One of the ideas that I try to really drive home when I’m out blogvangelizing (Read/Write Webvangelizing?) is that a) since most of our kids are coming to these tools with arms open, and b) since the ability to produce content is getting easier and easier, and c) finally, since it’s so much easier to publish the content we create, unlimited opportunities now exist for our students to become teachers in a real way. Case in point, Clarence Fisher’s students who are making videos about math. I just love this idea, because the purposes of this exercise are self apparent. As compared to just a few years ago when the only reason you’d create a video about math is because your teacher told you to and you needed a good grade, now the reason you create videos about math is to, um, teach someone else about math. (Doh!) So, the idea of audience (not just the teacher) is built in. And since it is, it’s just another way of changing the equation (bad pun, I know) when it comes to what we do with student work.

I searched the web and all I could find were videos that were at least high school level and mainly college. Of course, I got an idea. Why don’t we make our own? Talking about this with my students, they agreed. They saw a gap we could fill in the knowledge that was posted online. They thought it would be helpful for themselves, and for others.

How cool is that? Helpful for others. Who exactly? Who knows! But that’s the point. It’s for a real audience who is going to do just what Clarence’s class initially did, search for videos that can help them understand math concepts. Only this time, there will be some there to tap into.

And you can see what’s coming, can’t you?

If these videos turn out to be useful for us and for others, I hope they will become the first in a library of these videos that we will be creating. Another set this year will give us 14 concepts, by the end of next school year, we could have 28 of these online. A worthwhile project.

This is the potential that we have to understand. This is what changes everything about our classrooms. It’s not rocket science, but it is a huge shift away from the way we’ve been doing things for 100 years.

I really, really love this stuff.
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C-Net gets on the blogs as learning tools bandwagon with a pretty good overview of the direction this is going (though we still can’t get past the “online journal” label…) They quote Clarence Fisher in the lead:

Like other teachers bringing blogging into the classroom, he thinks the online journals will spark students’ enthusiasm for computers, writing and opining.

“They’re learning the technical skills, but they’re also learning that they have a voice online,” he said. “They may be from a tiny town in the middle of nowhere, but they’re writing online, people are commenting on it, and they’re learning that they have a voice.”

A bit more mo’ for our cause. Go blogs! Go!
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I know that I have said this before, but very few edubloggers out there have more practical experience than Barbara Ganley at Middlebury College. She’s back from an extended break with a post that talks about getting ready for her fifth year of using blogs in the classroom.

And so, here I am, back again, delighted to be a part of this evolution of blogs in our classrooms, convinced that we should take the time to help our students develop a grammar of and a practice of academic blogging, both individual and collaborative, then pretty much step out of the way except to ask questions and provide feedback (i.e. step out of the center of the blog and thus the classroom). Our students will surprise themselves by how much they accomplish even in a single course in a single semester. Imagine if all their courses, all their semesters, all their disciplines of study were connected via their blogging…

Barbara is definitely an inspiration, and she mentions a visit I made to Middlebury, must be three summers ago now to meet with her and Bryan Alexander, Sarah Lohnes, and Hector Vila. I think that was the first time that I had truly been in the company of bloggers, and the fact that it was at such a beautiful and well-respected educational setting just validated a lot of what I was feeling about blogs back then. If these guys were using them, there must be something to it.

And there definitely is. If you don’t believe me, believe Barbara, who is without question someone who has been a wonderful teacher of mine through her blog. If it’s not on your list of regular reads, it should be. I’m really looking forward to see what she has in store for her students this year.
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So the Times highlights some of the pioneering work done by Bob Sprankle in podcasting at Pat Delaney in blogging. It’s really great to see Pat’s contributions highlighted as he was one of (if not the) original edublogger who has been off-blog for the past couple of years.

Mr. Sprankle’s experiment with podcasting in the classroom is just one of the interactive technologies some pioneering teachers are using in schools nationwide. Most work teachers have traditionally had students do online – searching Google instead of card catalogs, doing exercises online instead of in workbooks – has largely been in the mold of offline coursework.

