Culturetopia

It's a bit embarrassing to admit but it has only been recently that I have started listening to NPR on a consistent basis. As soon as I saw the podcast assignment I knew I would end up on the NPR Podcast Directory in order to find my podcast.  I really enjoy listening to the Culturetopia series and I think the possibilities are endless for its use in the English Language Arts classroom.  Each Culturetopia podcast covers the best arts, movies, books and culture events from that week and combines news coverage with interviews and commentary.

The NPR Culturetopia podcast that aired on March 10, 2010 was one I already had bookmarked to hopefully use in my eventual classroom.  Among other topics, they talk with a first time novelist, Heidi Durrow, who writes the story of a biracial girl and the things she goes through in the book The Girl Who Fell from the Sky. I would love to have the opportunity to teach that book and then give the students the opportunity to hear from the author what she was thinking and/or feeling when she wrote this story.  Since the book is based on a true story, the students would then have the opportunity to write their own personal narratives and present them in any form that they feel best expresses their story.  They could create their own podcast, a digital video, scrapbook/collage, song or poem, traditional paper, etc. Student choice is so important if we truly want to receive meaningful work from our students, it has to mean more to them then simply a grade on a paper.

Shelfari

Shelfari allows you to build a virtual bookshelf to show-off books you've read, are currently reading, or hope to read in the future. As you add books to the virtual shelf, you can add your own critique and commentary so others can read your thoughts, opinions and ratings.  Shelfari also provides you with the opportunity to connect with other readers and see what's on their bookshelves. A community of readers can be formed by creating a space where people can seek out book recommendations or create an online book group to discuss favorites.  If you're unsure what book to read next Shelfari can assist you in making that decision by providing you with what other members are reading and what books are most popular overall or sorted by genre.

I'd like to tie this tool into the in2Books feature of ePals.  Students would create their own virtual bookshelf with two books that they would like their pen pal to read, their pen pal in turn would also select two books for the student to read.  Using their virtual bookshelves, the students and pen pals would read and review their own books and that of their pen pal.  This would provide opportunity for discussion, new perspectives as well as expanding their literary choices.  I think it would be interesting to also require that students read one book from one of their peer's Shelfari bookshelves as well.  Reflection pieces and/or journals could be implemented throughout the process to see what student's are discussing and learning from the project and their pen pal.

In2 Global Learning

 This course keeps amazing me with how much learning and education has changed since I was in high-school...and I've only been out of high school for 7 years! The ePals website was a lot of fun to explore, two of it's features - in2Books and SchoolBlog - really grabbed my attention though.

This feature seems like a great answer to the safety and accessibility issues that often arise when educators attempt to use blogs in the classroom.  It provides classroom only and parents only access, search capabilities to easily sort though past posts and material, multimedia hosting ability, as well as calendar and survey tools.  I think the best way to incorporate this tool into the classroom is to have it basically set up at the start of the school year and use it as a basic outline for what the rest of the school year holds.  There can be individual sections for different texts, discussion boards for students to respond to one another, a FAQ section for parents and contact information for the students and school.  All handouts could be posted on the blog so students can easily keep up-to-date with lessons if they are out of class.  Blogs are definitely not a passing fad in education so I think it's important that we embrace them, as meaningful and responsibly as possible.

As an English teacher, how could I not focus on the reading feature?  With this feature, students are matched up with adult pen-pals that they "meet" by writing introductory get to know you letters.  Students study five different genres (realistic fiction, social studies, biography, folklore, science) and read one book from each of those genres.  The students then discuss the book with their pen-pal while learning about it in their own classroom.  I absolutely love this idea.  It would be so much fun to have students reading a canonical text (like Shakespeare) and have the opportunity to communicate their thoughts and opinions and learn more about the text from an adult (who they've had time to get to know) perspective.  The teacher could assign the same questions to the students and the pen pals and see how their answers match-up or differ, it then provides the opportunity for learning to take place on both sides.  It also gives the students the chance to feel like an "expert" and they're opinion is being heard and understood.  It could be an extremely empowering experience for students.

Bubblr Bash

 I had a lot of fun exploring Bublr, a tool that allows an individual to create comic strips using photos from Flickr.  This tool seems like it was developed for the English Language Arts classroom (I'm only slightly biased!) and has endless possibilities.  Students search Flickr for images by putting key words into the "tag" box and then work to add text into the conversation bubbles.  One of the first ways I would like to use it in the classroom would be as an introductory activity at the start of the year.  Students would be able to create a comic strip using images that they think describes themselves, their personality and their lives, the strips could then be shared with classmates to learn about one another and begin building a strong classroom community.  Students could also create comic strips using images that illustrate vocabulary, themes from texts, character dialogue interactions, scene and setting interpretations and so much more.  I think it would be great to see the undoubtedly different images students use to describe the same scene/event/character/theme from a text that is being read in class!  These comic strips can be shared and published providing students with a wider audience.  They can be added to a classroom blog or school website allowing other classes, teachers and parents to view what students are working on.

