Category: Reflections

Closing 2010: Summarizing Our Reports from Cyberspace

For two years in a row, Sara Kajder, Bud Hunt, and I have presented Three Reports from Cyberspace. We plan to submit for NCTE 2011, so with any luck we will get to work together again and share in a wonderful conversation before, during, and after the conference. For the moment, I want to focus on that “after” part from this year’s conversation, one that began first in an open Google Doc that generated some initial conversation, led to a Google Moderator forum that we used on the day of the presentation, and now takes us back to the wiki for planning next year’s session. Bud has been posting some videos from our Orlando engagement, the first featuring Sara talking about assessment, and promises more to come.

So, on new year’s eve, I take my time to pause and look back at what we said, what our colleagues said, and what my agenda needs to be for 2011. To begin, a few quotes from that open Google Doc, loosely organized into the categories we discussed at NCTE — teaching, infrastructure, and assessment:

Infrastructure:

  • Suddenly, though, for the first time, I really worry about approaching the point where the state of the equipment gets in the way of the learning. I’m not there yet. I can just see some inklings of this problem on the horizon, and the fact is: my school doesn’t  have a lot of money to spend on equipment. ~ Kevin Hodgson, William E. Norris Elementary School, MA
  • The great thing is that my district purchased interactive white boards for each teacher in my school, a new computer lab for my school, and netbooks for each kid in 5th-8th grade in the district. They have also installed wi-fi in each building in the district. The not-so-great thing is that none of these things are functional. It is mid-November. The kids haven’t seen the netbooks, the white boards are not yet interactive, and the computer lab tables are empty. ~ Angela Knight
  • The subject of all things tech at my school is a sore one. We have 3 computer labs (2 of which are used for classes) and a mobile lab. Our free lab and library computers are pathetically slow. (We’re talking computers with places for the square 3×5 disks.) The mobile lab is better, but they’re not maintained as well as they need to be so many of our lap tops aren’t functional. ~ April Estep
  • My report from cyberspace is bleak. Two years ago I had a Writing lab to use with my students on a daily basis. Students could research on the internet, compose papers at the keyboard and do various online activities I selected for them to do. Today I need to share that same lab, so my 140 students need to share with 280 others. ~ Joanne Wisniewski
  • I’m at a 1:1 tablet school, so access is excellent. We’re in our second year of all the Middle School kids having their own blogs. Teacher comfort level with them is increasing, and while the new sixth graders take a bit of time to acclimate, they’re pretty much good to go by the second trimester. I occasionally feel guilty that we’re not doing more, pushing harder, since we’ve got the technology available. The good thing is that the tech feels like who we are at this point, so we’re not just pulling out shiny things. ~ Meredith Stewart, Cary Academy
  • In my local district, many teachers and parents are feeling upset because, in the same year, (a) the district had parents buy school supplies like paper, crayons, etc. instead of the school providing it all, (b) the district put iPads in all the 1st grade classrooms.  Not from the same pot of money, but there’s a general feeling that if strapped for cash you should buy paper and crayons first, then iPads. ~ Anne Whitney
  • I use lots of technology in my classroom, and my kids also use technology frequently.  One of the biggest obstacles to participating in authentic tech use in the classroom are the barriers erected by the district to protect students.  Bandwidth is a huge issue, with our upgrade, and the entire system going to a universal login (any building, you can access your documents).  This sounds like a good idea, but has slowed things down too much. ~ Freyja Bergthorson

Teaching:

  • (With an iPad initiative starting next year)… “This will be incredible for kids, but will take a lot of energy. Will I be able to keep up? I’ve never felt this unconfident before.” ~ Sandy Hayes, Becker Middle School, MN
  • First step: learning about the existing knowledge, skills and attitudes that support or inhibit people’s interest in exploring digital media tools for composition. Second step: creating simple collaborative on-ramp activities that help teachers experience success quickly to build confidence. Third step: introducing key concepts that help them connect mass media, popular culture and digital technology to their existing instructional priorities. Eventually, teachers will design, implement and assess their own projects which will be shared online. ~ Renee Hobbs, Temple University, Philadelphia
  • I got a Smart Board and LCD projector installed this year, so I’m enjoying that – but I don’t feel like I’m using the Smart Board as much as I should be. How are English teachers using Smart Boards in an interactive way? ~ Jennifer Sekella
  • For schools with International Baccalaureate programs, in the US and around the world, cyberspace is the most powerful and compelling place ever for their students. They are in the process of activating the largest social learning network in the world, with privacy and safety features and multiple security levels.

Assessment

  • I am scared that very few teachers that I know really use technology. This is just not good for students! We are all so obsessed with raising test scores, there is no demand at all. Tech is used for Read 180, SRI tests, but not for exploring, researching, creating. That’s a problem. ~ Teresa Ilgunas, Lennox Middle School, CA

And, some active verbs that we generated from the session at NCTE that indicate thoughts about what we can do in our classrooms, schools, districts, and communities:

  • Risk
  • Share
  • Advocate
  • Push
  • Model
  • Motivate
  • Try
  • Fail
  • Do
  • Fail better
  • Fail big, fail better
  • Play
  • Experience
  • Have fun
  • Implement
  • Change
  • Experiment
  • Question authority
  • Engage
  • Revisit
  • Reflect
  • Revise
  • Think
  • Entice
  • Archive
  • Yodel
  • Produce
  • Synthesize
  • Craft
  • Scrap
  • Celebrate
  • Learn
  • Seduce
  • Use what we have
  • Dump the “buts”

So, where does this leave me at in my thinking about our state of “educational cyberspace” this year?

First, I would suggest that we are at the “tipping point” for mobile/1:1 computing and, as educators, we should advocate for nothing less in our classrooms, especially given the web-based tools that we can ask students to use, from office suites to photo, audio, and video editing. Given the reports from above, and what I know about the digital divide that still exists in our schools and communities, I know that there are no silver bullets. Yet, the fact that mobile devices now cost about the same, or less, than textbooks and that we can ask students to live an academic life fully online, there really are no excuses for not moving in this direction. This will take a great deal of work in teacher education and professional development, no doubt, but the fact is that we should start with the assumption that students could and should have 1:1 access, and begin to teach teachers how to work that way.

Second, in terms of where I am going in my own thinking and work for the new year, I want to make sure that we continue talking about digital writing, not just tools. I am thinking about this in all of my presentations and teaching, making conversations about writing as explicit as possible, even when we are caught up in learning the tools. For instance, I will often pause and ask teachers to think about the actions they have performed when they have engaged in a task like composing a writer’s profile or collaborating on Google Docs. We talk about the writing process, the 21st century literacies they used, the common core standards that the task addresses. We need to continue to make the conversations about teaching and learning, no matter how the devices change.

Finally, I hope to continue this conversation with all of you this year, beginning next Monday night, January 3rd, on #engchat. The topic, “What’s happening in your digital writing workshop?” will, I hope, give us a chance to talk about the many examples of good work that teachers and students are engaged in. As we prepare for the conversation, I offer one last report from cyberspace this year… this one from Joel Malley, an NWP teacher, that he created as a part of his testimonial to Congress last fall. I hope that his video offers us some points to consider as we think about the obstacles and opportunities that face us in cyberspace in 2011. I recognize that we aren’t all able to teach in situations similar to Malley’s, but I do think that his take on teaching writing in a digital make for good points to consider as we continue the conversation.

Writing in the Digital Age from Joel Malley on Vimeo.


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Continuing to Create a Digital Writing Project

As I reflect on our experience in the CRWP Summer Institute, and prepare for a visit to the Boise State Writing Project this weekend, as well as the NWP Annual Meeting in just a few weeks, I am trying to capture some thinking about the core principles that I employ in planning PD experiences related to technology.

I know that my colleagues at BSWP, as well as in other sites I have visited and continued to communicate with, are continuing to think about how, when, and why to integrate digital writing into their site’s work. So, I am offering some thoughts about what we have done in our first two years at CRWP, and how technology informs and is infused in our site’s work. By taking the intentional stance that we are and will continue to be a “digital writing project,” I know that there are certain benefits and constraints that this creates for us, and I will hope to address some of them here, too.

Summer Institute
In the CRWP SI, we engage in digital writing from the moment we meet participants on orientation day. We regularly use our wiki as a space to share our daily agenda and discuss texts such as Because Writing Matters and Teaching the New Writing. (Kathy and I are going to present at the Annual Meeting about our
experiences with doing the readings and sharing responses through
digital means, and I wonder what value others see in the responses to
the texts that are evident in the links here.) We also use Google Docs to create and share materials for our teaching demos, as well as creating our collaborative response to teaching demonstrations with our writing groups. In addition, we explored digital stories, Voice Thread, and podcasts, ultimately leading to the production of a print, audio, and video anthology of our work from the summer.

From both our conversations with colleagues during the summer institute, as well as from comments that they made on evaluations at the end of the summer, we know that this stance of integrating technology as a core expectation of participation in CRWP is both a selling point for teachers as they consider participation, yet also generates much frustration in practice. At least two veteran teachers discussed their interest in joining CRWP because they knew it would push them to use technology, yet continued to share their frustrations with the pace at which we moved (I couldn’t even log into the wiki because I lost my password, I couldn’t access the Google Doc that we were all supposed to share…), yet with support from colleagues and our SI leaders, they were able to (eventually) get into the sites we were using. Everyone created a digital story this summer, and everyone submitted a digital portfolio.

