INTERTEXTrEVOLUTION

Rosenblatt, Poetry, & Technology

2012-02-01T04:52:00.000-08:00

Rosenblatt's Transactional Theory

Rosenblatt’sliterary theory (1938/1995; 1978) diverges from the New Critical perspectivethat readers examine texts in order to extract "the meaning."Rosenblatt states that during transactions with literary texts, readers draw onpast and present literary and life experience to create meaning and posits that“'[t]he poem’ comes into being in the live circuit set up between the readerand 'the text’” (1978, p. 14). Faced with traditional curricular and new highstakes testing requirements, today's literacy educators are pressured bytechnology’s promise to expand the repertoire of students' literacy experiences.At this juncture, Rosenblatt’s theory offers an important reminder thatregardless of, and perhaps even becauseof increased pressures, it is the role of the teacher to "fosterfruitful... transactions" (Rosenblatt, 1995, p. 26) between readers and allkinds of texts. Transactional theoryalso highlights the active, recursive, and multifaceted nature of reading andresponse, creating a model of classroom reading that values students’ initialresponses as a significant first step in meaning negotiation toward mature,considered responses (1938/1995; 1978).

Transactional Theory and Technology

BridgingRosenblatt’s theory with 21st-Century technologies, McEneaney (2003) exploredhypertext as rooted in transactional theory, suggesting, “[a] transactionalview of text structure... requires us to reject the notion of structure as aproperty of text in the same way [the transactional] theory rejects the notionthat meaning is a property of text” (p. 273). As students make meaning fromtoday's variety of texts, they transact linearly, laterally, andunsystematically— not only with words but also with infinite combinations ofimages, sounds, and videos (Kress, 2003). Thus, today’s teachers must not onlyhelp students respond to text but also must acknowledge that when students transactwith literary texts, they do more than establish a “live circuit”: they add newtransistors and switches (McVerry, 2007).

Transactional Theory, Technology, and Poetry

To enrich the contentand affect of the poetry classroom, technology may seem like an unwelcome stranger.Research has found, however, that “multimedia texts and multimodal composingmay actually shift classroom culture toward a more learner-centered paradigm” (Chandler-Olcott& Mahar, 2003, pp. 381-2). Thus,with careful embrace, technology may create fertile classroom conditions;robust, dynamic new texts, contexts, and representations show promise to crackinto marble of New Critical and five-paragraph essay monuments that historicallymark reading and writing in English classrooms (Pirie, 1997). We propose thatby responding to poetry through non-verbocentric activities and becomingauthors of multimodal texts, students will not only explore and refine 21st-centuryskills, but also, by building contemporary live circuits, they may benefit fromnew understandings of poetry and a powerful means of self-expression.

Treatsie Against Bloom's Taxonomy Infographics

2012-01-30T08:15:00.000-08:00

I am a huge fan of infographics. I think it goes back to my Father being a reader of USA TODAY. I loved the little graphs in the left hand corner.

Maybe that is why I get such an ill-feeling when I see how quickly all the Bloom's Taxonomy and (insert any tech tool here) are retweeted.

Sure they look pretty.

They even highlight some of my favorite tools.

Yet I feel they do a disservice by discounting the role of the teacher. They perpetuate the idea that simply introducing technology will transform education.

Technology transforms society. It is a matter if education will catch up, and all the pretty graphics will never get us there.

Technology as a Text

The focus on technology must be a recognition on the new texts that are created and not simply the tools. Lets take an example from above in the pyramid. Flickr is listed in remembering (a L.O.T. and prezi is in Creating a (H.O.T).

The placement of the tool on the infographic should be malleable by the instructor. Instead of asking what tool should I use to increase the level of creative and analytical thinking teachers shoudl ask What is my pedagogical goal? How do I want to enhance my pedagogical goal?

If I wanted my students to develop an awareness of social justice issues they could look through flickr about current events, analyze the perspectives in photos, and maybe even leave comments. They could go one step further and go out and collect photos on a social justice issue that interests them and share the pics with the world.

These events involve more creativity and analytical writing than a prezi on one of the 50 states.

Simply put when it comes to technology transforming education the tool is the least important element. It begins with a teacher, a pedagogical goal, and a recognition that reading and writing constantly shift.

Stripping away of Knowledge

I am glad that educators are using Krathwol's team's Revised Bloom's Taxonomy but these infographics remove an important element. Krathwol and his team separated knowledge from doing. There are very specific ways different content areas approach technology. These infographics ignore that fact.

Stripping away the Social

Bloom's taxonomy comes from a strong cognitive background. The idea being that learning involves a series of internal processes and the storage of memories. There are competing learning theories that focus on the social nature of learning.

These infographics spread the idea that learning involves one student. Yet the greatest advantage new digital texts and tools provide is their collaborative nature. The greatest challenge is recognizing the new proficiencies and dispositions these DT&T require.

Use with Caution

Am I saying never use these infographics. Of course not. They are great evangelical and Public Relations Tool. Just do not use them to justify or make any pedagogical decisions. That's just silly.

The Reasons Why

2012-01-15T10:17:00.000-08:00

Recently my travels have brought me to Scranton, PA. Ian and I work with a group of committed educators on transforming their curriculum by including digital texts and tools.

The teachers a part of a much larger grant funded by the McGowan Foundation and hosted by Marywood University. The researchers we work with designed the grant to broaden the horizon of students in the Scranton area.

Scranton is like many post-industrial American cities. You know, places that have a storied past yet imbued an an ambiance of fallen Grace. Scranton sits in the middle of coal and steel country in Pennsylvania. The problem, of course, the industries that made this city great have vanished into the annals of progress.

The people, however, remain. This has created an educational challenge for teachers. The jobs simply no longer exist in vast numbers. Yet the people remain.

As in do not leave. Not for college. Not for career. Their roots are strong.

This of course is not necessarily a bad thing. I am drawn to towns where the same families have sat in the same booths at their local diner for generations. Yet the local youth have not sought out new opportunities. That is the goal of the grant: to encourage a post secondary education.

Our job is to work with a dedicated group of middle school teachers to ensure that the literary experiences students get reflect the literary expericenes of their lives and the demands of the work place.

The Re-Occurring Question

Ian and I conduct workshops all over the country.We always get the same question. Scranton was no different. A teacher, who wanted to use many of the lessons we shared, asked, "Why should we do this if we know it isn't covered on the test?" She wanted tips to help quell the outcry of critics.

That is when I went to Monster.com and did two searches on their website. The first was for the word digital:

The next phrase was social media:

Each search literally had 1,000 of results. This grant is about jobs. This grant is designed to ensure that opportunities for students to excel still exist because of their education. This grant is about the ability American economy to transform.

If we want an economic future for our students (one of many goals for educators) we must continuously redefine by what we mean as literate. That is why I have developed three responses to the Re-Occurring Question.

The Reasons Why:
1. The current tests no long measure what it means to be literate
2. Digital texts and tools make it easier to take advantage of better teaching practices
3. Is what we are doing really working?

Lack of 21st Century Validity

Digital literacy, 21st century literacies, New Literacies. I do itch for the day when we no longer need this false dichotomy of page and pixel. I do wish for a time when the literate practices of today's youth are recognized and celebrated.