You can view my comic strip in more depth by clicking here.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/julianb/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Flickr: Creative Commons

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Others are allowed to copy, distribute, display and perform your copyrighted work, as well as any other works based upon your original work. Credit must go to the original producer of the work. 

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Others are allowed to use your work and are required to give you credit for using your work.  They cannot develop or base any of their photos based on your work. 

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Others are allowed to use your work and are required to give you credit for any photos they may use.  Others cannot develop their own works based on your original photos or use your original photos for any kind of commercial use.  

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Others are allowed to use your original photos and are required to give you credit.  Others can create new work of their own based on your photos as long as they are not used for any commercial purposes.  

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Others are allowed to use your original photos and are required to give you credit.  Others can develop their own works based on your original photos as long as it is not for a commercial purpose.  Others who use your original photos need to have a license that is identical to the license that governs your original work in order to  distribute their derivative works.

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Others are allowed to use your original photos - to copy, display, distribute - and any derivatives of your work and are required to give you credit.  Others are required to have the same license that governs the original work in order to distribute any derivative work.

 

http://www.flickr.com/photos/kharied/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Micro-Overload?

After reading a few of the articles on microblogging I became a bit torn on what to think. On one hand, I was really impressed with the possibilities of digital storytelling and how it could be used to get students reading and writing in the ELA classroom without having to stare mindlessly at a Folger Shakespeare book. Students are able to compose in so many ways beyond the traditional pen and paper that it is a necessity to invite digital literacy into the classroom. I can think of so many uses for microblogging in the classroom: writing tweets in the voice of major characters for whatever text is being read, keeping up to date with new technology and what's happening in educational communities across the world, having classroom twitter-pals instead of the old fashioned pen-pals, creating classroom Twitter accounts to keep parents and absent students up-to-date. One thing that I like best about Twitter is the brief character limit, I think this would be extremely useful in the ELA classroom to help take away the intimidation factor that many struggling writers face. Perhaps an assignment of writing tweets would be more accessible to some students than writing an essay or research paper but they would still be able to demonstrate their knowledge effectively.

As much as I love learning about all of these things and hope to incorporate them into my future classroom, this article on academic tweeting addressed the concerns I have about all of this. I think there's an extreme danger in taking all of these things that students enjoy, and learn from, and making them "just school". One way to avoid that is to not bombard students with these new things. During student teaching I made the assumption that of course all my students were using blogs and MySpace and Facebook and tried to incorporate them into my lessons. First lesson I learned: never assume and the second lesson I learned: there is no "everyone" using "everything", especially when it comes to adolescents.  As educators we have to truly think about why we are incorporating these things into our classrooms and ensure that we are using them in meaningful and purposeful ways, not simply using them for the sake of using them. I would hope that we wouldn't teach a text just because "everybody was reading it" and we should be careful to approach technology the same way.

Lightbulb

I got a little carried away with adding blogs to my RSS feeds so it was hard to narrow it down to one!  I finally decided upon the Bright Ideas blog that is published by the School Library Association of Victoria.  The Viddix post was interesting to me because it was a tool I had not yet heard of but could see how useful it would be in the classroom.  Viddix allows users to put documents, web content, powerpoints, photos and surveys next to video content and then easily upload and embed them.  I think students could get very creative with this tool and it would be interesting to see how they incorporate multiple aspects of technology into one cohesive piece.

Ning Me

I have used a Ning in a few graduate classes and have enjoyed the experience. Our classes used it as a discussion board, a place to upload, share and comment on one another's writing pieces, post podcasts we created and upload links and videos we thought related to the class. It is very user-friendly and would be a great way to extend your classroom onto the web. Students and parents would be kept updated, discussions could continue and a community of practice could be forged. 

A Ning that I have been a member of and find extremely useful and interesting is the University at Buffalo's English Education Ning. There are discussion boards that involve my content area as well as what is going on in the world of education, people share job openings, and you can network with current and past students of UB's English education program. One of the best things about this Ning is that it is constantly being updated and added to, it is never stagnant. I will be completing the education program at the end of this semester and have utilized the Ning in my job search.

Mold or be Molded

The learner of today is like a lump of clay. The learner is like this raw, unshaped form that is not yet aesthetically pleasing but through outside instruction and guidance as well as a learner's own internal desires and goals, the clay can be shaped into a masterpiece. Siemen's article explains connectivism as a way to "provide insight into learning skills and tasks needed for learners to flourish in a digital era". I was hesitant to use clay as an analogy because it has little relation to our technologically advanced world but he also goes on to describe learning as "a lasting charged state brought about as a result of experiences and interactions with context or other people". A  lump of clay will have gone through several transformations before turning into a final product. Learners are always being molded and shaped through their interactions in their own minds and the ones they engage in through the various networks available to them.

