Writing Project Conference

I'm definitely excited about the CSU Writing Project conference in January; I think it will be a lot of fun. I'm planning to set up in a computer lab and help teachers create their own class blogs. I'll be offering two sessions, one designed to help beginners to get online and create a blog, the other for teachers who are ready to explore the infinite possibilities of class blogs.

Here is a quick description of each session. Hope to see you January 26th at CSU.

Beginning Blogging

Learn fast and easy ways to bring your classroom into the twenty-first century through class web log discussions. Participate in a real-time web log discussion and learn how to protect yourself and your students while taking advantage of the opportunities for critical thinking discussion that the World Wide Web offers. Walk out of the session with a published web log ready for class on Monday.

Advanced Blogging

Take your class web log to the next level. Learn advanced techniques for facilitating critical thinking discussions online. Discover ways to expand your classroom beyond the four walls of your room; connect your class discussions from class to class, grade to grade, and even connect to classrooms on the other side of the world.

Class Blogs

We had our class blog discussions today and I think they went pretty well. We definitely got into some heated conversations (check out some of the posts under "Girls Only"). Overall the response from the kids was overwhelmingly positive, and there was actually an audible groan when the bell rang after first block--students were asking me if we could come back to the discussions next time.

I think that for the most part the students really did engage the issues that I wanted them to think about and discuss. There are a lot of pretty insightful comments in there; I'm excited to wade through them all systematically.

I want to give my classes a survey about the discussion next time to get a sense of how productive they thought it was. I also want to ask them if they felt that they were truly anonymous while posting or if they felt that their classmates knew who they were. I think I'll also ask them how many of the other students' pseudonyms they were able to figure out. Previously on this blog we discussed whether students were really anonymous--we wondered if they could figure out who their classmates were even with the use of pseudonyms. I think they can in some cases, but overall I think they really are anonymous. Obviously they can figure out some of their friends' pseudonyms, but at several points I heard students saying "Who is that?" or "Who wrote that?" One student in particular mentioned to me as she left that she thought other students felt more comfortable being controversial and saying what they really believed because "no one knows who they are."

I am still convinced that the format itself is an advantage when trying to get students to address controversial or difficult issues. The feeling of anonymity combined with the reduced pressure (students don't have to raise a hand and speak in front of a group) make for a better environment for these kinds of conversations.

If you'd like to check it out for yourself, there are two different discussions, block 1 and block 2.

Class Blog Discussion

I posted the prompts for my class blog discussion, which will be happening in early October. If you see anything that might need to be changed or can think of any additional questions, feel free to offer suggestions.

I'm sticking with the plan we came up with at our last meeting, which is to have my students write prompts for the teachers at our conference to respond to. I think I'll have them write questions about the reality show Kid Nation. It relates to Lord of the Flies, and is pretty controversial. I'm sure we'll think of a couple other relevant topics as well. I'll have the blog set up with anonymous comments enabled so there will be no need to sign in or get a blogger account. That way anyone who comes to learn about classroom blogging should be online and part of an active discussion within five minutes of coming into the room.

Some Old Guy with a Blog

You know, there's nothing like working with 14-17 year-olds all the time to make a guy feel old. To be honest I thought I was doing pretty well in this category. The gray is just barely starting to show, my hairline is holding tough, no premature wrinkles or anything to complain about. But not just that, I feel pretty young, too. I still listen to the latest music, I'm not stuck in the eighties or anything. I keep up with pop culture and *used* to think of myself as at least reasonably cool.

But that was yesterday--in the days of my youth. Now I'm just some old guy with a blog.

You see, I teach in a "cottage" as I've mentioned before, which is actually a double-wide trailer containing two classrooms which are connected by a closet. In that closet I have been storing my TV because I've been using some multimedia lately. Well, I was pushing my TV into the closet for safe keeping when I overhead a conversation in the room next door. It was obvious immediately that my trailer-mate was gone and two girls were in his room talking.

"Hey, I wonder what's in the closet." I heard one of them ask.

"Go see," responded the other, with an excitedly curious tone.

The next second the door opened and I nodded hello to the girl who stood there and looked at me like I was the last thing in the world she had expected to see. She didn't say a thing, turned around and the door swung shut behind her.

"What's in there?" I heard the other voice ask through the door.

"Some old guy with a TV."



I promise I'll post my class blog prompts soon, but I thought this was an anecdote worth sharing :-)

Back to Work

School is back in full swing and it's time to get back to my research project. I have written a few questions for my class blog discussion, which I want to center around the book we are reading, Lord of the Flies. I'm hoping to get that new blog up and posted sooon with the questions I have already written.

From my inquiry group I am hoping to get some feedback about the questions I have already written, and hopefully generate some ideas for additional questions. I think that it's essential for this first discussion to have good topics and questions to discuss.

The next step will be to have the students write and post their own prompts for a second discussion, this one centering around Macbeth. For the final blog discussion of the semester I will have my sophomores write prompts for my ninth graders to respond to. I'm excited about this last step because it will give me some communication and discussion between classes and grade levels, one of the unique features of a blog discussion. I see this as sort of a precursor to the kind of work that Jason Malone is getting going with his students having discussions with classes from around the world.

So my question is, what can I do to improve the questions I have, and what additional questions or topics could I post for my students to respond to?

Teaching Generation Y

What happened? Where did these kids come from? As a gen-Xer raised by a pair of decidedly baby boomer parents I can't help but look at the latest crop of teenagers and shake my head in wonderment. Aren't all adults supposed to be horrified and disappointed by the rebellious antics of the next generation? Shouldn't we be cringing and bemoaning the fact that our civilization is headed straight to hell? Isn't that the natural order of things?