So, I continue to think that an immersive experience, one in which participants are expected to use technology and supported in that use through just-in-time instruction is a hallmark of a digital writing project. The expectation, for instance, that we would all use Google Docs to create collaborative responses to teaching demonstrations let to some unique discussions that were, initially, focused on how to use Google Docs, but eventually allowed us to use the technology transparently, and contributed to our experience in the response groups. That is, we were able to use Google Docs as a way to both focus our face-to-face conversation and allow everyone to contribute to the response, even though each group usually picked one “scribe” to be the main person responsible for each letter.

On a less positive note, we did find that participants, over the course of the summer, were using technology more and more to facilitate their own distracted behavior. One day while I was gone, for instance, my co-leaders told me that people were essentially ignoring the presenting teacher and focusing only on their laptops and cell phones. This led me to have a brief, yet pointed discussion the next day with the group about laptop etiquette; while we were fortunate to be in a situation where we could all use laptops, we needed to think — both from the perspective of teacher and student — about the advantages and disadvantages of using laptops. As teachers, helping students know when and how to use the laptops for learning purposes is critical, as well as the idea that we sometimes need to have “lids down” moments where we focus on each other, not just on our screens.

Still, having the expectation that we would all engage in experiences mediated by technology creates a different vibe in our SI. It means that we come to the institute with our own literacy and technology goals related to using the laptops for our own writing and for teaching writing. It means that we have the opportunity to connect and collaborate, and that those connections and collaborations are a core part of our lived experience as readers and writers in the institute. It also means that we make our work public, at least in the sense that everything we do is shared with at least our writing groups, sometimes the whole group, and sometimes the world. It makes the accountability for sharing a teaching demo and our own writing even more than it would be if it were only shared on paper, and that sense of audience and purpose, I feel, makes a huge difference in how our TCs see themselves as teachers and as writers.

Professional Development
Last year, we were able to be involved in two professional development series. In the first, we were able to meet with teachers five times over the year, and in each session we introduced a new technology (wikis, wikis part 2, Google Docs, podcasting, digital stories). In the second, we worked with teachers in a variety of contexts, but in the last two sessions we were able to work with cross-content area teachers to develop wiki pages. In both of these series, we had some teachers who were highly engaged in the process, some who were engaged, yet timid, and some who didn’t really seem to be interested in the technologies we were discussing.

This is a similar pattern for what I see in many PD sessions, and it makes me wonder what my/our responsibility is in offering background/context for why and how we should be using technology in the teaching of writing. While I have noted this before, and I do feel that the conversation about technology and teaching has, generally, moved from the “Why should we?” perspective to the “How should we?” one in the past few years, I am still reminded that not everyone shares my enthusiasm for technology  and that we need to situate our stance about digital writing when doing PD, especially for the “non-voluntary” types of work that we often do in schools, where teachers may not have had a choice in participating due to district mandates and expectations.

As I think about where we are at and where we are going to go next with our PD services, I am curious to learn more about how we can offer online and hybrid options to help teachers customize their own experience. While I know that this isn’t always possible, I am curious to see what we might be able to do to help teachers create and sustain their own personal learning networks within the context of a writing project. I am looking forward to what Sara, our tech liaison, and Rita, our PD coordinator, come up with in terms of how this might work with our current PD series and future advanced institutes. I don’t have all the answers, but I excited that we continue to explore the questions.

Continuity
While we hosted a few continuity events last year, this year we hope to do more. One way that we are trying to connect with our TCs is by sending out more messages through our listserv (a pretty standard practice from what I have heard from other sites), as well as to now connect via Facebook and Twitter. I am not exactly sure how much/well this strategy is working, although I can get stats from FB on who has looked at and joined our fan page, which is an interesting set of weekly stats.

Of the events that we are planning, we do try to use technology as it seems appropriate. For instance, a few weeks ago, Erin led a book discussion on Penny Kittle’s Write Beside Them, and I was able to take notes on her computer as people shared their thoughts on the book and connections to their own teaching. Last week, Penny held her first Saturday seminar, and focused on digital storytelling. Over the course of the year, we hope to plan some other events that will engage our TCs and their colleagues in digital writing and distance learning, although we are still figuring out exactly how to do that.

What this reminds me of is the fact that we can create opportunities through technology that allow TCs to connect when and how they are able. I am not sure what we will do in particular related to webinars or synchronous online conversations (either through chat or voice). I want to offer our TCs the chance to reconnect in whatever ways we can, but not dilute the experience of being connected. So, we need to continue to think carefully about when, how, and why we offer online continuity events in conjunction with our face-to-face offerings such as our 100 days celebration and book clubs.

What’s Next…
So, as we continue to evolve as a digital writing project, I am honored and excited by the opportunities to talk with other NWP colleagues about what it is that we are doing and how they might work to integrate digital writing into their work. While I hesitate to offer advice because any type of work with writing and technology is highly contextual, I can summarize what I have learned (and continue to learn) in the following:

  • Just like we expect teachers to write, we can expect them to use technology. While we neither want to or are able to expect that teachers will use digital writing tools all the time (for instance, I still take my notebook on writing marathons), it is perfectly reasonable for us to expect that a teacher can bring his/her own laptop (or borrow one from school) when they come to writing project events. Put agendas up on a wiki or Google doc. Invite a backchannel conversations through TodaysMeet or other means. Ask people to compose digital texts. We know that this is important work, and we should expect our colleagues to come prepared to do it.
  • When we make an expectation, we need to support it. Now that we expect teachers to come to the table with technology in hand, we need to offer them the time and support to learn how to use it. Create immersive experiences, yet continue to offer one-to-one support as teachers learn how to use it. Connect experiences that they know (writing on a word processor) with pedagogical practices (how to revise effectively) and then make the leap to a new technology (online word processors) and another pedagogy (offering comments and feedback). It’s that idea of facilitating learning through a “to, with, and by” model.
  • Finally, make the experience meaningful. Don’t just have people create a profile on a wiki and never look at it. If you ask them to post it, then you need to encourage others to respond to it, and offer response yourself. It’s this old idea of a tree falling in a forest… if no one is there to see the wiki post, does it matter? Show your colleagues that their writing matters, and encourage revision and response, across time, space, and contexts.

So, those are some current thoughts about teaching and learning in a digital writing project. I hope that they help others writing project colleagues as they continue to think about what it means to integrate digital writing practices into both site work and their own teaching. I look forward to my conversations about this with colleagues this weekend, and in a few more weeks at the NWP annual meeting, and hope to hear ideas about how this work is happening for you, too.

Continuing to Create a Digital Writing Project

As I reflect on our experience in the CRWP Summer Institute, and prepare for a visit to the Boise State Writing Project this weekend, as well as the NWP Annual Meeting in just a few weeks, I am trying to capture some thinking about the core principles that I employ in planning PD experiences related to technology.

I know that my colleagues at BSWP, as well as in other sites I have visited and continued to communicate with, are continuing to think about how, when, and why to integrate digital writing into their site’s work. So, I am offering some thoughts about what we have done in our first two years at CRWP, and how technology informs and is infused in our site’s work. By taking the intentional stance that we are and will continue to be a “digital writing project,” I know that there are certain benefits and constraints that this creates for us, and I will hope to address some of them here, too.

Summer Institute
In the CRWP SI, we engage in digital writing from the moment we meet participants on orientation day. We regularly use our wiki as a space to share our daily agenda and discuss texts such as Because Writing Matters and Teaching the New Writing. (Kathy and I are going to present at the Annual Meeting about our
experiences with doing the readings and sharing responses through
digital means, and I wonder what value others see in the responses to
the texts that are evident in the links here.) We also use Google Docs to create and share materials for our teaching demos, as well as creating our collaborative response to teaching demonstrations with our writing groups. In addition, we explored digital stories, Voice Thread, and podcasts, ultimately leading to the production of a print, audio, and video anthology of our work from the summer.

From both our conversations with colleagues during the summer institute, as well as from comments that they made on evaluations at the end of the summer, we know that this stance of integrating technology as a core expectation of participation in CRWP is both a selling point for teachers as they consider participation, yet also generates much frustration in practice. At least two veteran teachers discussed their interest in joining CRWP because they knew it would push them to use technology, yet continued to share their frustrations with the pace at which we moved (I couldn’t even log into the wiki because I lost my password, I couldn’t access the Google Doc that we were all supposed to share…), yet with support from colleagues and our SI leaders, they were able to (eventually) get into the sites we were using. Everyone created a digital story this summer, and everyone submitted a digital portfolio.

So, I continue to think that an immersive experience, one in which participants are expected to use technology and supported in that use through just-in-time instruction is a hallmark of a digital writing project. The expectation, for instance, that we would all use Google Docs to create collaborative responses to teaching demonstrations let to some unique discussions that were, initially, focused on how to use Google Docs, but eventually allowed us to use the technology transparently, and contributed to our experience in the response groups. That is, we were able to use Google Docs as a way to both focus our face-to-face conversation and allow everyone to contribute to the response, even though each group usually picked one “scribe” to be the main person responsible for each letter.