Yet as long as we get the question about raising test scores educators must draw a distinction between the literacy practices assessed by our state tests and those that are required to fill one of the 1,000 of jobs available to those steeped in the digital life.

Many of activities that we encourage participants to use with their students will never automatically raise test scores. The tests, simply no longer (if they ever did) ask the right question.

Take writing for example. If your state test looks at students' ability to state an argument and defend their claims that in no way assesses students' ability to present claims and details in a variey of modes or to make design decision that can influence an audience.

Tracking the Digital Footprint

My second response to "The Question" is to highlight the ease digital texts and tools can bring to the process of assessing and tracking student progress.

I call it the end of "milk crate grading" In fact our dedicated cafeteria workers can rest easy and no longer have to guard their milk crates from marauding teachers who raid their wares in the middle of the night.

Teachers no longer have to trek home with hundreds of binders and journals to monitor student reflections and writings. In fact they can quickly look across long periods of time to look for growth.

As another example think of comprehension strategy instruction. Teachers, and rightfully so, often use literature circles or reciprocal teaching to allow students to model and practice what good readers do. Yet because a teacher may only be able to observe one group at a time many literature circles devolve into five children doing five different worksheets ( I mean roles) alone.

If these pedagogical practices were augmented online a teacher would be able to monitor many more groups both synchronously and asynchronously.

What we are Doing isn't Working

A Nation at Risk was published in 1984. This aligns with birth and growth of the personal home computer. Since then schools across America have tried to raise scores, combat the opportunity gap, and increase literacy levels.

Yet not much has changed. Still more and more calendar days are given to reviewing material on the state assessments. More and more intellectaul endeavors (music and art) face the budgetary ax.

And district after district look to technology to simply improve test scores. Schools utilize technology to train not transform. Expecting score to go up as students are plopped in front of screens in the hope that they may raise their lexile scores a few points is ineffective.

So why do we keep doing that which is not working? I am not sure. What I do know is that if the focus remains on outdated assessments and inefficient pedagogy we may never discover what truly works. Consequentially our students may never be prepared to participate in a truly global and digital society.

Does your Digital Footprint Get you in the Door?

2012-01-03T13:47:00.000-08:00

Times are tough for recent graduates of education programs. Given the economic conditions of many school districts the labor pool has swelled with teachers who have many years of experience. These recently released recruits are quickly filling the ranks of the few full-time positions and almost all of the long term substitute positions.

It is that last point that is most trubelsome to new graduates as that was often their first step into a full time position.

Recent graduates need to do more if they hope to succeed in this job market. One area that students need to pay particular interest to is their digital footprint.

Sure many education students are aware of the pitfalls of facebook. Some have gone on to replace their last names with their middle names or mastered the web of privacy settings. Yet it isn't enough.

A negative footprint on the web will stand the time as a fossilized impression of your character.However those seeking employment must put even more effort in building a positive digital footprint.

A positive digital footprint is not a fossil. It is more a step on the beach that ebbs with the tidal flow Each day new waves of digital content can simply wash away your efforts.

It is simply not enough to vigilantly guard your online presence against images of high school and college shenanigans.

You can rest assure that multiple members of every hiring committee will Google your name. Yes, no bad news is good news, but why not use the web to your advantage? Why not use the Web to build an online presence that puts forward an image of a talented, caring and knowledgeable educator?

You want the committee to have you stand out in a pool of very talented teachers. Here are a few steps you can take (in no order of importance):

1. Create a Google+ Account

Keep Facebook for friends. I find it advantageous to utilize other social networks for professional development. I would think it is strategic to get involved in Google+ as the popular search engine might just favor their own social network in search algorithims.

Google+ is also a great place to find many wonderful educators. You can develop circles, a collection of peiple, based on different topics. More importanty you can share relevant education resources to your circles.

2. Participate in Twitter

Twitter has quickly become my favorite professional development tool. Whether you use it to follow leaders in the field of education or to participate in many of the weekly educational chats it is a great place to make connections to other educators.

Twitter results do not show up as high in Google anymore as the two companies did not renew their real time search results agreement but a few retweeted or blogged about tweets can go a long way to soldifying your digital footprint.

3. Join Educational Social Networks

Another strategy to improving your digital footprint is to join one of the many educational themed social networks. These are a great place to get new resurces and learn how to become a better teacher. The discussions, forums and groups are a wonderful tool for new teachers. As you become more involved some of your posts will begin to show up in Google seach results.

4. Create a Blog

Reflective teaching and learning are at the center of growing as an educator. By creating and posting to a blog you will not only grow as a teacher but you will improve your chances that something beyond local sports results will show up in Google when a hiring committee searches your name.

5. Create your own Website

While I stated earlier that these tips were listed in no order of importance I would stress the importance of creating your own website. Many education programs require students to submit a portfolio. Many students may still put together a binder of their lesson plans and reflections for search committees to ignore.

Instead you should create a website. There you can link to your other online spaces, thus increasing the chances of Google displaying the content you want when a member of a hiring committee enters your name as a keyword.

On this website include examples of your lesson plan, a learning philosophy, and interesting links.

Getting noticed online is tough. Especially if your name is common. If you plan on joining the job market soon I would take steps to ensure your positive digital footprint is not washed away for ever.

Pedagogy, Assessment, and Research of Social Networks

2011-12-21T07:07:00.000-08:00

Recently I presented with Jonathan Bartels, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Joan Rhodes, Virginia Commonwealth University on the literacy practices of social networks. Below is a summary of that presentation.

Social Networks are becoming a powerful tool to transform the classroom. Instead of learning about a discipline we can utilize the affordances of social networks to have students learn to be a discipline.

At this point, Mendeley offers a great product...just having the ability to clean up your files and save them in a sensical pattern is an invaluable tool for most researchers.

What really sets Mendeley apart from all the other options for saving and indexing your PDFs is their online presence. The desktop version of Mendeley you can download and it will clean up, organize, and index the files on your machine. When you sync your library to their servers, you can then log in to your dashboard on Mendeley.

What follows is part social network, part shared library, part remote access to your library files. You can share your collections...and grow your collections...with other researchers.

You can also search to see what others are reading about, or what they may have published. Mendeley offers a small amount of free space to host your files online...this usually is enough to host your own materials. They also offer more space for a relatively small fee.

Social Networks in the Classroom

Role Play:

Use a social network to teach argumentative writing. Part of the challenge of teaching academic discourse and writing practices is contextualize writing. Rick Beach has done some great work using social networks to support argumentative writing.

If you were exploring climate literacy you could have students play as three characters: a coal conglomerate, an environmentalist, and a chamber of commerce member. Each character could then build a page on a social network. They could critique a source that does not support their position and then add sources that support their position.

Moving beyond Discussion Boards

Social networks allow us to create online or blended classroom that capture identity in a way that simple discussion boards do not. In fact many literacy and teacher educators use social networks to create a community of practice that continues beyond one semester.

As students add profiles, videos, and status updates you build a classroom not just a Q and A Discussion.

Eportoflios

Too often our eportfolios are becoming a tool for simply showcasing and caegorizing student work. We can use social networks like Mahara

to use portfolios to truly look at the residue of learning that comes through participating.