If you had asked me back in 1989 what I thought the twenty-first century would be like, I would have painted a picture that looked something like the futuristic dystopia of Ridley Scott's Blade Runner. I would have argued that the teens of the future would be listening to some new combination of death metal and hard-core gangster rap while watching explicit violence and sexuality on prime-time television and taking insane amounts of some new generation designer drug. It seemed to me that since the idyllic 1950s that I heard so much about we had rapidly descended into a pit of ever-increasing violence, cynicism, angst, and social ills that were frankly impossible to combat.

But the millennium generation seems to have caught on to a cultural wave that I never would have expected. Rock music in general has moved back to a less gritty and more organic, songwriter-oriented sound, gangster rap is slowly giving way to lighter brands of hip hop as the allure of explicit lyrics fades, drug use has fallen, binge drinking has decreased among teens, abstinence has increased, and those teens who are having sex are now much more likely to use condoms than ever before. Who would have thunk it?

I'm not saying that today's kids aren't faced with some serious problems. Crime, violence, drugs, overpopulation, global warming, terrorism, the list goes on. But what does surprise me is that the two previous generations' angst, anger, pessimism, and rebellion seem to have given way to a certain optimism and even enthusiasm for the future. These kids are definitely aware of the problems they face (their boomer and gen-X teachers and parents have made sure of that), but what surprises me is how many of them feel up to the challenge of facing them. According to today's Denver Post, teens in 2005 volunteered twice as much as their parents did in the late nineteen eighties--they really seem to realize that there's a lot that needs to be done, but unlike their parents who just whined about it, they're doing something.

In a year when the biggest cultural phenomenon among kids has been a Disney movie called High School Musical, I'm not so sure anymore that the violent dystopia found on the island in Lord of the Flies is going to resonate with my students the same way it did when I was fifteen and read it for the first time. Seriously, when I was in junior high any movie with the word musical anywhere in the title would have been instantly doomed to utter failure. I can clearly remember having to hide the fact that I had seen just about every musical out there with my theater-going mother ("Don't ever admit that you know show-tunes!" a well-meaning friend of mine once told me earnestly).

So maybe it really is a "brave new world," but one that twentieth-century futurists like Huxley and Golding never would have imagined. Absent the pervasive irony of the twentieth century, a brave new future doesn't sound quite so bad anymore. Although I can't shake the feeling that as a society we're still headed in the wrong direction in so many ways, while working with this new generation of kids I've managed to see a ray of hope for the future that I never thought I'd find in working with a bunch of teenagers.

Remembering the Flood

I'm excited about continuing to work with my class blogs this fall, but in the mean time I've been able to do some traveling and get some writing done. I did some freelance work for Health and Wellness Magazine this summer, but I was also very happy to get a piece of creative non-fiction published.

During the flood of 1997 I happened to be working at a pizza shop right next to the Johnson Mobile Home park that was destroyed, killing five women and destroying dozens of homes. I was deeply emotionally affected by what I witnessed that night and wrote down some of my memories. Then last year I brought out what I had written and prepared it for the Writing Project's author's chair. This year, for the ten-year anniversary of the flood, I submitted it to the Coloradoan and they published it as part of their coverage of the anniversary of the flood. If you'd like to read it, you can find it here.

I'll also be on 600 KCOL tomorrow, Saturday the 29th at 7:00 am, to talk about the flood. For those who weren't here ten years ago, it'll be a good opportunity to learn about this sad chapter in the history of the city and for those who were it'll be a chance to look back on the tragedy ten years later. There are a lot of stories to tell, and a lot of myths and misconceptions that still linger which I hope I'll be able to address.

Critical Thinking

I think that I have finally created a definition of Critical Thinking that seems to work in the context of a class blog discussion. It's certainly different from the definitions that I surveyed in other contexts.

Critical Thinking in a class blog discussion demonstrates an understanding of the text, the ability to draw conclusions or ask good questions about it, and the ability to engage the ideas of other students or to make connections to previous knowledge, other texts, contexts, or ideas.

I've actually thought about this definition so much that I'm having serious internal debates about the placement of the words "and" and "or." I can't find a combination that I'm perfectly happy with. I think the second "or" should be an "and" . . . maybe. I also think this a sign that I have thought about this too much and need fresh insight.

Why Blog in English 10?

I think it's important that I find a solid way to justify my project, because the fact is that a lot of people either don't understand, or misunderstand, blogging and therefore don't see how it's relevant to teaching English. With the help of my colleague, Jason Malone, who is working on the same project here at the CSU Writing Project Advanced Institute, I think I've come up with some preliminary reasons for bringing blogging into the classroom.

One of the things that I've noticed as we read teacher research from a number of different sources, is that often t-r is heavy on the "what" (id est, what a teacher did, what the results were, etc.) but light on the why and how. Often, I think, the why and how are the questions that are most pressing for those of us who are in the trenches, trying to find ways to engage kids, so I don't want to give them short shrift.

The key question that I'm asking here is, "What can I do in a class blog discussion that I cannot do in a traditional (i.e. tech free) classroom?" I don't want to ignore technology, but I don't want to bring it in to my classroom before asking why?

Is there really an advantage to putting class notes on Power Point, or is it really just a glorified chalk board masquerading as technology in the classroom? I think that the answer is that it depends on how the teacher is using the technology, and why. A well-created Power Point can be powerful (who would have guessed that a PP presentation would become Al Gore's improbable foray into the film industry?) but if we're just using a smart board so that we can type our notes instead of writing them on the board, what is technology bringing to the table that is unique?

The first reason that I offer is a nod to Malone, and is a major factor in his pursuit of this topic. It is definitely something that I want to explore down the road, and I think that as far as justifications for blogging go, it's about as good as it gets. (BTW, for those of you who don't know, Jason Malone has been instrumental in opening up the blogosphere for the students and teachers of PSD, which has been closed to them up until now--nice work Jason!)