On a less positive note, we did find that participants, over the course of the summer, were using technology more and more to facilitate their own distracted behavior. One day while I was gone, for instance, my co-leaders told me that people were essentially ignoring the presenting teacher and focusing only on their laptops and cell phones. This led me to have a brief, yet pointed discussion the next day with the group about laptop etiquette; while we were fortunate to be in a situation where we could all use laptops, we needed to think — both from the perspective of teacher and student — about the advantages and disadvantages of using laptops. As teachers, helping students know when and how to use the laptops for learning purposes is critical, as well as the idea that we sometimes need to have “lids down” moments where we focus on each other, not just on our screens.

Still, having the expectation that we would all engage in experiences mediated by technology creates a different vibe in our SI. It means that we come to the institute with our own literacy and technology goals related to using the laptops for our own writing and for teaching writing. It means that we have the opportunity to connect and collaborate, and that those connections and collaborations are a core part of our lived experience as readers and writers in the institute. It also means that we make our work public, at least in the sense that everything we do is shared with at least our writing groups, sometimes the whole group, and sometimes the world. It makes the accountability for sharing a teaching demo and our own writing even more than it would be if it were only shared on paper, and that sense of audience and purpose, I feel, makes a huge difference in how our TCs see themselves as teachers and as writers.

Professional Development
Last year, we were able to be involved in two professional development series. In the first, we were able to meet with teachers five times over the year, and in each session we introduced a new technology (wikis, wikis part 2, Google Docs, podcasting, digital stories). In the second, we worked with teachers in a variety of contexts, but in the last two sessions we were able to work with cross-content area teachers to develop wiki pages. In both of these series, we had some teachers who were highly engaged in the process, some who were engaged, yet timid, and some who didn’t really seem to be interested in the technologies we were discussing.

This is a similar pattern for what I see in many PD sessions, and it makes me wonder what my/our responsibility is in offering background/context for why and how we should be using technology in the teaching of writing. While I have noted this before, and I do feel that the conversation about technology and teaching has, generally, moved from the “Why should we?” perspective to the “How should we?” one in the past few years, I am still reminded that not everyone shares my enthusiasm for technology  and that we need to situate our stance about digital writing when doing PD, especially for the “non-voluntary” types of work that we often do in schools, where teachers may not have had a choice in participating due to district mandates and expectations.

As I think about where we are at and where we are going to go next with our PD services, I am curious to learn more about how we can offer online and hybrid options to help teachers customize their own experience. While I know that this isn’t always possible, I am curious to see what we might be able to do to help teachers create and sustain their own personal learning networks within the context of a writing project. I am looking forward to what Sara, our tech liaison, and Rita, our PD coordinator, come up with in terms of how this might work with our current PD series and future advanced institutes. I don’t have all the answers, but I excited that we continue to explore the questions.

Continuity
While we hosted a few continuity events last year, this year we hope to do more. One way that we are trying to connect with our TCs is by sending out more messages through our listserv (a pretty standard practice from what I have heard from other sites), as well as to now connect via Facebook and Twitter. I am not exactly sure how much/well this strategy is working, although I can get stats from FB on who has looked at and joined our fan page, which is an interesting set of weekly stats.

Of the events that we are planning, we do try to use technology as it seems appropriate. For instance, a few weeks ago, Erin led a book discussion on Penny Kittle’s Write Beside Them, and I was able to take notes on her computer as people shared their thoughts on the book and connections to their own teaching. Last week, Penny held her first Saturday seminar, and focused on digital storytelling. Over the course of the year, we hope to plan some other events that will engage our TCs and their colleagues in digital writing and distance learning, although we are still figuring out exactly how to do that.

What this reminds me of is the fact that we can create opportunities through technology that allow TCs to connect when and how they are able. I am not sure what we will do in particular related to webinars or synchronous online conversations (either through chat or voice). I want to offer our TCs the chance to reconnect in whatever ways we can, but not dilute the experience of being connected. So, we need to continue to think carefully about when, how, and why we offer online continuity events in conjunction with our face-to-face offerings such as our 100 days celebration and book clubs.

What’s Next…
So, as we continue to evolve as a digital writing project, I am honored and excited by the opportunities to talk with other NWP colleagues about what it is that we are doing and how they might work to integrate digital writing into their work. While I hesitate to offer advice because any type of work with writing and technology is highly contextual, I can summarize what I have learned (and continue to learn) in the following:

  • Just like we expect teachers to write, we can expect them to use technology. While we neither want to or are able to expect that teachers will use digital writing tools all the time (for instance, I still take my notebook on writing marathons), it is perfectly reasonable for us to expect that a teacher can bring his/her own laptop (or borrow one from school) when they come to writing project events. Put agendas up on a wiki or Google doc. Invite a backchannel conversations through TodaysMeet or other means. Ask people to compose digital texts. We know that this is important work, and we should expect our colleagues to come prepared to do it.
  • When we make an expectation, we need to support it. Now that we expect teachers to come to the table with technology in hand, we need to offer them the time and support to learn how to use it. Create immersive experiences, yet continue to offer one-to-one support as teachers learn how to use it. Connect experiences that they know (writing on a word processor) with pedagogical practices (how to revise effectively) and then make the leap to a new technology (online word processors) and another pedagogy (offering comments and feedback). It’s that idea of facilitating learning through a “to, with, and by” model.
  • Finally, make the experience meaningful. Don’t just have people create a profile on a wiki and never look at it. If you ask them to post it, then you need to encourage others to respond to it, and offer response yourself. It’s this old idea of a tree falling in a forest… if no one is there to see the wiki post, does it matter? Show your colleagues that their writing matters, and encourage revision and response, across time, space, and contexts.

So, those are some current thoughts about teaching and learning in a digital writing project. I hope that they help others writing project colleagues as they continue to think about what it means to integrate digital writing practices into both site work and their own teaching. I look forward to my conversations about this with colleagues this weekend, and in a few more weeks at the NWP annual meeting, and hope to hear ideas about how this work is happening for you, too.

Continuing to Create a Digital Writing Project

As I reflect on our experience in the CRWP Summer Institute, and prepare for a visit to the Boise State Writing Project this weekend, as well as the NWP Annual Meeting in just a few weeks, I am trying to capture some thinking about the core principles that I employ in planning PD experiences related to technology.

I know that my colleagues at BSWP, as well as in other sites I have visited and continued to communicate with, are continuing to think about how, when, and why to integrate digital writing into their site’s work. So, I am offering some thoughts about what we have done in our first two years at CRWP, and how technology informs and is infused in our site’s work. By taking the intentional stance that we are and will continue to be a “digital writing project,” I know that there are certain benefits and constraints that this creates for us, and I will hope to address some of them here, too.

Summer Institute
In the CRWP SI, we engage in digital writing from the moment we meet participants on orientation day. We regularly use our wiki as a space to share our daily agenda and discuss texts such as Because Writing Matters and Teaching the New Writing. (Kathy and I are going to present at the Annual Meeting about our
experiences with doing the readings and sharing responses through
digital means, and I wonder what value others see in the responses to
the texts that are evident in the links here.) We also use Google Docs to create and share materials for our teaching demos, as well as creating our collaborative response to teaching demonstrations with our writing groups. In addition, we explored digital stories, Voice Thread, and podcasts, ultimately leading to the production of a print, audio, and video anthology of our work from the summer.

From both our conversations with colleagues during the summer institute, as well as from comments that they made on evaluations at the end of the summer, we know that this stance of integrating technology as a core expectation of participation in CRWP is both a selling point for teachers as they consider participation, yet also generates much frustration in practice. At least two veteran teachers discussed their interest in joining CRWP because they knew it would push them to use technology, yet continued to share their frustrations with the pace at which we moved (I couldn’t even log into the wiki because I lost my password, I couldn’t access the Google Doc that we were all supposed to share…), yet with support from colleagues and our SI leaders, they were able to (eventually) get into the sites we were using. Everyone created a digital story this summer, and everyone submitted a digital portfolio.

So, I continue to think that an immersive experience, one in which participants are expected to use technology and supported in that use through just-in-time instruction is a hallmark of a digital writing project. The expectation, for instance, that we would all use Google Docs to create collaborative responses to teaching demonstrations let to some unique discussions that were, initially, focused on how to use Google Docs, but eventually allowed us to use the technology transparently, and contributed to our experience in the response groups. That is, we were able to use Google Docs as a way to both focus our face-to-face conversation and allow everyone to contribute to the response, even though each group usually picked one “scribe” to be the main person responsible for each letter.

On a less positive note, we did find that participants, over the course of the summer, were using technology more and more to facilitate their own distracted behavior. One day while I was gone, for instance, my co-leaders told me that people were essentially ignoring the presenting teacher and focusing only on their laptops and cell phones. This led me to have a brief, yet pointed discussion the next day with the group about laptop etiquette; while we were fortunate to be in a situation where we could all use laptops, we needed to think — both from the perspective of teacher and student — about the advantages and disadvantages of using laptops. As teachers, helping students know when and how to use the laptops for learning purposes is critical, as well as the idea that we sometimes need to have “lids down” moments where we focus on each other, not just on our screens.

Still, having the expectation that we would all engage in experiences mediated by technology creates a different vibe in our SI. It means that we come to the institute with our own literacy and technology goals related to using the laptops for our own writing and for teaching writing. It means that we have the opportunity to connect and collaborate, and that those connections and collaborations are a core part of our lived experience as readers and writers in the institute. It also means that we make our work public, at least in the sense that everything we do is shared with at least our writing groups, sometimes the whole group, and sometimes the world. It makes the accountability for sharing a teaching demo and our own writing even more than it would be if it were only shared on paper, and that sense of audience and purpose, I feel, makes a huge difference in how our TCs see themselves as teachers and as writers.

