The Lamppost Blog

I’ve been enjoying Bruce Schauble’s 100 Words a Day (a favourite is “Thirteen Ways of Thinking about 61“). I admire the commitment that it takes to write so regularly. I briefly wondered about taking the 30-day challenge myself, but alas, well…

Reading these 100-word gems along with a summary of the process behind their creation reminded me of something I first encountered in Bruce Pirie’s Teenage Boys and High School English: students are able to learn a lot about writing simply by watching someone else model the process. In the classroom, I guess that ’someone else’ should be me. Modeling writing is not something I have done before, as I have usually organized in-class writing time so that I can conference with students, check notes, or answer questions. (And have thereby neatly avoided the certain embarrassment that would come from fumbling with words in front of a class of teenagers.)

Therefore, my personal challenge this semester is to model writing for my students. It’s not nearly as interesting as 100 words a day, but it is still daunting for me. Our semester-end culminating activity will be a multi-media project based on the “This I Believe” essay, so my plan is to create my own project along with students.

Wish me luck.

I’ve had a great Friday so far.

I thought for a long time (an hour is a big time investment) about the new-to-me concept of using a wiki for class collaboration. After reading Mr. B-G’s post about wikis, and as a result checking out Kristin’s “Not-So-Intimidating World of Wiki“, I felt emboldened. I hunted around and found some examples of wikis being used in ways that I think fit my own teaching style; a favourite was discoveryisms, which connects in so many ways to the English course I’ve re-organized around life’s big questions.

I ended up checking out free wiki hosting options. Wetpaint was ruled out almost immediately: despite its nice themes, it asks for a birth date to sign in (what’s with that?) and members of private spaces have to be emailed invitations. (I make a point of not collecting student email addresses.) I couldn’t find any examples of pbwiki use that I really liked. And not being so emboldened as to want a public wiki yet, I landed with a nice, safe private one (free for teachers) at Wikispaces. So now I will have the fun of launching an experiment in online collaboration with my Grade 12 English students this semester.

But that’s not all, nor is it even the best part. Another Grade 12 English teacher at our school, who has also set up a blog for his class, is interested in having his students participate in the brand-new wiki that I’ve launched.

I’m already benefiting from having another person thinking about and working on this with me. He has suggested that we create groups containing students from both classes to work on specific parts of the wiki, thus enabling cross-class collaboration. All sorts of possibilities are opening up here.

And my third bit of good news for the day: I’m going to have a working LAN in my classroom this semester! No more screen shots of interesting online texts for my classes. This is a very generous move on the part of our school IT person, who himself is a busy teacher and doesn’t need the extra work that comes with supporting teachers’ connections in the classroom. I am very grateful.

On top of all of this, it’s Friday. All around a great day.

I am a rookie when it comes to using technology in the classroom, and the unfamiliar makes me wary. I appreciated reading about another educator’s cautions in Mr. B-G’s English Blog: Wiki wannabe

Web 2.o is about control, authorship, and authority. Students aren’t getting the full experience because I still hold the reigns. I suppose I do it out of caution.

I am the only teacher at my high school who is posting student work to a blog for all the world to see. I am meaning to move beyond using my class blog pages as a place for displaying student work. I’d like each of my kids to have their own space where they upload class content and harness the connective powers of the Internet to move the discourse beyond the limitations of our classroom’s four walls.

I get this. I, too, am the only teacher at my high school currently using blogs with my classes. This is unsettling because I miss the usual level of collaboration with my colleagues. My principal and department head are very open to using technology and new forms of expression, as long as students’ privacy is respected and everyone is kept safe. That’s great.

Some have been less enthusiastic about teachers setting up websites and blogs. I can understand their concern on one point — teachers are already incredibly overworked, and once a few teachers start setting up these types of class structures, the pressure on other teachers to create online classroom spaces might be unrealistic.

But … the truth is I’ve found that my class website is beginning to save me almost as much time as it takes. A student loses an assignment? They go to the class site to get it, and I don’t have to send home extras or have them on hand to distribute. Someone misses a class? They can download any presentations that were shared.

Without having had a classroom to claim as “mine” yet, I haven’t been putting up posters, displaying student work, and just creating that physical space that makes a class thrive. My website has provided that for me, and students have loved it. It’s taken some time and energy, but not any more than that given by my colleagues in creating their physical classroom environment.

Like Mr. B-G, I am wondering if a wiki could be a new extension of my virtual classroom, allowing more 2.0 functionality.

One of the many enjoyable aspects of a new semester is selecting texts to study with my classes. I have my favourites that usually find their way into specific courses I’m teaching (I can’t imagine missing the opportunity to study Hamlet with Gr. 12 students), but otherwise I try to mix it up a bit to keep courses fresh for me and, I hope, more interesting for my students. I have some terrific people to work with who indulge this passion of mine, and so there are brand new copies of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime on their way to me for my Modified Essential students. It will be a challenging text for us, but I can’t wait.

As I was carefully choosing the combination of novels, short stories, and plays that would work for each course, I realized that I have not been bringing the same depth of experience and thought to selecting online texts for students. Part of this is due to the ephemeral nature of many online texts — they are so quickly dated that I feel that I need to make my selection the day before class, rather than at the beginning of the semester. Still, it’s no excuse for selecting a text without thinking about why I’m selecting it for a particular situation.