Researching Social Networks

Netnography — the online practiceof anthropology — could be helpful to advertisers and copywriters as theyseek this enhanced understanding. Netnography is faster, simpler, timelier,and much less expensive than traditional ethnography- (Kozinets, 2006)

Content Analysis Protocol- Document the frequency and types of personal, identifying, and contact information they included (e.g., identification of real name, hometown, gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, interests, and identifying image). Examine the use of various technical features, such frequency of blog use (if applicable) and blog topics as well as the presence of various visual media (e.g., videos, photos, music player). Note others’ comments on their pages, including the number of comments, topics commented on, and number of friends in their network. (Greenhowe and Robeila, 2006)

Using Multimodal Poetry to Engage in Critical Literacy

2011-12-19T10:11:00.000-08:00

Many of us agree that we need to align our classroom activities with the digitally literate lives our students lead. Yet we still hear of many classroom simply focusing on technology integration.

Simply put this is a mistake. When we look at the shift from page to pixel in terms of technology integration rather than an ever shifting and dynamic text we create a horse race environment where technology never improves learning.

It's like the old Orbitz commercial where a refund is delivered by hovercraft instead of mail.

Just because you have technology does not mean you need to use technology. Instead always ask yourself, "How do these emerging text enhance or inhibit my pedagogical goal?" Do not simply use a hovercraft because you have one.

Multimodal Poetry

One area that I have been working on for the past five or six years is to integrate digital texts and tools into my teaching of poetry. There is something rewarding about using the oldest genre of litertature with the newest forms of text.

I also think poetry, as a potter's wheel of the soul, is a great place to shape ideas about design effecting meaning making. Each word, phrase, stanza, image, or metaphor continuously redesign meaning as a new audience stumbles upon the poem. The rich words and guttural reaction to poetry allow for a conversations around topics such us color scheme, image placement, font, etc.

Finally I have too often seen poetry taught so poorly that generations of new writers may have never discovered their poems from within. We do not let students work with one poem over time, or to play with meanings. Instead the focus in on literary elements, i.e. find me a one poem with a metaphor, one poem with alliteration, etc.

The humanity is lost in the hunt for the mechanics

Celebrating Poet Laureates

It was decided then that at each year at NCTE we would submit a proposal to celebrate the work of a Unites State Poet Laureate through multimodal poetry so we could get away from what Billy Collins (our first featured poet) called teaching children, "To beat the meaning out a poem with a hose."

In 2009 we highlighted Billy Collins by exploring new ways to respond and author poetry with images.

In 2010 we featured Kay Ryan and went through #Twitpoems and multimodal retellings with iMovie.

This year, in Chicago, we brought in the works of W. S. Merwin and connected to using poetry to make the world a better place. That is our definition of critical literacy-words in action to change or question the status quo for the greater good.

W. S. Merwin and Poetry for Change

W. S. Merwin is also an interesting choice as he has developed a natural suspicion to many things digital. We wanted to show that there is just as much poetry in the design choices students make as in the words they add or leave off the page.

Basically we read some Merwin poems as mentor texts. Next we took ideas from Probst and concentrated on converting prose to poetry. Students had to choose a social justice issue. Then we took he project into two separate directions.

One group of students completed an internet inquiry topic around their issue. They wrote a collaborative paragraph. Next they highlighted important words or phrases in the paragrpah and used those a basis for a poem. Students then, using Audacity and iMovie, created a multimodal version of their poem.

Another group of students went out into their world to find a social issue. They collected cell phone pictures to document the problem. They then searched for similar images online. Using search engines they connected back to the websites that hosted the images and "found" texts they wanted to use in their poems. They then used iMovie or MovieMaker Live to create the poem.

Moving Forward

Poetry has been a great avenue to explore multimodal design elements. We hope to continue our work at NCTE next year, or by simply sharing our work with other teachers.

TAG TEAM Writing Method

2011-12-16T07:56:00.000-08:00

I have been throwing around a few ideas trying to conceptualize my idea of effective writing instruction into a pedagogical model. Being a teacher I of course needed a catchy acronym: TAG TEAM.

For me the term captures the essence of writing as a social practice and a collaborative classroom effort.

Note on a Strange but True Story: I had the the idea of TAG-Targeted Areas of Growth, as a method for differentiating my writing instruction. It was the day I read that Randy "The Macho Man" Savage tragically died that I formulated the model. I share not because I was a huge wrestling fan, not even a fan of Slim Jims, but because it shows that pre-planning and ideas for writing come from anywhere.

TAG TEAM

TAG- The key to the instruction approach will be to make individualized pedagogical decisions based on data collected from formative assessments.

Each student, in conjunction with the classroom teacher, will choose Target Areas for Growth based on the District Wide Argumentative Writing Rubric. Setting specific writing goals is an evidence-based strategy for improving writing.

I think the writing rubrics we give to kids over over bloated and useless. Seven criterion with 4 scales of quality do nothing for a kid. They may give us some summative data but they are useless for formative assessments that improve instruction.

So under TAG one student who struggles with organization may just choose to focus on the criterion on your rubric around organization and develop a TAG such as "use details to support a clear main idea." Now through the revision process that student puts all their focus into that TAG.

Then when it is time to assess progress you can have the student highlight the areas in between drafts that address the TAG. This makes your assessment time more efficient and effective.

TEAM This program recognizes that the best writing instruction requires a collaborative environment for students to develop the skills and habits of good writing. Therefore it utilizes research based best practices involving feedback, modeling, and collaborative writing.

Together- The TAG TEAM approach recognizes that a writing classroom requires a classroom of writers. Collaborative pedagogical practices must be the center of any curriculum.

At the student level it requires the teacher and the writer to conference, either f2f or virtually, to identify and asses Target Areas for Growth.

At the group level students will meet to work with each other on editing and revising and to assess their peers on their Target Areas for Growth.

At the classroom level collaborative writing assignments will be used throughout any unit of instruction and embed writing as a tool for inquiry.

Evidence- The TAG TEAM approach recognizes that evidence must inform practice. Students and teachers will draw from evidenced-based writing strategies for planning, revising and editing compositions across disciplines. Student growth is not simply assessed in the products of writing. Instead the TAG TEAM approach also looks for growth in the feedback students leave for peers, reflections students provide on their own writing, and comments made during conferencing.

Authentic- The TAG TEAM approach recognizes that writing instruction must offer opportunities for students to write their way into a discipline. Therefore the learning activities must be driven not only by skills of writing but also the unique content demands of different subject areas; and the digital literary lives students lead. Students will use the TAG TEAM approach to follow disciplinary specific writing processes.

Models- The TAG TEAM approach recognizes that models are a scientifically research based method for improving writing. Therefore students will be afforded the opportunity to analyze models of varying quality and to evaluate annotated comments left by other students and teachers.

Publishing as a Province for Popular Culture

2011-12-13T09:49:00.000-08:00

Understanding Perspectives when Reading Online

I hear it all the time as I spend countless hours watching screen captures of students reading online, “This website is reliable because it has all the information I am looking for.”

Why have all of my efforts to teach students to evaluate websites been so futile? I think it is because I relied on the most common approach to teaching website evaluation: providing a checklist of strategies. I now realize this approach relies on two fallacies when reading online: 1:) a stable taxonomy of skills exists for online reading, 2:) metacognition is an “inside the head” experience.