Professional Development
Last year, we were able to be involved in two professional development series. In the first, we were able to meet with teachers five times over the year, and in each session we introduced a new technology (wikis, wikis part 2, Google Docs, podcasting, digital stories). In the second, we worked with teachers in a variety of contexts, but in the last two sessions we were able to work with cross-content area teachers to develop wiki pages. In both of these series, we had some teachers who were highly engaged in the process, some who were engaged, yet timid, and some who didn’t really seem to be interested in the technologies we were discussing.

This is a similar pattern for what I see in many PD sessions, and it makes me wonder what my/our responsibility is in offering background/context for why and how we should be using technology in the teaching of writing. While I have noted this before, and I do feel that the conversation about technology and teaching has, generally, moved from the “Why should we?” perspective to the “How should we?” one in the past few years, I am still reminded that not everyone shares my enthusiasm for technology  and that we need to situate our stance about digital writing when doing PD, especially for the “non-voluntary” types of work that we often do in schools, where teachers may not have had a choice in participating due to district mandates and expectations.

As I think about where we are at and where we are going to go next with our PD services, I am curious to learn more about how we can offer online and hybrid options to help teachers customize their own experience. While I know that this isn’t always possible, I am curious to see what we might be able to do to help teachers create and sustain their own personal learning networks within the context of a writing project. I am looking forward to what Sara, our tech liaison, and Rita, our PD coordinator, come up with in terms of how this might work with our current PD series and future advanced institutes. I don’t have all the answers, but I excited that we continue to explore the questions.

Continuity
While we hosted a few continuity events last year, this year we hope to do more. One way that we are trying to connect with our TCs is by sending out more messages through our listserv (a pretty standard practice from what I have heard from other sites), as well as to now connect via Facebook and Twitter. I am not exactly sure how much/well this strategy is working, although I can get stats from FB on who has looked at and joined our fan page, which is an interesting set of weekly stats.

Of the events that we are planning, we do try to use technology as it seems appropriate. For instance, a few weeks ago, Erin led a book discussion on Penny Kittle’s Write Beside Them, and I was able to take notes on her computer as people shared their thoughts on the book and connections to their own teaching. Last week, Penny held her first Saturday seminar, and focused on digital storytelling. Over the course of the year, we hope to plan some other events that will engage our TCs and their colleagues in digital writing and distance learning, although we are still figuring out exactly how to do that.

What this reminds me of is the fact that we can create opportunities through technology that allow TCs to connect when and how they are able. I am not sure what we will do in particular related to webinars or synchronous online conversations (either through chat or voice). I want to offer our TCs the chance to reconnect in whatever ways we can, but not dilute the experience of being connected. So, we need to continue to think carefully about when, how, and why we offer online continuity events in conjunction with our face-to-face offerings such as our 100 days celebration and book clubs.

What’s Next…
So, as we continue to evolve as a digital writing project, I am honored and excited by the opportunities to talk with other NWP colleagues about what it is that we are doing and how they might work to integrate digital writing into their work. While I hesitate to offer advice because any type of work with writing and technology is highly contextual, I can summarize what I have learned (and continue to learn) in the following:

  • Just like we expect teachers to write, we can expect them to use technology. While we neither want to or are able to expect that teachers will use digital writing tools all the time (for instance, I still take my notebook on writing marathons), it is perfectly reasonable for us to expect that a teacher can bring his/her own laptop (or borrow one from school) when they come to writing project events. Put agendas up on a wiki or Google doc. Invite a backchannel conversations through TodaysMeet or other means. Ask people to compose digital texts. We know that this is important work, and we should expect our colleagues to come prepared to do it.
  • When we make an expectation, we need to support it. Now that we expect teachers to come to the table with technology in hand, we need to offer them the time and support to learn how to use it. Create immersive experiences, yet continue to offer one-to-one support as teachers learn how to use it. Connect experiences that they know (writing on a word processor) with pedagogical practices (how to revise effectively) and then make the leap to a new technology (online word processors) and another pedagogy (offering comments and feedback). It’s that idea of facilitating learning through a “to, with, and by” model.
  • Finally, make the experience meaningful. Don’t just have people create a profile on a wiki and never look at it. If you ask them to post it, then you need to encourage others to respond to it, and offer response yourself. It’s this old idea of a tree falling in a forest… if no one is there to see the wiki post, does it matter? Show your colleagues that their writing matters, and encourage revision and response, across time, space, and contexts.

So, those are some current thoughts about teaching and learning in a digital writing project. I hope that they help others writing project colleagues as they continue to think about what it means to integrate digital writing practices into both site work and their own teaching. I look forward to my conversations about this with colleagues this weekend, and in a few more weeks at the NWP annual meeting, and hope to hear ideas about how this work is happening for you, too.

Continuing to Create a Digital Writing Project

As I reflect on our experience in the CRWP Summer Institute, and prepare for a visit to the Boise State Writing Project this weekend, as well as the NWP Annual Meeting in just a few weeks, I am trying to capture some thinking about the core principles that I employ in planning PD experiences related to technology.

I know that my colleagues at BSWP, as well as in other sites I have visited and continued to communicate with, are continuing to think about how, when, and why to integrate digital writing into their site’s work. So, I am offering some thoughts about what we have done in our first two years at CRWP, and how technology informs and is infused in our site’s work. By taking the intentional stance that we are and will continue to be a “digital writing project,” I know that there are certain benefits and constraints that this creates for us, and I will hope to address some of them here, too.

Summer Institute
In the CRWP SI, we engage in digital writing from the moment we meet participants on orientation day. We regularly use our wiki as a space to share our daily agenda and discuss texts such as Because Writing Matters and Teaching the New Writing. (Kathy and I are going to present at the Annual Meeting about our
experiences with doing the readings and sharing responses through
digital means, and I wonder what value others see in the responses to
the texts that are evident in the links here.) We also use Google Docs to create and share materials for our teaching demos, as well as creating our collaborative response to teaching demonstrations with our writing groups. In addition, we explored digital stories, Voice Thread, and podcasts, ultimately leading to the production of a print, audio, and video anthology of our work from the summer.

From both our conversations with colleagues during the summer institute, as well as from comments that they made on evaluations at the end of the summer, we know that this stance of integrating technology as a core expectation of participation in CRWP is both a selling point for teachers as they consider participation, yet also generates much frustration in practice. At least two veteran teachers discussed their interest in joining CRWP because they knew it would push them to use technology, yet continued to share their frustrations with the pace at which we moved (I couldn’t even log into the wiki because I lost my password, I couldn’t access the Google Doc that we were all supposed to share…), yet with support from colleagues and our SI leaders, they were able to (eventually) get into the sites we were using. Everyone created a digital story this summer, and everyone submitted a digital portfolio.

So, I continue to think that an immersive experience, one in which participants are expected to use technology and supported in that use through just-in-time instruction is a hallmark of a digital writing project. The expectation, for instance, that we would all use Google Docs to create collaborative responses to teaching demonstrations let to some unique discussions that were, initially, focused on how to use Google Docs, but eventually allowed us to use the technology transparently, and contributed to our experience in the response groups. That is, we were able to use Google Docs as a way to both focus our face-to-face conversation and allow everyone to contribute to the response, even though each group usually picked one “scribe” to be the main person responsible for each letter.

On a less positive note, we did find that participants, over the course of the summer, were using technology more and more to facilitate their own distracted behavior. One day while I was gone, for instance, my co-leaders told me that people were essentially ignoring the presenting teacher and focusing only on their laptops and cell phones. This led me to have a brief, yet pointed discussion the next day with the group about laptop etiquette; while we were fortunate to be in a situation where we could all use laptops, we needed to think — both from the perspective of teacher and student — about the advantages and disadvantages of using laptops. As teachers, helping students know when and how to use the laptops for learning purposes is critical, as well as the idea that we sometimes need to have “lids down” moments where we focus on each other, not just on our screens.

Still, having the expectation that we would all engage in experiences mediated by technology creates a different vibe in our SI. It means that we come to the institute with our own literacy and technology goals related to using the laptops for our own writing and for teaching writing. It means that we have the opportunity to connect and collaborate, and that those connections and collaborations are a core part of our lived experience as readers and writers in the institute. It also means that we make our work public, at least in the sense that everything we do is shared with at least our writing groups, sometimes the whole group, and sometimes the world. It makes the accountability for sharing a teaching demo and our own writing even more than it would be if it were only shared on paper, and that sense of audience and purpose, I feel, makes a huge difference in how our TCs see themselves as teachers and as writers.

Professional Development
Last year, we were able to be involved in two professional development series. In the first, we were able to meet with teachers five times over the year, and in each session we introduced a new technology (wikis, wikis part 2, Google Docs, podcasting, digital stories). In the second, we worked with teachers in a variety of contexts, but in the last two sessions we were able to work with cross-content area teachers to develop wiki pages. In both of these series, we had some teachers who were highly engaged in the process, some who were engaged, yet timid, and some who didn’t really seem to be interested in the technologies we were discussing.