1. Blogs open up the potential for global communication in the classroom. In his "Theories of Knowledge" class, Jason is planning to set up a blog in which his kids can not only communicate with members of the other sections of his class, but also with kids taking the same class in ISRAEL. What an incredibly mind-expanding experience that could be. Imagine kids from Ft. Collins, Colorado, talking to kids in Tel Aviv about the theories and justifications for warfare!

2. On a slightly less impressive scale, I am planning to open up discussion between students in different sections of my own classes and also kids from different grade levels. My hope is to have my sophomores write prompts for my freshmen to respond to, and have the sophomores assess their responses. I think that it is generally true that the best way to master something is to teach it to someone else. How else can you generate that kind of interaction between grade levels so easily and efficiently?

3. I believe that the format itself opens up opportunities for student expression and critical thinking. Many kids are self-conscious and unwilling to raise a hand and contribute to a whole-class discussion, and even in a small group find it difficult to freely express themselves. Possibly in journal writing they can find that outlet, but unfortunately I am often the only audience for student journals--their peers don't usually read them. The blog gives students a forum in which they can express their true opinions in a relatively anonymous setting, when the "gaze" of the classroom is not on them.

4. The simple fact that blogs are published on a world wide network is also interesting. Someone from the other side of the world can see what my students wrote this spring in their class blog. This means two things--one, that they are engaged in public writing, which is, I believe, vastly superior to an essay written for the teacher alone in terms of teaching writing for an audience. But also, don't forget that blogs allow students to give each other feedback, and to get feedback from others. It's a great opportunity to put some sentences into the stream of public consciousness and see what comes back. (BTW, thanks, Cam, for engaging my students on the blog, when I develop the year-long blog next year those kinds of interactions will be invaluable for my students).

5. Need I mention that students are developing and/or cultivating computer skills, which are already one of the most highly marketable skills of the twenty-first century? Kids who don't have computer access at home are given the opportunity to gain important computer literacy, and those who are comfortable with the computer are given the chance to hone their skills in a focused way, with carefully directed activities and structured assessment. (I'd like to add my own voice to the cacophony calling for a "digital intelligence" among the multiple intelligences).

6. One last thing that I think is important was brought up during my "researcher's chair" opportunity to share at the CSU Writing Project Advanced Institute. I think that there is an advantage to having that "publish" button. Students can write, and then self-edit, before posting. I always do this, and I encourage my kids to as well--it could potentially mean that the blog comments will be significantly more developed than those brought up in our "live" discussions, and that kids will learn important revision skills by practicing them. Also, some of us just need that extra minute to look at our words before we send them out there to be digested by the group.

It's a new forum, and a new opportunity for kids to think critically in a format that was simply not available to us just five years ago.

My Research Project

I've covered a lot of ground on this blog, and I think it's time to try to create a summary of what I've done so far. I'm doing this mostly because I have the researcher's chair at the CSU Writing Project Advanced Institute tomorrow, and as you can read on the AI blog, we've decided that it would be a good idea to write a summary of what we're doing in preparation for the group discussion about our research. I debated about whether I should post it to the AI blog itself, as Renee has done, but I decided that I wanted it to be here as a summary of the work I've posted here. Besides, we are definitely filling up the AI blog; it's a bit intimidating at this point, I think, because it's so loaded with good stuff.

I think that the why and how are important questions, which hopefully I'll be able to address soon, but for now I'm going to limit my scope simply to the "what." (Id est, what I've done so far, as opposed to why or how I did it.) So here is a step-by-step summary of my research project.

1. I asked my Sophomore Honors English students to find examples of good and bad web writing and then to post their examples to a blog, along with a brief explanation of why the sample was good or bad. I asked them to find four samples, one that was excellent, one that was decent, one that was bad, and one that was horrible.

2. I compiled their responses and created a rubric for their posts based on the traits that they identified. I weighted each item based on the number of students who identified that trait. So if one student said that good writing is "appropriate," and five students said that bad writing was either "inappropriate" or "used swear words," then the rubric reflected that six points of the assignment would be based on the appropriateness of the student's responses.

Here is the rubric that we created:

Good Spelling and Grammar/No Errors _____/19
Has a Point/Is not Completely Random _____/16
Understandable/Clear/Logical _____/15
Stays on Topic/Does not Ramble or Digress _____/12
Does not Contain Slang/No Txt Tlk _____/11
Uses Factual Information/Credible Sources _____/11
Is interesting/Funny/Entertaining _____/10
Is not Offensive/No Profanity _____/6

Total Points _______/100

3. I then created a new blog, which contained 18 prompts from the book we were reading at the time A Tale of Two Cities, by Charles Dickens. If you're interested in what it looked like, check it out by clicking here.

4. We then spent about an hour of class time writing comments in response to the prompts and engaging the issues that I identified in my posts.

5. The next day I gave the students a survey, which asked for their feedback about the project.

6. I am now in the process of analyzing all the data (the blog, the survey, their grades compared to their grades on in-class discussions we had before this assignment, etc.)

7. When I have analyzed the data as much as I can, I will then begin the process of designing next year's class blog discusssion(s).

Some things I already know I will change. I am hoping that I can set it up next year so that the student's write the prompts themselves (in small groups or individually) on their own blogs. That would also mean that we would need to create two different rubrics--one for blog posts, and another for comments.

I also want to change the rubric-design process. I don't think it's that important that they post the actual examples that they find. It's really just the traits of good and bad web writing that I'm looking for. Next year I think I will try to point them in the direction of some good and bad blogs (rather than just saying, "find some blogs on a topic that interests you," as I did this time) and then just ask them to post their top three traits of good and bad web writing to a blog. That would simplify the process and make it more realistic to ask them to design two rubrics in one day.

Finally, I want to expand the activity so that rather than being a one-time deal, it could be something that we go back to for each of the major texts that we read each semester, possibly several times each semester.

