Examining Digital Learning Day

As with all educational initiatives and fads, I strongly encourage everyone participating in the Digital Learning Day celebrations this week to do some homework about the history of the day itself, as well as some of its corporate, foundation, and “core” partners (which, for the record, include the two professional organizations I call home: NWP and NCTE).

So, this week I’m playing with Storify and trying to curate a “live textbook” about Digital Learning Day, but looking at it from a critical perspective. In other words, I am trying to follow the money. Thus, as Digital Learning Day enters its second year… I wonder what do we know about the day itself?

  • Who are the corporate partners? Who are the foundation partners? What about some of the “core” partners such as iNACOL, CCSSO, and Pearson?
  • What are the broader themes and messages that we should explore, based on the stated interests and goals of these partners? Who wins and who loses in these partnerships? Teachers? Students? Taxpayers?
  • Finally, what is the vision of digital learning that these corporations, foundations, and “core” partners represent?

I pose these not to extinguish the excitement that so many people have in Digital Learning Day. But, I do want to raise awareness and ask the unasked questions. I’ll be curious to find out what everyone else discovers and reports back this week.

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

NWP/NCTE 2012: Mentoring Matters

Natalie Merchant opens up NCTE 2012
Natalie Merchant opens up NCTE 2012

As NCTE President Sandy Hayes said at the very beginning of the convention, this entire weekend would feel like Christmas: so long in the making, with the magic lasting only a moment.

Still, what a moment it was, and continues to be, as the many conversations I had this weekend still resonate with me. Natalie Merchant opening the conference, for one, still echoes.

Identifying a key theme is always a difficult task, yet if I had to zero in on just one, it would be this: mentorship. The power of mentors in small moments — and across generations of teachers — continues to amaze, it keeps me connected to the profession of teaching and thinking about how best to empower students.

There are the mentors who guide me mostly through the books and articles that they write, and with whom I was able to share a few moments to describe my appreciation: Lucy Calkins, Katie Wood Ray, and Linda Christensen were three in particular that I hadn’t met before and I was able to spend a few moment with each. Others, like Barry Lane, Jim Burke, Penny Kittle, Kelly Gallagher, Richard Kent, and Jeff Wilhelm have invited me into this profession as a fellow author, friend, and colleague.

And, now, I am beginning to have more opportunities to interact with my contemporaries, all of whom mentor me in different ways. Fellow authors and English Educators like Rob Rozema, Allen Webb, Cathy Fleischer, Bill Tucker, Elaine Hunyadi, Lindsay Ellis, Sara Kajder, Jory Brass, Jim Fredricksen, Leah Zuidema, Janet Swenson, Carl Young, Sam Caughlin, Anne Ruggles Gere, David Kirkland and Ken Lindbloom have all provided me with opportunities to collaborate and learn from them. Kristen Turner and I were honored with a grant from CEE, and we continue our collaborations around digital writing and teacher education. Friends and colleagues who defy categorization because they touch so many parts of my professional life were all here, too: Jennifer Collison (and Jim,too!), Paul Oh, Paul Allison, Chris Sloan, April Niemela, Bud Hunt, and Kevin Cordi.

Yet, most importantly, I appreciate the opportunities that I have had to mentor others, especially through my work with the National Writing Project. Seven teachers from my site were on the program at the NCTE annual convention: Erin Busch-Grabmeyer, Jeremy Hyler, Beth Nelson, Penny Lew, Andy Schoenborn, Kathy Kurtze, and Amanda Smoker. More colleagues than I can count from broader NWP circles were on the program, too, and one of them, Dawn Reed, has now been invited to be a Co-Director of the Red Cedar Writing Project, a role I once proudly held and shared with colleagues like Mitch Nobis, Renee Webster, and Toby Kahn-Loftus. I met people who I first knew through twitter — like Meenoo Rami, Cindy Minnich, and Chad Sansing — and others who I will now know better through twitter. Also, I was fortunate enough to meet with a number of doctoral students, especially from Fordham and Liz Homan from U of M.

I have now been to a decade of consecutive NCTE conventions, as well a trip to Detroit for the 1996 convention. Over those ten years, I have been able to go from being a face in the crowd to, I hope, a face who welcomes others to the crowd. All of my sessions were fun, but in particular I enjoy the hour at the “tech to go” kiosk and my CEE round table discussion, interacting with just a small handful of colleagues over the course of an hour. These small moments where we have time to dig deep into a number of ideas that will, I hope, help us all improve teaching, learning, and assessment.

As I do each year, I head back to campus to work with pre-service teachers, fresh with ideas, knowing that all of these mentors and mentees, colleagues and friends will come with me. I try to describe the power of these professional networks to my students, but even in writing this post I know how futile a task this really is. Handshakes, hugs, and smiles are the best way to see what I mean, and these are way to hard to capture writing, or even in pictures, as these are fleeting moments.

The real mentoring happens during the other 360 days of the year, when we exchange emails and tweets, create new projects, write about the ones we are doing, and prepare to enter our classrooms again. And, I am sure that I have inadvertently left off many other names of colleagues with whom I met this weekend — as well as those who I didn’t even get to catch up with, like Kevin Hodgson and Antero Garcia — and for that I apologize.

I wish you all well as you step back into your classrooms and enjoy Thanksgiving with your families. I continue to be thankful for the mentoring you have provided me, and the mentoring you allow me to provide you.

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

The New Normal: NWP and NCTE 2011

Welcome to Chicago
A moment in front of the Chicago Institute of Art on my first night.

Each fall, November brings the NWP Annual Meeting and the NCTE Annual Convention, two events that mark the new year in my professional life.

This year was no different, yet quite different at the same time in the sense that the NWP as we have known it for so long is no longer. We are adjusting to what many are calling the “new normal.”  Since the elimination of federal funding this past spring, the NWP has been scaling back, and this annual meeting was a tangibe result of that process while, on the other hand, the NCTE convention seemed as big as ever, celebrating its 100th birthday in the town where it all began, Chicago.

For me, this annual pilgrimage becomes a chance to meet with colleagues, share new ideas, reaffirm our beliefs about teaching, and to identiy the latest technologies to support readers and writers. From the moment I got on the train last week to the ride home, where I am composing the bulk of this blog post, I have been offered hugs, handshakes, and smiles from countless colleagues, both those in Michigan who I sometimes only see in November and from others around the country and, this year, around the world. As an opportunity to reaffirm my convictions about teaching and in the strength of educators, NWP and NCTE have always been the cornerstone for me.

Yet, this year is different, as noted above. The NWP Annual Meeting was subdued, perhaps even sad. Still, the work continues, and I document my days in Chicago with as much detail as I can remember, with hopes that this reflection will be useful to others, too.

