A new sandbox

While I had hoped my blog would become a record of my experiences with instructional technology as a student teacher, I never anticipated all of the time necessary to become an effective teacher. After allotting time for lesson planning, assessment creating, and assignment grading, there did not seem to be enough time to reflect on my practice in the blogosphere. Well, over the course of the next year, I hope to do a better job in recording my successes and failures in utilizing instructional technology in my classroom to enhance instruction, encourage student engagement, and maximize skill mastery.

This summer, I have a couple of new teaching opportunities. First, I will be teaching summer school at my field placement from graduate school. Although the courses are not in my first love, English, I hope to integrate a little technology here and there to help my students forget that they are actually in school during the dog days of summer. Primarily, I hope to introduce the calculator as a machine more capable of processing basic computations; in fact, I want to showcase our calculators, the TI-84 plus, as a tool capable of presenting information in exciting ways (e.g., bar graphs, histograms, box plots, scatter plots, trend lines, etc.). I want to show my seventh- and eighth-grade students that they can use calculators for other things besides playing Tetris or Block Dude.

Second, I will be teaching a couple of intensive English classes for middle school students at a local tutoring center in Ann Arbor. With small classes, excellent texts, and a computer lab (!), I envision students using blogs to produce original compositions accompanied with visual or auditory aids, which other students will read and leave comments. Both classes are four weeks long and meet every Tuesday-Thursday night for 90 minutes, and I think we will have plenty of time to experiment with different modalities and maximize teaching and learning. While I am a couple of months away from entering my own classroom in the fall, I am going to value the next month or so in testing a few ideas on a small scale in preparation for full classes next fall.

Wish me luck!

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Image Citations

TI-83 Plus Silver Edition. Retrieved on June 16, 2008, from http://www.ticalc.org/images/clacs/84plus-se-big.gif.

Dmmaus. (2006 November 1). Waves of sand. Dmmaus’s Photostream. Retrieved on June 16, 2008, from http://www.flickr.com/photos/dmmaus/311011350/

Blogs as branches from the same the trunk of thought

Will's unsuccessful attempt at finding student "bloggers" (writers) reminds me that there is still a lot of teaching and learning to be done on fruitful classroom blogging. While I cannot attest to the strengths or weaknesses of the blogs Will received from his Tweeting, I acknowledge the fact that Will's evaluation of student blogs was most likely fair and appropriate, given his professional background. If future teachers hope to incorporate blogs into their classrooms, perhaps there should be more of a focus on how writing is different from blogging.

Blogging is not simply writing online. Although blogging does ask students to produce text, it additionally provides a means for collaboration through hyperlinks. In a standard classroom, teachers provide writing prompts to students with the expectation that students will each write their own individual responses. When teachers read the assignments, they more than often look to see whether students succeeded in sustaining a thorough, complete argument. But what if teachers could evaluate a student's ability to continue a discussion rather than to complete one?

Every teacher wants to foster a safe learning environment where students feel comfortable sharing ideas in front of their peers without the fear of ridicule, and most teachers will give students the highest marks on persuasive and analytical assignments as long as the evidence supports the thesis, regardless of a teacher's bias. However, shouldn't teachers also strive to reach a shared understanding to some degree? Wouldn't a longer conversational thread (via a blog ;) )help in building this shared understanding? In the event students were providing hollow discussion tracks, teachers could step in to challenge or redirect thought. Now, I'm not suggesting that teachers lecture from the pulpit on the one, true interpretation of a text, but what I am intimating is that teachers should, perhaps, reconsider how they assess student thinking.

Being part of a conversation, as blogs enable its users to do, is a skill that all students should develop.

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Image Citation:

Mrhayata. (2008 January 3). Tree trunk. Mrhayata's Photostream. Retrieved on January 22, 2008, from http://www.flickr.com/photos/mrhayata/2161899616/

Blog Reflection - Week of December 3rd

I’ve recently found a new interest. Although it does include reading, it is a step away from biographies and fictional narratives. After mulling over which Web 2.0 tool to integrate into my class this spring for weeks, I have finally settled on one: blogs. Classroom blogging seems to be the most user-friendly Web 2.0 tool, and once I teach my students the basics, I can begin to show them how to use some of the other Web 2.0 tools that can utilize blogs, for example, podcasts, RSS feeders, etc.

Blogs are certainly a learning tool that offers students ways of expressing themselves in public, yet potentially private, spaces, and I think students will really enjoy the publishing aspect of the tool. By having students post their work in a public domain, they are enabling more of their peers to read the writings. As I begin to think about how to best incorporate this tool in the English classroom, I imagine I will have students post smaller assignments as opposed to five paragraph essays. In addition, students will be required to read the posts of their peers and make constructive comments. While I do not foresee this exchange becoming an editing workshop, I believe feedback at any level is better than no feedback. Finally, using a strong RSS reader, like Google Reader, I will be able to track the work of and interaction between my students.

Professional edublogger Will Richardson seems to suggest classroom blogs can help prepare students with the appropriate literacies to enter the job markets of the future. I believe classroom blogging has the potential to engage students on multiple levels. For the low-achieving students, they may only wish to add text or, perhaps, the freedom to add pictures and video will spark interests and enable them to excel. For the high-achieving students, the potential of blogs as far as layout, add-ons, and input feeds are seemingly limitless. Blogs can be as simple or intricate as the author wants.

For further readings about the capabilities of blogs in educational settings, I would recommend the books of Will Richardson, Blogs, wikis, podcasts, and other powerful web tools for classrooms, and David Warlick, Classroom blogging. I am currently reading both, and I find each of them incredible helpful as I begin to frame how I see blogs operating in my classroom. I would also recommend subscribing to their blogs.

Before I leave today, I want to dispel a common misconception about using the Web as an educational tool and how it relates to blogs. Parents are often worried about whether their children are in danger when they use the Internet because most parents associate the Internet with online predators, but Blogger has security settings in order prevent this type of abuse; in fact, you can set up one classroom blog with multiple authors and treat the blog more like a wiki in order to have less data to manage. Also, sometimes educators worry about anonymous peer-to-peer bullying, but Blogger has additional proactive steps to prevent this as well in the settings.

The only thing I can ask of my colleagues is to give classroom blogging a chance – experiment with it.

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Image Citation:

Helmond, A. (2007). Google and Blogger, please stop localizing me! Retrieved December 6, 2007 from http://mastersofmedia.hum.uva.nl/wp02/wp-content/uploads/2007/04/blogger01.png