This is a similar pattern for what I see in many PD sessions, and it makes me wonder what my/our responsibility is in offering background/context for why and how we should be using technology in the teaching of writing. While I have noted this before, and I do feel that the conversation about technology and teaching has, generally, moved from the “Why should we?” perspective to the “How should we?” one in the past few years, I am still reminded that not everyone shares my enthusiasm for technology  and that we need to situate our stance about digital writing when doing PD, especially for the “non-voluntary” types of work that we often do in schools, where teachers may not have had a choice in participating due to district mandates and expectations.

As I think about where we are at and where we are going to go next with our PD services, I am curious to learn more about how we can offer online and hybrid options to help teachers customize their own experience. While I know that this isn’t always possible, I am curious to see what we might be able to do to help teachers create and sustain their own personal learning networks within the context of a writing project. I am looking forward to what Sara, our tech liaison, and Rita, our PD coordinator, come up with in terms of how this might work with our current PD series and future advanced institutes. I don’t have all the answers, but I excited that we continue to explore the questions.

Continuity
While we hosted a few continuity events last year, this year we hope to do more. One way that we are trying to connect with our TCs is by sending out more messages through our listserv (a pretty standard practice from what I have heard from other sites), as well as to now connect via Facebook and Twitter. I am not exactly sure how much/well this strategy is working, although I can get stats from FB on who has looked at and joined our fan page, which is an interesting set of weekly stats.

Of the events that we are planning, we do try to use technology as it seems appropriate. For instance, a few weeks ago, Erin led a book discussion on Penny Kittle’s Write Beside Them, and I was able to take notes on her computer as people shared their thoughts on the book and connections to their own teaching. Last week, Penny held her first Saturday seminar, and focused on digital storytelling. Over the course of the year, we hope to plan some other events that will engage our TCs and their colleagues in digital writing and distance learning, although we are still figuring out exactly how to do that.

What this reminds me of is the fact that we can create opportunities through technology that allow TCs to connect when and how they are able. I am not sure what we will do in particular related to webinars or synchronous online conversations (either through chat or voice). I want to offer our TCs the chance to reconnect in whatever ways we can, but not dilute the experience of being connected. So, we need to continue to think carefully about when, how, and why we offer online continuity events in conjunction with our face-to-face offerings such as our 100 days celebration and book clubs.

What’s Next…
So, as we continue to evolve as a digital writing project, I am honored and excited by the opportunities to talk with other NWP colleagues about what it is that we are doing and how they might work to integrate digital writing into their work. While I hesitate to offer advice because any type of work with writing and technology is highly contextual, I can summarize what I have learned (and continue to learn) in the following:

  • Just like we expect teachers to write, we can expect them to use technology. While we neither want to or are able to expect that teachers will use digital writing tools all the time (for instance, I still take my notebook on writing marathons), it is perfectly reasonable for us to expect that a teacher can bring his/her own laptop (or borrow one from school) when they come to writing project events. Put agendas up on a wiki or Google doc. Invite a backchannel conversations through TodaysMeet or other means. Ask people to compose digital texts. We know that this is important work, and we should expect our colleagues to come prepared to do it.
  • When we make an expectation, we need to support it. Now that we expect teachers to come to the table with technology in hand, we need to offer them the time and support to learn how to use it. Create immersive experiences, yet continue to offer one-to-one support as teachers learn how to use it. Connect experiences that they know (writing on a word processor) with pedagogical practices (how to revise effectively) and then make the leap to a new technology (online word processors) and another pedagogy (offering comments and feedback). It’s that idea of facilitating learning through a “to, with, and by” model.
  • Finally, make the experience meaningful. Don’t just have people create a profile on a wiki and never look at it. If you ask them to post it, then you need to encourage others to respond to it, and offer response yourself. It’s this old idea of a tree falling in a forest… if no one is there to see the wiki post, does it matter? Show your colleagues that their writing matters, and encourage revision and response, across time, space, and contexts.

So, those are some current thoughts about teaching and learning in a digital writing project. I hope that they help others writing project colleagues as they continue to think about what it means to integrate digital writing practices into both site work and their own teaching. I look forward to my conversations about this with colleagues this weekend, and in a few more weeks at the NWP annual meeting, and hope to hear ideas about how this work is happening for you, too.

Continuing to Create a Digital Writing Project

As I reflect on our experience in the CRWP Summer Institute, and prepare for a visit to the Boise State Writing Project this weekend, as well as the NWP Annual Meeting in just a few weeks, I am trying to capture some thinking about the core principles that I employ in planning PD experiences related to technology.

I know that my colleagues at BSWP, as well as in other sites I have visited and continued to communicate with, are continuing to think about how, when, and why to integrate digital writing into their site’s work. So, I am offering some thoughts about what we have done in our first two years at CRWP, and how technology informs and is infused in our site’s work. By taking the intentional stance that we are and will continue to be a “digital writing project,” I know that there are certain benefits and constraints that this creates for us, and I will hope to address some of them here, too.

Summer Institute
In the CRWP SI, we engage in digital writing from the moment we meet participants on orientation day. We regularly use our wiki as a space to share our daily agenda and discuss texts such as Because Writing Matters and Teaching the New Writing. (Kathy and I are going to present at the Annual Meeting about our
experiences with doing the readings and sharing responses through
digital means, and I wonder what value others see in the responses to
the texts that are evident in the links here.) We also use Google Docs to create and share materials for our teaching demos, as well as creating our collaborative response to teaching demonstrations with our writing groups. In addition, we explored digital stories, Voice Thread, and podcasts, ultimately leading to the production of a print, audio, and video anthology of our work from the summer.

From both our conversations with colleagues during the summer institute, as well as from comments that they made on evaluations at the end of the summer, we know that this stance of integrating technology as a core expectation of participation in CRWP is both a selling point for teachers as they consider participation, yet also generates much frustration in practice. At least two veteran teachers discussed their interest in joining CRWP because they knew it would push them to use technology, yet continued to share their frustrations with the pace at which we moved (I couldn’t even log into the wiki because I lost my password, I couldn’t access the Google Doc that we were all supposed to share…), yet with support from colleagues and our SI leaders, they were able to (eventually) get into the sites we were using. Everyone created a digital story this summer, and everyone submitted a digital portfolio.

So, I continue to think that an immersive experience, one in which participants are expected to use technology and supported in that use through just-in-time instruction is a hallmark of a digital writing project. The expectation, for instance, that we would all use Google Docs to create collaborative responses to teaching demonstrations let to some unique discussions that were, initially, focused on how to use Google Docs, but eventually allowed us to use the technology transparently, and contributed to our experience in the response groups. That is, we were able to use Google Docs as a way to both focus our face-to-face conversation and allow everyone to contribute to the response, even though each group usually picked one “scribe” to be the main person responsible for each letter.

On a less positive note, we did find that participants, over the course of the summer, were using technology more and more to facilitate their own distracted behavior. One day while I was gone, for instance, my co-leaders told me that people were essentially ignoring the presenting teacher and focusing only on their laptops and cell phones. This led me to have a brief, yet pointed discussion the next day with the group about laptop etiquette; while we were fortunate to be in a situation where we could all use laptops, we needed to think — both from the perspective of teacher and student — about the advantages and disadvantages of using laptops. As teachers, helping students know when and how to use the laptops for learning purposes is critical, as well as the idea that we sometimes need to have “lids down” moments where we focus on each other, not just on our screens.

Still, having the expectation that we would all engage in experiences mediated by technology creates a different vibe in our SI. It means that we come to the institute with our own literacy and technology goals related to using the laptops for our own writing and for teaching writing. It means that we have the opportunity to connect and collaborate, and that those connections and collaborations are a core part of our lived experience as readers and writers in the institute. It also means that we make our work public, at least in the sense that everything we do is shared with at least our writing groups, sometimes the whole group, and sometimes the world. It makes the accountability for sharing a teaching demo and our own writing even more than it would be if it were only shared on paper, and that sense of audience and purpose, I feel, makes a huge difference in how our TCs see themselves as teachers and as writers.

Professional Development
Last year, we were able to be involved in two professional development series. In the first, we were able to meet with teachers five times over the year, and in each session we introduced a new technology (wikis, wikis part 2, Google Docs, podcasting, digital stories). In the second, we worked with teachers in a variety of contexts, but in the last two sessions we were able to work with cross-content area teachers to develop wiki pages. In both of these series, we had some teachers who were highly engaged in the process, some who were engaged, yet timid, and some who didn’t really seem to be interested in the technologies we were discussing.

This is a similar pattern for what I see in many PD sessions, and it makes me wonder what my/our responsibility is in offering background/context for why and how we should be using technology in the teaching of writing. While I have noted this before, and I do feel that the conversation about technology and teaching has, generally, moved from the “Why should we?” perspective to the “How should we?” one in the past few years, I am still reminded that not everyone shares my enthusiasm for technology  and that we need to situate our stance about digital writing when doing PD, especially for the “non-voluntary” types of work that we often do in schools, where teachers may not have had a choice in participating due to district mandates and expectations.

As I think about where we are at and where we are going to go next with our PD services, I am curious to learn more about how we can offer online and hybrid options to help teachers customize their own experience. While I know that this isn’t always possible, I am curious to see what we might be able to do to help teachers create and sustain their own personal learning networks within the context of a writing project. I am looking forward to what Sara, our tech liaison, and Rita, our PD coordinator, come up with in terms of how this might work with our current PD series and future advanced institutes. I don’t have all the answers, but I excited that we continue to explore the questions.

