Former Marine, Current Student, Future Teacher, but always a Dad!

Wow! The end of the semester………………………………………………. but not the end of this blog. I was not sure what I would discover about the use of blogs in teaching writing when I originally started this but I know I don’t want to stop the process.

I know that the use of the RSS along with this blog has been the most interesting part of my education in a long time. I feel as though this has lead to a sense of self discovery in me. Let me clarify that a little bit. My blog involved using certain search terms, newpaper feeds, etc but I would say that I found things that actually pertained to my subject about 3 or 4% of the time. I was amazed to find myself reading most of the other articles that were appearing. I found myself interested in many things that I had not looked at before and in the process learned about so many new things. Through this project I now have started to look at subjects such as the needs for migrant farm workers on a daily basis. I had no idea it would interest me so much. Some of you are probably asking what blogs and the needs of migrant farm workers have to do with each other and the answer is for the most part nothing. A story on migrant farm workers came up in my RSS reader one day and i read it. it then took about 10 seconds to subscribe to a google search feed on that subject. Now i look at them everyday. This has happened to me exactly 6 times this semester with my two blogs and now I have 22 other subscriptions outside of my blog subjects.

The only negative I had with this blog was my own procrastination and time management with the project parameters. I had a little to freedom under the flexable schedule of due dates for posts and comments. I think when conduct my class using blogs I will have more structured due dates for specific posts. This should not be a needed requirement at the college level but should be taken into account at the secondary level. 

 My plan is to continue to use my blog and my RSS reader to continue this blog (it will probably have different categories then 310 and 311) and I might expand it to include one or two more categories about social studies and the process of becoming a teacher. I will extend my search to include and focus on more scholarly journals. hopefully this will help me develop an ongoing teaching philosophy throughout my career. To me it is the perfect way to express, review, and edit my beliefs while hopefully getting feedback from outside sources.

David Perry of the University of Albany writes in Blogs for Learning- 

Although in the past few years there has been a marked growth in the number of higher education classrooms that utilize an on-line writing component, adapting the teaching of writing to digital spaces has met with resistance on the part of both students and professors. While there are many hurdles to address in navigating technological changes in writing practices, I would like to suggest that part of the problem has been a lack of understanding about the ways that information is disseminated and archived in these spaces. We need to begin by framing the approach in a new way to contextualize writing better, and, more importantly, to make classroom blogging (and even more broadly writing in digital spaces) more productive for the students and professors. In particular, I want to show how the technology of RSS is crucial both from a theoretical and a practical standpoint to any digital writing, but especially to any blogging classroom.

If you were to tell high school teachers that you had a way to get their students to aggressively research for a paper and enjoy doing it they would be very interested and a little excited. Tell them that this same method would teach or improve those students ability to cite that research and they might be a little skeptical. Add the fact that the students will really enjoy it and those teachers will probably walk away thinking you have some crazy new untested theory and won’t sit by you in the teachers lounge anymore, but that is exactly what blogging while using a RSS reader can accomplish.

Today’s high school students are digital natives that naturally have the ability to multi-task using technology in ways that  their teachers have a hard time catching up with. If we bring these abilities to the classroom for use in positive way there should be no reason that the academic abilities of the student won’t increase while achieving the standards set forth by the curriculum. By using RSS in tandem with blogs we allow these students to use their digital culture to meet our academic expectations. In the process they are exposed to many different points of view, journalistic and literary genre, and writing role models. When used properly the RSS will give students a base knowledge of all aspects of a project and in depth knowledge of specific focused areas. they are then able to process this information and create informed pieces of writing for an audience using blogs. This combination when presented the right way can accomplish a conceptualization of material while also improving writing skills.

Many people in the education field feel as though this type of project is to clumsy or awkward to be used in a classroom where teachers are expected to teach students material to prepare them for standardized tests. i say this could not be farther from the truth. Like any other  assignment the success and efficiency of it will depend on the preparation, organization, management, and follow through of the educator. The difference being that once this system is set up for a given classroom then the transition between different assignments and writing topics will go much easier then they would in a traditional class where the teacher starts over with each assignment. Classroom time will not be wasted going over bulky instructions and unnecessary time used for researching in the traditional ways. The subject will be given, the type of writing clarified, and prompts for searches in the aggregater given. the students will spend half the time researching and have much more time writing leading to more polished results and a more invested student.

Toward the end of of his article Mr. Parry writes:

Finally, as a related concern, utilizing RSS on the professor’s end can help you to keep a handle on all of your students’ postings and comments. Having a robust RSS reader enables all of the student posts to be delivered to your reader, instead of requiring that you visit each individual blog. This makes it much easier to asses student work, and, perhaps more importantly, much easier to comment on and provide feedback about students’ blogs.

What better argument then to say it will make the teachers job easier while also helping improve students writing?    