Decontextualized Reading

Creating taxonomy of online reading skills, which can be applied as a universal approach will never work. As fans of Gee and Street note, reading is always a social practice. Using this perspective every inquiry task students engage in is overlaid with the residue of contexts, culture, relationships, and power structures.

When we provide students with a simple checklist we are attempting to strip away this context in search for a set of universal skills. Instead we need to focus in on the practices of reading online while introducing a variety of contexts that recognize how perspectives shape the words and images authors use.

Metacognition versus Strategy Exchange

The second fallacy is that metacognition, or thinking about thinking, is a solitary act that happens in the “mind.” After spending the better part of half a decade researching how students read online I realize it is more about strategy exchange than simply thinking about what good readers do.

Students, when they are engaged in the practice of online inquiry, learn when they can share, collaborate, and remix what works when reading multiple sources. It is more of an issue of social regulation rather than self-regulation.

Using Remixes to Understand Perspectives.

How can I focus on the context and engcourage strategy exchange? Like most things digital I found the answer at NCTE. I recently had the pleasure of attending my first #HackJam in Chicago this year; organized by the National Writing Project and facilitated by Andrea Zellner. At this event we were introduced to Hackasaurus, a project run by the Mozilla Foundation. Basically using their tool, X-Ray Goggles, a Firefox plug in, you can remix any website. I quickly realized this would be the an effective method to get students to consider perspective while reading multiple online sources.

What better way to have students look for markers or credibility as they read by having them rewrite them into websites. My thought was to take two opposing viewpoints on a contraversial issue and have students remix and “flip the perspective”

Reading Remixes

For example they could begin by analyzing remixes I made (in just a dew minutes) and look for markers of credibility. I would send them to my remixed Vegan Action page and my remixed National Rifle Association page. Then we would discuss which pages had a more effective message and better markers of credibility. My students would realize that the remixed NRA page used authoritative quotes, credible sources versus the sarcasm on the Vegan Action page.

Ready to Remix

Then I would have my students “flip” perspectives on a controversial issue. I would first provide brief training videos (similar to this one made for teachers):

Then I would let students loose and work in small groups to remix two websites by providing the simple tutorial tools provided by hackasaurus.

Building Better Digital Reader and Writers

This project would have many benefits. Students would have opportunities to exchange strategies without decontextualizing the reading. They would work with the html code that is still the backbone of digital writing. Finally they would understand how perspectives shape the words and images authors use while building their argumentative writing skills.

Collaborative Case Studies

2011-12-13T08:21:00.000-08:00

(**note I am back on blogger temporarily as I rebuild my hacked wordpress website. Never changed my username and password from the default... Even the savvy can be stupid sometimes).

Last night during the combined #engchat and #sschat some folks were asking m about how I use collaborative case studies to improve argumentative writing. Since my original post was deleted I thought I would try to recreate it.

First I am a huge fan of collaborative writing to support argumentative writing. Not because it is backed by empirical research (it is see Writing Next ) but because I know it works.

Increases Strategy Exchange
I am a firm believer that teaching isn't about learning new strategies to read and write but it is a matter of building in opportunities for emerging reader and writers to exchange Just in Time strategies embedded in literacy practices. Collaborative writing allows for in-depth discussion, meaningful revision, and thoughtful composition over time.

More Efficient and Effective Assessment

Collaborative writing also eases the assessment burden on teachers. Much of my teaching is online and managing hundreds of post while reading twenty essays is daunting. Having students write in groups of 4-5 reduces my load.

The assessment is also more meaningful. I can look for growth not simply in the final product but using the comments on a wiki or GDocs I can see students growth through the process of writing.They leave comments to each other and I can look at these comments to see if student "X" understands supporting details.

New tools also allow for greater accountability. As teachers who have assigned group projects we have all had the pushy parent proclaiming their child was the only productive member of the group. Using the revision history we can show students how we track the work load.

Real Life Experience
We are all now familiar with the adage, "In the real world it is collaboration in schools it is cheating." Last night during #engsschat folks, who had spent time in actual writing careers, commented that my description of collaborative case study reminded them of editorial meetings. If we are going to prepare students to write themselves into the world we need to build in opportunities for collaboration.

How it Works

I begin by giving my students a controversial issue or inquiry question such as is "Google Making us Dumber?" Then I give them multiple sources to consider such as the Cspan book talk with Mark Bauerlein and Neil Howe debating "The Millennials: The Dumbest Generation or the Next Great Generation?"

Then in groups they decide how they will read the sources and compose a document. They then start composing on a wiki or gDocs.

I then sit back and watch the writing process unfold:

After taking collaborative notes the students plan their essay:

Then they draft and revise:

Finally they publish a piece:

Overall it is very effectice and I encourage everyone interested in supporting argumentative writing to give it a try.

2011-08-11T08:33:00.001-07:00

Moving from We Can't to We Must

2011-03-25T09:11:00.000-07:00

Something wonderful happened today. I was speaking at the Connecticut Association of Administrator Mentor program and came to a realization:

For the first time I was able to hear a chorus of "We Must" instead of "We Can't" when discussion technology and literacy integration. There were no calls of not enough machines or students too far behind grade level to worry about technology. It seems the critical mass of administrators in Connecticut understand the challenges students face in a multimodal world.

This is a monumental shift that I do not take lightly. I usually hear calls of overwhelmed budgets, resistant staff, cyberbullying. Not this time. It was great to work with a group of such committed folks.

After the talk we gathered to discuss some key strategies that administrators could use to implement literacy and technology in their district. I will do my best to summarize the issues, but I am sure I am missing some key issues. If you attended the talk please feel free to leave your ideas below in the comments.

Encourage Teacher/Classroom Websites

It was agreed that building a classroom presence is the first step teachers should take. As one participant commented, "Having a classroom website meets the needs of special education pre-teaching requirements and lets gifted and talented students work at their own pace." It meets your differentiation needs."

Building a class website frees education from the time and space constraints of schools, increases accountability, and provides a home-school connection.

We discussed the (minimum) types of elements that should be included: notes and objectives from lessons, homework and assignment calendar, a place to publish student work, and links to outside resources.

Encourage Teachers to build their PLN

Professional Learning Networks have greatly improved what I teach. We agreed that administrators must encourage teachers to seek out their peers on online spaces such as Twitter, Facebook, ISTE, NCTE Connected Community English Companion Ning, SMART and Mimeo networks, etc.

I shared some common hashtags for Twitter such as #edchat, #BlackEdu, #cpchat, and #edtech that teachers could use.

Require Hybrid Lessons

If educators are not teaching some part of their lesson online it is impossible to say school systems are graduating college ready studnets. According to recent Sloan Consortium Reports the majority of students enrolled in K-12 will take an online class in college. How can students be college ready if they did not take an online class in K-12.

We also discussed the benefits hybrid teaching approaches have for empowering students who do not always participate in class.

These learning spaces can range from gDocs to wikispaces to discussion boards. The point is students have an opportunity to build their digital footprints with faculty pointing the way.

