Blogging is a GO!

I work at a big school. A really big school. We not only have a technology person on staff, but a whole department with a technology budget. When I learned about the educational promises associated with blogging, I knew I wanted to try it with my students, but I've never been the type to stretch the boundaries of what our school will allow or fund. I can't say I've really been a leader in this regard, so I was nervous to try. But I decided to plunge ahead with the project, and so I set up a meeting with my assistant principal, who got me set up with the technology director for our school. He asked me to put something together to show him and pitch my idea, so prepare I did!

When I went into his office, I learned that he was a former English teacher, and he launched into a beautiful story about how he had started a radio broadcasting project with his students when he was a young student teacher. He hinted that my blogging project reminded him of what he undertook so many years ago, but he wanted me to prove to him that it was a worthy cause.

Let's just say that, with many thanks to my New Media and Literacies class, along with my wonderful classmates, I was able to win over our wonderful technology guy. My school is going to fund a closed Ning network, for my use in a classroom blogging project, which I will pilot in the coming year. I'm going to be the guinea pig for the entire district. What a feeling!

I'll let you know how it goes-- the Ning should be up and functioning after we get back from Christmas break, so I'll have more to report after that!

Poetry is Evolving

My students struggle with poetry. I teach at a school with 100% poverty-level students, and studies show that these types of students "lag behind" their classmates in making nonliteral inferences. On a recent poetry test I gave, my students couldn't understand the sarcasm in a cold reading of Stephen Crane's "Do Not Weep, Maiden, for War is Kind," taking the poem to mean that Crane is showing war as honorable and glorious, when in fact it is just the opposite. I really thought that there was no better way to prepare students to understand sarcasm than to have me as a teacher!

I decided I needed to change my tactic. Rather than bogging students down with ten-step strategies and methods for analysis, I gave them a question completed unconnected to the standards. I gave them a question about life, and asked them to start by examining their own beliefs.

How do gender stereotypes affect society and the individual?

Of course, this was a bit lofty for self-reflection, so we started with these questions:

Are boys and girls today raised differently? What are modern society's expectations for each gender? Should boys and girls be treated differently?

The ensuing conversation (and debate) lasted for an entire class period, with students slamming their hands down in frustration at not getting the last word at the end of class. Wow.

Rather than looking at poetry as something to be beaten to death and analyzed for a test, we used it as evidence to help us answer our guiding question about life. One of my students shared the following slam poem with me. It's remarkable.

I asked my students to mark down the places where the crowd reacted audibly to her powerful statements. Then, we went through and marked all of the places in the poem that were not meant to be taken literally. We discussed the endless possibilities opened up by her nonliteral language. My students came up with dazzling theories about why she describes her mother "waning" and her father "waxing." They were able to make amazing inferences once they had a reason to read it beyond "analyzing poetry."

Our students are evolving, so shouldn't our study of poetry evolve with it? Why not use literature, poetry, art, and other forms of expression as a form of exploration into the human soul? After all, that is one thing that will never change.

Research in the Digital Age

In the past few weeks, I've been guiding students through the writing of a research paper which culminates our unit on war and poetry. I began it with my honors students, since they're a little more flexible (and therefore excellent guinea pigs), and it hit me very quickly that research has undergone an enormous paradigm shift since my high school days.

I remember getting my dad to drive me to the local college library where I approached the intimidating college librarian with sweating palms and asked how to find books in this overwhelming college library. Then, I read through about a hundred books and about a thousand pages to try to find one tiny tidbit of information I could use in my paper. I painstakingly copied out the quote onto a notecard and paid ten cents to copy the page with the bibliographic information. As I arranged my notecards and drafted my paper, the time spent must have amounted to what it took Beethoven to write his Ninth Symphony.

Oh, how things have changed. Before starting the paper with my students, I did some initial exploration into the databases offered by my school district, and quickly realized that the information was not only there, but also easily accessible and only a copy-and-paste away from an outline.

I can't deny I was a little bitter.

My students would never even have to touch a printed text or write a printed word. Instead, the digital tools available made it as easy as pie to conduct research and compile the information into a coherent argument. One of the databases even contained a full citation in MLA style, so all my students had to do was copy and paste the entry into their Works Cited.

I'm so excited by the up-and-coming research tools offered by the digital age. Yet a small part of me wonders if they're missing anything by skipping so many steps. Will it take away from their ability to problem-solve? To truly dig and make decisions about where to find information? Or is it acceptable to rely on these digital tools and their ease of use, knowing that this is likely what students will face in life after high school?