Thursday, November 17

Working on Google Docs
Google Docs saves the day for procrastinating presenters

The morning began early, with a breakfast meeting that found Paul, Steph, Michelle, and I tucked in a corner of the Corner Bakery, putting the polishing touches on our NWP session, “NWP Connect Community Builders.” This was a chance for each of us to share one case study related to our use of NWP Connect, and I talked about how the NWPM network used it during out advanced institute last summer. This led to a smart conversation about how sites can use NWP Connect to continue engaging in site work. Rather than focus on the tools, we talked about the many elements present in NWP Connect could be used by TCs as the organize Summer Institutes, Professional Development, Continuity, and Youth Programs.

In the afternoon, I found myself engaged in conversations with other site directors and, in all sincerity, found myself asking them “Why are you here?” Please understand that we had already had many opportunities throughout the day to express our concerns and, indeed, our remorse over the loss of federal funding. Yet, I was still surprised at the bitterness and anger that permeated that conversation. When one of my close friends and colleagues was struggling to figure out a plan for moving forward, I asked her why she was here, at the NWP Annual Meeting, if she didn’t see a purpose in her work. This led to a broader conversation about what we value as teacher educators, reminding us of the importance of what it is that we do. That was Debbie Meier’s message from lunch, a message that was meant to be hopeful, and I hope that I was able to refocus that conversation.

In short, the NWP Annual Meeting was bittersweet, and moving forward in this new educational and financial landscape remains a task that will be both challenging and rewarding. Our luncheon speaker was Deborah Meier, and that was inspiring to hear from a seasoned educator and real reformer. That said, is anything in education NOT ever both challenging and rewarding, simultaneously?

Friday, November 18

The first morning of the NCTE Annual Convention brought an educational heroine, Linda Darling-Hammond, into conversation with a few thousand English teachers. Her message, as always, was inspiring and evidenced-based, giving us pause to think about what “counts” as evidence and to whom that evidence counts. Clearly, as the research she has done her entire career shows, there are many things that we know about successful schooling, as outlined below in this series of tweets I sent out, reading from the bottom up:

  • LDH: “Those who can do. Those who understand teach.” #ncte11
  • LDH: If we are serious about equitable schools, we will set meaningful learning goals, provide equitable and adequate resources. #ncte11
  • #ncte11 Think about how you are spending your (and your school’s) money. Who benefits from the books you buy? ow.ly/1AzPBN
  • Whose interests drive standardized assessments? Who pays? Are we indirectly supporting bad curr. and inst. by the texts we buy? #ncte11
  • LDH: Highest achieving nations: kids have housing, healthcare, and pre-school. Invest in teacher learning. Leaner curriculum. #ncte11
  • LDH: Alternative certification and less coursework lead to teachers who have students that achieve even less than others. #ncte11
  • @MrsT73199 Indeed. Sadly it depends on your ultimate goals and what counts as evidence. I think we see education much differently… #ncte11
  • LDH: Evidence from NCLB is clear: lower test scores, more drop outs. Hooray for “evidenced-based” education… #ncte11 There are other ways!
  • #ncte11 Sadly, our school system is doing a great job at what it is designed to do: replicate inequality, demoralize teachers and students.
  • LDH: Anatomy of inequality diagram. We are moving backwards since the 1980s #ncte11 ow.ly/i/lyF4 We know what to do, now do it!
  • LDH: Amongst industrial nations, US follows on Mexico in rate of childhood poverty, nearly 20%, and major inequity in their schools #ncte11
  • LDH: Equitable teachers see, hear, and understand the child. They look for experiences, prior knowledge, and strengths. #ncte11
  • #ncte11 What does the fact that we are laughing at Ferris Bueller clip 20 years later tell us about ourselves? Our colleagues, profession?
  • LDH: The amount of information we have access to doubles each year. Most important skill is learning to learn. #ncte11
  • Blurry picture of LDH slide showing growth in high skilled jobs vs low skill jobs over last century ow.ly/i/lyAp #ncte11
  • LDH: Metaphors be with you… Hummingbirds, steel traps, and colonies of e. coli #ncte11
  • LDH: The power of literacy is so great that those who want power deny others access to the book. #ncte11
  • #ncte opens its second century w/ an award to Linda Darling Hammond and a standing ovation. Great start to #ncte11 !

The next session gave me opportunity to (finally) see a presentation by a long-time friend, Jennifer Collison, who invited us to write and think about the connections between film and literature. Also, in that session, another NWP teacher, Nick Kremer, presented his work on using comics to teach writing. He gave us some ideas from Scott McCleod‘s work, and then asked us to compose our own “sequential art narrative” using William Carlos Williams‘ poem, “The Act.” In the spirit of creativity, I made a short, digitized version of the nine-panel comic that I drew, repurposing the original text of the poem in the background.

I was also able to take in a brief session on globalization and then headed to the CEE Luncheon to hear author Rebecca Skloot. Her book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, has become a best seller, and I read it over the summer. Her backstory as an author was interesting, weaving her history in school (including, essentially, dropping out of regular high school only to complete alternative high school in 18 months, and heading to college at age 16). She also talked about the obsession that she had with writing, biology, and, of course, Henrietta Lacks, which all combined in a ten year pursuit of the story that led her to craft the book. Hearing the story of an author, especially one who writes creative non-fiction, was inspiring, to say the least.

The evening found me in conversation with my colleagues from the Chippewa River Writing Project over a family-style, Italian dinner. We each talked about our big take aways from the day, as well as what we would hope to have happen for our site in the coming year. I think that we are on the right track, and the enthusiasm they all shared reminds me of our shared goals as colleagues in a writing project site. We will, of course, have to think about our finances and our mission in relation to what we are, and are not, able to do, but I am confident that our decision-making will be guided by our shared knowledge and experiences from NWP/NCTE this year.

Saturday, November 19

I will start my thoughts on Saturday by working backwards from the NCTE 100th birthday party and my first visit to the annual Scholastic dinner. Despite my general wariness about the role of publishing companies and textbooks — and their effects on students, teachers, instruction, and assessment — I feel that the words of the Scholastic CEO are genuine and that the family history and philosophy of the company is one that aligns with NCTE. It was good to be a part of this centennial event.

Now, back to the morning. I began my day in a great conversation with Kristen Turner, talking about data that we had collected from her writing methods class in the spring. That data had revealed some “opportunistic tensions” in the ways that pre-service teachers described their own experience with digital writing and what they (perceived they) were able to do in the classroom. That led us to our morning session, “Writing Our Inquiry,” where Kristen, Kia, and I reported on our experience with last year’s CEE Colloquim on multimodal/multigenre writing. We had a small, but participatory crowd, and the conversations about digital writing in pre-service teacher education were valuable. Kristen and I have plans to write an article, and I enjoyed having the chance to talk with her about our work.