Create schoolwide email systems

Much of the discussion focused on technology solutions. It was agreed that schools should adopt a schoolwide email system. There are many options out there such as Google Apps for Educators or epals.

We all shared a laugh about how many times an email we wrote is misconstrued. These discussions highlighted the need to include email writing in the curriculum.

We also discussed how email can help alleviate communication issues with students and parents

Have a published filter/unfilter policy

There is nothing more frustrating to a teacher who works all weekend long on a lesson plan who then comes in to find safe sites they need are blocked by a filter. We discussed how important it is for school systems to have a published filter policy that teachers understand.

The unblocking requests teachers file must also be returned in a timely manner with a clear explanation of why the site was or was not unblocked.

Invest more in PD than technology

We spent some time discussing funding issues and agreed that professional development was more important than capital purchases of equipment. You can have the latest and greatest technology but if your staff does not knwo how to use the tchnology to enhance their pedagogical goal the computers will gather dust or just be used to migrate worksheets into electronic forms.

We agreed that a good bench mark would be 50% of the technology budget should be spent on professional development and 50% shoudl go to purchasing.

One strategy shared by a participant was to give out limited resources to teachers who attend professional development or show promise in integrating technology into their classroom.

Have long term 1-1 computing strategy

Another issue we discussed was the choice between laptops, netbooks, tablets, and smartphones. I do not think the technology matters. What is important, and participants agree, that schools should have a plan and place to reduce the computing to student ratio with a long-term 1-1 goal.

We discussed how publishers may start to underwrite tablets with the purchase of textbooks or allowing to access the Internet using smartphones.

Either way everyone agreed access is key.

Encourage and assess students' digital footprints

This was the most critical step. I call it the end of milk crate grading. In fact cafetria staff across the country can rest assured that teachers will no longer need to "liberate" milk crates in order to lug binders and notebooks home. By teaching in online environments students can build a history of where they have been an point to where they are going. Teachers can then look for growth in content knowledge and skills not in final products but over time..all the while providing responsive feedback. To me that is the real power of technology.

Digital Residence and Affinity Spaces

2011-01-05T08:12:00.000-08:00

Digital Residents of Affinity Spaces

A recent #edchat discussion centered on Prensky's idea of the digital native/digital immigrant (see transcript). I have never been fond of the metaphor. It is like assuming everyone born during the agricultural revolution produced bushels of wheat. Coming to age during these monumental changes to literacy and social practices does not automatically equate to participation in a digital landscape.

Instead I was drawn to @tomwhitby's idea of digital residence. To me it harped back to James Gee's idea (2004) of affinity spaces. These communities have low barriers of access, offer support for N00bs, and social connections. Unlike the idea of a digital native, howver, digital residency doesn't assume involvement. Affinity spaces, IMHO, require some involvement of the individual as they express their agency through increased participation.

This got me thinking about what kinds of skills and dispositions would be required to increase participation in affinity spaces, or in other words to become an active digital resident. The answer actually came to me not through the readings of scholarly articles or participation in class. Instead it was image driven and the thinking distributed across the folks I interact with in one particular affinity space: Twitter. I came to see that digital residency in affinity spaces required three components: online collaborative inquiry, online content creation, and online reading comprehension.

I chose to represent this with the Zelda Tri-force. Why? Well first it is a homage to a classic video game that created moved a way from scrolling into a world of choices. Next, the trinagle, as the mathematical symbol of change, is a perfect metaphor for the upheaval in the world of literacy that we are currently witnessing.

My Journey to find the Tri-Force

It is not the image I settled on that really matters. Like Link, who had to find the missing pieces of the tri-force, it is the journey that mattered.

It began with a request by @DrAshCasey that was retweeted by someone I follow, and fellow UCONN Grad Student, @DrGarcia. Dr. Casey was looking for an image that would work for the idea of the teacher as a researcher.

In this little exchange I came to realize the power of distributed cogntion over affinity spaces. I also saw the power of thinking in non-verbocentric ways. I began our online collaborative inquiry not with words but with images.

I first started with Flickr. I love being able to search through images marked Creative Commons license (got the idea from another person I follow @mbteach). This also represented an important online reading comprehension skill: locating information.

I started with "teacher as researcher" as a search term. This just brought up iamges of TED talks from around the world. I then kept tweaking my search terms until I picked an image of Pedro Pnce de Leon, one of the founders of deaf education.

I thought this might serve as a perfect metaphor for the teacher as a researcher. As inventing in alphabet for the deaf to use was in fact research. It was also research for a greater social good rather than our current infatuation of chasing effect sizes. I thought it would work perfectly for the classroom.

That idea brought me back to Reinking and Bradley's ideas (2009) on formative design experiments. Reinking often uses an engineer as a metaphor. I thought this was perfect. Instead of Flickr I thought I would try deviantart (a site I can spend countless hours on).

I began with the search term "teacher." The results were not for the faint of heart. Deviantart has a strong anime following and many of the images, were..well...not appropriate for the school audience.

Yet at the other end of the spectrum the images of teachers i could use also reinforced negative stereotypes. It was the classic: A teacher with a button collared, glasses, her hair in a dun, and a scowl across her face. Neither image represented the teachers I know.

So I switched terms, again a key online reading comprehension skill, and used engineer. I settled on an image.

While it was still racy, it is PG in terms of the anime images of teacher I found on deviantart. I also thought it was important to show engineering not as a boring male-dominated career. Especially as a mataphor for teacher as a researcher. First a teacher/research needs a toolbox with many tricks. Second any research endeavor by a teacher is not a neat activity. You are going to make a little mess. That is the joy of teaching.

So I sent these images along to @DrAshCasey. I am not sure if they wer ever used. That wasn't the point. It was an activity in online collaborative inquiry, online reading comprehension, and online content creation.

This realization brought me back to the discussion of affinity spaces and digital residency. I needed some image to represent the skills I thought @tomwhitby's digital residents would need. I thought of change, I thought of the traingle. Then like, Link, I searched for the Tri-Force.

Yet I did not stop there. Online content creation isn't a matter of jsut sharing links or content consumption. There has to be an act of re-design, a transformation of available signs into something new (New Londong Group, 1996). So using Gimp, a free image editor almost on par with Photoshop) I added in some simple text to share my ideas.

In Conclusion

Involvement in affinity spaces, at least increased participation, requires all three elements of digital residency: online collaborative inquiry, online reading comprehension, and online content creation.

I can not take credit for these ideas. It only came about because of my involvement in different affinity spaces and because of colleagues like Ian (who helped coin the term online content creation). What strikes the greatest resonance with me is how image driven my thinking has become. The writing process has in many ways broken the verbo-centric shackles we have thrown on it in the last few hundred years.

To me that is the power of digital media. Connecting new neighbors to the links of the past through affinity spaces.

2010-11-23T09:00:00.001-08:00

I always feel so revitalized when I get back from NCTE. It is great to be around a group of teachers who truly get the paradigm shifts involved in new literacies.

I was struck by a question from an audience member during our presentation on supporting striving writers through non-traditional narratives. He asked if our work in digital narratives supported traditional writing.

I went through the normal caveats (well most measures of writing our single item assessments, what exactly is good writing, etc). I then concluded by saying instruction in digital writing has to improve traditional tools for communication but simply providing writing instruction using paper-based tools ca not improve important new compositional skills.