I feel like a bitter Betty doing a bit of soul-searching. What do YOU think?

Google Forms for Self Assessment

This past week, grades were due. I don't know about you, but I find grading at the end of the semester (especially as a language arts teacher) to be a daunting and time-consuming prospect. In addition to finishing that stack of papers that has been piling up, double-checking missing assignments, and entering comments for each student, my district also requires that we enter a grade for students' effort and conduct, respectively. This is an amazing idea, because it allows me to separate students' effort (such as homework assignments that only count for practice, not assessment) from their true academic achievement, and also provides an incentive for them to be on their best behavior.

The only problem with these grades is that they're highly subjective. I keep track of students' completion of effort-based assignments, but a student can keep up with their homework and never say a word in class, so this percentage isn't really a true reflection of students' effort. Instead, I took a cue from my technology hero and colleague, Matt Bergman, and tried having students rate themselves using a Google Form.

(On a side note, check out his blog on Universally Designing Learning-- it's a great resource on using technology to make learning accessible to all students, and he's donating money to a local child in need for each visit to his website!)

It's easy to make a Google Form on Google Drive.

I created a form based on Matt's suggestion, asking the students what they feel they did well, what they did not do well, and what they will work on in the coming semester, in addition to giving themselves a grade for Effort and Conduct.

Here's a preview of what my form looked like (without any coding or programming on my part!):

My students' responses were then automatically collected in a spreadsheet for me to read and print. They were surprisingly honest (and accurate!), and easy to read quickly because they were typed, resulting in some great feedback that helped both my students and I to reflect on their learning this semester.

Why Blog?

I'm working on getting a blogging project approved at my school, so I've been playing around with an introductory post I would publish on my own blog to get them started. This week, I thought I'd share it with you!

“Blogging to Learn”

It seems that as the world expands, the amount of characters we are permitted to use to interact with one another grows smaller and smaller. What used to take a sentence now takes a hashtag to say. (Interestingly enough, hashtag enthusiasts claim that "hashtags are the most literal manifestation of a broader tendency of our highly connected, socially mediated environment toward greater interactivity." That's funny, because I'm not sure anyone using the hashtag"#iamtherealcookiemonster" is going to use it to connect with anyone.)

However, there exists on the internet a sort of backlash against the "principle of economy," the tendency of a language's speakers to shorten their words to the form that takes the "least effort." It seems that everyone, from Jenna Marbles to the Food Network to my high school friend Stevie, has their own blog. Why? I truly believe that we feel our expressivity is constrained by the 140-character rule. We have more intelligent things to say, words to use, and ideas to share with the world.

Why else are blogs becoming so popular? If you ask me, it's because there is something aesthetic in the human soul that craves to be released through language. Modern education continues to focus on more standardized methods of instruction and assessment, and the love of writing starts to be squashed by the bubble sheets and brief constructed responses, but there is something inside us that wants to fight back against the limitation of our expressive freedom. In this sense, the blog can be seen as a subversive act of creative release.

You have a unique voice and a perspective on the world that no one else will ever be able to match. Use your blog to explore that voice, to examine the world, and to make it better. As Ghandi apparently didn't say, you have to "be the change you wish to see in the world," but first you have to write about it.

What a blog should be...

• A place to critically examine and evaluate society, the media, popular culture, literature, films, theater, music, etc.
• A space to explore the boundaries of your fiction and nonfiction writing using advanced literary techniques
• An opportunity for thoughtful reflection, making meaning, and finding connections

What a blog should not be...

• A place to air your emotional dirty laundry, complain, or rant
• An opportunity to write inconsequential, meaningless drivel
• An advertisement for your awesomeness, insecurity, or anything else that only serves YOU and no one else

Your blog is a reflection of you and should therefore be well-thought-out, planned, revised, and always show the world the best version of yourself. Now... go dream big dreams!

Inquiry Based Learning - Timeline, Ahoy!

Digital-age students are pretty great at inquiry-based learning, and I really had no idea. 

Let me explain.

In designing a new unit around poems that are thematically tied to war, my fabulous grade-level teachers and I decided to frame our studies around a guiding question: 

How has public sentiment toward war changed throughout time? 