Then, in the afternoon, I got to see my friends and colleagues Bill Bass and Franki Sibberson talk about “digital mentor texts,” and they shared some great resources on how to help students think about identifying and using mentor texts to create their own digital writing pieces. Bill especially gave some great examples that helped me think how to talk more about the craft of digital writing, and we carried that conversation well into the evening. I hope that there are some collaborations that may come from these ideas.

Sunday, November 20

And, now on to today. I have to admit, I kind of stayed away from the conference sessions until it was actually my turn to present. I had some wonderfully productive conversations with my long-time MRA colleagues, Amber and Sue, which led them to give some great insights into what I want to write for my upcoming book. This led to a conversation with my editor from Heinemann, Tobey, who again offered some great ideas and has given much to think (and write) about in the coming weeks.

Finally, this brings me to the session that I was most anticipating for NCTE 2011, the opportunity to do “Reports from Cyberspace” with Sara Kajder and Bud Hunt, our third annual attempt and introducing newer literacies and technologies to our colleagues. This year, Bud joined us virtually, using Adobe Connect, and we attempted to use Celly and Google Docs for backchannel conversation. Our audience this year was very concerned about the practical and pedagogical implications of using technology, fueled in part by many of continuing trends in education towards budget cutting, lack of technology resources, and more standardized curriculum, as evidenced by their comments in the “yeah, buts…” list that Sara transcribed:

  • Where is the research that shows it works?
  • Where is the tie to common core?
  • I don’t have the time and the energy
  • My kids don’t have access to the internet at home
  • When do I have time to learn how to do this myself?
  • I am afraid the students know more than meWhere do I even begin?
  • I am teaching to my strengths – that doesn’t include this.
  • How will they function when the world ends?
  • Is it cheating?
  • Where is the discursive space for critique?
  • That media project doesn’t product the same quality as does my beloved 5 paragraph essay?
  • My district has no money for this.
  • They will be distracted and their grades will go down
  • We can no longer talk with one another
  • If I use it, won’t they just play games when I’m teaching?
  • How can I test this?
  • Students are spending time in corporate-controlled online spaces
  • I don’t want my kids’ work online.
  • Why spend time on a tech project when we need to spend time on the paper…
  • I have to prepare them for a MC test
  • What happens if the power goes out?
  • I can’t afford a smart phone myself so how can i let kids use theirs
  • It kills their brain cells, right?

That’s quite a list.

I am not sure exactly how best to answer all of the questions, except to say that we need to shift paradigms, as I have said before. I think that Bud, Sara, and I have been consistently on target with our message over the past three years, and our article that will be appearing in English Journal next year. It almost goes without saying, but I suppose it needs to be said… the time to act is now.

Teach. Digital. Writing.

We still tried to share many ideas with people though, all of which are outlined in our Google Presentation, Google Doc, and recorded in the archived version of the webinar, available here.

Reflections

Reflections on NCTE 2011
Looking back at Chicago and NWP/NCTE 2011

Since this was the tone on which we ended the conference, I am not quite sure what to think. As I sit here on the train, talking with my good friend and colleague Aram Kabodian (who is making a much more engaging and playful video about his experience in Chicago, which I am sure he will post to his blog), I am a bit disheartened. NWP was not, and will never again, be the same. At NCTE, while we wanted to have audience members this afternoon grab the bull by the horns and become advocates for themselves and their students seemed, instead, to end with a whimper, not a bang. And, finally, as I look ahead to what will happen for our site, Chippewa River Writing Project, I am just not sure where things are at, or where they are heading, although I know that we won’t stop.

As with many reflections of this nature, I come home from NWP/NCTE very tired, and a bit sad, although not for the normal reasons of leaving friends and colleagues behind for another year. This time, sadly, I think that I have finally said “good bye” to the NWP as I have known it, and I am not sure what my future holds. No matter what, I will return to NCTE in future years to share my knowledge and experience, learn from my colleagues, and renew our faith in teaching writing.

That, I know, will never change.

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Notes from Kelly Gallagher’s Talk at the Dublin Literacy Conference

Kelly Gallagher kicks off the Dublin Literacy Conference with his keynote on “Readicide: How Schools are Killing Reading and What You Can Do About It.” Here are some notes from his presentation.

  • Kicks off with Barry Lane’s “Basalreaderville” parody. Interestingly, Barry asked me to have my students create accompanying slideshows that he could use in his performances. Here is a link to Katie Eckardt’s portfolio/slideshow she made for him.
  • Read-i-cide — “the systematic killing of the love of reading, often exacerbated by the inane, mind-numbing practices found in schools”
  • Mike Schmoker’s new book, Focus: Elevating the Essentials To Radically Improve Student Learning.
  • Gallagher is talking about sacrificing teaching in name of standards… I am not sure that this rhetorical approach of attacking standards is necessary anymore. The standards are not the curriculum, and we if we are engaging in a more holistic, integrated approach to teaching reading and writing, aren’t we meeting these standards and moving beyond them? In what ways can we move beyond this conversation about whether or not standards are useful or good? How can we think about teaching standards and not always seeing them as standardization?
  • Gallagher is talking about the fact that we are losing a focus on writing. Very true. See also the new “Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing” from WPA, NCTE, and NWP.
  • Jeff McQuillan – The Literacy Crisis — more books equals more reading equals better reading
  • Concept of “word poverty” — Gallagher is showing political cartoons and and talking how context and background matters to reading comprehension. He argues that our mission is to build background knowledge for our students. I wonder, is this, in some ways, an argument for teaching cultural literacy or, at least a more liberated vision of cultural literacy, ala E.D. Hirsch?
  • Gallagher idea — read and respond to article of the week. Digital twist — have students post this to a blog or wiki, and copy quotes, make hyperlinks to the article, embed images, make connections to what others have written in their posts.
  • “Many kids are literally starving the lobes of the prefrontal cortex of their brains.” Jane Healy, Endangered Minds: Why Our Children Can’t Think and What We Can Do About It
  • Gallagher cites Kenneth Burke — imaginative rehearsals
  • Gallagher — need to find the “sweet spot” of instruction, not too heavy and not too light
  • Gallagher – “What you bring to the page is often more important than what’s on the page.”
  • Ideas from Gallagher
    • Sometimes the framing of the text should be motivational in nature. Reading an article about olestra and giving having them taste test potato chips.
    • More often, the framing should be to help gain surface-level comprehension. Carol Jago talks about the idea about giving students a guided tour during the first part of reading a text, and then dropping off and helping the kids go on the budget tour by themselves.
  • I had to leave before the end so I could go get things set up for my own session! I appreciate Gallagher’s humor and insights and look forward to hearing him talk again at the NWP Spring Meeting in a few weeks.


Creative Commons License

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

Preparing for NWP/NCTE 2010

Photo courtesy of NCTE

Well, the week is here.

So, now that it is Monday of my biggest and busiest professional week of the year, I need to hit full stride.

NCTE and NWP 2010. Hooray!