These days, though, some teachers are building coursework around low-cost, software-based technologies. Some other programs include a blog shared among students in rural Maine and inner-city students in San Francisco to promote writing and cultural perspective; a voice over Internet protocol, or VoIP, exchange among schools worldwide to practice foreign language and debate skills; and an urban planning course that’s taught using a virtual world.

Even better, the article raises some of the tough questions that we’re all beginning to grapple with:

Still, some educators are not completely sold on the value of interactivity. “If interactivity becomes the fundamental basis of the educational process, how do we judge merit?” asked Robbie McClintock, a learning technologies expert at Teachers College of Columbia University.

The push by some teachers for greater interactivity in the classroom also goes against the current emphasis on testing. Testing requires a known body of material, but interactive learning often involves students’ seeking out topics on their own.

What a concept, huh? I LOVE IT! And, I love the Skype Foreign Language Lab in Del Valle, TX. Phone pals among 47 schools in seven countries!!! What an awesome idea.

Now you and I read this and go “this is the future!” But I wonder how someone with no real context for these technologies and these shifts feels. Wonderment? Fear?

Go blogs. Go!

Well, duh. Is it any surprise that a nationwide survey by the National Governors Association find dissatisfaction from students about their high school experience? Bored. Dumbed down. Not challenged.

We are becoming irrelevant because we continue to advocate a system that doesn’t allow our kids to pursue their individual interests and challenge themselves in meaningful ways.

How sad is it that “a large majority of high school students say their class work is not very difficult…” What does that say about what we’ve been doing for the last 100 years?

Ok, so this isn’t revolutionary, but it’s kind of a neat application of Furl that I really hadn’t thought of. (One of those “Doh!” moments.)

The journalism 2 kids here have their own blogs and Bloglines and Furl accounts. As they write their stories, they’re Furling all of the relevant pages they find. So, on each of their sites, we’re pulling the RSS feed from their Furl archive into the right hand column, so anytime someone Furls something, it automatically shows up on the page. No biggie, I know. But the cool part is that as the kid Furls the site, he blogs it, meaning he annotates it, writing about what the potential use and relevance the information there has to his story. So, he’s got a handy reference right in front of him as he plans the story.

Now, if we could just have them tag the pages in del.icio.us and then push those feeds to the left column while importing relevant feeds for photo tags from Flickr…

Welcome Scott Moore to the ed-blogger list from the University of Michigan whose blog already has me learning. He’s thinking big blog ideas…like over 1,000 students in a section big. Oy. At least he’s thinking like Barbara Ganley in terms of highlighting the best posts from him mini blogosphere in his own course blog. But 1,000 students. Sheesh. Hope he has a lot of teaching assistants…

Anyway, Scott writes about the Cluetrain Manifesto as it applies to education, and I think the vision is, as they say, spot on.

The Cluetrain authors point out that the internet has restored the original conversational dynamic of the marketplace, where individuals exchange information in their authentic voices. Similarly, in education the internet can bring the conversational dynamic to large (distributed or not) courses, where individuals exchange ideas, research, and opinions online.

Applying the concepts of the Cluetrain to education, the internet heralds the end of “education-as usual,” ending information asymmetries forever. “Education-as-usual” is characterised as both top-down control of students by a de-personalized university and a barrier erected between students and the university’s professors. In the traditional education model, lectures are one-way channels through which students are bombarded with information. Top-down, cookie cutter, de-personalized lecturing has become an annoying barrier to education, the opposite of a conduit to real learning.

Professors (and universities) that do not join the conversation will soon have no students to talk to. The internet enables students to talk about the professor amongst themselves. Encouraging professors to join in conversations with students enhances the professor’s credibility and increases the chances that the professor’s voice might be heard.

Weblogs offer a way for a professor to reclaim a place in the education of students using the professor’s authentic voice. Blogging helps a professor build a community around a course and increases his students’ commitment to the ideas discussed in the course. Blogging is individualistic, customized, and scalable. It originated in individual conversations and is a ground-up, grassroots phenomenon. Technology is changing the modern university.