Blogs for Learning
The Technology of Reading and Writing in the Digital Space: Why RSS is crucial for a Blogging Classroom
By David Perry

What role does technology play in the classroom? I would like to talk about this question today even though it doesn’t specifically concern blogs. I just feel as though it is important to discuss and come to some sort of position as individual educators belief on technology in general while looking at blogs specifically.

Tomorrow, myself and some of my classmates will be going to The Bright Ideas , a conference for English language art/literacy educators at Michigan State University, and much of we will hear will have to do with technology. So again I will ask the question but in a different way, what role should technology play in the classroom? Some educators are very intimidated by technology. While others feel as though technology get in the way of the connection between an individual student and the teacher. Still others have some unknown reason to resist any change in there chosen profession where they are the expert and see the change as losing some of this expertise. Before discussing this further please read this excerpt from an article in The Roanoke Times:

Dylan Holcomb’s 10th-grade English students shouted the names of Shakespeare’s plays as they identified them while watching a YouTube clip of “Jeopardy!”

Earlier, Holcomb used Google Earth to show his Del Oro High School students the distance between Venice and Cyprus, where the play “Othello” is set, and had them calculate the distance.

“When you use a YouTube clip of a guy doing Shakespeare in England, they’re impressed,” Holcomb said. “It speaks to them a little more because that’s their generation. They live in that world. They live in the Internet.”

Holcomb is among a growing number of teachers using Internet tools, programs and Web sites to enhance curriculum. The trend is being noticed by Internet companies, such as Google, which makes its products readily available to educators.

“There is definitely a trend in the educational community at large of using the Internet in the classroom,” said Bart O’Brien, superintendent of the Placer Union High School District.

As Mr. O’Brien says the use of the Internet is definitely a trend in education but so are most technologies. The key to this is how it is used. Opponents of technology will say that to many educators are using technology as the main focus in the classroom and bending the curriculum to it. They say this detracts from the purpose of the class and that core material is not being learned and academic ability is not being served. In my opinion this is a cop out. I agree that the curriculum should be the main focus and technology should be used to support and enhance the learning of the material being taught. But to use the improper use of technology in the classroom as an excuse not use it to me in ridiculous. The fault does not lie in the technology bitin the philosophy and poor teaching methods of the instructor. It seems to me that with the ever increasing use of technology in the world around us that the use of it in the classroom should not be some sort of decision of preference but a mandatory inclusion into the curriculum. With all the different aspects  of media including things like social networking sites, blogs, you-tube, etc that we should be able to find some sort of technology to support our curriculum. This is the world the students of today are en-wrapped in and we as educators need to use it as a vehicle to teaching our students.

Roanoke.com
Online learning earns a net gain in classroom
By Niesha Lofing
McClatchy-Tribune
April 2007

As I was searching the Internet in this sometimes frustrating quest for information on using Blogs to teach writing I stumbled across this article title: “Moderating and Ethics for the Classroom Instructional Blog”. The subject matter this title alludes is obviously interesting to me in and of itself but what struck me instantly was the simple notion that using a blog in a writing class might lend itself to teach more then writing fundamentals. I thought back to my writing classes in high school and even recently in college and realized that while there is academic integrity involved, I wasn’t really learning more then just the essentials of writing and the subject matter that I was writing about. Does using a blog in the classroom teach more then that?

Lets take the article and its subject I mentioned earlier as a way to begin answering that question. The article talks about ethics. By merely stating that a classroom blog is going to need ethical consideration in its implementation insinuates that ethics (blog or otherwise) will be addressed with the students. Patricia Deubel writes:

 A blog is still a public forum, even in the gated environment of a password-protected class account you might have created with services such as Class BlogMeister or Edublogs.org. Martin Kuhn (2005) suggested that any valid code of blogging ethics needs to consider values both unique to and shared among those in the blogging culture. The ethics debate goes on, and there is still no agreement about best practices, nor how to enforce a code should one be developed (e.g., Bloggers Code Imminent?). However, as educators, we are charged with keeping our students safe and instilling ethical considerations in them. As you monitor a blog, will you delete comments that don’t meet your standards or appear to hurt others? How much free expression should you permit in the K-12 blog? Should learners define their own blogging rules? According to Kuhn, “Any workable code of blog ethics would need to strike a balance between ['factual truth' and 'free expression'] and encourage practices that would enhance both” (p. 6). In general, the rules of engagement in blogs appear to include the need for truth, accuracy, and accountability for what you say, as well as respect for others even when you might disagree with them. There is also need to ensure that bloggers keep private issues private to minimize potential harm to others.