You see I am a true believer that real meaning is found in the negative space and not copy. Unfortunately most writing instruction makes learning about meaning making a negative space instead of learning to make meaning with negative space.

I came to this conclusion rather serendipitously. It was actually at my first NCTE conference in NYC. I was sharing a room with Doug Hartman, whose command of literacy theory always blows me away. We were looking to kill a few hours and shield ourselves from a blustery October wind. I read that the local school of design (not sure which one) was hosting a museum exhibit to honor Steven Heller, a man who has touched everyone of our lives with his art.

I realized before new literacies were on the radar those in the field of graphic arts had come to many of the same conclusion literacy theorists are still lumbering towards. I picked up his book Design Literacy. Heller writes:

True design literacy requires a practical and theoretical understanding of how design is made and how it functions as a marketplace tool as well as a cultural signpost, which takes years of learning and experience to acquire.

I came to realize exactly what the New London Grup was going for in terms of design and (re)design. We had to recognize that digital writing in terms of making meaning on the world is a process. We also have to stress the importance of design in digital composition.

That's why I view Heller's book as a must own for all ELA educators. It is not a how-to. It doesn't go over different design no-no's. Instead it is a collection of essays on important works of graphic art that have had an impact on history. Its a great read in the classroom or the porcelain library.

It is time to teach students about negative space and instead of making writing a negative space for learning.

My Research Path and New Literacies: Following Digital Footprints

2010-10-16T10:22:00.000-07:00

The Wikipedia article for New Literacies casts research into two separate, and often incompatible, camps of thought. I would tend to disagree. Different lines of inquiry while rooted in varying traditions, are not as dichotomous in nature such as the debates of Locke and Hobbs. Nor are they as different as humanistic traditions that grew from Kantian empiricism versus schools of Critical Theory that emerged from Heidegger and Hegel.

I tend to view “the different camps” as combined efforts in an “open-source approach to theory development” (Leu, O’Bryne, Zawilinski, McVerry, and Everett-Cacopardo, p. 265) as we try to “account for the burgeoning variety of text forms associated with information and multi-media technologies” (The New London Group, 1996, p. 11).

Yes, the questions asked and thus, the research methods chosen are influenced by philosophical differences in views of learning, but general agreement exists that technology is reshaping the “stuff” and “space” of learning (Lankshear & Knobel, 2003). What questions we ask simply depend on the spaces and stuff we study.

At the lab we study the digital literacy practices that are favored in both schools and the workplace. Thus an emphasis is placed on the teaching and measuring of more discrete skills. While these are connected, for better or worse, to “specific social, cultural, institutional, and political practices” (Gee, 1999, p. 356) I feel being able to locate, evaluate, synthesize, and communicate information is central to participation in a global economy.

Studying this “stuff” of learning leads us to methods that involve positivist methods of assessment models and verbal protocol analysis (Afflerbach, 1995). This does not mean other methods or questions are not as important. For example, in studying the contexts that support learning of new literacies of online reading comprehension a participant-observer ethnography maybe the only option.

Other work in the broader field of New Literacies research, which often takes a more participatory view of learning (Gee, 1999, Greeno,1989), study different “stuff” and “spaces” for learning. These theories look to assess not discrete skills but involvement in “affinity spaces” (Gee, 2004) by examining both participation and proficiency through ethnographies (Black , 2008) or through design based measures (Hickey,Honeyford, Clinton, & McWilliams, 2010).

I, however, do not agree that positivist methods cannot be used to investigate learning through participation. Socio-cultural views (Smagorisnky, 1999) and cultural-historical (Cole, 1989) views of literacyshare common roots in Vygotsky (1978) (similar to constructivist learning theories). If learning and language development are rooted in social practices through mediated tool use, can’t this tool use be counted? The idea that we can’t build our knowledge base by counting things just seems silly.

I also agree that positivist methods of measuring learning do not capture the entire picture of the mediating affects that culture has on learning and development. Instead I would argue, using Wittgenstien’s (1980) metaphor of learning as an “immense landscape,” that measures of observable skill and strategy use are like samples on flora and fauna. Its not the entire landscape but this information sure helps put the picture in focus.

This is why I am drawn to the concept of open-source theory development. This is why I ask questions that require me to draw on both cognitive and learning as doing models of learning.

Most importantly however, wherever you stand both constructivist and situated visions of learning seem to promote the same type of inquiry based collaborative pedagogy. The theories may have different methods for measuring and observing but as educators we all want to have kids leave their digital footprints as they transverse the “immense landscape” of learning.

Teaching Online Reading Comprehension using the World Cup

2010-06-18T10:24:00.000-07:00

As I sat and watched the USA robbed of their victory I realized the World Cup can be a powerful teaching tool. Students, in many of the interviews I conducted, commented that they love using the Internet in the classroom becuase they can learn about "stuff happening now, while our textbooks are filled with old stuff."

During the match I wondered how the groups are determined. So I Googled it...then it hit me. The World Cup is a perfect venue for teaching online reading comprehension. There are international perspectives, thousands of websites, and plenty of motivation around soccer...I mean Football.

Questioning
Give or have the students develop some questions. Determine which are more restricted or unrestricted.

In other words how open are the questions. For example: "How are the World Cup groups determined?" is a very restricted question. The answer is concrete.On the other hand, "Should there be video review of goals?" is more open ended and open to interpretation.

Locating
Locating is an easy skill to teach but hard to master. I would take a restricted and unrestricted question from the class and Google it. Then print out the search results and analyze the results with the students.

I also think the classic Internet scavenger hunt is unapproachable in its ability to build searching skills. As a teacher, though, why do all the work? Put students in groups, create a Google Doc, and have each group create a World Cup scavenger hunt.

Evaluating
As my readers know (all two of you) I define critical evaluation as a contextual process of examining, adopting, and changing perspectives in order to judge the relevancy and credibility of a website. There are many opportunities with the World Cup to encourage what Lankshear calls, "developing perspectives on perspectives."

For example it would be interesting to read what different bloggers from opposing countries say about a game. Another idea would be to investigate the question chosen by class and examine the author of each site to determine the level of expertise.
You could also look at these websites and identify markers of reliability that the authors use.

You could also give students a list of four websites and have them consider how perspectives influence the way authors shape information.Julie Coiro, who I differ to all matters of critical evaluation, developed a set of questions that works well with this activity:

Understanding Perspectives

1.Who (individual and/or organization) created this source?
2.What motivated the author to create this source?
3.What techniques does the author use to make you understand the topic in a particular way?

Reading Across Perspectives

4.How does this author’s perspective compare to other sources you have read?
5.Where do YOU sit on the issue of ___________, in relation to the set of perspectives you have read?

Synthesis
Synthesis is probably the hardest of all skills to assess and teach. It happens almost unnoticeably as students interact with other people, discourses, and learning artifacts. Yet it is probably the most critical of all skills as it is important for all learning.

Once the students have investigated the authors and their perspectives have them choose the four best websites on their World Cup question. Then use the following form to scaffold their synthesis:
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I adapted from my former colleagues at the New Literacies Research Lab and created a gForm. If you make your own gForm your students information will be loaded to a spreadsheet to allow you to quickly track their growth.