The end of education as usual. Hmmm… Could we be at the beginning of the end? (Last night’s speech sure didn’t sound like it.) But I think we are at the beginning of the realization that the Internet is presenting new and valuable opportunities for learning, and that at some point, students and teachers taking advantage of those opportunities will overwhelm the idea that every student must learn the same thing at the same time at the same pace in the same place from the same person. More and more, teachers are beginning to connect these ideas, learn in different ways, see the potential. We are moving ever so slowly toward a more constructivist, collaborative, reality based form of learning, not schooling. And I really believe that as what happens in our classrooms becomes more and more transparent, the pressure to change will come from more people and more directions. It feels painfully slow, right now. But the fact that my blog roll is growing every day makes it real, and real change, fast or slow, is worth the effort.
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At NECC, Presenters from Innovative Video in Education (IVIE) are showing some great examples of student produced videos that speak to a “millenium student’s” need to use various forms of multimedia to facilitate learning.

They describe students as digital natives vs. digital immigrants. Adults are DSL –digital as a second language. Students want to learn with technlogy, with one anohter, online, in their time, in their place, doing things that matter. And the process of video supports that: brainstorm, story board, write/revise script, tape, edit final draft, publish. Video involves every aspect of a student’s creativity.

We can use video to reach some of the standards that we couldn’t otherwise achieve. And video production is supported by a wide variety of learning theory including constructivist, multiple intelligences, transfer and more. It’s active learning that sticks, that makes connections in the brain. In many ways that I’ll try to get into later, it parallels to what we can do with Weblogs, especially in the area of constructivist thought.

Some really amazing examples of ways to use video to facilitate learning. The website has most of videos for viewing.

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From the BBC comes this story about a school in England doing some large-scale stuff with Weblogs at an early age.

Children as young as seven in one British school are using weblogs as part of their normal routine, and are doing better than non-webloggers as a result, their teacher says.

If you read the article, you’ll see that the improvement is being shown in the IT area, as in copying and pasting. Now that’s great, but somehow I guess I was hoping there was some evidence of improvement in writing or critical thinking skills or something that they can’t get by doing it somewhere else. While the article sings the praises of blogging, it never really delivers anything more than general observations about what Weblogs seem to be able to provide in some situations. Nice, but…well, nice.

I’ve been thinking about this more and more lately, this need for some real classroom research. I’ve been thinking about broaching the idea with one of my English teachers, seeing if maybe I can finagle some duty release or something if she agrees to teach one class with blogs and another section of the same class without. We could take a look at levels of participation, frequency of edits, words written, lots of other data like that and try to come to some conclusions about what really happens when you introduce Weblogs into the mix. Of course, there are a ton of variables to consider, and I’m sure it would take almost as long to set up the study as it would to carry it out. Still…it would be nice to get some hard data.

(via Rick Barter) Samantha Blackmon at Purdue offers this reasoning behind her use of Weblogs with her students:

There are many reasons for blogs in the classroom. The one that stands out for me most as I use a blog in my summer gender and literature class is that students get the opportunity to write about the texts that we read and to see and respond to what others in the class are writing. They seem to find affirmation that they are puzzled by, frustrated with, amused by, or totally hating the same things about the texts.

She has a class blogging about Pride and Predjudice that gets to some of what she describes.
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(via Ray Schroeder) In light of my weekend at I-Law, I’m not surprised at the news that 53 percent of kids admit to downloading music even though 88 percent of them know its protected by copyright. But what did surprise even me was this:

But only 18 percent of the students surveyed said they learned about copyright law from a teacher or other educator.

