NCTE Winds Down
Today is Tuesday, and the NCTE conference is just about over. Actually, most of the people have left already. The only ones remaining are those who are attending workshops, executive board meetings or other conferences. I am here for the Conference on English Leadership, an excellent group of leaders in the English teacher’s world. It’s actually a bit strange–I have been on CEL’s executive board for three years (I came off the board last night), yet I am not an official leader in any way. CEL believes that we are all leaders.
One of the great things about going to NCTE is that you gather so many ideas for what you need or want to do within your classes and through other professional avenues. I always make a list of things I want to do. Last year my focus was on writing, and I made myself a list of five pieces I wanted to write. Unfortunately, I only completed one of them. This year I hope to do better, as my list is a little more ambitious:
- Work with Jim Mahoney to set up a CEL blog with NCTE.
- Finish the article I started on Saturday for Terry Bigelow and Michael Vokoun’s column in English Journal.
- Enroll in an online course such as this one.
- Look into establishing a writing group with teachers in my school.
- Write a proposal to present at NCTE about our writing group.
- Write a proposal to present at NCTE, continuing to work with Bill and Bud, thinking about our use of technology in the classroom.
So hopefully I’ll get through many, if not all of these. Deadlines will be the killer. The proposals are due in January, so I need to get busy.
Hope you all have a good holiday weekend. I fly home to New Jersey tonight, teach a half day tomorrow, and then have a few days off.
Headed to Nashville
Tomorrow night I’m heading to Nashville to attend the NCTE annual convention. This really is a great convention and I always learn a lot. This year I’ll be presenting a session about using blogging and related technologies in class with Bud Hunt and Bill Bass. They’re both English teachers and are both much more advanced in their use of technology in their classes. I hope to learn a bunch from them. Our session is on Friday at 2:30–if you’re going to Nashville, come check us out.
Also, we’ve set up a wiki for our presentation for folks to go to after the session is over. You might also want to check that out. Bud is hosting it here.
And the last thing is that I don’t believe that I’ve posted the addresses of the sites I’m using for my blogs and wikis. My classes’ blogs are over at 21publish.com and I’ve set up some basic wikis over at wikispaces.
Hope to see you in Nashville.
Why blogging?
Well as I said yesterday, I have a clearer idea in mind about why I want students to blog and what I want them to do on their blogs.
Last year, my idea was to use the blogs as a place for students to discuss the literature we were reading, especially focusing on an overarching theme of the American Dream as we made our way through American Literature. It had some success, but not much.
This year my goal has changed. I’ve really been rethinking how I am teaching writing this year and emphasizing writing much more in my classes. I spent the summer reading about teaching writing, especially Deborah Dean’s book, Strategic Writing: The Writing Process and Beyond in the Secondary English Classroom, Tom Romano’s book, Clearing the Way: Working with teenage writers, and Inside Out by Dan Kirby et al. I’ve decided to make writing a daily thing in my class and, staying with Dean’s idea, work much more on teaching writing strategies. In the past, much of the writing in my classes has been the end-of-unit-tell-me-what-you-know type of writing, rather than real writing for real purposes.
As part of making the writing a little more real, I want students to write for an audience larger than just me. Here is where blogs will be used. Rather than blogs being a place for their initial thinking, musing, or chatting, I’m having students use blogs as a place to put revised work, work that they are proud of and would like to share with the world. This is the place for taking the rough work they’ve done in class or in their journals and reworking and rethinking the ideas to share with others. We’ll see how it goes.
Last week students wrote personal narratives, shared them in small groups and now will be posting their revised drafts onto their blogs. Then they’ll have a chance to comment in writing on each others’ writing. I’m hoping for the best!
Back to blogging
Well, it’s been ages since I started this blog and then abandoned it. Last year, I started using blogs with my students, and then pretty much abandoned that, too. We were using blogger to house our blogs and I didn’t have much success with that, mostly because of our school’s website administration. There were many days where we’d go to the computer lab, only to have the site blocked, or partially blocked. It was very frustrating.