NWP AM  2010
Image courtesy of NWP

Although I tell myself each year that I’ll cut back, do a little bit less, and just enjoyed my time at the convention, it seems a year after year I find more and more things to do. This year is no exception, and in reality I’m thankful for the many opportunities that these two organizations continue to offer me each fall as I network with my colleagues, present new ideas, and grow as a professional. In some ways it’s fitting that this happens right before Thanksgiving, because it does make me thankful for all the people with whom I am going to interact with in the next few days (although I will say that I’m usually exhausted by the end of it all!). So, as I am preparing for multiple sessions, I want to share some of my thinking, as well as the details on when and where I’ll be, during these busy days coming up.

Thursday, November 18, 2010

Upon arriving in Orlando on Wednesday night, there really won’t be any time from the moment we get on board the Disney Express until we crash at our hotel. That means a bright start on Thursday morning as Sara and I make our way from the Yacht and Beach Club over to the Contemporary Resort for the NWP annual meeting. Right away, at 9:30 AM, I’m presenting with one of our CRWP co-directors Kathy Kurtze and two other NWP colleagues in a session called “Reading in the Summer Institute.” Goals for the session include inviting people into our thinking process about how, when, and why we choose particular texts, inviting participants to share their own texts that they use in the Summer Institute, and thinking more broadly about how we can respond to texts through a variety of professional types of writing and with various technologies. As with every NWP session that I have been a part of over the past seven years, this one provides new opportunities to think about what it means to teach teachers, and I’m excited to work with Rick, Ann, and Kathy to lead this session. In particular, I am really interested in hearing how other sites are engaging teachers and reading responses through the use of technologies such as digital stories, podcasts, discussion forums, and other types of read/write Web. After the session, we will ask people to contribute to a collaborative Google Doc where they can share their reading lists with one another. I look forward to seeing what will be happening with NWP’s new social network as well as the Digital Is collection of web-based resources.

After my morning session with NWP, I will have a little bit of time to hang out and talk with some other colleagues there. Before too long though, I’ll have to make my way back over to the Coronado, as Sara Kajder, Bud Hunt, and I are on tap to repeat our session from last year’s annual convention, Three Reports from Cyberspace. During the session last year, Sara was, unfortunately unable to join us. That said, her spirit still infused the interactive, multi-layered discussion while Bud and I led the room of about 200 teachers, as well as some online colleagues who couldn’t be at the convention. When are asked to present the session again, we jumped at the chance, and we think that there will be a whole new series of opportunities to open up conversations about how on why to use technology in our classrooms. In particular, Bud is going to talk about infrastructure, Sara is going to talk about assessment, and I’m going to talk about pedagogy. At that point, we’ll open up the floor as we did last year questions, comments, links, and insights from the audience. What we hope to do this year, even more so than what we did last, will be to continue the dialogue. We all began by collaboratively composing a welcome letter in a Google document, which we then each posted to our blog, the presentation wiki page, and the NCTE connected community. While many conference presentations comes and go, we hope to inspire an actual dialogue where our colleagues able to share their reports from cyberspace, and we might find stories, examples, and other types of data that will support the argument that digital learning matters.

Once we finish with the cyberspace reports, we will immediately run down the hall in the Coronado and present at NCTE’s middle level get-together. Sara will lead the way on this session, followed with lots of tech support and ideas from Bud and me. This is a wonderful honor for me, since being asked to be a featured speaker at NCTE is something that, quite honestly, I never really imagined. I remember attending my first and NCTE conference in Detroit in 1997, and I saw many of the people that I’ve been reading in my undergraduate methods courses, hearing about from other colleagues, and wondering if they were, in fact, real people. As an undergraduate, this experience opened my eyes, and now I know that those who are featured speakers at the NCTE annual convention really set the tone, pace, the conversations for our entire organization. So, working together to deliver the cyberspace reports and then moving to the middle level get-together is a wonderful opportunity for Sara, Bud, and I to set our own ideas in NCTE’s broader conversations related to literacy. One of the things that we want to make clear is that we are not using technology for technology’s sake, and that we want NCTE to continue taking a leadership role in promoting digital literacies in curriculum and instruction practices, as well as in decision-making about school infrastructure and assessment.

That rounds out a busy Thursday or sessions, followed that evening by a gathering of my CRWP colleagues to celebrate the second year of our writing project’s work and the fact that we are bringing ten site leaders to this year’s annual meeting. I look forward to hearing from them about their experiences at the annual meeting, many of them attending for the first time.

Friday, November 19, 2010

Friday morning brings us to my favorite part of the NWP annual meeting, the General Session, where the Executive Director  speaks, as well as the keynote speaker, other site directors, NWP teacher consultants, and various guests. It is, by far, one of the most exciting moments of the entire trip every year. We are bringing 10 CRWP teacher consultants with us this year, and I look forward to being at the session with them. Energy, excitement, enthusiasm that this two hour meeting generates propels the writing project forward through the doldrums of winter and into our planning for spring and summer months. So, needless to say, it’s something that I want to attend. Also because the rest of my time on Friday will find me at NCTE, it might be one of the few opportunities I have really connect with NWP colleagues, unless I can make it back for a tweet up later on.

Also on Friday, NCTE will be premiering its 100th anniversary film “Reading the Past, Writing the Future.” Two years ago was fortunate enough to be invited by John Golden to be interviewed for this film while in San Antonio. At the time, I was still working on my book, and didn’t really know what would be happening with my career in digital writing. Two books, a new writing project, three NCTE webinars, and too many PD sessions to count later, I’m kind of curious to see what I sounded like two years ago, and whether or not the things I said I’ll been reported in San Antonio still ring true. I’m told that they do, from those who have reviewed of the film, and I’m still honored to be a part of the many among many distinguished voices that will be heard in celebration of NCTE’s past, present, and future. One of the things that I enjoy most about NCTE is the fact that, as colleagues, I do feel comfortable roaming the hallways of the convention center, easily talking with my mentors and peers as well as those who are just now entering the profession. This dialogue that happens across generations of teachers happens in few other places, and I really enjoy the opportunity to be a part of it, and I hope that this film contributes to NCTE’s rich history and exciting future.

Saturday, November 20, 2010

The NCTE adventure continues on Saturday, first with a “tech to go” session on writing with wikis, and then participating in the Google monsters session with Bill Bass, Andrea Zellner, Tara Seale, and Sara Beauchamp-Hicks.

Photo courtesy of Bud Hunt

First, Tech to Go. Sara Kajder has, over the past three years, invited a number of teachers to participate in NCTE’s just-in-time, nearly one-to-one personal development experience teaching English for technology: “Tech to Go.” While topics vary from video production, blogging, collaborative wordprocessing, using apps for the iPhone, the Tech to Go sessions have become a destination for many the past few years. In the three sessions that I have led, I’ve enjoyed the intimate conversations with colleagues, all who are able to ask genuine questions about why and how they might use particular technologies in their teaching. Moreover, I appreciate the opportunity to be standing there with the computer and be able to put their hands on the mouse and keyboard, rather than standing on the front of the giant lecture hall, unable to have an interaction, perhaps teaching them just one small thing that they can take back to their classrooms.  While we know that seeing these tools in action in front of a large audience is sometimes inspiring, I also know that many teachers benefit from the one-to-one support types of sessions offered. So I’m looking forward to being a part of to go again this year.