That’s just amazing. And as I said the other day, it’s indicative of the changes that we need to make in our classrooms when it comes to helping kids understand and manage everything that the Internet means, from research to news gathering to p2p to community. In my perfect school, it’s a mandatory course on Information and Internet Literacy covering media and blogs and p2p and all that stuff. But that means that more and more teachers need to become literate in these areas too, and in turn, they need to model effective an appropriate use. This quote could have come out of my mouth, too:

“I believe students understand the concept of copyright, but have few models of appropriate behavior to follow,” said Jim Hirsch, associate superintendent for technology at the Plano Independent School District in Texas. “Xeroxing of printed works, videotaping, ‘TiVo’-ing, ripping CDs, scanning, et cetera, are all techniques used in the workplace and at home by adults–which provides the illusion of appropriate use.”

Maybe it’s a course kids could take WITH their parents…

(via David Weinberger)

Hi we are room 209. We are students in the Chicago Public Schools and we maintain this blog. This blog is a way of asking questions, writing about the things we are learning, discussing ideas from many sources, (books, blogs, letters, interviews) and reflecting on those ideas.

And the kids want our opinions on “Who is king of the jungle?” Another great example of an easy way to expand the classroom to include a variety of voices.
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All of a sudden today, I’ve seen about thirty comments put up on the old Secret Life of Bees site that we did almost two years ago now. Someone out there somewhere must be teaching the book and having students respond to my students’ posts. That happens every now and then, but usually not with such a flurry like today. By the way, the latest hit count on the site…867,366 with over 1,500 coming in the first 12 hours today. Still pretty amazing.

Jill Walker posts a copy of the Weblog review assignment she gives to her students to

“…become familiar with the blog genre, gain experience in writing for a web audience and develop your skills in describing, contextualising, interpreting and assessing websites.”

I’m realizing that many of the assignments of this type regarding blogs and blogging have gone uncollected. Might be good to start a list using my handy dandy Furl RSS feed.
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Nancy Peralta has picked up on the student blogging thread and points to some of her own reasons for keeping a Weblog, the main one being audience. I love her enthusiasm:

To me, blogging is all about the audience – it’s about the fact that there IS an audience. I wouldn’t be doing this if I didn’t get any response from readers. I know because I’ve tried journaling about a dozen times and never kept it up longer than a week or two. It’s the interaction between my readers and I, my reading other blogs, and my ideas being picked up on other blogs and commented about that keeps me blogging. It’s the audience and community, the reading/writing connection, that makes blogging so fantastic for me!

I’m sure most of us wouldn’t be doing this in any sustained fashion if we didn’t think anyone was reading. Just look at the voice that we use in our posts. We’re all definitely writing to someone, and that motivates us (most of us) to write clearly and thoughtfully and relevantly (is that a word?) Audience dictates our selection of topic (Is this too personal? Is it too silly? Will anyone else care?), it dictates our tone (Is this readable? Is it too pedantic?), and it begs us to revise (Are there mistakes? Is this confusing?) I know I’ve referred to this before, but that Donald Murray philosophy is always at the core: good writing is a conversation with the reader. Audience matters. (Yesterday, in fact, I decided to check the referrer logs for our library Weblog, and wouldn’t you know, as soon as I forwarded the results to our librarians, there were a bunch of new posts on the site.)

“I wouldn’t be doing this if I didn’t get any response from readers.”
–Nancy Peralta

Nancy also points out, as have others, that student blogging starts with little or no audience, and least none that is not constructed for a particular blogging environment. But Nancy talks about a simple yet potentially effective idea for solving that problem in creating what she calls “blog alliances.” Hook up with other teachers whose kids are blogging and have them read and respond back. She’s done this with her students and Anne‘s kids with good success. In fact, I’ve done it with Anne’s classes with great success. But I think Nancy wants to push this idea to a wider circle.

I think there is some potential for this as more and more teachers start using Weblogs. Maybe we need some type of clearinghouse for teachers looking for other teachers to work with. Another good idea to put into the mix.

And by the way, if you really want to see some GREAT fifth-grade blogging, check out Emily’s site from Anne’s group in Georgia. She was one of the students that my journalists worked with last year in an early blog alliance we set up, and she’s just doing amazing things. It’s really inspiring. Now the big question is, will Emily be blogging in high school???
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