I posted my three questions to the AI blog. I'm sure I'll get some good feedback tomorrow and find some ideas to help me keep moving forward with this thing. Thank you!

CSUWP Advanced Institute

Today is the first day of the AI!

I have taken my original three research questions and boiled them down to one central Research Question: What happens when I use technology to create new opportunities for "critical thinking discussions" in the classroom?

There are a few assumptions that I think that I have been making, which is one reason that I changed the language of my question to remove the "student's existing interest in technology" phrase, which applies to some students, but certainly not all. Also, I think that I am beginning from the premise that technology does have the potential to open up new opportunities for students. This may or may not really be the case. One of the things I hope to show is that web-based discussions give students opportunities that they wouldn't otherwise have to think critically and interact with texts in a way that is unique or at least different from the activities that we do in class in whole-group or small-group discussions and activities.

So, here is my plan for the next two weeks. First, I plan to take a look at the data that I gathered from my web log experiment, the surveys that I had the students take, and the in-class discussions that we conducted throughout the semester. I hope to organize and begin to analyze that data to see what it shows. My hunch is that there were students who did well and contributed to the web discussion who do not usually contribute to whole-class discussions. I also think that the web discussion was in some ways highly critical-thinking based, but that is certainly not true for all students across the board. I wonder what else I can do as a teacher to increase the level of critical thinking in those discussions.

Second, I want to design a plan to integrate this activity into an entire semester, as an activity that we return to at least twice per quarter. I also want to look into the possibility of making it a more continual process, rather than a one-time, in-class event. I would also like to find a way to allow students to create their own blogs, which other students could then respond to. I think that would make it more of an "actual" writing assignment rather than just a web-based discussion. I think that for an activity like that, I would need to have two different rubrics, one for comments and one for blog posts.

As I churn through the data I'll keep posting!

Data Deconstruction

Well, I appreciate the fact that I haven't made it particularly clear how the rubric relates to the blog, so here is my attempt. By the way, I also took a survey at the end of the semester about the project--they liked the blog activity significantly more than the moodle activity. Interesting, because many of them admitted that they learned more from the moodle, though they liked it less.

One student wrote, "Just use the rubric we made up again next year," which I thought was funny, and not a bad idea. But honestly, I think that finding examples of good and bad web writing and explaining why it's good or bad is a useful exercise in the development of a class-owned rubric, although the kids prefer to just go straight to discussing the book.

I'm going to use "John Lennon" as my first example. You can see her work in the test blog. And by the way, I find it interesting that you can choose a gender-neutral name, or a name which clearly marks your gender, or a name that suggests the other gender. I think this is interesting in the context of inquiry in the classroom--kids can discuss important issues that they may not be entirely comfortable addressing in public.

As I moved through the class blog I kept all of the student's rubrics in front of me in three rows. As I read each comment, I marked on that student's rubric a number of points that I thought reflected their contribution to the discussion, in the appropriate column of the rubric. A particularly "understandable/clear/logical" post might gain three points, while a "completely random/slang" post might warrant a -3 and -3 respectively. Then I just totaled them up (with my eyes, not my calculator--the numbers don't have to add up exactly) and gave the student a grade in each category that I felt reflected their contribution to our discussion.

John Lennon

_16/19_ Good Spelling and Grammar/No Errors (-3)
_16/16_ Has a Point/Is not Completely Random (+3 +3 +3 +2 +2 +1 +2 +2)
_15/15_ Understandable/Clear/Logical (+3 +2 +2 +3 +2 +2)
_12/12_ Stays on Topic/Does not Ramble or Digress (+2 +2 +2 +3 +3 +2)
_11/11_ Does not Contain Slang/Txt Tlk (No instances recorded)
_8/11_ Uses factual information/credible sources (+3 +3 +2)
_10/10_ Is interesting/funny/entertaining (+3 +2 +2 + 2 +2 +3 +2 +2 +2)
_6/6_ Is not offensive/no profanity (No instances recorded)

Total __94__ /100

Here's a student who didn't do quite as well. His comment on the survey (I know it's supposed to be confidential, but I recognized his hand writing) was, "you should have told me this assignment would be worth 100 points." I agree with him, that was a mistake.

Dr. Love

_17/19_ Good Spelling and Grammar/No Errors (-2)
_8/16_ Has a Point/Is not Completely Random (-3 +3 -3 +2 +2 -1 -1 -1 -1)
_10/15_ Understandable/Clear/Logical (+3 -1 -1)
_6/12_ Stays on Topic/Does not Ramble or Digress (-3 +2 -2 +1 -1)
_5/11_ Does not Contain Slang/Txt Tlk (-2 -1 -1 -2)
_8/11_ Uses factual information/credible sources (+3)
_10/10_ Is interesting/funny/entertaining (+2 +2 +2 + 3 +2 +1 +2 +2 +2)
_2/6_ Is not offensive/no profanity (-2 -2)

Total __66__/100

It took me a little over two hours to grade this assignment. Considering that it represented about one and one half hours class time, you can see that it is time-intensive for the teacher. One goal is to streamline this grading process--I think it will be easier (the little devil on my shoulder just chuckled ominously) when each student has a school email and can create his/her own blog.

Can the Internet Save our Democracy?

"The Internet has the potential to revitalize the role played by the people in our constitutional framework . . . It's a platform . . . for reason." --Al Gore

When the constitution of the United States was written in the eighteenth century, it created a system of government that has proved itself for more than 230 years. The constitution was based on the idea that the people, informed by a free press, and freely electing representatives to national, state, and local governments, would be better able to meet the needs of our country than any dictatorship or monarchy ever could.