The other component of that day is the Google Monster presentation. Last year, Jeff Golub invited Sara, Bud, and I to do the reports fromcyberspace session. Attendees in that session included Bill Bass, Tara Seale, Andrea Zellner, and Sara Beauchamp-Hicks. We wondered if there was a way to do something with all of these teachers were already trained as Google certified teachers similar to the reports from cyberspace session. I suggested that we extend his reports from cyberspace model to a Google monster session, and they snapped up the opportunity and submited a proposal. So, here we are with kind of a cyberspace reports, part two, but Google style. Although my role in this session is technically listed as responder, I’m actually going to act as more of a moderator of as Bill, Andrea, Sara, and Tara offer their insights about how they use Google tools to solve their daily tasks and problems as educators. Like the cyberspace report session, this should be interactive and invite comments questions and interaction from the audience. It will be lightning fast, so there’ll be resources posted online for later. All in all, very excited about the opportunity to watch Sara present to a large audience, see her enthusiasm for teacher education and technology shine through along with Bill, Andrea, and Tara.

Saturday afternoon and Sunday bring a little bit of a break this year, at least in the sense that while we are wishing many of our colleagues safe travel home, we will have a little bit of downtime where we are actually able to attend some sessions and connect with other colleagues. Again, this is one of the most exciting parts about being at the convention. These sessions are always useful, as the one session that I went to last year on fair use has completely changed my thinking on why and how to invite students to use copyrighted materials and creating digital media. It’s amazing to think that one hour-long session really fundamentally change the way I go about teaching and writing. But this session has, and I’m thankful for opportunities such as this during the annual convention. What I normally say to myself when I jump on the plane is that if I can come back with one good, solid, thoughtful idea that I can integrate into my own teaching and writing, then I’ll be all that much better for. A usually come back with much more, but it’s my goal to seek out that one nugget, that one session that I know will provide me with some answers and movie forward to next year. I look forward to finding that session sometime on Saturday or Sunday.

Monday, November 22, 2010

Just as many people are heading home from the convention, I’m still warming up. On Monday I’ll actually be a part of two different workshops. First, I will be a part of the ACE workshop, hosted by Ewa McGrail, and presenting on the topic of using Zotero and and RSS for researching. I really do want to hone this presentation, and think more carefully about how I can talk to teachers in a future book, article, and/or presentation about fundamentally rethinking what it means to teach argumentative and informational writing at the secondary level. This stems in part from a blog post I wrote last year about rethinking the research process. Given the requirements of the common core standards, not to mention standardized assessments by which we are measured, and our students are measured, I really do want teachers to think more critically and carefully about how digital writing tools such as a bibliography manager, an RSS reader, social bookmarking, and any number of other interactive, web-based digital writing tools may help students become more active, engaged, and the research process. Also, given the many commercially licensed products that are out there nowadays, I want teachers to see that they really can organize their research process with free web-based and open source tools. So, I look forward to constructing a hour-long workshop and getting feedback from peers.

Later in the morning, I leave ACE and  head over to the CEE colloquium: “Multicultural, Multiliterate: Writing the World.”  Kristen Turner and Jonathan Bush invited me to be a featured speaker during this year’s session, sponsored by the commission on writing teacher education. They wanted to focus on the multigenre approaches as well as multimodal technologies. Featuring, Tom Romano and Christina Ortmeier-Hooper in the morning, I’m fortunate enough to be speaking about multimodal composition in the late morning. One of the unique challenges of presenting at the NCTE annual convention this year will be the fact that there is limited or no wifi connectivity, and this day is no exception. For many years now, there are a number of us who have lamented the fact that these conventions do not have free, open, and adequate wifi access. If we really wanted to our colleagues to move forward with digital writing, this is an absolute essential. At any rate, that means that my session will focus on mobile learning, and that is a cool new area for me to explore and present on.

That said, the goal for the afternoon will be to move to EPCOT center to both capture and critique the ways in which we see cultures presented there. So, a large degree what we’ll be doing later in the day will involve mobile devices, so that’s where I’m focusing my attention during my presentation. I want to get people thinking about how and why they might choose audio recordings, video recordings, snapshots, twitter messages, and other forms of digital writing that can happen on their mobile devices and across networked spaces in order to both capture their reflections in the moment and prepare to make a digital composition later on. I will probably invite them to use Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, and Cinch. Other tools are, of course, welcome! One of the goals that they have for the moment in terms of simply capturing digital assets is that they can go back to their computer later create into a digital story, wiki, or other type of digital writing media. We want people to be comfortable using their mobile devices to stay connected both with their small groups, across the entire CEE group, and in preparation for preparing pieces of multi-genre pieces of digital writing. We are following up this colloquium with the webinar December, the time and date still yet to be set, as an opportunity to read/view/listen to one another’s texts and respond to them.

Since we will be in EPCOT Center Monday afternoon, my hope is that Sara and I will be able to enjoy one last dinner alone, or perhaps with a small group of colleagues, before we hit the road on Tuesday. She will be heading back to the UP while I stay in Florida to visit with my dad. This is one of the bittersweet parts about  NCTE; once you convene with all your friends and colleagues for many days, everyone heads home for Thanksgiving, exhausted, yet refreshed at the same time. I get tired just looking at my schedule is coming week, yet at the same time I am genuinely excited about the opportunities that continue to be presented to me. My hope is that my message across all the sessions remains consistent: if we engage students as writers, and we offer writing tasks and technologies that are both timely and useful, we as teachers will be able to open up our pedagogy, expect more from them as writers, and begin to see their worlds and different ways.

I look forward to continuing conversations with many of you face-to-face next week in Orlando.

Travel safe, my friends.

Creative Commons License

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

Reflections on NWP and NCTE 2009

As the holidays begin, another conference season comes to a close.

For the past week, Sara and I have been in Philadelphia at the National Writing Project‘s “Digital Is…” pre-conference, the NWP Annual Meeting, and the National Council of Teachers of English Annual Convention. As it is each year, we enjoy spending time with colleagues and find opportunities to learn about their work. Moreover, we pause to think about our own work including what we have accomplished in the past year and what we are looking forward to in the next.

To that end, I began writing this reflection in the lobby of the Sheraton in Philly, continued it at the airport and on the plane, and now post it as I spend Thanksgiving with my parents. Here is my day-by-day account of NWP/NCTE 2009.

