’t walk the walk, then it is likely that the students won’t follow.

On a related note, I often wonder about our efforts as teachers to adapt technologies that students are using for their own personal purposes and then connecting it to more academic purposes. In what ways does this co-opting of the technology change the use of it, for better and for worse? For instance, in the social network Rob and I set up this semester, I decided not to make it a “requirement” for my ENG 315 class, and I noticed that very few students have been active in the network as an extra curricular activity. What if I had made it a requirement? Would obligatory postings be worthwhile for students? Would the network have grown more in an organic manner, even though I required it to be fertilized?

As I prepare to present this weekend, these thoughts continue to roll around in my head. In some ways, I don’t even know that I consider myself a proficient user of social networks, as I am in a number of Ning, Facebook, and other groups, yet rarely participate in any meaningful way. I am just wondering how the norms of social networking map on to the academic life of a university faculty member, let alone K-12 teachers and students. I know that they can (as the examples above show), but I am still struggling to make it work for my students.

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• Begin with questions from the audience:
  • How to get younger students to access technology on their own?
  • How do parents react, what do they want?
• Our Hopes
  • To demonstrate daily uses of technology that serve a variety of purposes
  • To aid students, parents, and colleagues in realizing the technology of potential
  • To equip students with the skills that they will need
  • Michael Wesch vide: “A Vision of Students Today“
• Our Plan
  • To share the tech tools that we use with students and parents
  • To discuss why it is important to integrate technology when we feel like we are “giving up” time for content
  • To discuss how flexibility is the key, because teaching with technology always yields surprises
• Students
  • Shared Drive
    • Create hotlists in word that students can click to for computer lab assignments
  • District Digital Dropbox
    • Track changes in word sometimes works with middle school students
  • Wikis
    • Amanda’s Class Wiki
  • Nicenet
    • Classroom discussion forums
    • Good for access at home and school, because it is all online and doesn’t require a specific word processor (files lost, incompatible formats, etc)
    • Watching for IM language and asking students to express themselves more clearly
  • Google Docs
  • Podcasting
    • Buy inexpensive MP3 recorders
• Parents
  • Blogs and Edline
  • Lack of participation and interest in training sessions
  • Considering teaming up with local libraries
  • Be persistent and specific
• Teachers
  • Open yourself up to learning with your students
• Our learning
  • Small, simple steps can be beneficial
  • Honor the time of the student, parent, or teacher coming to learn
  • Listen to input from students
• Lessons and Student Work
  • Book discussions

• 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% by teenagers
  • In four years the growth has been phenomenal
• Rationale for use in the classroom
  • Blogging in English Class (on Teacher Tube)
  • At first, it was different, but then students described how it was interesting
• Why use blogging in the classroom?
  • To share items from writer’s notebook (used to share it in a circle on the floor, now we do it on blogs)
  • Edublogs forums (support video)
• Blogs to check out
  • Sonja’s Class
  • Lavon’s Reflections
  • Elementary Classroom Blog
  • Blog about Movies
  • HS English Blog
  • Blog about blogs and education

  What we’ve noticed from our students

• All students are able to contribute
• Comments are more heartfelt

“Writing Transformations: How New Literacies and New Times Invite Us to Rethink Composition”

• Literacy is changing, literacy as design
• Obstacles: accountability measures and deficit thinking
  • If we are constantly trying to fill in gaps, we are not moving into the future. Looking at education from a deficit model results in damaging education.
  • You cannot move toward the future from a deficit model
• Spotting deficit thinking
  • “these kids”
  • “s/h/they have no language/culture/experience
  • “culture of poverty”
  • finger-wagging to parents
    • Varieties in deficit thinking
      • Individual ability/genetics
      • Culture
      • Poverty
      • Language
      • Mass and popular culture
  • Examples
    • Paying kids in NYC for grades to “compete” with what they could earn on the street
    • Motives for teaching that see children as coming from deficient lives
    • See the book: The Evolution of Deficit Thinking edited by Richard Valencia
  • New literacies are not just about machines.
    • Texts call attention to how they are made, how they work materially, and why
    • Thinking about the design of text and interaction with it
    • Spencer Schaffner’s “five paragraph essay” picture (can’t find image online yet, here is his blog)
    • Habits of minds and material
  • Design
    • Example 1
    • Bill Harvey Music
  • Design as a literacy practice
    • Two phases of the writing process:
      • Generating writing in the notebook — used design as a way of thinking about content
      • Publishing — used design as a way to think about how to publish their work
    • Examples of student work
      • Map of the zoo with narrative annotations
      • Story that was drawn out into a graphic novel/comic page, and by drawing was able to add more detail
        • Bomer claimed that the students wrote more on the days that they drew, and students generated more by working in two modalities
      • Brought in pictures and used cropping Ls
      • Transferred pictures that were cropped and focused in on small components
        • Mother’s image from one image
        • Necklace from another
      • Texts in new literacies may be single pieces that are loosely joined
      • Making Journals by Hand by Jason Thompson or Memory Keepsakes or Artists Journal Sketches by Lynne Perella
      • Design Decisions
        • What pathways are the readers going to take?
          • Box, journal, notecards

Rather than see these children and what they could do from a deficit model, we enabled them to produce texts that mattered to them and developed new literacy practices.

Reflections:

As Bomer talked, I appreciated his perspective on new literacies as “avoiding the deficit” model of thinking. This adds a new twist to the discussions of new literacies that I have been reading about recently, both because it honors the socio-cultural perspective that NLS has developed over time and also addresses issues about about accountability and assessment by hitting it head on by using the research on deficit thinking to support the idea that approaching literacy in reductive ways really contributes to poor literacy practices.

Cool! Given that I have been reading about memes in Lankshear and Knobel’s New Literacies, this was timely.

So, here goes:

Images from my ENG 315: Writing in the Elementary Schools Courses, Spring 2008

Why these images? Well, they highlight some of the conversations that we have been having this semester in ENG 315 about the teaching of writing. As I view these images, I am reminded both of how much I enjoy teaching teachers how to teach writing and how much these students learn over the course of a semester as they work together in class, assist in local schools, and become writers themselves. I am very much looking forward to their final projects in just a few short weeks of class.

All right, now for the fun part. Miguel provides three simple Meme rules:

• Post a picture from a source like FlickrCC or Flickr Creative Commons or make/take your own that captures what YOU are most passionate about for kids to learn about…and give your picture a short title.
• Title your blog post “Meme: Passion Quilt” and link back to this blog entry.
• Include links to 5 folks in your professional learning network or whom you follow on Twitter/Pownce.

And the five people that I am inviting in to the meme:

• Andrea Zellner
• Aram Kabodian
• Bud Hunt
• Cherice Montgomery
• Leigh Wolf
• and (I know I am breaking the rules) John Lee and the whole SITE blog team

Enjoy!