In order for a democracy to function, it requires an informed and educated electorate. In the past that was guaranteed through the freedom of the press provision of the first amendment of the Constitution and later by universal compulsory education, which helped us build an educated electorate as we marched toward universal suffrage. But "freedom of the press" 230 years ago had a decidedly different meaning than it does today. Back then it could be taken quite literally--freedom of the printing press, which was the source of just about everything anybody ever read at the time.

In the twenty-first century, however, much has changed. Our court systems have done a decent job of protecting our freedoms as technology has advanced--I am not here to argue that the government is violating our rights or censoring our news. However, a different threat to our democracy came from a direction that the people of the eighteenth century could not possibly have anticipated--the rise of the corporate conglomerate and the mass media. Almost all of the television, radio, and print news that we read comes from an increasingly tiny list of corporate owners--even the non-fiction books we read are published by just a handful of publishers who are owned by major corporations.

These companies control the information we receive every day. The most extreme example of this kind of censorship came when MoveOn.org tried to purchase a thirty-second spot during the 2004 Super Bowl. This may seem petty, but keep in mind that while a presidential debate on substantive issues rarely affects the polls one way or the other, a well-run television ad campaign can easily shift a candidate 10% one way or the other (as one prominent politician has personally observed in his numerous campaigns and documented in his new book).

By itself, this is a big enough problem, but as this blog testifies--the truth is out there. If you look hard enough you can worm your way through the dung pile and get a glimpse of what's really going on. But how many people in this country still care enough to try?

The greatest current threat to our democracy is willful ignorance. It's incomprehensible to people of just about any other time in history or place on Earth--the idea that a group of people with a world of information at their fingertips would purposefully, intentionally, and even with a certain flair of pride, willfully and knowingly ignore that information is mind boggling.

According to the most recent Harris polls, 47 percent of Americans believe that Saddam Hussein helped plan and support the hijackers who attacked the U.S. on September 11, 2001 (up six percentage points from November), 44 percent actually believe that several of the hijackers who attacked the U.S. on September 11 were Iraqis (up significantly from 37% in November), and 36 percent believe that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction when the U.S. invaded (down slightly from 38% in November). These are claims that not even George W. Bush himself has supported--he has made it clear that to the best of his knowledge none of the preceding three claims are true. So how is it possible that so many Americans still believe them?

At times, I must admit, I have entertained the idea--first presented to me by a colleague who teaches at a high school just north of mine--that we should have a basic test for all registering voters. This test could determine whether a potential voter had the basic critical thinking skills and knowledge of basic civics necessary to participate in a democracy. This is obviously a highly problematic proposal on a number of levels. I don't seriously believe that it could ever happen (nor am I positive that it should). But at times I have to wonder whether a group of people who on average spend 4 and 1/2 hours of every day in front of a television--90 minutes more than the world average--have the mental capacity to participate in a functioning democracy.

This is where computers come in. You may think that the computer is just another form of television. That it creates a similarly passive, under-stimulated mental condition that hurts an individual's ability to think critically. But the science does not back up that claim--in fact, the opposite appears to be true. A recent study at Johns Hopkins University came up with some results that didn't seem to surprise anyone--students who had a television in the bedroom scored significantly lower on standardized tests than those who did not. But one element of the study that got less attention was this--students with access to a computer at home scored higher on the tests than those without a computer at home.

I understand that many turn to computers for pornography, pirated music, and video games. But most people who have a computer know this to be true--computers can be incredibly intellectually stimulating, particularly now that they are connected to the world wide web. People can now put their opinions out there, read other's reactions to them, respond, engage, explore, dig deeper into important issues, and find sources of information that simply aren't on the television or in the mass media. The internet is an invaluable resource--it has to be protected. For more on the fight to keep the internet free, check out one of my favorite blogs, shouting loudly.

The problem is that there is so much "noise" on the internet that it is often difficult to tell a good source from a bad one, or a reasonable opinion from an inane one. That is where we come in as teachers. This generation does not need us to teach them a bunch of facts or make them memorize a bunch of rules--they can access any information they want instantly from anywhere. What I need to do as a teacher is to give my students the ability to decipher that information, filter it, critically examine it, differentiate it, and understand it. If we can do that, we can help cultivate a new generation of thinkers in this country who just might have the power to save this ailing democracy.

Class Blog Discussion

Well, we had our class blog discussion today. Overall I think it went well, the kids definitely seemed to enjoy it. The responses to the topics ranged from insightful and profound to completely inane and totally random. Luckily I have my rubric so that I can give credit to those kids who took it seriously and did a great job (which was the vast majority of them).

Grading this is going to be interesting, but I have a system worked out. I am going to have a rubric printed for each student and as I go through the discussions I'll be adding points and taking them away in the relevant categories based on the quality of the comments they make in each post. Then I'll be able to give each student credit relative to the quality of their contribution to our discussion. Focus will be on quality as opposed to quantity; quality will be defined by the rubric they created. It'll take some time, but not any more time than reading and grading a stack of essays.

One other thing that I think is cool. There were four kids gone today, but unlike most class discussion days they don't have to miss out on what we did. I can just give them the web url and they can read the discussion and post their responses when they get back. Yet another benefit of this forum.

By the way, I've linked the discusssion page above and I'll do it again here if you'd like to take a look for yourself and let me know what you think.

Some Preliminary Results

Well, we did our "Moodle" experiment in which I asked the students to identify four examples of web writing and to categorize them as "Excellent," "Decent," "Poor," or "Horrible." I then asked them to explain why they put the example in the category they did. On moodle I was able to create four different forums for the students to post in, which made the organization easy and accessible.

The students seemed to really enjoy the project, and I am happy to say, I/we seemed to get something out of it too. I did have a couple of students who didn't really engage with the project or wrote random, sarcastic things like "blah, blah, blah . . . same as everyone else's." But overall they took it seriously and did well. (By the way, "random" is one of the characteristics of bad writing they identified--so on their web discussion this kind of thing will affect their grade--by their own choice!!) I'm hoping that the fact that they created the rubric themselves will give me more buy-in, we'll see.