Tuesday, 11/17/09

Arriving in Philly on Tuesday afternoon, we had some time to enjoy a quick walk and prepare for the “Digital Is…” reception. Sponsored through NWP’s work with the MacArthur Foundation’s Digital Media and Learning Initiative, the entire “Digital Is…” conference was designed as an opportunity to convene teachers, teacher educators, and other stakeholders in conversations about what we know about teaching and learning with digital media. The opening reception was fun, followed by dinner with colleagues from Science Leadership Academy. A great way to begin our week, for sure.

Wednesday, 11/18/09

Digital Is…“convened in the Sheraton, with two slideshows from Danielle DeVoss. The first ran as a background show during breakfast, the second was her keynote. There is no way to capture the energy that she shared during this session, except to say that she really framed the day with her eight key themes about “digital is…” that I outlined in a previous post. So, even though the experience is not nearly the same, here are the slideshows:

For the afternoon, I was again fortunate to present with Dawn about our work with podcasting, as featured in Teaching the New Writing. By doing a protocol analysis discussion of the work, we were really able to dig deeply and think about what was there. One of the more stunning realizations that we had in the conversation was about the ways in which the composing process changes when writers begin with the goal of creating a spoken and, in some sense, permanent text. I think that the line from the notes that captures it best is that the process of recording the podcast “reinforces writing as a capacity that changes across genres and audiences and mediums.” It will be interesting to see where Dawn goes next with this work.

The second round of discussion was interesting, too, as we mixed up groups and have conversations across the elements of student work. Rather than try to capture all the complexities of that conversation in writing, I will share two items. The first is a list of “final words” that I asked participants in our session to state in relation to their thoughts about composing in digital environments at the end of this hour-long conversation. The second is a concept map that I tried to draw while we were talking. Neither alone captures all that happened in our session, but perhaps will give you some insights into what happened.

Concept Map from Digital Is
Concept Map from Digital Is
  • Hybridity
  • Genre
  • Messy
  • Openness
  • Elegance
  • Excitement
  • Immediacy
  • Future
  • Mistakes
  • Surrender
  • Reciprocity
  • Space
  • Dirty
  • Play
  • Organic

I had the opportunity to then help close the day, asking participants to create “invitations” that could be used to ask other stakeholders to join in the conversation about digital writing with youth. One of the most consistent themes from throughout the day was the fact that most of the digital writing opportunities that students have are taking place outside of school. This is a travesty. If we can create these types of engaging opportunities outside of school, then surely we can consider how to do better at creating these types of learning spaces inside of schools. This is something to chew on in the weeks and months to come as I figure out where to go next with my own work and the direction of our writing project.

That night, we were treated to a panel discussion of “What Kids Learn When They Create with Digital Media” with Renee Hobbs, Founder, Media Education Lab, Temple University; Nichole Pinkard, Founder, Digital Youth Network and DePaul University professor; and Elyse Eidman-Aadahl, Director, National Programs and Site Development, National Writing Project.

Thursday, 11/19/09

The NWP Annual Meeting kicked off with morning and afternoon workshops. In the morning, I attended one on developing site leadership and, in the afternoon, on integrating new literacies into the site’s work that featured Paige Cole, Joe Conroy, Shasta Looper, and Sara Beauchamp-Hicks. Along with Sara’s overview of how she integrated her own growth as a tech leader into her site’s work and securing mini-grants and creating professional development experiences, I was particularly interested in watching Paige and Joe talk about the work that they initially developed at Tech Matters 2007 and to see how they have grown work at their sites. Literally, I had goose bumps watching Paige’s video reflection. Taken with ideas from the morning about how to support and encourage site leaders, the two sessions reminded me of the power of the NWP network, and how small doses of encouragement from a mentor can turn into incredible work.

Friday, 11/20/09

More NWP today, with Billy Collins bringing down the house at the general session. Truly, truly wonderful. Also wonderful was the introduction of the Chippewa River Writing Project as one of the new sites in the NWP network! Later in the afternoon, I was able to attend a session on community partnerships, including a presentation from Joel Arquillos from the amazing 826 organization (which, if you haven’t heard about, watch Dave Eggers’ TED Talk and then visit the 826 website). Also, I got to hear about the Eastern Michigan Writing Project‘s Family Literacy workshops from their program director, Kim Pavlock. So many powerful ideas here from both Joel and Kim, but the biggest one being that we need to make learning to write purposeful for students and the process of doing so clear to their parents. What incredible programs to model from. To close the day, I got to hear from two of my mentors — Patti Stock and Peter Kittle — about the power of taking an inquiry stance towards teaching demonstrations in the summer institute. I am very much looking forward to returning to CRWP and talking over all this information with my leadership team, most of whom were there with me and will have ideas of their own to share, too.

Saturday, 11/21/09

An early morning brought both Sara and me to the NCTE booth, leading Tech-to-Go sessions for those beginning their day at NCTE. I talked about wikis, while Sara presented on Google Forms and then, later in the day, on iPod Touch applications. This led us to my presentation with Bud Hunt, “Reports from Cyberspace,” This was truly an amazing session, as we tried to incorporate a backchannel discussion through Twitter, delicious, and Chatterous. Also, in trying to use newer tools for presentations, I created a Prezi and Bud made a Voice Thread. The conversations that occured in the session, both face-to-face and online, were amazing, and we are thinking about repeating the session again next year. One recurring question was about access, and both Bud and I contended that it is reasonable to expect kids to do digital writing now, because there is access available in many more places and most of the tools are web-based. We also touched on issues of filtering, curriculum, assessment, and how to begin digital writing workshops.

Later that night, Sara and I were able to join the Heinemann reception and found out that my book sold out in the convention hall! Thanks to everyone who picked up a copy there, as well as to everyone else who then ordered one online. I am  looking forward to where my next writing opportunity may take me…

Sunday, 11/22/09

We awoke Sunday morning for a wonderful session on erasing copyright confusion, and I was then able to interview Renee Hobbs for an aricle on fair use for CCCC-IP. We also were able to meet with the CEE Web Site Editors, and came up with a plan for developing some basic content for the site. Our afternoon found us on adventures in Philly with my friend Carl Young, and we enjoyed a visit to the National Constitution Center. In thinking about how and why we ask students to compose digital writing, our visit to this center was particularly appropriate, as we were greeted with remixed versions of “People” magazine covers, featuring such historical figures as Abraham Lincoln and Betsy Ross, as well as a highly-interactive multimedia experince in the museum.

Monday, 11/23/09

While we had planned to go to SLA, and appreciated the invite to be there, we ended up spending most of our day at at the Franklin Institute. Perhaps we will have to do EduCon instead. So, even though we missed SLA, we greatly enjoyed the Body Worlds exhibition, and felt that was a good use of our final hours in Philly.

Also, we realized that we missed the NCTE Centennial Preview, but John Golden provided the link for me, so you can enjoy it online!

