Writing for Myself: Writing to Teach

I always really enjoy reading Will Richardson's posts. I do, I really do. I think he's advanced a lot of educators' thinking about blogs, but I'm crinkling up my face today as I read his latest post. Actually, let's go back a few weeks ago to the "teaching is dead" post, and now we have the "reading is dead" post along with his vast assertion that most, if not all students see Of Mice and Men as irrelevant.

If students see Of Mice and Men as irrelevant, then it is the fault of teachers. Are they giving them quizzes everyday over "who is the 'prince of the ranch'?" Are they creating opportunities where students can converse and write in a variety of genres about what they are reading? Are teachers allowing students to read in class--to show students that reading is not just homework and that it deserves a valued place in our classroom. This may sound like a slam against teachers, and it is not. I'm really arguing that Richardson is wrong. Reading is not dead, and just because blogging is exciting it doesn't mean reading is dead and classic books are irrelevant.

Why is he such a naysayer all of a sudden?

Writing for Myself: Writing to Teach

I just read Barb's post about the NWP/NCTE convention which you can find at the Teaching with Blogs link. Barb and Laura went to these cool sessions, and I attended some very practical sessions that weren't related to the classroom. I went to a session that explained how to collect and input data for the NWP Inverness surveys that they do each year to get federal funding. This will be helpful because I can use that information to show how many contact hours our satellite has with teachers, how many students our teachers work with, and how many counties and school districts we are impacting.

On Friday, Barb and I presented about the blog and the data I've been collecting. I think Barb and I both felt very proud. We've learned some good stuff about educational blogging and we have insights that we can share with teachers. I saw a lot of attendees nodding their heads as spoke, and Barb and I both had several people come up to us who wanted to exchange emails and find out more.

Will Richardson's been depressed about whether or not school's will shift to accept this technological presence. He's mostly thinking "not" right now. There are huge obstacles for teachers who want to try something new--like blog with students. Don't get down, Will, but we may need to take baby steps for awhile.

It can be done though. There are many people in higher ed who blog with their classes, and they share with one another. One insight that Barb had was that anyone researching technology tools in a classroom spent very little time talking about or with the teacher. She was right. They focused on the student, and the teacher was an afterthought. The students' perspective is important, but in our research, if we don't address the teachers' perspective--the people who have to change the way they have thought about teaching and learning--then we aren't helping other teachers to initiate this change in their teaching.

Thursday afternoon Diane from UMSL and I shared how the Missouri Writing Project Network set up the Literacy Academies in collaboration with DESE. The audience was people from other sites who wanted to know the steps that occurred as we started these academies. We created a timeline for the presentation, and it was a good process to sit down and record what had happened in the last year.

I missed a blogging session at 8:00 a.m. on Saturday. I went to a session on New Teacher Initiatives presented by Winthrop Writing Project. Thank goodness Laura went to the session, so she can update me. I also attended Roy Fox and Amy Lannin's session on MMEET--Mizzou's Men for Excellence in Elementary Teaching. They shared the research they are doing with a group of male teachers--interviews, classroom observations, blogging, and focus groups. It was interesting to hear some of their early observations. Several people from Kansas State were there.

From 12:00-2:00 on Saturday, Jane from Prairieland, Amy from MWP, Diane from Gateway, Dr. Fox, and I met to discuss writing a research grant for some work the MWPN is doing.

Sunday morning I attended Lanette's session. She included information on her session. Her dissertation was on girls' personal blogging practices. In her presentation, she explained how what she learned their could be incorporated into the classroom.

National Writing Project Annual Conference

What do you say? If you've been to a National Writing Project event, it's overwhelming in the best way. For the first time, we had representatives (besides me) from Springfield. Barb and Laura came, two high school teachers who will participate in, hopefully, our first invitational summer institute next summer.

I was just telling Barb about the Red Cedar Writing Project's NWP annual conference "homework." They have their TC's blog the conference in exchange for paying for travel expenses. They met before the conference and cleared up any technical problems. They learned to blog and podcast too. That's an awesome idea that I will be stealing.