I have to admit that this rubric is quite a bit different from the one I would have created had I done it on my own and just given it to them. For one thing, they roundly rejected web language or "txt tlk," which I found interesting. They also helped me think of things that I wouldn't have thought of, like "random," "rambling," and "offensive." I would have definitely told them to be appropriate, but I like the fact that this last item is part of the rubric itself--I probably wouldn't have done it that way on my own. If you're curious, my rubric would probably have been some slightly modified form of six traits (which is my default rubric for everything--and as you can see, some of those traits show up here, but this one is more to the point for our particular assignment).

I also found it interesting that it did turn out to be important to include both good and bad examples; I debated about the value of this with myself (and one of my students remarked "duh, the opposite of good writing" in the "bad" forum). But there were things that showed up more in the bad column than the good that might have been missed had I focused only on good examples, and that made the rubric better I think.

Here is the rubric we created (the numbers reflect the number of students who mentioned the trait). Interestingly, when I totaled the votes for each of the eight most popular items in the rubric, it magically and miraculously came out to exactly 100, which made the weighting of each item easy (based on how many students identified it as important).

Results of Class “Moodle” on

Good and Bad Web Writing

By combining the good and bad characteristics you identified, I created the following rubric, which is based on the top items you thought were most important overall. They are weighted based on the number of you who identified them as important. I will be using this rubric to grade the web discussion we have on Friday:

Good Spelling and Grammar/No Errors _______/19

Has a Point/Is not Completely Random _______/16

Understandable/Clear/Logical _______/15

Stays on Topic/Does not Ramble or Digress _______/12

Does not Contain Slang/Txt Tlk _______/11

Uses Factual Information/Credible Sources _______/11

Is Interesting/Funny/Entertaining _______/10

Is not Offensive/No Profanity _______/6

Total Points ____________/100

Teachers are the World's Worst Gossips

I couldn't let this go without some comment. A recent poll has revealed that teachers gossip more than professionals in any other field. I'm sure this comes as a complete shock to all of us, since none of us have EVER heard any gossip around our schools. One theory is that it's because we don't compete with each other the way other professions do, so there's less concern about burning bridges and making enemies while in other fields they worry that what they say might come back to haunt them and hurt their chances of getting a raise or promotion.

Hmmmmm. Or maybe it's just because we're teachers, and we tend to be of a certain personality type . . . I don't know, but I can tell you that this poll surprised me when I first heard about it, but now that I think about it I'm not sure why I was surprised. I have heard some crazy stories, let me tell you . . . or actually . . . maybe I shouldn't tell you, I might be accused of being a gossip.

Maybe that is why it's so nice to come to CSUWP--we can work with professionals from outside our own schools and put some of the politics aside in order to get things done.

Getting Started

Thanks to Bud (and some very good advice and input from a lot of others) I am very close to getting this project off the ground. I am getting my students registered for Moodle. I am hoping that from there we can conduct our web searches, post some examples of good and bad web writing and generate some discussion toward the creation of our class rubric.

I may also be looking into 21publish as an option for posting our actual discussion about A Tale of Two Cities. Bud has suggested that it might be easier/better to keep everything in the same format which is probably true. I figure it will be worth it to at least check out 21publish to see how it works and if nothing else, expand my options for the future.

So thank you for everyone who's helped me with suggestions and ideas so far, I'll let you know how things go once this thing gets rolling!

Spelling

This discussion is all over the place, showing up in various comments and referenced in various posts, but I think it's a fascinating side issue that I wanted to provide a specific forum for while I continue frantically to get my blog project running for my t-r. I am very interested in hearing Stacey (Or anyone else who wants to chime in), express an opinion or two about this, and don't worry, I'm not easily offended so don't hold back and let me have it!

My objection to spelling is philosophical. Let me first state that I agree that students need to learn audience adaptation and that giving students access to the power code is an essential part of what I do as a teacher. I would not be a good teacher if I did not follow the curriculum standard which clearly states that students should learn and use proper grammar, mechanics, and spelling.

However, I do not believe that spelling tests are an effective way to teach spelling. They are an assessment of a student's ability to spell, but they don't teach a student how to spell. The best way to learn spelling is by reading--repeated exposure to words in context works much better. By the way, the same is true of grammar rules--reading is the best way to learn them. Check out the book Understanding English Grammar, particularly the first chapter, or just about anything written by George Hillocks for more on this.

Bottom line is, if in doubt look it up (which is much easier now that so many kids have a spell-checker and are writing on a computer that has web access so that they can double-check problem words like their/they're). Using all the time saved by not giving spelling tests to work on grammar and spelling in context allows me to apply these concepts to what the students are actually doing rather than forcing them to engage in an exercise that doesn't relate to what they are writing. I do grade spelling in my student's formal essays, but not in their journals. I want their journals to be a place where they can focus on content and critical thinking rather than worrying about spelling and grammar (I give guided, specific prompts [level 3 questions about the texts we're studying] for journals--they are not free writing or morning pages style journals).

The issue goes deeper than that for me, however. While it is part of my job to teach students how to write in formal situations for audiences that expect good spelling, it is not my job to like it, or to believe that it is an important, worthwhile, or even legitimate project. I believe that spelling is just another way for people to judge others, feel superior to others, and find ways to discriminate against other people. I can't count the number of times I've seen a comment posted on the web criticizing another person's spelling and the comment itself contains misspelled/misused words or grammar errors!