Continuity
While we hosted a few continuity events last year, this year we hope to do more. One way that we are trying to connect with our TCs is by sending out more messages through our listserv (a pretty standard practice from what I have heard from other sites), as well as to now connect via Facebook and Twitter. I am not exactly sure how much/well this strategy is working, although I can get stats from FB on who has looked at and joined our fan page, which is an interesting set of weekly stats.

Of the events that we are planning, we do try to use technology as it seems appropriate. For instance, a few weeks ago, Erin led a book discussion on Penny Kittle’s Write Beside Them, and I was able to take notes on her computer as people shared their thoughts on the book and connections to their own teaching. Last week, Penny held her first Saturday seminar, and focused on digital storytelling. Over the course of the year, we hope to plan some other events that will engage our TCs and their colleagues in digital writing and distance learning, although we are still figuring out exactly how to do that.

What this reminds me of is the fact that we can create opportunities through technology that allow TCs to connect when and how they are able. I am not sure what we will do in particular related to webinars or synchronous online conversations (either through chat or voice). I want to offer our TCs the chance to reconnect in whatever ways we can, but not dilute the experience of being connected. So, we need to continue to think carefully about when, how, and why we offer online continuity events in conjunction with our face-to-face offerings such as our 100 days celebration and book clubs.

What’s Next…
So, as we continue to evolve as a digital writing project, I am honored and excited by the opportunities to talk with other NWP colleagues about what it is that we are doing and how they might work to integrate digital writing into their work. While I hesitate to offer advice because any type of work with writing and technology is highly contextual, I can summarize what I have learned (and continue to learn) in the following:

  • Just like we expect teachers to write, we can expect them to use technology. While we neither want to or are able to expect that teachers will use digital writing tools all the time (for instance, I still take my notebook on writing marathons), it is perfectly reasonable for us to expect that a teacher can bring his/her own laptop (or borrow one from school) when they come to writing project events. Put agendas up on a wiki or Google doc. Invite a backchannel conversations through TodaysMeet or other means. Ask people to compose digital texts. We know that this is important work, and we should expect our colleagues to come prepared to do it.
  • When we make an expectation, we need to support it. Now that we expect teachers to come to the table with technology in hand, we need to offer them the time and support to learn how to use it. Create immersive experiences, yet continue to offer one-to-one support as teachers learn how to use it. Connect experiences that they know (writing on a word processor) with pedagogical practices (how to revise effectively) and then make the leap to a new technology (online word processors) and another pedagogy (offering comments and feedback). It’s that idea of facilitating learning through a “to, with, and by” model.
  • Finally, make the experience meaningful. Don’t just have people create a profile on a wiki and never look at it. If you ask them to post it, then you need to encourage others to respond to it, and offer response yourself. It’s this old idea of a tree falling in a forest… if no one is there to see the wiki post, does it matter? Show your colleagues that their writing matters, and encourage revision and response, across time, space, and contexts.

So, those are some current thoughts about teaching and learning in a digital writing project. I hope that they help others writing project colleagues as they continue to think about what it means to integrate digital writing practices into both site work and their own teaching. I look forward to my conversations about this with colleagues this weekend, and in a few more weeks at the NWP annual meeting, and hope to hear ideas about how this work is happening for you, too.

(Still) Learning How to Be a Digital Writer, Digital Teacher

As I whittle away some time between flights on my way to visit colleagues at the Boise State Writing Project this weekend, I finally have a few moments to capture some thoughts about my experience leading the book club conversation on the English Companion Ning during the month of September. Overall, I want to start by saying that it was a positive experience, and that I was energized by the participation and enthusiasm of the 100+ members who joined in the conversation. So, my comments below don’t reflect negatively on them… it is more of a musing about what it means to be a digital writer and digital teacher, even when technology doesn’t cooperate. With the smart, collegial nudge from Kevin, I offer some thoughts on what I had hoped to do over the course of that book club discussion, as well as what really happened.

Week One: (Mis)Adventures with a Webinar
In the first week of the discussion, we got off to a wonderful start with some pre-discussion threads that led nicely into a conversation about how we are using digital writing in our classrooms this fall. There were many thoughtful conversations that happened on the forum (which I hope to reflect on in more detail in another post), and I wanted to have an opportunity to more directly address some of the questions that were emerging. So, I signed up to host an Elluminate session through LearnCentral. I thought I had gone through the steps necessary to have a full session, not the kind that was limited to only three participants. I broadcast the URL on the ECNing and on Twitter, and anxiously awaited the opportunity to chat with people in the webinar.

What happened, unfortunately, was that I had signed up to host only a three person “room” with the free version of Elluminate and, once I had logged in, only two others were able to join me. Notes appeared on the ECNing and via Twitter, and I quickly had to change gears and launch a chat in an alternative space, a Meebo chat room. That, too, gave me difficulties as I had to login (after not using Meebo for almost two years) and finding a stable URL for the chat room to share with people. Eventually, we were able to make it in, and about 15 people were in the conversation at one point.

As with all things tech, I realized again that I needed to have a back up plan for when something didn’t work the way that I wanted. My pedagogical goals were still accomplished, but only after dropping five and punting, which was frustrating. It reminds me that I (and all teachers, for that matter) need to have a certain level of TPACK in order to make plans, and contingency plans, on the spur of the moment. Fortunately, people were able to follow me to Meebo, although I am not sure how many. They had to have a certain level of experience to know that it was a problem with Elluminate, not them, and then to navigate their way to Meebo based on my updates. That takes some initiative and skill, which is tough to coach when I, as a teacher, was not able to really talk with them. While I was hoping for one experience, I had to settle for another, yet still held tight to my purposes (talking about the issues raised in the forum through an interactive chat). From this, I am reminded that we can meet our pedagogical goals using a variety of technologies, yet both teacher and learner need to have some level of expertise with navigating online spaces and be highly motivated to participate.

Week Two: A Voice(less) Thread
The second week, I wanted to create an interactive, multimedia experience through which we could all contribute to a conversation about a piece of student work. Voice Thread seemed to be the logical choice for this. So, I created a Voice Thread about Looking at Student’s Digital Work, and posted it to the ECNing forum with some discussion points for people to respond to. I welcomed comments on the forum, as well as on the Voice Thread itself, where people could leave voice, video, or text comments right there. I sent out the email to the book discussion group, and waited for replies. Kevin replied quickly to let me know that I had to adjust the settings on the Voice Thread to make it public (a point I will come back to in a moment).

By the middle of the week, there were only a few replies, and one person emailed me to say that this was a big jump for most people — moving from a text-based discussion thread on the ECNing to a Voice Thread — and that they may not have know what to do, both in the practical and technical sense. While many people still seemed comfortable with the process of reading and replying to discussion threads on the ECNing, suggesting/encouraging alternative discussion formats without the opportunity for explicit coaching and mentoring stifled the conversation. Also, it could just be that people got busy with back-to-school work, but I seem to think based on the initial technical difficulties of not being able to post, combined with the hesitation that many people may have had about moving their conversation to a Voice Thread, I inadvertently made a pedagogical move that, instead of opening up conversation, unfortunately shut it down.

As I continue to think about how and why I would invite fellow teachers and students into a Voice Thread, I think back to our brief experience using that tool in the CRWP summer institute and to this conversation on the ECNing. I am still not exactly sure why the technical problems with Voice Thread occurred in the manner that they did, but I do know that, again, I had tried to make a technological move that didn’t work with the pedagogical goal I had in mind. This time, I failed to drop five and punt. I just turned the ball over on downs, and let the week’s discussion remain stagnant, both on the Voice Thread and the ECNing. In a classroom situation, I couldn’t have let that happen, but I was able to in this case given the context of the situation. Not a teaching move that I am proud of, and it makes me think about how I might recover from such a situation in the future, both in face-to-face and online teaching. I’m still thinking.

Week 3: A (Semi) Failed Attempt to Teach Both F2F and Online
Knowing that I would be delivering an opening session at the Eastern Michigan Writing Project‘s “Writing Beyond Expectations” conference at the end of my third week of leading the book club, I had thoughts that I would create a video stream of the session for others to join into the conversation. Having cleared it with colleagues at EMWP and knowing that I would have a wifi connection that would handle the stream, I sent out a note to the ECNing and on Twitter to join in the next morning. As luck would have it, this would be strike three.

As soon as I connected to UStream and had a signal, I sent out the tweet. I tested the broadcast in another browser and it all looked good. As the time to begin the presentation neared, however, UStream lost connection to the server. I don’t know exactly why this happened — was it a UStream error, a wifi error, or user error? It doesn’t matter because, again, the technology that I had hoped to use failed me. This time, I had no backup, although I am sure that I could have tried to get another service to connect and stream if I had wanted to. But, I had no time since the presentation was starting with the audience in front of me waiting.

Also, Sara and I had hoped to have a back channel conversation occurring on a Google Doc, but because of our set up in the room (two computers running, with one unable to connect to the wifi), and the fact that many participants couldn’t connect either, I was stymied. Luckily, I was able to jump from one computer to the other and deliver my Prezi, with the few people who were able to get on the Google Doc adding some ideas. In my evaluations, many people expressed frustration with the pace of my presentation and the fact that they couldn’t get online. I know I was moving at a speed that assumed most people were online, but I wasn’t able (or, at the very least, didn’t take the time to) confirm that this was the case. Because of this, people in the room weren’t able to engage in the ways that I had hoped they would, and there certainly was no external audience either. Again, the technology didn’t work in the way that I wanted, and while we were able to recover and still have a good presentation overall, I agree with some of the comments from participants that what I did was not immediately applicable to their classrooms because, well, it just isn’t practical to fumble so much during our limited class time.