As with all NWP/NCTE trips, this one game me so many good ideas and connections with colleagues. Next on my agenda are to begin planning next summer’s CRWP SI and, ideally, an advanced institute related to digital writing and copyright. Also, I am working on writing the article for the Cs Intellectual Property Caucus, CCCC-IP. Still thinking about so much, and hoping to get back to Philly with my entire family for more of the historical aspects of the town that we missed.

And, so goes another NWP Annual Meeting and NCTE Convention. Thanks for sticking with me through this whole pose.

Now, time to plan for the convention in Orlando, celebrating 100 years of NCTE.


Creative Commons License

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

Notes from “Erasing Copyright Confusion” at NCTE 2009

Notes from “Erasing Copyright Confusion” at NCTE 2009

Joyce Valenza, Renee Hobbs, Kristin Hokanson, and Michael RobbGrieco

Center for Social Media

  • Renee Hobbs, Temple — What is the purpose of copyright?
    • Protect intellectual property
    • Ownership, profit
    • Authors’ right
  • In fact, the purpose of copyright is to promote creativity, innovation, and the spread of knowledge
    • Owners have pushed for longer length of copyright
  • How we Cope as Educators with Copyright
    • “See no evil” teachers — don’t examine copyright issues at all
    • “Close the door” teachers — know that there is something to copyright, yet keep it private
    • “Hyper-comply” teachers — they hold on to this idea more strongly for their students than themselves
  • When I use creative materials, which concepts apply?
    • Attribution — citing your sources (an academic community’s normative conventions that they agree upon to acknowledge other’s work)
    • Plagiarism — not acknowledging source material used in your work
    • Infringement — copying another’s work in violation of the law
    • Fair Use — the legal use of copyrighted works without permission or payment
    • Licensing — Asking permission and paying a fee
  • Copyright balances the rights of owners with the rights of users
    • Owners get to control how their work is controlled and distributed for a limited use of time
    • As users, however, we have some rights, too
    • All those things you knew about the “30 second rule,” the “10% rule,” the “45 day rule” are not the law
      • The charts that you see, they are not the law — they are negotiated agreements that have “the appearance of positive law”
      • The guidelines actually limit our understandings of fair use
      • You can use copyrighted material in a variety of ways — criticism, comment, news reporting, scholarship AND creative work
      • Peter Jazi — the benefits to society outweigh the private costs to the copyright holder, or else copyright law becomes a form of private censorship
  • Michael RobbGrieco, Temple — Responding to the Rise of Remix Culture: Challenges and opportunities for teaching, learning, and literacy
    • Are you a part of remix culture?
      • Build on others?
      • Quote passages?
      • Do you have a website?
    • Our students are fully immersed in a remix culture
      • Remix is how our students add their own personal experience to the wider culture and make their experience known to others
      • Can remix perpetuate cultural norms that are oppressive?
      • Critical remix for democracy, dialogue, and exchange
      • Single Ladies in Mayberry
    • Develop media literacy skills
      • Balancing producer and consumer identities
      • Can create shallow engagement without critical interpretation (this is where educators come in)
      • How do we realize the potential of fair use while also facing the challenges that are present?
      • How can we be critical with our students and invite interpretation and argument?
      • Michael’s video: Copyright, What’s Copyright?
  • Kristin Hokanson, Upper Merion High School
    • What does it mean to add value to other people’s work?
    • Use of Flickr images for a biology project
    • Use of Dave Matthews “Gravedigger” with Spoon River Anthology
    • Media Lab’s “Teach Them to Reason” tool
    • Ending Copyright Confusion Wiki
    • Attribution is an ethical practice, not a legal one; citing sources doesn’t let you off the hook
    • Fair use is a reasoning process that requires critical thinking; context and situation determine how fair use applies.
    • Am I creating something new (through transformative use), or am I redistributing (which is, in contrast, a violation of the law)?
  • Joyce Valenza, Springfield Township High School
  • This project is a user-rights movement
    • The Code of Best Practices for Fair Use is NCTE’s official policy on fair use
    • The guidelines that have been created since the implementation of the 1970s copyright law were brought about from negotiations by the media industry; the guidelines that were created are not set down as the law


Creative Commons License

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

Looking for Feedback on the Idea of a Digital Writing Project

As we prepare to head to the NWP Annual Meeting and NCTE Convention in just about a week, I am also plugging away at our Chippewa River Writing Project Continued Funding Application. I have come to one of the most compelling parts of the report, at least for me… the point where we reflect on the summer institute and think about what that means for our site. So, here is where I am at right now and, in the spirit of collaboration, I look for any insights that you might be able to offer me here as I try to articulate my vision of our “digital writing project.”

Thanks in advance for your feedback and I look forward to seeing many of you in Philly next week!

From the CRWP CFA — Troy’s Reflections on the Summer Institute:

Our summer institute, from its inception, focused on a clear integration of literacy and technology. In seeing ourselves as a “digital writing project,” we began our work with the intent that a “web 2.0” ethos of collaboration, creativity, and commitment would infuse our work. As we reflect on our experience as leaders in this first summer institute, and review the comments of TCs, we see that these elements were present. In terms of collaboration, we relied heavily on the wiki and Google Docs as spaces to share all of our work, from our initial writer’s profile to our responses to teaching demos to our own personal writing. Teachers began the institute with the expectation that they would, indeed, become part of a collaborative and connected group, largely enabled by the technologies that we chose.

In terms of creativity, we invited participants to engage in literacy and technology not just from a functional perspective (although, getting the technology to simply function was sometimes a problem!), but from critical and rhetorical perspectives as well. Our use of digital storytelling, for instance, highlights this perspective. While inviting participants to create their own digital stories, we also analyzed the stories that others had created to get a sense of what worked, what made the digital stories more than simply a collection of images set to a narration. By constantly moving back and forth from the technical to the critical and rhetorical aspects of composition – both analog and digital – we feel that participants were better able to articulate what was creative about their work, as well as why that approach worked.

Finally, we look at the commitment or level of engagement from participants. While we are happy to report that participants in our summer institute, like participants at countless other institutes, reported that their summer experience was, to use an oft-quoted phrase, “life changing,” we were also surprised to see the level at which they believed the digital aspects of our work influenced them. For instance, one participant may sum it up best by responding to the “most important thing” question from the final SI survey conducted by Inverness: 

The most important “thing” I gained is confidence with some interactive technology to implement in my classroom. I think implementation of the Wiki will benefit my students. Their mindset is that school work isn’t “real” work, and I’d like to change their mindset. Use of the Wiki will assist, I believe.

Simply stated, we “wikified” our teachers’ beliefs about what it means to be a writer and teacher of writing. Like Wikipedia, where many contributors create a collective whole that is, indeed, much more than the sum of its parts, we feel that our summer institute, with its focus on “collaboration, creativity, and commitment” allowed participants to see writing, and digital writing, in an entirely different perspective. We hope, like all NWP sites do, that this new vision will help inform the ways that they teach writing in their classrooms, especially in the ways that they integrate technology.


