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"...

Adventures in Scriptwriting

Have you ever had an idea for a lesson or a that made you question your sanity? In teaching honors English for the first time this year, I've found myself doing that a lot. I blame it on the fact that I'm not far enough removed from higher education, and therefore I have (almost) impossibly high expectations about what my amazing little minds can accomplish.

They never fail to amaze me, though, even when I have my doubts.

Before I explain the concept behind this multi-step synthesis project based on Edgar Allan Poe's "The Black Cat," I have to say that I put hours of mental sweat into planning it and consulted multiple colleagues to work out as many of the "kinks" as possible, so that it was ready to roll on the day I introduced it...

...and was formally observed teaching it. Like I said, probably a little insane.

Anyway, here's the concept!

Step 1 - Read and Analyze "The Black Cat"

We took about two days to read, discuss, and analyze the short story by Edgar Allan Poe, focusing on the skills of the horror unit (diction and imagery contributing to mood, characterization and narrator reliability, etc.). We also discussed whether or not the narrator was responsible for his actions, including all the possible factors that might influence that decision.

Step 2 - Investigate the Insanity Defense of the 19th Century

In order to fold in a high-level, complex nonfiction text, I used excerpts from an article by John Cleman that described the legal aspects of the insanity defense as it was used in Edgar Allan Poe's time. Although many characteristics are similar to today's insanity defense, people of Poe's time were also determined to be insane on the basis of things like phrenology (which was, in effect, studying the bumps of the head to determine personality traits, including sanity). The students read the article excerpt and created this how-to guide to paraphrase their understanding (I typed in a few examples):

"How to Be Declared Insane in 19th Century England"

Step 3 - Put the Narrator on Trial-- in Script Form!

The natural connection between the short story and the historical background (at least, in my mind) was to have students use the insanity defense of Poe's time to argue the culpability of the narrator in "The Black Cat." However, I wanted this to be a moment of individual ownership and serious thinking for my students, so simply having another mock trial in class wasn't enough for me.

Instead, I decided I wanted them to write a script describing the trial.

You're probably thinking I'm crazy, that there are too many steps involved, that students won't know how to write a script... Well, luckily for me, I spent hours laboring over this project baby, chatting with my wonderful fellow teachers about what challenges they might face in attempting such a task, and I came prepared for these hurdles. I scaffolded the steps thus:

1. Introduce and explain the project requirements
2. Model how to turn prose into script with silly examples
3. Analyze my sample script starter - how I used script conventions and created mood and character
4. For some classes, we even got students up to form a miniature court room to help them visualize the scene

My sample script used to analyze mood and character

The students felt challenged, and empowered, and a little scared... in fact, one left the room (during my formal observation, no less) saying in awe, "Mrs. Vinton makes us think REALLY hard...!" I just laughed and told her I would take that criticism any day.

What does any of this have to do with new media literacies? The point of this philosophy is to use as many different modes as possible to engage and challenge our students, and I felt like using fiction, historical nonfiction, and creative writing all in one project hit so many different modes that I could hardly ignore sharing it with you.

That, and I'm just THAT pumped up about this project.

Screencasting - Taking Teaching on the Road

A new tool that I've been playing around with this week is screencasting. Although it's undoubtedly true that nothing can ever replace direct instruction, I certainly feel like we can make it more personalized (and portable!) with technology.

I found two excellent uses for screen casting this week that just tickled my students pink.

Tutorials and Lectures

Although I've used Educreations in the past to create tutorials "flipped-classroom"-style, I was always frustrated by the fact that it was limited to a white-board-like screen, a finger acting as a marker, and whatever images you took the time to drag into the frame. (And if you wanted text, such as a worksheet, you had to screenshot it or make it an image first. Ugh.)

An Educreations tutorial I made for poetry

Although I know teachers who use Educreations to thunderous applause from students (the social studies teacher next door to me last year was a HUGE hit when she put her lectures into this format), it is fairly tough to use with the English Language Arts classroom. I don't know about you-all, but I don't do a whole lot of lecturin'.

This week, I had to make a screencast for class, and it set off a little lightbulb in my head. Rather than showing students on the projector how to use a certain website, for example, and getting assaulted with questions later ("What did you say again?"), why not record the instructions and inject a little humor?

