Blogging with Students: Raising Reluctant Writers

In a previous post, I wrote about how to setup your classroom blog page (as a teacher) as a tool for communication with parents and to relate school events to home. Another exciting way of incorporating the blog idea in your practice is to give students blog pages to write on.

Addressing gender gaps in achievement (and improving literacy skills in boys) remain hot topics in education: blogging with your class is a terrific way to make strides in letting the writing flow. For those students who are hesitant to put their ideas down on paper, using a web 2.0 tool like blogger.com can provide an alternative method of producing wonderful writing.

Once you have a class blog page setup, it is an easy process to add student blog pages to your account. This post will again refer to http://blogger.com. Follow the steps below to make this endeavor a reality:

Adding Student Blogs to Your Class Blog Page

1. In the "Design" tab, click on the "add gadget" link where you want your student blog names to appear.

2. Decide what you want to assign as a title (e.g. Our student blogs) and type in the URL address for each student blog that you want to add (e.g. johnnystudent.blogspot.com).

3. Click "save" and your new gadget is all set and ready to view.

*If you need to setup student blogs for your class, follow these steps to begin the process by providing students a blog (especially for elementary school students) who might not already have one. To do this, you will need an email address for each student who is going to have a blog page created.

In some school boards, each student is given an email account from their school board - this would be an ideal solution. If not, you would need to ask students for an email address if they already have one OR possibly even gain parent consent to create an email account for them (or have them use one from home). The email address is solely used to setup the blog page initially and would only be used to verify the google account or contact the student with blog-related alerts, if needed.

Creating Student Blog Pages

1. Go to blogger.com

2. It will ask you for a google account OR ask you to create a new one.

3. Enter in the required information and use the student's school email or personal one (if it applies).

4. When assigning a blog address, choose a template to follow (e.g. http://myschool.johnny.blogspot.com) and then simply change the student's name for consistencies sake.

5. Choose a starting background template and give it a temporary name (e.g. Johnny's Blog). The student can change these things once they get going.

6. Your student blog page is created and ready for them to personalize!

How to Use Student Blog Pages

One of the greatest first-steps in using blogging is to release the reigns and allow students a chance to "make it their own." Don't be afraid to give the students 'free-writing' tasks, as well as suggested topics and sentence starters (e.g. The scariest thing that ever happened to me is...). Once students have bought in to this kind of writing forum - by using their own creative devices - they will be more willing to invest their energy into topics that you assign as well.

On my class blog page, I have added the gadget "Pages" where I have created a page for "Blog Assignments" and "Glog Assignments." These pages are where I create a number list of topics assigned (e.g. Free Choice, "My favourite band") and the dates they were assigned on. Students can access my "Blog Assignments" page in order to check their progress with past blog work and find new blog assignments as they are assigned. This is a great way for students (and parents) to keep up-to-date with writing work both at school and at home.

Why Blogger Matters to Kids

Even the most reluctant writer wants to be successful. For many students, writing stories or written responses in notebooks is simply painful and uninteresting. Blogging is a way to bridge the age gap between teacher and student using web 2.0 technology. In the same way that you hear that kids don't email - they text. Many students don't write - they type. Give them a forum for their ideas with the novelty of technology, gadgets, feedback from classmates (or even a global audience), and they will dive in and tread in the waters of literary excitement.

As teachers, we need to incorporate new ways to address traditional learning. Writing matters. But not the writing on the ruled paper with holes to the left; rather, the writing that comes from the meaning and purpose of the writer whether on a blog or in a text message. Writing is communication and our global world (and its technology) have been re-drawing and re-defining this on a revolutionary scale for some time now. It is on our shoulders to find ways to catch up and keep the learning both relevant and preparatory - for life...not just the course syllabus.

Good luck with your student's blogging journey. This could be the thing that hooks them into being lifelong learners and writers - which is what we are, in fact, here to accomplish.

Online Coursework as a Supplement for Traditional Teaching

This guest post written by Natalie Hunter. Thanks for your focus on e-learning, Natalie, one of the future frontiers of learning in our education system.

Computers will never have the responsiveness and adaptability to each student's strengths and weaknesses required in teaching that a human teacher has. Conversely, teachers not always be able to give each and every student the time and attention comparable to what can be received from an online coursework source that can be accessed at any time of day and from any computer or online device. Online schooling, therefore, makes an excellent supplement to a traditional educational system by allowing the student a means of accessing extra help and information outside of the classroom.