Communication
I am one of those folks who thinks their is a clear line between composition and communication. Although Web 2.0 tools are blurring the differences. As a teacher decide if you you want to focus on digital composition or just have students communicate the answer to their original question. There are many numerous tools out there for communication and/or composition. As you choose one make sure to focus on the unique discourses associated with that tool.

In Conclusion, Fire that ref, Go USA.

First (and Maybe) Last Reoccuring Column: Challenges of Assessing Online Reading Comprehension

2010-04-16T08:08:00.000-07:00

Many of my twitter followers have been very interested in the work we are doing the New Literacies Research Lab here in Connecticut. Currently we are working on an IES grant to develop valid and reliable measures of online reading comprehension. So I have been asked to document a few of the challenges and obstacles we face.

Synthesis
I am sure by now most of you are familiar with Leu's model of online reading comprehension: Question, Evaluate, Synthesize, and Communicate. Of these skills synthesis has always been the hardest for us to measure. This plays out in both anecdotal evidence and our data. First how do you make evident something that happens in the head (for you cognitive folks) or in the act of doing ( for those more situativley inclined)? Second in all of our factor analytic patterns we have not developed a model that separates synthesis from communication. As we begin our cognitive labs of our items we are determined to get a measure of synthesis.

A Little Background
I figure we can start with Bloom. When in doubt with assessments its a great place to start. Bloom and his crew (1956) placed synthesis among the higher order thinking skills.It had to do with the assembly of knowledge: putting parts into whole. When Krathwol revised the taxonomy his team renamed synthesis create and moved it to the top of the pile.

I like that it where it belongs. Nothing makes me cringe more when teachers equate synthesis to citations. It is an act of creation. You take multiple streams of information and combine them into something new (Thanks NCTE definition of 21st century literacies I really enjoy that phrase. For us this has been especially hard to capture in a comprehension assessment.

I recently sat in our Scientific Advisory Board meeting and got to listen in as Spiro, Pearson, Kirtsch, and Klienman had a lively debate on synthesis. They all agreed it wasn't simply finding detail A and detail B to make summary statement AB. That was way too old Bloom. The SAB wanted synthesis to look more like A says this B says this so therefore the answer is C.

Thus the act of creation. Of course what isn't accounted for in this model is prior knowledge and unique experiences people brind to knowledge assesmbly. Rand Spiro kept reminding us of this point. So many times new knoweldge comes from such non-linear paths. What we know is often out of happenstance. Once again how do you measure this in an assessment of online reading comprehension.

Preliminary Results
In our first round of cognitive labs we immediately noticed the difficulty of measuring synthesis. We started with one screen in surveymonkey that had students take notes on all the websites they found and then combine them into one summary sentence. Kids hated it. They wanted to take notes as they searched for info or judged websites.

So we encouraged notetaking throughout the task and just made synthesis a final statement. The problem this time was brevity. Their summary statements were short, but their final communication showed evidence of them integrating many details they read. Also if we scored synthesis in the final communication some students who could combine ideas, and make them their own ,might lost points for not being able to use a blog, wiki, email or discussion board (our communication tools). Also what about prior knowledge? Should students not get a scorepoint for using what they already knew? So we needed to change the model again.

Our Latest Iteration
The scientific advisory board also suggested we needed to push the social aspect of our assessment and make it an authentic web experience (I would argue taking notes and using that information is authentic, but that's for another time). So we tried to accomplish two things at once: increase authentic task and embed synthesis. In our next round of cognitive labs we are trying three new ideas: a testlet embedded in instant message, a testlet that uses both surveymonkey but uses instant message for synthesis, and then a third version with your standard Word Document for taking notes. It will br interesting to see how these three versions play out.

Future Iterations
I know many of you are suggesting that instant messages is so 2000 and late.I guess that is the nature of the beast we are trying to study. The instant message interface is just a way to simulate a two way communication embedded within our assessments. We have a talented group of programmers working on a response capture object. The latest idea is to make the assessment look like a social network. I am excited about this idea. I do worry that in chasing temporal and chique validity we may threaten actual validity. Have you ever used Facebook to solve a common problem or investigate an issue? I would still argue that discussion boards (for groups) or popular editorial blogs are where the debate around issues is centered. I guess there are specific fan pages out there that could serve as launching pads. It will be a wonderful line of investigation. If we go this route there will be wonderful opportunities to capture synthesis, even if it is still an incomplete model.

Online Content Creation: Digital Writing and Digital Storytelling

2010-04-10T06:39:00.000-07:00

I am excited by all of the interest in digital storytelling. Many wonderful colleagues are pushing the field forward. I finished Troy Hicks's book The Digital Writing Workshop and just ordered Dana Wilber's book Iwrite. These recent efforts are meeting the needs of teachers who all want to use multimodal composition to meet the needs of digital learners. These are exciting times.

I am a little worried, however, that we also need a pedagogy for teaching digital expository and persuasive texts to join such a strong emphasis on narrative storytelling.

Digital Texts
In almost every field students will need to create digital texts to inform and persuade. I recently read that IBM uses thousands of wikis for technical guides. Journalism is quickly shifting to online environments. Finally entreprenuers have to build a web presence using social media tools.

At the same time, however, I see very few schools preparing students for a world where they have to communicate information using digital tools. My hypothesis is simple. You can teach students traditional writing skills in online environments, but you can not teach digital writing skills in pen and paper environments.

During our Internet Reciprocal Teaching lesson many of our lessons were embedded in the persuasive writing curriculum (CT is one of the few states that actually cares about writing on state assessments, we came across many of the differences between offline and online reading. Our students were working on both their critical evaluation skills and persuasive techniques. We started with Mumia Abul-Jamal, a Philadelphia man whop has been convicted of murder. Some contest this claim. We started with the Wikipedia article and other expository texts. We looked at the text structure and design options. Next we looked at websites from both perspectives-guilty and not guilty. The students quickly noted the design issues such as image, font, and color the authors made.

We repeated the same lessons usings zoo's. The students had to decide if zoos were cool or cruel. You would be amazed at how fast a picture of a sad monkey can persuade a student. They had to learn to read the images and understand design choice. There is no way these skills can be taught with paper and pencil!

Classroom Ideas
Having students research an issue and look for articles from a variety of perspectives is an importatn start. I wish we continued and had students use different writing tools such as websites, wikis, and blogs to create persuasive texts. The focus of the study, however, was on comprehension and not composition.

There are classroom ideas teachers can use. One of the most exciting ideas has turned into Ian's dissertation study. He is having students create hoax websites (think the fake product lessons we have done for decades). First the students look at webites and develop a list of markers of reliability. Then using Iweb the students create their own websites with different levels of sincerity.

Another easy lesson, similar to our Mumia Abul-Jamal lesson, is to have students choose an issue and create a website to persuade. The final phase III lessons we did were similar to this approach. We had students choose an issue to make the world a better place. Sure many students focused on dress code and bad school lunches, but others addressed issues such as dating violence, drugs, and crime. The students had to create a website or online presentation on the topic. We began by storyboarding the websites and focusing on design issues. Only then did we actually begin to write copy.