This is a fact of life, I know, and kids need to learn that they will be judged, whether it's fair or not, by the way they speak, dress, wear their hair, and write. But spelling in the English language does not make sense. We have held over spellings of words from Old English, and continued to include letters that are no longer pronounced. Words like "weigh," "through," "night," and "sleigh" were originally spelled phonetically by speakers of a "vulgar" tongue that did not have a codified system of spelling. Having studied Old and Middle English texts, I can tell you that often the spelling of words changed even within a single text, let alone between different texts. Eventually spellings were codified into a dictionary, and the spellings at that time reflected the way words were pronounced--words were spelled phonetically. But as the pronunciation of these words has changed, and the meaning of our words has changed, and the syntax of our grammar has changed, the spelling of our words has not changed--why?

It makes life more difficult for English language learners of all ability levels and backgrounds. It makes students afraid to write and "dumbs down" their writing because they replace the word that they really want to use with one that's easier to spell. By the way, I feel the same way about some of our grammar rules. Some are necessary to avoid ambiguity; other rules are arbitrary and unnecessary impediments to our student’s ability to express their thoughts freely and without fear.

I devote two whole days of my Freshman English class to reading about and discussing the idea of grammar and spelling rules, in which I explain the importance of learning the power code, while also explaining how much I detest and resent the fact that the power code is defined and enforced by those who are in power at the expense of those who are not. It's just another form of discrimination masquerading as education.

The following excerpt is from a junk email, and I have read various opinions as to whether the idea contained herein is legitimate or not, let alone the assertion that it comes from research at Cambridge (which I've been unable to find any evidence of). But at the very least, I think that it is food for thought. I turned it into a poster and have it posted in my classroom:

Do Not Read This!

I cdnoult blveiee that I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd what I was rdanieg! Wtienss the azaimng pweor of the hmuan mnid. Aoccdrnig to rseeacrh at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer waht odrer the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer are in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit too mcuh torbule. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Itnseretnig, huh? Wow, and I awlyas tuohght slpeling was ipmorantt!

Any thoughts?

Defining Good Web Writing

I am working on the technical questions with Bud (Thank you, Bud!!!!) so hopefully I am on my way to finding the answer to my "how" question. But I'm also thinking about the idea of bringing the process of discovering the differences between good and bad writing more in line with the underlying idea of the project. I think that rather than a Power Point that includes good and bad examples, I'd rather set up a discussion page for the purpose of writing a rubric, based on student input, to use to grade the project. It might also be a good opportunity to get the students to learn how to set up links, cut and paste examples, etc. So I think smb is right in her reservations about Power Point as a format to "deliver" my standards.

As a group, we've decided basically that we don't need a formal "protocol" beyond the guidelines that Cindy gave us at the beginning of our Mother Blog. I think that's fine for the Advanced Institute; we're all adults and we're all genuinely trying to make this work, so we're learning, discovering and building our techniques as we go. But for high school kids I really want to develop a clear set of guidelines, based on student observations (along with my observations), that will hopefully give my students (and myself) a clear idea of what their posts should look like, sound like, and contain.

The Learning Curve

First, I apologize to everyone for setting my blog to "moderate comments," I didn't realize that it wouldn't allow people to post without my "approval." I just thought it would send me emails about comments when they were posted. Anyway, I have that part figured out now.

Thank you smb (Stacey) for your comments, I think you make some great points. I have definitely decided that while I will have the students find some good and bad examples, I'll also bring in some of my own (and yes, handouts are good--my thought was that PowerPoint would give me point and click access to the actual web pages--I may do both). I use PP a lot, so it wouldn't be a big deal for me. I just think that it makes a huge difference to be able to show kids pictures and videos to support the things I'm trying to explain, so I use it at least once or twice per semester (plus I make the kids design and present them too, they're already amazing at it, it works great with honors kids). I know PP is already outdated, but that' s what we have, so that's what I use.

On spelling: I'm afraid that when I said that I am an unusual English teacher I wasn't kidding. I seriously do not see any value in spelling at all. As long as the first and last letter of a word are correct, research has shown, people know what you are trying to say. Why are we so hung up on spelling in this country? Our language is not phonetic, which is a huge problem for our students and for all English language learners. If we switch to "thru" and "nite" we are reducing that problem by making our language more phonetic--that is a good thing in my opinion.

This is a whole post in itself--I'm going to put it on my "other" blog because it's a bit out of place here. Check out Letters from Today for more on why I don't give spelling tests, believe in teaching spelling, or think that spelling is an important skill for twenty-first century students to learn.

More on my learning curve: My district, in its infinite wisdom, does not allow blogging (hey PSD teachers, wipe that smug look off your faces!!!!! ;-) However, I talked to my tech guy and he said that I can let them post things if certain conditions are met. They have to have parent permission slips (no sweat--already written, ready to be copied in concert with the t-r permission slips that I have to give them anyway). But more problematic, they can't enter their email addresses at any point, ever, which means that blogspot is out.

I know that there are people here who have solutions to this problem, so please let me know what I should do next. My first thought was to set up a ghost hotmail account, then use that to set up a blogspot account, then give the students the ghost email and blogspot password so that they could post. This would be a disaster, though, because then they would all be changing the format and messing with everything and well . . . you get the picture. So, what now?

I still strongly believe that there is a difference between good and bad web writing (btw, txt tlk doesn't necessarily signal "bad" to me), and that good web writing is an important skill to learn. I'm thinking that for kids who don't have home computers, this is a really crucial opportunity for them to gain net literacy, while for the others it is a chance to show them why it is so important that they learn how to write well. The question now is, how?

Writing on the Web

Now that I have my question, I'm moving on to the next step, which is the phase in which I'll have to decide how I'm going to try to explore this question. I've decided to focus, at least for now, on my Sophomore Honors English class. This class has been lagging a bit lately, in fact I've found that the last two years I've had a hard time with this particular stage of this class. With my freshmen I keep things moving with a non-fiction unit that works well for this time of year, but my sophomores need to get ready for AP classes next year, and the last quarter is spent on the novel Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens.