To introduce to them a new vocabulary site I wanted to use, I made a tutorial using QuickTime, which I then uploaded directly to Edmodo for them to access. Since you obviously can't access their Edmodo class, here's a condensed version of what I gave to students. (Please note and forgive my sarcasm-- I promise, the students are in no way emotionally scarred by my gentle verbal ribbing).

My students were cracking up as they watched this. One commented, "She talks to that just like she talks to us!" I can guarantee they were more engaged than they would have been if I had just pulled up the site on my laptop and projected it while I talked. The students got really into the new site I was modeling and wanted to log on right away to start using it for their vocabulary homework.

• Cool discovery, by the way-- I had so much trouble figuring out where to upload my enormous QuickTime file that I finally remembered about Screencast-O-Matic, an amazing site that lets you easily record and store screencasts for your students.

Conferences, Sans Me

The other cool way I got to use screencasting this week was by using it to record myself making comments and giving feedback on their PowerPoint projects. I went through the project slide by slide, made suggestions, and avoided telling them their grade-- purely comments and suggestions. Then, I emailed the link to students to watch outside of class. No homework requirement necessary-- once students saw that there was a personalized video waiting, they were more than excited to have our one-on-one conference (well, if you can still call it that when I'm not really there physically).

A screen shot of a video I used to give feedback on a project

I never would have had time to meet with each student in our very short classes, so this was a perfect solution, tailored to my schedule and my students'. (And it was just a little fun for both of us).

Best of all? I actually had students emailing me back, thanking me for my feedback. How great is that?

Digital Media Literacy and... Bath Salts?!

When I set out on this new media and literacies adventure, I have to admit that I had some misconceptions about exactly what it would mean. Like many teachers, I thought that using new media would mean simply incorporating technology into my classroom. How wrong I was!

I came to learn that new media and literacy was about finding authentic purposes for technology use in the classroom (which I've explored in my first posts), but more importantly, about teaching students the critical literacy skills they need to survive in a digital age. According to the NAMLE Core Principles of Media Literacy Education:

"Media Literacy Education requires active inquiry and critical thinking about the messages we receive and create... All media and message contain embedded values and points of view" and, if we are not careful, "media messages can influence beliefs, attitudes, values, behaviors, and the democratic process." 

Media literacy is clearly about more than simply switching out the chalk board for the Smart Board. In fact, we can teach students to critically read new media without ever touching a computer!

Bath Salts!

So, why bath salts, you ask? Well, I was polling a few students last week as they worked on a group project, asking them what news stories they were interested in reading in conjunction with our horror unit. A student reminded me about the incident in Miami last year when a man allegedly took bath salts and ate another man's face. I found this article from NPR and thought it would be an excellent one to use to examine the diction (word choice), details used, and the author's tone.

The author's word choices, such as that the victim was "homeless" and is "fighting for his life," paint a picture of a heartless attacker that are clearly heavily opinionated. Through his choice of what details to include (and leave out), the author attempts to influence the public's opinion of this man-- and of bath salts in general. In fact, after this incident, several key laws were passed relating to this "new" drug.

So, what's the problem? The man never took bath salts.

Take another look at the wording of the article-- it claims that there is "a theory emerging" that he was "high on 'bath salts'"-- hardly conclusive proof. And yet, we read it as fact.

In teaching students to critically read new media, I will have them read and analyze this article using critical questions such as what might be left out of this story, what details are used to portray the subject of the story, and how it could influence our opinion. See the worksheet here.

After they more closely read and analyze this article, I will have them read another perspective on the story-- actually, an analysis of another take on the story.

Though this version points out many holes in the original story, it is also highly biased and has some flaws in reasoning-- at one point, the author states,

If Aguilar said bath salts were the new form of LSD, Adams would concur that you "can call it the new LSD," even though he knows LSD and bath salts are completely different drugs....

He claims to know what the police officer who shot the attacker is thinking. Clearly, though there are two sides to every story, every side has its own agenda. Teaching students to examine the inherent biases in the news will help them to form more reasoned conclusions for themselves.

Digital Discussion - Harder Than it Sounds!

Last week, I tried my first digital discussion on Edmodo. I gave the students the task of exploring a website that would give them some information on the historical backdrop of the short story we were about to begin reading. They were to investigate the site, read the information, watch the movie clip, and then go wherever the site-- and their curiosity-- took them. Then, they were to post an insight on the Edmodo link.