As the presentation continued and I was asked smart, hard-hitting questions about how and why we should continue to use technology when, not only in my own presentation but also in the schools in which we work we can’t rely on the technology to do what we want or need it to do, I continued to answer with my belief that we are still able to use technology now in more flexible and robust ways than we were able just a few years ago. I still believe this, and I think that technology can allow us to write beyond expectations, as I shared in an earlier blog post. Yet, these are important questions when, for the third time in three weeks, the technology guru was stymied. I began to wonder about my own stance related to technology use and I shared my frustration on Twitter. And, as I noted before, Kevin encouraged me to write and think about this experience, and here I am.

Closing Thoughts
As much as I want to say to say that I have clearer answers about why and how we should use technology to teach writing after this experience, I simply don’t. What I do know, however, and have reaffirmed through this experience, is that online and face-to-face networks of teachers who work together have the potential to make substantive changes to their teaching practices. n particular, by working together to use technologies in new ways, we can see what works, when it works, and why it doesn’t work. I am glad that I shared these “failures” in front of my colleagues because, as I noted above, it shows that even the “tech guru” doesn’t even have all the answers. Yet, I keep asking the questions and trying things out. That’s the philosophical response.

Here is the more practical response, for those who are teaching other teachers about digital writing, as well as for those of us who want to integrate digital writing into our own classrooms. When introducing a new technology/digital writing practice into our teaching, make sure that you are building on an established practice, and make sure that you have a back up plan. For instance, I wanted people in the session to be able to contribute to a collaborative Google Doc during the presentation. Many were not able to, and I simply asked them to write down (on paper) words and phrases in my talk that sparked other ideas for them. This led to a turn-and-talk moment, and we were able to move forward from there. When Elluminate didn’t work, and we couldn’t literally talk through our ideas in that forum, we switched to a chat room which, while clunky, still worked.

I wish that I had a particular plan to share with you for how to use all different kinds of technology for all different situations (when, for instance a wiki is better than a Google Doc, or which program you “should” use for digital storytelling). Yet, what this experience leading the discussion on the ECNing, and the associated failures that I had with it, remind me of is the fact that we really can’t have a strict blueprint. This is the reason that we have to think about our teaching with technology from a broader perspective, thinking about how to build our own TPACK through our own personal exploration, play, and failure. I am thankful that I continue to have opportunities to read, write, and teach about digital writing in a variety of contexts, and to learn from my mistakes.

So, I end this post where I began it… with the energy and enthusiasm of those teaching in their own digital writing workshops. At the end of September, Joel Malley represented the NWP on Capitol Hill, and shared this video about his digital writing workshop. I appreciate what he is doing with and for his students, and for all of us, in providing this vision of what it can mean to teach digital writing and it reminds me that, at the end of the day, we are all still learning.

Writing in the Digital Age from Joel Malley on Vimeo.

Thanks, Joel, for sharing this resource, and Kevin, for prompting me to write this blog post.

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Mid-Summer Thoughts: Technology Use in Class

Recently, a conversation on our department’s listserve sparked me to offer a rare response. Most of what you need to know about the conversation on the list is embedded in my comments below, and I would welcome ideas for how you help students use technology during class in productive, ethical, and responsible ways.

—
Colleagues,

This conversation about student technology use comes for me at an interesting point in the summer, having just a few weeks ago finished our summer institute with the Chippewa River Writing Project (which was a four-week, laptop intensive experience for participants) and as I plan for teaching and professional development work this fall (in which computer labs and internet access will be a critical part of the work). Having been on vacation and just now catching up on the conversation, I have a few thoughts on this. While I surely sympathize with all of you who have students using laptops for off-task behaviors in class (and have had similar experiences myself), I am quite disturbed by the general tone of this conversation in regards to students, their social skills, and technology uses. To me, the suggestion that we “selectively shut-off the WiFi in the classroom” or “forbid in-class use of laptops and any of those smaller things” is akin to something like censorship, an act that we would rally against.

While I am not condoning the use of Facebook during class time or other types of distracted behavior, I think that there are two aspects of this issue that haven’t been addressed — the ways in which we invite students to be academics and our own pedagogical styles, both in relation to technology. For the first, I find the suggestion that students not use the internet during our classes or outside of class to be ridiculous, as it is our responsibility to teach them how to use it productively, ethically, and responsibly for many purposes, not the least of which is communicating with us, engaging in research, and creating digital texts. For the second, I think that we all have a responsibility to think about the ways that we ask, even encourage students to use technology in our classrooms, above and beyond simply taking notes.

My experience — having taught in labs for the past three years and with the writing project this summer — is that simply setting norms for technology use and, periodically, revisiting these norms will eliminate most of the problems and help you learn from your students how best to employ technology. If you want them to take notes, why not have an interactive Google Doc with the day’s agenda posted for the all to take notes, post questions, and add links to pertinent web resources? If you are worried that internet searching and instant messaging is killing their critical thinking ability, then why not engage them in online discussions and model the types of responses you would expect them to give? In other words, don’t blame the technology causing bad behavior when you have opportunity to employ it in productive ways.

As I have done with undergraduates, graduates, and teachers in professional development settings, when we were having trouble with off-task behavior this summer, I simply paused in class one day to ask everyone to brainstorm with me in a grid about the positives and negatives that the laptops had for us as teachers and learners. Many people expressed great appreciation for the fact that they could be connected to one another in class through our wiki, Google Docs, and other collaborative technologies. Some were concerned that these technologies could be distracting when they couldn’t get the right log in password or find the right settings to make changes on a website. Many admitting to quickly checking their email or Facebook during class time, and agreed that it should not be done while others were presenting their teaching demonstration or when we had a group discussion. In fact, we agreed to make an effort to ask for “lids down” moments when we really wanted everyone to attend carefully to what was said in this face-to-face setting and “lids up” moments when we wanted them to do something hands-on with their computers.

In short, I fear that this discussion about limiting students’ technology use in class treads on very dangerous water, as we are fortunate enough to have the computer labs that we do have and making broad claims that we would want to turn off the internet or ban technology all together seems, at best, anti-intellectual and, at worst, a violation of students’ right to learn in whatever manner they see fit.

Beyond that, I haven’t even addressed some of the latest research about how young people perceive technology use in their own lives and the social shifts that are happening because of it. If we ignore these shifts, it is at our own peril, because students will find other ways to learn. For more on that, I recommend that you check out this book (available as a free PDF download) — Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out: Kids Living and Learning with New Media (MIT Press) and this FRONTLINE Special, Digital Nation.

My hope is that we can continue to talk about productive uses of technology, both for our students and for our teaching while not simply resorting to the “kids these days” kinds of comments that have been evident in the earlier threads of this discussion.

Troy
—


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End of Semester Thoughts: Digital Storytelling, Wikis, and the Changing Conversation

Another semester has zoomed past and, before these thoughts escape me, and I begin a series of summer workshops and our CRWP summer institute, I am going to try to capture a few of the lessons learned in relation to digital writing and digital teaching. Good lessons seem to come in threes, so here goes:

1. Digital storytelling takes time, and a story to tell (larger lesson: any digital writing takes time, and a distinct audience, purpose, and sensibility to craft and design)

I enjoy digital storytelling, both as a digital writer and as a teacher. I appreciate the ways in which a combination of images, sounds, music, and video — coupled with one’s own voice — can create a multimedia work that is truly more than the sum of its parts. Moreover, I continue to be intrigued by new understandings related to fair use of digital media, and the implications that this has for creating digital stories. So, when I introduce digital storytelling to any group, especially my pre-service teachers, I get excited about the possibilities of what can come.

That said, I also get worried, because sometimes what comes when their stories finally premier are not really digital stories in the sense that they have crafted a narrative and supported it with multimedia. Instead, they are slideshows set to music. While one could argue that I am being snooty in this distinction, I don’t think that I am. Let me elaborate a bit.

If we want writers to compose stories, then we have to expect them to begin with the story. I am not sure where I went wrong with this over the past semester, but as I watched the numerous digital stories that my students produced for their final portfolio, I was amazed by the fact that so few included their own voice (literally, by recording it) even after they asked me if they needed to do that. Also, even after we looked at a few digital stories and talked about the ways the authors used transitions and effects, as well as supporting their tale with music rather than letting the music tell it, I still saw many, many slideshows with music.

So, I am not sure what else to say about this right now except to say that I need to reiterate the idea that digital stories need to, well, tell a story. In your voice. With your voice. More to think about with that in the summer institute.

2. Wikis are the most functional space for digital writing to live

After talking with my friend Steve before the semester about how and why to keep using wikis (after almost making an ill-fated decision to switch to Ning), I am more pleased than ever that I use a wiki for the hub of activity in both ENG 315 and in CRWP.

This semester, I asked my ENG 315 students to post almost all their work to the wiki, as well as to respond to the work of their peers. This really extended the conversations that we were having in class and made having a writer’s profile that much more important because they could link all their work back to it to form a makeshift portfolio. As many of them have continued with their work over the semester, the wiki grew and grew. Now, most have very robust writing profiles that also include their multigenre projects.