We can now say that blogs have the potential in a very specific context to teach students about ethics. Now that doesn’t mean that students will learn about ethics but this medium (the Blog) lends itself to that outcome in ways that more traditional writing cannot.  Ms. Deubel also mentions “truth, accuracy, and accountability” or ‘factual proof’ and ‘free expression’. Many will say that a traditional writing classroom is also supposed to teach that. I can’t help but think that the publishing to classmates that blogs incorporate would make the individual student much more aware of these issues. It is one thing to write a paper for the eyes of a teacher that is reading 25-100 of the same type paper and quite another to write to your peers who are going to have the opportunity to critique your work in an open forum. Students are forced to back up their “free expression’ with ‘factual truth’ if they are to retain credibility amongst their academic peers. Once this credibility is established one would think that the individual student will also attain self-esteem and intellectual pride in a way that normal writing class couldn’t provide. Some of the critics of blogs will say that the good writers do get those things from the traditional methods whether their work is published or not. This is true but my answer to that is in the form of a question: What’s wrong with using a different methodology that comprises writing distinct skills along with academic and social awareness to help other students to become better writers who might not otherwise do so?         

Moderating and Ethics for the Classroom Instructional Blog
by Patricia Deubel, Ph.D.
The Journal
February 2007

My question today is (just in case you didn’t read the title of this post) why is it that we are even considering using blogs in the classroom? What is about this medium that makes it different or better then other mediums? The learning journal is nothing new. Teachers have been getting students to write this type of thing for years. So why is a blog a better then lets say just having them write an ongoing journal on Microsoft word and turn it in to be graded as part of a portfolio every so often? To me this question is the first question that should be asked when considering using a blog in your classroom. You need to make sure you as the teacher feel that some of the work (maybe even hassle) will be worth it. If you you don’t totally by into the purpose for using the blog how can you justify it to the critics or even more importantly, your students.

I believe the answer to this question is in the basics of teaching writing. Blogs are not something that are written with the purpose of just getting good grades from your teacher. These blogs will be read by your classmates, your teacher, and maybe other people that have nothing to do with your class. This gives you an audience (remember I talked about the basics of writing), this gives the writer a vested interest in his/her writing that they is on another plane then just writing for the teacher. This audience makes the writer aware of how the writing is being read and how they are being viewed. The voice pr personality starts to hold importance in the writers point of view. Kristen Kennedy explains this on Techlearning.com a few years ago during the early stages of using blogs in classrooms:

What makes Web logs unique is their emphasis on publication and their signature as a dynamic genre of Web writing. Forming the technical backbone of blogs are content management programs, such as PostNuke or UserLand’s Manila, that are built to be “personal publishing systems,” as UserLand president and COO John Robb puts it. No HTML is required, since these programs are designed to be as easy to use as a word processing application, but with additional collaboration and communication features. Manila, for example, can manage 500 individual student sites, discussion boards, mail bulletin functions, and digital portfolios all with site search and syndicated news stream capture capabilities.

Unlike most Web sites, which generally combine static and dynamic features, a blog is produced with an active writer in mind, one who creates in an online writing space designed to communicate an identity, a personality, and most importantly, a point of view.

This begins to answer the question of “why blogging?”. By providing a means to publish the writing of your students, they start to care about this writing in ways they wouldn’t otherwise. They are not just presenting a paper to a teacher but are presenting themselves to their peers and the outside world via the blog.

Now that we have started to consider the why question we need to start to investigate the how question. How do we as teachers implement the blog into our curriculum so that it supports the fundamentals and methods of writing to make our students not only become powerful writers but to meet the expectations of the outside world (i.e. standardized tests, employers, future teachers, etc.). Hopefully we can start to investigate this fully in my next post.  

techLEARNING.com | Technology & Learning - The Resource for Education Technology Leaders

Are blogs really where its at in education now!?! Can blogs be done in a way that is counterproductive to what you are trying to accomplish? Do teachers jump on the latest technology teaching craze (blogging in this case) without thinking how it can be used effectively to support the curriculum? Do students feel as though blogging is just as big of a hassle as any other type of writing they are assigned? 

These are the questions I would ask if I was approaching this subject from a negative viewpoint. I am not approaching this subject in that way though. I want to look at it from all viewpoints. I want to display the good, the bad, and the ugly if need be. Most of what we hear or read about blogs in education are glowing reviews or stories of how they have breathed new life into the classroom but not all blog experiences are like this are they? I wanted input from an instructor (not a student because we are fickle) who has experience teaching with blogs and has a different point of view from what we hear most of the time.  Kara M. Dawson articulates some of the problems she has encountered in a recent issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education:

In some courses, I use a single blog on which all students are expected to post comments. In other classes, I require students to create individual blogs and to visit their fellow students’ blogs through RSS feeds. Typically I expect students to write at least one posting a week and to comment on several others’ blogs. Sometimes I require students to post on a particular topic, and sometimes I leave it open-ended. Whatever the approach, I found last semester that many students fell victim to blog overload.