I'll talk more about NWP and NCTE when I'm not quite so tired.

Blogging and Language

In Sunday's New York Times, there was a front page article called "Sites Invite Online Mourning, But Don't Speak Ill of the Dead."

In the last few weeks, the focus of my research has been exploring the blog posts on the class blog that are either fairly negative or sometimes outright racist. I really wanted to ignore this part of the class blog because I felt like if I "reported" this it would give teachers ammunition to say "Ah, that's why we shouldn't blog. Kids will use inappropriate language."

Well, they use inappropriate language anyway, and I'm discovering that the blog exposes the innerworkings and relationships of the kids. Some of these "negative" or "inappropriate" blogs are really important topics that teachers should be talking about.

But, it's not just the kids who comment or post inappropriately. I felt (oddly enough) better after reading the article because it discussed how 30% of Legacy.com's budget goes to hiring screeners--people who delete inappropriate comments posted to obituaries.

Nice.

For me, this made me feel even more sure that it is important to discuss how we post and how we comment. These conversations need to be had. Real audiences are impacted by our comments. In my interviews, I notice that students don't really believe that there is a larger audience "out there."

The teacher I'm working with has been doing a lot of screening in the first few weeks of the blog. It's strange because that didn't happen as much in the spring semester.

A Talk on Blogging

I was reading Barb Ganley's post about teaching a new set of students who weren't taking to blogging maybe as quickly as she would have liked. She had them do a paper version of commenting with sticky notes. In the pilot study last year, I found that students didn't comment too much. They posted a lot, but they didn't extend conversations. So, Barb and I made a decision to scaffold the blogging a bit more, and we tried something similar. We didn't use sticky notes, but I like this idea.

She wrote

But I can't make them like it or even do it. That's their responsibility. Their commitment to make. Yes, I want all my students to have this experience connecting with one another, with themselves, and with the world through social software--but they don't all have to take to this kind of interaction at all. As long as they gain skill in the use of this medium for this kind of deep learning, they can choose to use it or not as they see fit in the future. I've learned not to be disappointed when any one group doesn't really take to blogging. And so far, this group of first-years are moving into blogging versus posting drafts and assignments to blogs, quite slowly. They love being connected to one another; they crave the feedback, but it takes longer for them to see conversation-in-writing as part of thinking-and-learning.

I'm giving a talk about blogging to some teachers on Friday. Even before blogging came about, I decided I couldn't be the police in the class. What she writes above goes for almost everything we do in teaching. She goes on to explain that she had to make some changes in her teaching and in how she approached blogging with this set of students.

I don't know. Her post made me think about some things that I might need to address with teachers on Friday.

Who teaches preservice teachers technology?

I'm teaching a methods course for middle and high school preservice teachers. I went to an area school, mostly rural, and observed one of my students teaching an English IV class. It's a brand new school, and it looks like a huge hotel.

The teacher had this beautiful LCD projector (is that what's it called) hanging from the ceiling and a beautiful white screen in the front. Computers lined the sides of the room. I was so envious. I remember how I got computers in my room. I heard the business classes were getting new computers, and I spent hours after school negotiating to take some of their old ones (really old ones) and then filling out the serial numbers on the paperwork to be able to transfer them to my room. Then I started haggling with other teachers to get tables from their rooms. Then there was the begging I did to get chairs to go with the tables. I have no idea where I found the energy. We didn't have the Internet though. We used the computers for our writing workshop, and I brought in our mobile laptop computer lab for the internet. In a school of 2000 students and I don't know how many teachers, I was one of about two who used that lab on a regular basis.

Here's my point: The student didn't even consider using any of that technology. They take some technology class from Education, and I'm not sure what they learn. I asked if she thought about using it, and she said no.

I had given the class a "thought for the day" at the end of class on Monday night about taking risks. Here they have this great opportunity to teach and practice their teaching. Even after all of our talk I sometimes find they lecture. They talk, talk, talk, and don't show the students how to do anything. I know they are learning and it takes practice. The main point is we have to show new teachers (these 20 some years olds who have lived technology) how to use this stuff and become a part of this Web 2.0.