The simplest way of implementing online education is simply a web page that contains text relevant to the course in question. Students could then access the website to read about the subject, just as they would read a textbook they had taken home. Teachers can also record lectures and present visual models in the same manner, to accommodate students who respond better to verbal explanations or visual aids, and making the online textbook into a sort of book on tape as well. More information on these methods can be found at the National Repository of Online Coursework.

Repetition also helps students to learn, and being able to rewind any given lecture allows a student to repeat instructions or facts until he or she is comfortable with the material. Given the cost of textbooks, keeping lectures and text online may help ease the financial burden on students and their families, provided that the family can be expected to own a computer or have access to a library. Since the cost of a year's worth of textbooks in four or five subjects may exceed the cost of a simple computer, and many families may have a computer anyway, this is not an unreasonable expectation. This tactic also can help to bring down district costs, which is a definite bonus.

Providing reading material, however, is insufficient without proper assessment of the student's comprehension. Online assessment methods do exist, but presently they are crude and ill-suited to certain subjects. Many online coursework programs include multiple choice tests, and a computer can easily execute a math assessment, but for anything more nuanced, a human instructor is needed. Teachers can use online assessment methods as a valuable tool in determining what students are learning and not learning, and refocus the lectures and discussions accordingly. Just as it is the instructor's duty to evaluate the students' progress, so must the instructor evaluate the online programs used. Foundations of educators such as the European Foundation for Quality in e-Learning have been formed specifically to help educators find suitable online resources and evaluate their worth.

Another new aspect that online coursework brings to the education process is that online learning aids can be "asynchronous", meaning that the student and teacher need not be using them at the same time. An instructor can post an audio file of a lecture or a text file regarding the subject to a website when his or her schedule permits, and each student can listen to said file when it is convenient for them. Because the student and teacher need not bend their schedules to each others' more than a traditional class would require, this allows each student to seek extracurricular help at any time of day regardless of the instructor's availability, giving students more "virtual face time" then would be possible by traditional means. This is as much a drawback as it is an advantage, however, in that instructors have no guarantee that a student will check the online updates with any degree of frequency or regularity. Outside of the classroom, a student may fail to check e-mail or other educational websites as surely as a student may fail to finish homework on time. Online materials will therefore never fully replace the time spent with a teacher in the classroom.

Online learning programs can never replace the guidance and personalized assistance that a teacher can provide, but teachers can use online learning programs as a versatile tool in their courses. If teachers are willing to make use of the possibilities that online learning have opened up to them, schools and universities will someday come to see online programs as just as much a part of the total learning experience as textbooks, notebooks, and the like.

The Blogging Teacher: Setting Up Your Classroom Page

Blogs ("web logs") are an effective way to communicate with parents and the school community about the learning and events taking place in your classroom. As a teacher, using a blog page as a method of sharing news and information can be helpful to parents (and students) by allowing them access to these things online - rather than by paper handouts and agenda writing.

By customizing features of your blog page, you can ensure that this blog page functions just as you intended and does not bring more grief than good. This is my current classroom blog page (grade 8 class). This post will describe how to get started blogging as a teacher.

Here are some simple steps to creating and using blogs as a teacher (using blogger.com):

1. Create a "google account" if you do not already have one (http://blogger.com)

2. Once activated, choose "create blog" to initiate the blog.

3. Once you have chosen a web address, title and background - you are ready to blog!

4. As a communication tool for parents, you may want to enter the "Settings" area and change some of the default options. For example:

BASIC

* Change default so your blog is not added to the blogger listing

* Change default so search engines cannot find your blog

FORMATTING

* Change default in Timestamp format so the time posted is not shown - only the date (no one needs to know when you are posting to your blog)

COMMENTS

* Change default so "Hide" is chosen for comments

* Choose "Only members of this blog can comment" - that way you can email people that you would like to participate in your online blog experience by posting comments.

* Choose "Always moderate comments"

* Choose "word verification" needed.

PERMISSIONS

* If you share a classroom or would like another teacher to be able to post writing to your blog page, you can "Add Author" by sending them an email and requesting to be an author of your blog page.

5. In the "Design" area, you may wish to remove the "Followers" gadget which is included on your blog page by default. You may also wish to remove the "About Me" page if you would like to avoid needing to give a personal description of yourself on your site.