So I’m going to work on a set of criteria for choosing an online text for students to read and interact with — say a blog. I wonder if anyone else has already created something like this? I know that there’s lots out there on finding credible information, but I’m looking for something a bit more … pedagogical here.

Here’s my first try; I imagine I’ll come back and work on this more.

• Obviously — no objectionable content.
• Is the text’s date going to be a barrier to learning? (If it’s “so ten minutes ago”, then students may not engage.)
• If it’s a website or blog — does it have the reputation of producing only quality articles?
• Is it a good example of online writing? Are hyperlinks used judiciously to enhance content? Is it easily navigated?
• Is this type of text best for what I want to teach, or am I just using it because it’s cool?
• Will it provide students a launch point for their own thinking and writing?
• Am I mindful of giving space for a diversity of voices in the class? Does the text give an interesting, perhaps overlooked perspective?
• Can I actually access it, or will the school filter block it?
• And … how could I change this so that students would select the text rather than me?

Let’s see where this takes me for now.

Tags: online texts

Another semester has ended, and I’m wrapping up my final report card comments. I often experience some anxiety over writing comments, not least because of the time in which these concise, insightful, grammatically correct summaries of student’s achievements are to be completed.

But it’s more than meeting the deadline that challenges me. I struggle to find a way to express a student’s progress in a way that helps students and parents alike — meaningful without being too wordy; honest without being harsh; linked to curriculum expectations without being full of education jargon. The Report Card Blues posting by TVOParents suggests that there are parents out there who read these comments carefully and want to be able to understand them. I can appreciate that.

Another challenge is the decision to recommend a student for another level next time. This, I find very difficult. On the one hand, I want students to experience success in school, and some of my students strike me as ideal candidates for a less challenging level. On the other hand, I realize just how significant the course level is in determining future opportunities. Academic/University students have more future options than those in the Applied/College level, who in turn have more than those in the Essential/Workplace level. By recommending that a student try an easier level, am I favouring their short-term success over their long-term fulfillment?

Ultimately, it is the parents who will decide which level to place their student in, so I know that my recommendation is not a final ’sentence’ for a student. Still, it weighs heavy on me.

Tags: course level, report cards, teacher comments

A new semester is starting, and with it the opportunity to re-think the way I structure courses. And since the Ontario English curriculum has been recently updated, there’s even more impetus for me to rework courses from the ground up. Naturally this process includes considering how best to integrate blogging into the English courses I’ll be teaching. Bud Hunt’s September 2007 English Journal column “Linkin’ (B)Logs: A New Literacy of Hyperlinks” has encouraged me to ask myself: am I teaching students to write with blogs, or am I teaching blogging, with all of the possibility that this new technology offers for communication? I suppose that I have been taking writing online, without teaching students how to use features like hyperlinks to communicate in entirely new ways.

Jeff Utecht has given me another, related set of questions to think about when it comes to evaluating how technology – in this case blogging – is being used in the classroom:

What if we turned these stages of technology adoption into questions that an evaluator could use during the evaluation process?

1. Is the technology being used “Just because it’s there”?
2. Is the technology allowing the teacher/students to do Old things in Old ways?
3. Is the technology allowing the teacher/students to do Old things in New ways?
4. Is the technology creating new and different learning experiences for the students?

This could be a simple list that any evaluator can use to decipher how the technology is being used in a particular lesson.

I like those questions. I like wondering if I’m using technology to create new and different learning experiences.

And now to revisit those course plans and work towards a practice that achieves new and different learning experiences while working within the bounds of technology access, policy, and student learning goals.

A new semester is starting, and along with it I get a new classroom to call home for 3 periods each day. Not surprisingly, it is a fairly run-down room, with a lost blind, missing window screens, gouged plaster where students are carving it away, a broken projection screen, and ripped out wires in the PA system. I learned from a colleague that this list of things to fix has existed for several years, yet requests for replacement or repair have not been answered because of budget constraints.

It got me thinking of an idea I read in The Tipping Point (Malcolm Gladwell), which the author calls “The Power of Context” or the broken window theory. In brief, the idea is that epidemics can be reversed by tinkering with the smallest details. For example, crime can be slowed by cleaning up grafitti and fixing broken windows. So I’m wondering what might happen if we were to actually fix what’s wrong in this classroom. They’re all small things when compared to the need for class texts … BUT together they add up to an atmosphere that suggests apathy.

So I’m going to try to fix what I can and give the room a good cleaning. And hope that this year the budget allows us to do more about my to-fix list.

Tags: Classroom, tipping point

I’ve been using blogs and a website in the classroom for a couple of years now and thought it high time I started tracking what I’m learning through this.

Tonight the issue of online security is foremost on my mind. I want to support my students in being literate online, and I believe this means actually letting them work online. However, there is some nervous reaction to this; some students, parents, and colleagues wonder whether or not it is safe.

Making the wired environment a safe one for teens should always be a priority in any classroom, but I don’t think that keeping students in a bubble is the best way to keep them safe. It’s a bit like driving — even though it’s dangerous when you look at the accident statistics, the accepted solution has been to educate teens in how to drive safely. Preventing teens from driving hasn’t really been an option. So with online work in the classroom. Educating them on protecting identity, citing reliable sources, and avoiding all cyberbullying gives them tools to thrive and survive in their future.

We fail our kids with denied access. Let’s cruise the information highway safely … using traffic signals and safety belts.

Tags: class blog