Creative Commons License

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

Reflecting on the Purposes of Digital Writing and Professional Development

Over the past few weeks, I have had a few opportunities to reexamine my thinking about the purposes of digital writing and professional development. As Sara begins her doctoral program at MSU and has started to share her own thinking through her “Connecting, Collaborating, Continuing to Learn” blog, it has given me pause to think about why and how we enact professional development in the ways that we do, especially if we are hoping to have teachers pursue (improve? discover?) the ways in which Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPACK) can affect their teaching. Sara’s interests align with my own:

Connecting, Collaborating, Continuing to Learn » Thinking Out Loud

Teacher networks and professional learning communities have been shown to be very effective models for encouraging teacher professional development. These networks are successful due to the relationships teachers build, exposure to inquiry based research and the continuity of the professional development projects. Now there is a new phenomenon: the use of technology to enhance the notion of developing a personal learning network. Technology, in particular social networks, empower teachers to connect with other professionals who have the same interests and issues in a continual learning environment. The digital environment allows for customization of professional development in an efficient and fiscally responsible manner.

So, more recently, I’ve been thinking about how we can do this. What do we do to create networked learning opportunities for digital writing, especially when the process of digital writing is both part of the activity itself and an outcome that we hope to achieve? What can we reasonably expect teachers to know and be able to do as a result of particular professional learning opportunities, both online and face to face? I have been thinking about this as a result of at least four different PD invitations I have been pursuing in the past month, and here are some of my ideas.

One invitation I received was from NCTE, and I was able to present a webinar, Creating Your Digital Writing Workshop, about two weeks ago. Like the one I did last year, I tried to make this webinar informative and interactive, providing some “hands on” digital learning with some discussion of theory and some sharing of student examples, courtesy of Aram Kabodian. So, we tried to use the chat room, the white board, audio responses, and the ability to stream video during that session. Overall, I found the webinar to be a successful experience, but there were a few questions raised about the value of digital writing and its relation to the rest of the curriculum (including standardized testing) that we need to cover. One particular criticism was that digital storytelling could be considered a bit “plug and play.”

My response at the time may not have been as articulate, but I basically feel that we (and our students) get from the process of digital writing what we put in to it. Simplistic, I know. But, the idea is that if we have students just grab some photos, throw them in a timeline, and simply narrate over top, then yes, it is plug and play. But, if we really engage them in a recursive process, ask them to examine the choices that they are making about which words, images, and transitions they are choosing, then we can really focus on teaching them how to digitally write. Sadly, I don’t think that I was able to get that across in the webinar, and that may have been an issue of format and time constraints, so I wonder how I could do that better in future PD events such as this — how do you invite teachers into both the pedagogy and the process of digital writing through an online experience such as a webinar?

My second recent experience was a presentation to pre-service teachers about the digital writing workshop. In this session, I was able to do in a face-to-face setting what I had hoped to accomplish online with the webinar. The face-to-face setting, as one would expect, was richer in the sense that I was able to converse with the pre-service teachers directly and gauge their reactions to what we were discussing. I also had two hours, allowing them time to talk in small groups so they could have more time to process their own thinking. As I reflect on the experience of doing the webinar — and the value that it has in distributing a professional development experience widely — and the local experience of being in one classroom, I am torn. I wish that there were enough ways (and bandwidth) to have people engage in some of the smaller group discussions through a webinar. And, I wish that it were practical enough in the classrooms in which I was teaching to use some of the technologies we had in the webinar (such as a chat backchannel and interactive whiteboard). Not sure where I am going with this particular series of thoughts right now except to say that I do feel that teaching digital writing seems to be best when there are some elements of both online synchronous and face-to-face elements involved. 

A third experience that is coming soon will be my hosting of three episodes of Teachers Teaching Teachers, all featuring my colleagues who shared lessons and ideas in the book. My goals for this PD, in conjunction with the Ning that I have set up, is to provide the teachers who are doing this work in their classrooms the opportunity to share what is working and engage in a conversation with other colleagues about questions and concerns that they have related to teaching digital writing. To me, this on-going conversation — both the actual conversation that happens during the webcast and the follow up that can happen on the Ning — seems to be a hybrid model where people may not meet face to face, but they do get to share their ideas, then go back to listen again, and continue the conversation. As we think about ways to develop TPACK, it is this recursive process that I find most inviting for novices and experts alike.

A final set of experiences will come through a variety of upcoming professional development sessions that I will do as a part of CRWP and other conference presentations, including UPRA next week. In these face to face sessions (some with computer access and some without), I think that emphasizing the ways in which digital writing changes our rhetorical contexts as writers will be very important, and it is that focus that I think helps keep the focus on the writer, then the writing, and finally on the technology. My hope is that engaging in these sessions, where I will be able to give some background and show some examples, then inviting teachers into conversations about how and why they could teach digital writing, will then inspire them to get online, join the community in the Ning, listen to the webcasts, and find resources from other interested colleagues.

All of this is just to say that I think professional development for teachers — like all other industries — is undergoing some changes. We can’t just say that it should all happen online (synchronously or asynchronously), or only count face to face sessions (through PD or grad classes) as a means to an end. Like their students, teachers need choices about how, when, and why to engage in learning. My thoughts are still evolving on this and, like Sara, I look forward to hearing other ideas about how you are helping your colleagues engage in digital writing and professional learning.


Creative Commons License

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

Back to School, Back to Digital Writing

Image from Heinemann.com
Image from Heinemann.com

Well, the summer has certainly slipped by, as they all tend to do, and I am now getting back in the swing of things.

To that end, I have exciting news to share — the publication of my new Heinemann title, The Digital Writing Workshop. Building on the writing workshop principles of choice and inquiry, conferring, examining author’s craft, publishing student work, and on-going assessment, the text explores many ways in which K-12 teachers can integrate digital writing into their classrooms. I am honored to have worked with many colleagues who contributed ideas to this book and look forward to talking about it in a number of ways this school year.

One way is through my launch of a Ning site to support conversations about the book through a social network. I encourage you to join the Ning and contribute to our on-going discussions about how you are using digital writing in your classroom.

Another way is through some professional development that I will lead this year, including last week’s presentation to the Mason-Lake ISD secondary English teachers, next month’s UPRA conference, and the Wisconsin State Reading Association’s conference this next winter. Also, I have been invited to lead another NCTE webinar and hope to appear on Teachers Teaching Teachers later this fall with some of my colleagues who have contributed to the book.

All of this will, I hope, help me get back in the habit of blogging more regularly, too. So, thanks to all of you who have supported me in so many ways as I wrote this book. I look forward to continuing the journey of becoming better digital writers and teachers with you.

Creative Commons License

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