I really like this book, and I enjoy teaching it. Unfortunately, the kids don't seem to share my enthusiasm. I made the observation last week that they were bored out of their gourds, and I was starting to lose momentum. My discussions have gone from lively and animated early in the semester to forced and (judging by the looks on their faces) boring. So I did some reflection and decided to turn the discussions over to the kids, asking them to write their own level three questions for us to focus our discussions on. I'm also going to do a round of group projects that will hopefully get them thinking about the book in a different way, and hopefully that will give the class some variety and relieve some of the boredom while still maintaining the rigor that I know I have to keep up.

But, as I have learned in my discussions on the Mother Blog this kind of reflective practice is only the beginning, so I'm going to attempt to apply the inquiry methods of teacher research to the problem. One of the things I want to do is to create a discussion about the book that is modeled after the "silent discussion" that my colleague Nate Hoffman shared with me a couple of years ago, and which I have used since then with varying degrees of what I consider to be success. The idea is that each student will post a paragraph or two to a class blog, and then will be asked to comment on one another's blogs to hopefully generate some discussion.

First, however, I want to make sure that I am answering my question; an essential component of this project is that I use my student's interest in and knowledge of the web to build a better sense of what "good writing" looks like. My plan is to look at examples of web writing and to ask the students to assess that writing, asking them what makes it good or bad. From that we will generate a list of characteristics of good writing from which we can create a class rubric to judge both their blog posts and their comments.

My first question is whether I should find examples, organize them into a Power Point and show them to the students as we go through the rubric-designing process, or if there is a way to get the students to find the examples themselves and then to share out with the rest of the class their ideas about good and bad web writing. One sounds easier than the other in terms of my work load, but if there is a significant advantage to having the students find the examples themselves, it may be a case in which the easier path is also the best for the kids. Easier is a relative term, though, I'll still have to come up with a system to organize the student searches and then set up a way for them to present their findings to the class (Power Points?).

Technology and Writing

In talking to my colleague Natalie yesterday I definitely have some new thoughts about the direction of my inquiry. She gave me a lot to think about, but the idea that I've been thinking about most is the impact of technology on writing.

She expressed an opinion that I think a lot of teachers (and people in general) hold--that technology and good writing are in opposition to one another. She said, and I'm paraphrasing here, that it seems to her that young people's increasing use of technology is damaging their ability to write. She pointed to their use of what I call contemporary shorthand (or "txt tlk" as web users sometimes refer to it) as an example of how technology is damaging kid's ability to spell, write complete sentences, and organize their writing.

I think perhaps I'm unusual in that I am an English teacher who believes that spelling tests are a waste of time. Although I believe that they are a reliable assessment of a student's ability to spell, I've never read any studies that show that they actually improve student's ability to write. (For more on ways that teachers can use valuable class time to improve student's writing ability check out Because Writing Matters, a publication of the National Writing Project).

Not that my opinion of spelling tests necessarily addresses Natalie's concern, but I think that it gives you an idea of the perspective that I'm coming from. I spent 7 years of my life participating in competitive debate, and during that time I learned, developed, and used a system of shorthand to write down my opponent's arguments that has helped me as a student, as a freelance reporter/writer, and as a teacher. Txt tlk, like debate shorthand, is a useful tool--students use it to make text messaging easier and more efficient. Why can't we teach them that there is a time to use it (in their lecture notes, debate notes, and text messages) and a time not to use it (in formal communication, school papers, and business communication)?

I see an excellent opportunity in the text messaging, emailing, blogging, and My Space visiting world that so many of today's students inhabit. I had a My Space page for about one week before I realized that for a teacher My Space is not the best place to be--I prefer the professionalism of a blog to the informality of that particular networking site. But I remember one string of messages that I sent to a debater of mine about one of the debate cases we were working on. At one point she wrote, "You have a bad sense of paragraphs ;-)." Looking back at my own messages I realized that she was right--I did tend to create huge blocks of impenetrable prose, while she wrote in short, easy-to-read and digest paragraphs that made her messages much better than mine.

It's exactly that kind of breakthrough that technology can give our students. This is a basic organizational tool that can be applied to all kinds of writing. But strangely, even as an English teacher and a professional writer, I didn't understand how and why it applied to web writing. But it does--there is good and bad writing on the Internet just as there is good and bad writing in novels, magazines, newspapers, and student compositions.

I think that by bringing different examples of blogs, posts, emails, and other communication into the classroom for side-by-side comparison we can start to identify some of the things that separate good writing from bad writing. Perhaps then I can finally answer the question "Why are we learning this?" in a way that a fifteen-year-old can understand. Being a good writer will make your My Space page more popular (or in teacher-terms, it makes you a better, more influential member of the world-wide information network that fills up an increasingly large portion of our student's lives).

It's time to stop fighting it and start realizing technologies' potential. The kids are miles ahead of us, but if we keep at it I think that the web can become a teaching tool with incredible power. I really believe that by bringing it into the classroom we can reach kids by making what they learn relevant to what they do now as well as what they will be doing as adults in the twenty-first century.

Teaching English and Debate

As a participant in the CSUWP Advanced Institute, I am going to be using this blog to explore some questions about teaching. As a beginning, I've generated three essential questions to guide my inquiry. I know that I'll be moving beyond these questions, looking deeper at aspects of some of them, and hopefully developing them into something that's worth thinking and writing about.

1. How can I use my student's existing fascination with technology to cultivate a desire to write well, an understanding of the importance of writing well, and an appreciation of good writing?

2. How can I use technology to create a forum for the cultivation of controversy in my classroom? What possibilities does technology open up that are not available to me in the classroom?

3. How can I use technology to help students express their opinions in a forum for public consumption, helping them to think about how to write an argument, how to address an audience, and how to defend a point of view in writing?