6. I would recommend adding the "Pages" gadget to your blog page which will allow you to add new pages that deal with different subjects or areas in an organized way (e.g. News, Student Assignments, Forms and Letters, Calendars). To do this, go into "Design" and click on the "Add a Gadget" option directly below the title header. Scroll down and choose the 4th option "Pages."

7. If you create your class calendars in Microsoft Publisher, you can add them to your class page by saving them in Publisher as a "jpeg" file not a .pub file. In your blog page options, choose "New Post" and find the "Add Image" icon at the top of the post and find where you saved your calendar as a .jpeg file. You can then alter the size and alignment. This is the same process if you want to add a picture from the internet into a blog post.

You now have a blog that is setup to communicate with parents. You may wish to send home a letter describing how you wish to use this internet resource. In this letter, you will definitely want to include the blog's web address, so parents know where to find it. If your school can link it to the school's webpage that is an even better way to directing traffic to your site.

If you have any questions about this process, please comment to this post and I will do my best to steer you in the right direction. Thanks and enjoy!

Born Digital: Book Review

During the summer, I had a chance to read Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives (Palfrey & Gasser). This book is highly reflective of some of the challenges and tribulations facing the education system today. How we manage the transition to an ever-changing and digitized society will play out first and foremost within school walls.

The influx of online and high-tech tools to purvey lasting and effective educational strategy are unfolding in front of our eyes; yet, there are many reasons why we are apprehensive towards these new possibilities. Palfrey & Gasser focus on “how to balance caution with encouragement,” as pivotal in our pathway to understanding and establishing a common point on which learning can take place without compromising aspects of security, individuality and privacy. This question is monumental when you frame the degree of trust needed in students building their own skills and discovering their technological talents as a tightrope walk between protection and proliferation. How do we allow students to form their own conclusions and insights in their online world without abandoning our policies concerning their safety and our current role as stakeholders in their learning?

While many people view online social networks as timewasting and unimportant in the context of learning; Born Digital tells us that these networks allow participants to learn what it means to be friends, to develop identities, to experiment with status, and to interpret social cues. The juxtaposition created by allowing adults (coming from a human and “social” world) to develop online and technology policies in education for students that have been born into this digital and “e-social” world is obvious. How can we make the leap to a place we hear but cannot yet listen to? It’s like staring into one of those pictures for a long period of time waiting to see the actual picture emerge – trying not to blink and allow anything to break your concentration – but all the while not sure what it is you’re expecting to see. We may need blind faith in our students (at times) and the courage to try (ourselves) – by not suppressing their creativity and needs because they don’t seem to match our traditional policies of academic progress.

Many students experiment and learn identity play, an important part of the development or therapeutic stage in overall identity development, through the use of online learning environments and social networks. Our students are learning what it means to act a certain way in certain situations. How they respond to people on Facebook is different than how they project themselves in our school hallways. Digital natives think of their identity as context-specific, and therefore, are building social skills around recognizing cues and behaving appropriately on an individual and needs-specific basis.

Palfrey & Gasser caution us that, “in the digital world, people trade convenience for control all the time.” We should not be willing to sell ourselves and our interests for commercial purposes just because we want an app for our phone or feel the need to belong to online forums or friend groups. Students indeed need to learn limitations and be cautioned about their online identities before they get away from them. One example given in Born Digital is that we should be teaching kids about asterisks in online forms and what “denotes required field” actually means. Controlling the amount and kind of information given to online sites and companies should be an explicitly taught topic; yet, many of us don’t realize the significance and weight of that digital skill.

The world today is raising different-minded people. The shift from CONSUMERS TO CREATORS has been made possible through the influx of UGC (user-generated content). Our students are immersed in a world that allows them to be an active participant in the media that surrounds them. We need to cultivate places of learning that beg for their input and depend on their direction. Our students will show us the picture from inside the picture.

“If Digital Natives engage more critically with the cultures in which they are growing up, they stand a chance to remake those cultures in unprecedented ways.”

Whether it’s through the use of web 2.0 technologies in your classroom practice or a shift towards e-learning opportunities for our students to better meet their individual needs and situations, we are making the right decisions in beginning this journey.

Our role should not be to provide the vision of tomorrow’s education – it should be to finally recognize that it is our students who simply need to share it. Once we recognize that learning is through the individual lens; we can begin to shift our focus to more individual means of delivering education. The road ahead is promising and exciting…

For more information about this book, check out:

http://www.borndigitalbook.com/index.php

WIKI: http://www.digitalnative.org/