Also, I had students register their own accounts last year and got some very interesting and inappropriate usernames. And then they forgot their passwords and had to reregister. And, to be honest, I hadn’t really thought through exactly what I wanted students to do on their blogs. When I started having problems with blogger, I had students move here to learnerblogs. That worked better with our computers at school, but still things never really went anywhere.
This year, I’m trying again. I’ve found a new place to blog, and have a more clear idea of what I want to do. So far, I have eighty of my 100 students blogging over at 21publish, and soon all will be online. There isn’t much up yet except brief posts to let me know they all know how to use the blog, but more should be up soon.
I’ve only just found 21publish, but so far I like it a lot, for several reasons. First, it works at my school. But more importantly, instead of just a bunch of blogs that people need to seek out and find, all blogs are set up as part of a community. Actually, I set up each blog, assigning passwords and usernames. I also have complete control over the blogs. If a student posts something inappropriate, I can delete or modify the post. I can delete a user’s entire account, in fact. Although it was more upfront work on my part to set up, I like having that control.
But what I really like about the community is that when anyone views one of the blogs, there is a drop-down menu to go directly to each other blog. And my homepage for it is a kind of portal that shows active blogs, most recent posts, and other information, kind of like a miniature aggregator all set up already, allowing connections to develop between bloggers easily. So far I’m really happy with 21publish. Hopefully blogging will work better this year.
I also have a more clear plan for what I want to do with blogging this year, tied up very close to my re-thinking of writing instruction this year. I’ll post about that soon.
First post
Well I’ve messed around with blogs over at blogger, but for whatever reason, their pages frequently fail to load properly at school, so I’m exploring other places for me to host a blog.
A couple things first off. I’m an English teacher. As such, I value reading, writing and thinking. And I’m always looking for ways in which I can help my students do more of it easier, quicker and better. Especially the thinking part.
I’m still somewhat new to teaching, as this is only my fifth year in the classroom. I wouldn’t say that I’m extremely advanced with technolgy. There’s a lot of stuff that I don’t know much about, but I try to incorporate technology as much as I can.
I think, however, that just using technology at school is not a good enough idea in itself. It needs to be used in ways to empower our students. Ways in which they will take control of their own learning and thinking.
Here’s an interesting example of a typical technology use at school: Today at my school we had an in-service designed to help faculty set up web pages. A couple of teachers showed their pages to the faculty, earning admiration from many for how complete their sites were. Mostly what they had were just places where they could upload class information: calendars, PowerPoint presentations, assignments, class notes, etc. They called them “interactive” websites and talked about how nice it was that the kids have all this information at their fingertips and now there’s no excuse for “I didn’t know we had a quiz” or “But I didn’t get the assignment” students.
But… what is happening here? It’s great from some perspectives, especially a parent’s. Now parents can look to see what’s happening each day in class, they can check if their child has any work to do. It’s great for some students. Now if they are absent they can find out what they missed. Or if they forget their binder at school, they can download the calendar or assignment. But is it great for the teacher? Now he (both teachers who shared were men) has post assignments and daily activities every day. What happens if one of these teachers forgets to post today’s information? Is it now his fault if a student is unprepared? I see this as really putting a lot of the responsibility on the teacher. Where is the personal responsibility for the student? Why do they need to bother to take notes in class when they know they can download it tonight?
So I’m searching for the ways in which I can use technology to help with learning. Not as a resource for students, but as a way to help them learn, think, and do. I know there’s a lot out there, so I’m going to start with something simple: blogging.
Right now I’m finally trying to use blogging in my classroom. In the fall, I had a couple of my classes set up blogs and try to use them a bit. I admit, what I had them do was a bit forced. Ok, it was very forced. I made them use their blogs to think about a persuasive paper they had to write (also a very forced assignment). They had to think through their ideas and post information they found on the Internet. I wasn’t really impressed with what they wrote, but I wasn’t really planning to be. What I wanted to do was simple: get them to set up blogs and make sure they know how to use them. Now I just need to think of ways to get them to want to use them and to get them to use them for good reasons.
And I’m working on that now. I’ll try to keep track of what I do, why I do it, and what results I find here on this blog. Stay tuned.