Rather than simply beating poems to death for the sake of passing the test, we thought we would give students a true purpose in analyzing the DIDLS (diction, imagery, details, language, and syntax) of each poem and how they contribute to tone. 

I'm actually very excited about this unit, despite knowing practically nothing about war-- which, as it turns out, is about the same for my students.

We knew that students would have to have a general background knowledge of the wars mentioned in, or that inspired, the poems we would read, so my fellow teacher had the brilliant idea to have students create a timeline. We looked at a few different websites, and each decided which one to pilot in our classrooms. I decided to use Tiki-Toki.com, which takes some practice to work, but is very functional (it even allows students to add events in BC and AD).

Rather than give students the background information, I helped to guide them through an internet search, answering the 5 W's (who, what where, when and why) for each war and finding an appropriate image from the web to represent each. I helped them to brainstorm ways to find the information, but aside from that, they figured out how to get the information they needed on their own. Students are so used to doing a Google search to satisfy their curiosity and answer their own questions that it was very natural for them to gather information on 8 different wars in a very short span of time. They didn't realize it, but they were really performing what Dewey would call "productive inquiry," or "deliberately seeking what we need in order to do what we want to do."

Then, they had to plot their information on a timeline they created on Tiki-Toki. I modeled the use of the website for them in about 10 minutes, making sure to inject a little humor to keep them interested.

There was a definite learning curve in using this website, but once I told students to ask a friend before they asked me a question about the website, the students began problem-solving on their own!

The final products looked something like this:

Beautiful, fluid, and able to be viewed in multiple ways-- even in 3D! As we move through the poetry unit, we will plot each poem on the timeline, making notes about the tone and theme, tracking how attitudes toward war have changed over time. This project will dovetail right into our research paper, and the timeline will serve as a broad knowledge base from which they conduct further inquiries.

Cool, right?

One Site, Infinite (Vocabulary Learning) Possibilities

This year, I discovered a brilliant new vocabulary-enriching website that has become my go-to dictionary. Yet it's so much more than a dictionary. Imagine that Merriam Webster, Quizlet, a Google web search, and your favorite, funny English teacher were all combined into one site-- that site would be Vocabulary.com.

We know that using the internet can enhance and multiply the effects of vocabulary instruction in the classroom, so I was excited to find that this site blends many of those elements together. You can easily use this to supplement instruction, or even send students to this site to go on a vocabulary quest and learn more about the words (to fill in templates, teach the words to the class, and many more possibilities...).

Here is a shakedown of a few of the fabulous features of the site:

Since I just used this word in class discussion today, I thought it would be fun to investigate. This is the top half of the page for the word seedy. So many exciting things are happening here.

Let's start from the top.

Okay, so half the fun of my job is in hearing students pronounce words in ways that sound ridiculous, but we do want them to sound smart, don't we? This site pronounces the word for students in a very intelligent-sounding voice.

Then, there's the "definition." (Note the quotes and imagine Dr. Evil, if you please.)

There's nothing worse than a boring dictionary definition. This site seems like it was made by a human being with wit and charm, as the "definition" is more like an "explanation"-- and a knee-slapper at that.

Then comes the dreaded etymology.

Dictionaries also having a way of making the history of a language sound thoroughly uninteresting, when really, students are intrigued by word origins when I treat them like little nuggets of little-known information. The etymology here is much friendlier and more engaging.

The next part is going to blow your mind.

Not only is the word family (and all its forms) shown, but it also visualizes for students how often the word and its variants are used on the internet. Sometimes we introduce words that have fallen out of style, and this makes it easier for students to see just how weird the looks they'll get from strangers will be when they use it in a sentence.

Underneath that, you can browse real-time usage examples from around the internet-- in the news, in pop culture-- I've even seen literature excerpts on here. On one page, students are given multiple exposures of the word in varying contexts. Talk about learning a word efficiently.

At the bottom, almost as an afterthought, are the more "traditional" definition, examples, synonyms, and antonyms.

The site easily displays multiple meanings of a word so students can see the bigger picture and know that when Grandma is talking about her seedy brother-in-law, she might mean a number of things...

Last but certainly not least, teachers can make vocabulary lists that students can access, save, and learn using the quiz game and spelling bee.

Who wouldn't want to be in a spelling bee by herself? Instant glory, my friend.

Hopefully, you've learned some of the wonderful ways that Vocabulary.com can create a meaningful, even titillating, vocabulary experience. Now pardon me while I look up "titillating"...