I like the idea of calling these writers profiles, as that implies something that will continue to grow and change over time whereas, somehow, “portfolio” seems to be more fixed. Given the ways in which the profiles worked this spring, I hope to use the same strategy in CRWP this summer, the WRITE NOW grant workshop in August, and in my ENG 618 research methods class in the fall.

3. Something is changing in the conversations about literacy and technology

I am really not sure when and how this happened, but Sara and I were talking about the fact that, in the past year or two, the ways in which people talk about technology and education seems to have changed. Even as recently as the workshops I was doing for PROJECT WRITE in 2007-8, it seemed as though participants kept asking “why?” when a new technology was introduced to them (and these were people that volunteered to be a part of the grant). That said, it really seems to me that in the past two years, the question has shifted from “why?” to “how?”

In other words, there really isn’t a lot of time spent on arguing for technology use in education anymore, at least not when I go to a school or conference. Maybe it is because many people have laptops and internet-ready mobile phones. Maybe it is because of a backlash to NCLB. Maybe it is because of the many curriculum documents and reports about 21st century literacies. Probably some combination of all of this, plus a shift in the skills and attitudes that children now bring to school.

All the same, I have begun to find it refreshing that I can start the conversation with a group of pre-service or in-service teachers now and not have to justify technology use so much as I need to talk about the literacy practices enabled by technology. I get my first chance of the summer to have that talk tomorrow with teachers in Littleton, CO, as they work to integrate laptops into their writing courses.

So, considering my approach to digital storytelling, the use of wikis, and the ways in which we talk about technology will continue to be on my mind this summer. I look forward to the continued learning as I participate in the many upcoming PD events I have scheduled for the summer and hope to share more of my thinking here.


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Notes from Alfie Kohn’s Talk at CMU

Alfie Kohn, an outspoken critic of traditional schooling and standardized testing, spoke at CMU on Wednesday, March 17, 2010. Here are some notes I captured from his talk, “Overhauling the Transmission Model: An overview of traditional versus progressive teaching”

  • You may know if you have been a student or teacher that learning is not simply a process of absorbing information throw at you, but if that is true then it makes sense for this presentation to not be about me just talking at you
  • What I am going to describe for you is a first grade classroom in New England, where kids were studying the Mayflower, and the kids showed up to see that the chairs and tables were pushed to the edge of the room and the floor had an outline of a ship made in masking tape.
    • A classmate comes in and unrolls a scroll from the king — we cannot sail on the ship until we know how big it is. Teacher asks — any ideas for how to figure this out? Figuring out how tall a student is, using him as a measure, then with hands, etc. The king doesn’t know how long the child, the hands, etc are.
    • They don’t get it that day, but they return to it the next day… measure it with the classmate’s feet… he knows the king!
    • Finally, on the third day, the teacher finally introduces the concept of standard units of measurement, and gives them rulers.
    • What distinguishes this lesson, makes it unusual?
      • She took three days to let the students discover this concept; “covering” material makes you feel that you don’t have enough time — this is about “discovering” material
      • There was a rationale, not just “open wide” and here come the facts
      • Basis for life-long learning and problem solving
      • It was connected and inter-disciplinary
      • It was generative and collaborative
      • Invited the children to use their imaginations
      • Both hands-on and minds-on — they were inventing the idea of a ruler and figuring out standard units of measure
  • How might we find teaching and learning more generative if we were involved in these types of classrooms?
  • Middle school example — what questions do you have about yourself? What questions do you have about the world?
    • Looking at questions together to develop themes, then the teacher takes themes from each of the groups and to synthesize what students are saying to look at some overarching themes to intrigue them all. Examples: conflict and war, the future, etc. This becomes the overarching curriculum for the entire school for the entire year. Teachers in this school see them as generalists first, then content area specialists second.
    • The teaching is organized around questions that the kids themselves have asked. The students themselves become scholars, far more engaged in what they are doing than in traditional school settings.
  • High school example — Harvey Daniels and Best Practice High School, Chicago
    • Cross-disciplinary unit on fast food and how it connects to health, economics, popular culture, etc.
    • Read Fast Food Nation and connected it to content in biology related to nutrition, digestion, etc.
    • Students then chose from magazine articles about the fast food industry — animal cruelty, locations of fast food in low-income neighborhoods, etc.
    • Went to restaurants and kept anthropological observation journals of patrons and employees
    • Some became activists around the issue
    • Did they test at the end? No… they kept portfolios of letters, pamphlets, and other materials that they created
  • What can we do in classrooms to make this happen?
  • Setting up a false dichotomy… but one to use as a way to compare/contrast…
    • Traditional — skill and drill (although, “traditional” models in the sense of being “old” is multiage learning and apprenticeship models)
    • A new, progressive way… as exemplified by the examples I offered
      • Differences:
        • Traditional — the purpose is to get the “right” answer and spit it out on demand to the teacher who has all the power and will determine who talks when (the point is not to have an intellectual conversation, but to give the one answer that the teacher wants, the one that she is fishing for)
          • What to Look for in a Classroom (from alfiekohn.com)
          • I want to see stuff from the kids on the walls… but what does it look like? I don’t want all the pumpkins on the wall in a kindergarten room to look the same.
          • How to teach kids to read — a teacher thinking about phonics may look at the phonemes, the progressive teacher will focus on meaning
          • Standardized tests measure what we need least; efforts to improve tests scores lead to less authentic learning
          • Mom asks “what did you do in school today?” Kid answers, “nothing.” He is probably right — he may have had a lot done to him.
        • Old school — bunch of facts and skills. Worksheets to learn how to add, but not applying it.
          • Progressive school — facts and skills are taught in a context.
          • It is easier, not just more interesting, to make sense of this if there is a context… “I think that I could read this if I knew what it was about.”
        • Traditional — no good reason for learning
        • Progressive — create a lesson with and for your students that will engage them
  • When I talk about this in terms of context, problem-based learning, etc… I am referring to the idea that teachers have a collection of facts to but into students’ heads ala Dewey, Freire
    • When the kids have nothing to say about the course, the curriculum… consider the “ten year” question. What is left of your course after a decade has passed? We are creating elaborate snow structures on the last day before spring… it drains right out again if we are not helping students learn in real ways. We are meaning-makers, and we work from a constructivist approach. The best learning is a process of reconstructing ideas.
    • When people talk about making things more “rigorous,” we should be worried about that…
    • We often think that AP courses are the best courses in the high school because they are “accelerated”
    • It almost always works out that when we are trying to “raise the bar” and “close the gap,” we have kids who are poor who are being given more drill and skill while the rich kids are doing more real learning.
  • Last effect of traditional education is the loss of curiosity
    • As kids move into school, their intrinsic motivation dies off as a response to traditional instruction
  • Final question — if everything I have said is true, especially if progressive schools are proven by research to be effective, then why is the traditional approach still so common?
    • It is difficult to do well
    • Not given training in college
    • We teach how we are taught
    • “Any idiot can stay one chapter ahead of the kids”
    • Top down leadership; lack of autonomy
  • Q/A
    • Books: effects of grading, negative effects of homework, negatives of standardized tests, bribes and threats of disciplines
    • Check out Diane Ravitch‘s “Death and Life of the Great American School“
    • Question to ask at schools — How do you hope these kids will turn out? Happiness, problem-solving, ethics — these are the things that we care about in the long run and these are the criteria we should set as “standards”
    • Ted Sizer‘s work on the Coalition of Essential Schools
    • The teachers who were glad to have me didn’t need me; the ones who didn’t want to talk fit the model of traditional education

Reflections

Alfie Kohn certainly stays on message, despite his “digressions.” I first started reading him over a decade ago, saw him speak about five years ago, and have been influenced by his ideas in many ways. There are some points that I disagree on, especially the idea that assessment is — in and of itself — an almost evil force, because I think that we can do assessment in responsible ways that help kids learn and help teachers teach. But, overall, he reiterates the negative data (and anecdotes) about testing, grading, skill and drill teaching, and awards for kids that he has been discussing for years. As I think about writing instruction, especially in an age of technology, I think that we can take some of these ideas and look at how a writing workshop approach can foster student learning in a constructivist manner, one that values the context in which students work and the authentic inquiry that they choose to pursue.

I think, too, that we have to recognize the overwhelming forces that teachers face — it is not just about individual choices inside our own classrooms, although that is important; it is about the structural aspects of schooling and the expectations of our society that place particular demands on schools, teachers, and students. At the end, he began to talk about the socio-economic and political influences on our system of education, and I think that we really need to talk more about these influences because they permeate our classrooms. Teachers can be progressive within their four walls, or their school, but that is not going to create substantive change in the system. It is a start, indeed, but will not change the entire system.

At any rate, I know that many of my CMU students were in the audience, and my sincere hope is that they have gained some insights into some of the perspectives that I bring to ENG 315. I try to alleviate the pressures of grading and invite them to think critically and creatively about what they can do as writers and teachers of writing. I ask them to do authentic writing, both personally and professionally, and I do not rely on tests in any way. Instead, I ask them to write in different genres, for different purposes, and to different audiences. As one student said in class the other night, “This is a lot of work.” Indeed, it is. And, I know that it is overwhelming and that my class doesn’t meet the expectations that they have of what a college course, or a methods course, should look like. Yet, I think that it is valuable work, and I hope that it will encourage them as writers and teachers of writing to be a little more, as Kohn would suggest, “progressive” in their own classrooms.


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