I was excited by the possibilities presented by this online form of bringing up interesting points from the reading. The students, I thought, would be challenged by having to present something new to the conversation, rather than all of them repeating the same detail. In addition, I thought that the online format would encourage them to hold a discussion, since they all spend hours commenting on each other's posts on various forms of social media.

I quickly learned that there are a few drawbacks to using Edmodo for discussion.

Requiring a post doesn't automatically facilitate discussion. Some students simply wrote throw-away comments that didn't encourage any sort of response. On the other hand, a few students asked questions that I found insightful and thought-provoking, but no one answered. And why should they? This wasn't a requirement, and they only had one night to complete the assignment. One student in particular asked challenging questions about human nature that I'm fairly certain no one saw except me.

What a waste of valuable thinking! I wouldn't consider this assignment a complete failure, because some great ideas came out of it-- both from my students and from me (on my end, how to better hold a "discussion" in the future!).

This week, I'm going to try a different format. I searched the web for a discussion site that allows for students to post direct replies to each other's comments, but that is still private in order to protect my students. I found a site called Collaborize Classroom, which has a variety of discussion features, including the ability to attach a poll question (yes or no, multiple choice, even a voting option that allows students to suggest answers) to a discussion thread.

I'm going to make a few changes to the way I frame the discussion as well:

• Making the assignment a week-long project to give students time to think and make meaningful replies
• Requiring students to compose thoughtful replies to each other's posts
• Posting rules of online discussion etiquette to ensure that students treat this as an academic discussion, not an informal, social chat

Here's an example of one discussion prompt:

I'm hoping that this way of holding a digital discussion will more closely resemble the types of online conversations I'm used to participating in for graduate school, which is another plus-- if students do pursue higher education, they will be used to composing in this format.

Do you have any suggestions for how I will implement this discussion this week? Have you ever tried anything similar? I'd love to hear your thoughts!

Digital Fail

After the first few readings we did for my new graduate class in Theory and Practice: Teaching New Media and Literacies, I was hit with a variety of emotions-- I felt empowered, curious, and maybe just a little overwhelmed. My students this year all have laptops -- was I wasting a valuable resource in lieu of the "old fashioned" methods of instruction? Was the growing disengagement in my classrooms the result of worse students, or archaic teaching practices? Faced with emotional overload, I took to Facebook and polled my friends and family. My question was as follows:

I wasn't prepared for the 32 comments that followed in the coming day. Overwhelmingly, my friends and family realized that the majority of the reading and writing they do in the working world is through digital means. They suggested that their teachers had not prepared them for this part of their careers, and that it would be interesting if teachers today could do just that. (A few of my older family friends also reprimanded me for not teaching grammar to the no-good, comma-misplacing hooligans of today, but that's another story).

Feeling like a media literacy pioneer, I set out to digitize my classroom. The next day, I required students to sign up for a Google account so that they could all access and collaborate on the same document on Google Drive. Some students signed up for an account in a minute, then found themselves completely unable to focus on the next task they were to work on as I spent the following 20 minutes trying to help out the students who had been locked, out asked for a verification phone number, or just generally unable to work the internet intuitively. Finally, though, we were all signed up (well, mostly).

That night, I got an impassioned email from a houseparent (I teach at a residential school) suggesting that I had wandered into dangerous territory that might conflict with one of the school's policies by having students make email accounts. However, they wanted to help me legitimize my new project and get it approved by all the right channels.

I decided to deliver a very impassioned reply myself and espoused the many ideals of digital media literacy we have been reading about in the past week. The houseparent jumped on board and thanked me for my dedication to students. Win!

The next day, my optimistic bubble had been refilled, and I set about having students collaborate on the document. It was slow going, the students' excitement quickly turned into disruption, and we barely got anything accomplished. I felt like giving up on the whole enterprise. Then, slowly but surely, I started to pick up the reins and figure out how I needed to scaffold (and constrain) this collaborative mini-project. One the students knew what I expected, and I had modeled it fully and effectively, the students were hooked. I even had a student log online over the weekend and start filling in a document we were going to use in class the next day! Can you imagine?

A collaborative brainstorming document edited by my Honors English class

In The Socially Networked Classroom, Kist describes the "sometimes messy first steps of educators who are attempting to include social networking inside real schools and who are grappling with all the challenges that come along with this new kind of teaching" (7). It's important to remember, I suppose, that Rome wasn't built in a day, and that I won't become a digital literacy whiz overnight. The payoff will be worth all the struggle-- at least, that's what I keep telling myself!