I initially struggled to wrap my head around Siemen's theory because I couldn't think of a time where learning ever lacked "connectivity". Listening to Siemen explain in his video of The Changing Nature of Knowledge helped clear a few things up for me. Technology is changing so rapidly in our world today that I agree that we have "to continue to stay current...as knowledge changes" and that we have to utilize our "network of knowledge" because "the network becomes the learning". Students will come into our classrooms with a variety of networks - home, family, friends, social, digital - to ignore these vital networks and not incorporate into the classroom would be a huge disservice to our students. Technology will only continue to advance and we must stay as current and connected as possible.

Wake-Up Call

Pay Attention made me do exactly that. I consider myself a student of technology as well as a user but have never thought of myself as a teacher of technology. That realization gave me pause. Is it enough that I'm aware of all these technological tools that are out there that my students may or may not be using? The answer is no. I not only have to be aware of them but be aware of the vital role they play in my student's lives as well as how to use that technology to engage them in the classroom lessons.

The video provided shocking statistics on the hours adolescents will spend engaged with different aspects of technology, it is an absolute waste to not take advantage of the digital literacies our student's will have and begin to incorporate them into our classrooms. The video found here helps show how vital technological awareness will be to our student's future success. It is time for the educators of America to wake up and utilize all the advantages technology has to offer us and our students.

Safe Blogging - Tips and Ideas

• Make sure that the school, administration and parents are aware and on the same page about the role a blog will play in your classroom.
• Ensure that students can't be identified - use only first names or generic pseudonymous and make sure students know not to post any identifying details about themselves, friends or family, location and school.
• Clearly explain to students that they are expected to conduct themselves on the blog just as they would in the classroom - using appropriate language and responding helpfully and respectfully to classmates.
  
• If possible, enable some comment moderation so nothing unsuitable or inappropriate can be posted.
• Limiting blog access so only students, parents, teachers and administrators have access to the blog.  If possible remove it from search engine features and make it private.
• Having students and parents sign a permission slip stating that they will not share or give out the blog address, user log-ins and passwords.
• Consider a class blog as opposed to individual student blogs, this will make it easier to monitor content.

Using Blogs in the Classroom

Before coming up with a few ways I could use blogs in the classroom I took a step back to really think about the why factor of blogs.  As educators we can’t ignore emerging technologies.  What our students are doing at home will always affect what happens at school.  Students are using, and becoming proficient, at social networking, blogging, instant messaging and it would be extremely wasteful - and borderline irresponsible - to not incorporate student's out of school literacies into our classrooms.  If we can embrace these technologies and can help students learn to use them responsibly we can add exciting new elements to our classroom lessons. 

Blog Ideas

• One way I believe I could use blogs in the ELA classroom would be with literature circles.  During the reading of a novel students are expected to summarize and react to the book and any other supplemental materials with their thoughts, opinions, ideas and critiques.  Using a blog with this activity could help encourage students to read and revise their thoughts as well as comment on the work of their classmates.  This helps to create more of an ongoing conversation that can constantly be added to and referred back to rather than a stagnant written response that gets lost and forgotten in a locker or binder.  This activity would meet NYS ELA standard 2 - Students will read, write, listen, and speak for literary response and expression.

• A blog would be an ideal tool to engage in a collaborative project with another class.  With the power of the web, classes across the hall or across the country from one another can work together.  An English class can collaborate with a history class while they are reading a historical novel in order to learn more about the time period and significant people and events.  Students can contribute to an online discussion board to help facilitate everyone's learning and encourage questions.  This would help students develop a deeper and more complex understanding of the novel.  This activity would meet NYS ELA standard 4 - Students will read, write, listen, and speak for social interaction.

• Thanks to many of my graduate school classes one of the first uses for a blog that comes to my mind is using it for a class discussion board.  Time for discussion in class is limited and some students may not feel comfortable participating. Extending this process to a blog allows everyone to participate, often with more thought and a richness that’s not possible in real time.  Students can explore and respond thoughtfully to the text in ways that aren't always possible within the confines of the traditional classroom.  The discussion board can be used when the class is reading a novel in order to respond to certain passages, key quotes or general themes.  A teacher can have a weekly question or prompt to get students thinking and constantly writing.  The class discussions also become a sort of online portfolio for students to see how they've grown in their writing and responses.  This activity would meet NYS ELA standard 4 - Students will read, write, listen, and speak for critical analysis and evaluation.