I began to feel overloaded, too. Don’t get me wrong. I love blogs. I have my RSS feeds set to a number of blogs that help me stay current on personal and professional interests. But the key difference is that I am not forced to read any of those blogs. None of them were created because of someone else’s course requirement.

Frankly, the blog postings I required my students to write were just not very interesting. Those students are bright, insightful, frequently opinionated, and, as a whole, a pleasure to be around. Their blogs were not.

With few exceptions, the blogs would sit inactive until about 24 hours before our face-to-face class meetings (or 24 hours before the assignments are due in my online class) when a flurry of posts and comments would erupt. Then, I would spend an excessive amount of time reading and commenting in the hours before class. Some students did the same while others didn’t bother to comment at all. Effective teaching and learning? I think not.

This gives you a different view of what the typically hear from professors using blogs in their classroom. Given that view, how successfully will a high school teacher, who is not doing their homework, implement blogs into the curriculum. In my opinion no matter what the method, plan, or tactic you are using to introduce subject matter, if it is ill conceived, thought out, or planned itwill fail. Let me preface all the rest of my posts by saying that I believe blogs can work in the classroom. The problem I am starting to see in my reading is maybe just maybe some teachers see this as a way to lessen their work load. I’m not sure if this is the case but hopefully I will have an answer to that question along with many others as I investigate this topic. 

Chronicle Careers: 1/30/2007: Blog Overload

The Chronicle of Higher Education
Blog Overload
By Kara M. Dawson
January 30, 2007

How do you teach a student to write something that expresses what they are feeling in meaningful way? How do you get them to take a subject, pick a side, and use powerful sentences in combination with facts to argue their point? Its hard enough at times to get them to say hello let alone communicate in this way in writing. This is what I set out to do when I created this blog. While reading extensive on the different methodologies of how to teach writing I noticed that most articles kept mentioning something that was right in front of my face…..literally. They kept mentioning blogs. Some teachers love this new tool, others fear blogs, while others hate the idea of the Internet taking over yet another part of there teaching.  That is why I have decided to really focus in on the effects thatblogs have on the ability to teach students how to write well.

In a recent Chicago Tribune article this debate was showcased:

“It’s the tip of the iceberg of something really, really tremendous that’s happening in education,” said Dave Sherman, principal of South Park Elementary School in Deerfield. “I really think this is cutting edge, where education is going in the next five to 10 years.”

A little farther down the article the opposite point of view was expressed:

Blogs offer a new level of convenience, but some educators fear the technology will open them up to criticism.

“There is great resistance,” said Cynthia Mee

Don’t let me mislead you this is not a hot button subject. At least for now. Most parents and quite a few teachers have no idea what a blog is. As blogs become more prevalent I am not sure whether there will be a huge surge of opinion against it. Safety for the students writing these blogs is an issue but there are security measures to take care of that. Some people will complain that this type of on-line writing breeds poor writing habits but I am sure that capable teachers will be able to create boundaries and guidelines for this. 

I believe that the more you write the better you become at writing. It can’t be different from anything else. The more you do something the better you get at it. I am not saying that every person who plays the piano is Mozart and i am not saying every person who skates allot is Dorothy Hamel but what I am saying is that the people who practice those things a lot are much closer to reaching their potential then those who don’t practice at all. So my question for this semester will be “Does blogging make the average student have more interest in writing then if they were going through the more traditional approaches?” In other words: Blogging vs. the 5 paragraph Compare and contrast essaythat Prof. Rozema likes to talk about.  

 Does blogging is having positive effects on the quality of writing in schools? Lets find out.    

Source:

Blogging clicks with educators | Chicago Tribune

By Lisa Black

If some of you that are in both the 310 and 311 classes you will see that I am pretty much writing about the same type of thing. Only in 310 it is about writing instead of reading. We have already delved into this subject in class when we talk about the writing process.

I have mixed emotions when I hear us discuss the writing process or I read something like the Murray article “Writing as a Process…”. It all seems well and good in theory and I am sure that with the dedication of enough time it will work but does it play out with success in the classroom. Murray talks about rehearsal to draft to rewrite to revision that is the beginning of another rehearsal and so on. Sounds solid as you read it. The question is will you get students to buy into it and even if they do will they stay committed to it. High School Student A has got to learn all about integers, the Battle of Trenton, the Bill of Rights, run a mile and half for gym, has practice after school, followed by practice till 5:30 and guess what we want you to do. Write this way. I am just not sure it works in practice.

That is why I am blogging about methodology. I really want to know different methods and where these methods are in practice or at what stage of development they are. I want to say before i end that I am not an English Major, I am a Social Studies major. I also want to admit I know very little about this subject but I hope to discover a little bit about my beliefs through this process.