Will it work?
Is my hypothesis correct? Does instruction in digital writing improve measures in offline writing? There is no evidence out there and it is a line of inquiry that interests me. Connecticut would be a unique testing ground. Persuasive writing eighth grade could be used as dependent variables in an ANCOVA model with 7th grade scores as a covariate. CAPT scores in tenth grade could be used for group differences. Of course I would have to make a measure of argumentative web design.

An important element to teaching critical stances necessary for deep comprehension is to have students develop “perspectives on perspectives” (Lankshear & McLaren, 1993 p. 33). One method to developing critical literacy online is to have students learn about the design of websites (Burbules, 1995). Having students select materials for a page, linking to websites, and using the affordances of web design to formulate arguments may teach both argumentative writing and online reading comprehension. The more someone knows how credible arguments are designed the more they are aware when it is done and when it could be done (Burbules, 1995).

As stated I would hypothesize that instruction in traditional argumentative writing (Fulkerson, 1996) would not lead to an increase on scores of a measure of argumentative web design or online reading comprehension, but instruction in argumentative web design may increase scores on measures of both online reading comprehension and measures of argumentative writing.

Conclusion
I do not want to downplay the importance of narrative writing as we discuss digital storytelling. I firmly believe that creative writing is key to improving technical, expository, and persuasive writing. In fact my favorite educational authors blend their genres. That said I am worried that a strong research agenda in digital writing is not developing as quickly as the research surronding digital storytelling.

Draft of Theoretical Perspective

2010-02-25T05:21:00.000-08:00

Since so many of you helped me bounce around ideas as I was studying Vygotsky and the related literature I thought I would post a draft of my theoretical perspective for my dissertation proposal. Please feel free to comment or offer any feedback.

The study is framed using a cultural-historical lens towards and learning (Daniels, 2007; Vygotsky,1978) and meaning (Vygotsky, 1987; Wertsch, 2000) Lee and Smagorinsky, 2000) identified the following four principles in Vygotskian definitions of learning: 1:) learning is mediated between a learner, other people, and cultural artifacts and then appropriated by the learner; 2:)learning involves mentoring and scaffolding; 3) historically and culturally constructed tools such as language mediate learning; and 4:) the capacity for learning is connected to the context of learning.

These principles of learning are central to studies in online reading comprehension. First the advent of the Internet created access to unlimited people and cultural artifacts; while simultaneously it redefined opportunities for mentoring no longer limited by physical space (Leander & Knobel, 2003). Second the rise of the Internet has lead to an explosion in tools and contexts that mediate learning. Vygotsky noted that higher forms of thinking occur through a process of mediation as the participant actively modifies the stimulus response while responding to the stimulus (Cole & Scribner, 1978). As learners read online they can make almost limitless modifications to their text (Hartman, chapter) through a process of self directed text construction (Coiro & Dobler, 2007). These new tools that mediate learning have fundamentally shifted how we make meaning from texts.

Definitions of meaning from a Vygotsky perspective are less concrete (Mescheryakov, 2000). On one hand Wertsch, (2007) suggests that a strong rational legacy runs through Vygotsky ideas of meaning. Vygotsky, according to Wertsch (2000) defines meaning as occurring when socially and culturally developed signs identify objects. Concepts are then formed through meditational relationships with objects as signs can identify groups of objects. On the other hand Wertsch (2000) also notes that Vygotsky’s definitions of knowing, as consisting of two oppositional but related forces of meaning and sense, reflects a long standing tension in philosophy between enlightenment and rational ideas.

This tension between rational and expressive epistemologies is just as present in current literacy research. Socio-cultural (Smagorisnky, 2004) approaches draw on a more romantic view of meaning making while cognitive approaches (Kinstch & Kinstch, 2005) draw on a more rational lens. At the same time studies with digital literacies have seemed to accept the ontological differences in this long-standing philosophical debate. Tierney (2008) notes that meaning making with digital texts requires both agency and artistry. Leu et. al (2004) suggest that online reading comprehension requires not only skills and strategies but also specific dispositions. Finally Sprio and Deschyrver (in press) suggest “advanced Web explorations” and an “opening mindset.” are essential to learn online. In essence, with reading online being so complex researchers have drawn on multiple realities (Reinking & Labbo, 1997) to study literacy and technology.

Under the premise that meditational tools and social practices have shifted exponentially and conflicting philosophical viewpoints enrich research this study accepts the concept of multiple realities as a central theoretical viewpoint. A multiple realities perspective “confronts… a common and unfortunate tendency to treat technology in relation to literacy as a monolithic, unidimensional topic and a corresponding tendency to oversimplify its use… in literacy instruction” (Labbo & Reinking, 1997, p. 479). Accordingly this study, from a cultural-historical perspective embraces both the theory of new literacies of online reading comprehension (Leu, Zawilinski, Castek, Banerjee, Housand, Liu et al., 2007) and cognitive flexibility theory (Spiro, 2004).

The theory of new literacies of online reading comprehension is a specific line of study in the much broader field of New Literacies research (Leu, O’Byrne, Zawilinski, McVerry, & Everett-Cocapardo, 2009). This perspective defines online reading comprehension as a process, which includes:
“…the skills, strategies, and dispositions necessary to successfully use and adapt to the rapidly changing information and communication technologies and contexts that continuously emerge in our world and influence all areas of our personal and professional lives. These new literacies allow us to use the Internet and other ICT to identify important questions, locate information, critically evaluate the usefulness of that information, synthesize information to answer those questions, and then communicate the answers to others.” (Leu, Kinzer, et al., 2004, p.1570)

Cognitive Flexibility Theory (Spiro, Feltovich, Jacobson, & Coulson, 1991; Spiro, 2004) also informed this study. This theory suggests that the Internet, as an ill structured context, requires readers to flexibly apply prior knowledge to novel reading situations that constantly change. Spiro (2004) argues that traditional strategies taught to read offline texts may actually hamper the reading of online texts.

Fiction and the Internet: Connecting Curriculum

2010-02-18T10:00:00.000-08:00

Educators and researches have easily adapted fiction to teach online reading comprehension to students at all grade levels. Classroom literacy instruction often focuses around works of fiction and this may allow narrative texts to be an easy road for both the teacher and student to travel when delivering lessons in online reading comprehension. Educators can use interactive read-alouds and multimedia stories, plot analysis and video games, and collaborative writing and wikis to teach narrative fiction content.

Online Fiction and the Multimedia Learning Center

Maria De Jong and Adriana Bus (2004) used electronic books in kindergarten to introduce students to the features of hypertext. They found that students spent similar times listening to oral stories in electronic books as they did listening to adult read alouds. De Jong and Bus also found that the animations did not distract students from comprehending the meaning in the text. The students also followed e-books in a linear fashion while using hypertext features. In fact students did not fully explore features until second readings. This may mean students used animated features to develop comprehension beyond the oral text or used animations to support deficiencies in comprehension from the first reading.

Furthermore, Castek, Bevals-Mangleson, and Goldstone (2006) suggested using fiction to develop the dispositions students need for online reading comprehension. They suggested five activities using narrative content classroom teachers are familiar with: online read-alouds, interactive read-alongs, online story boards, and online book clubs. Students engaged in these activities will build offline reading comprehension but they will also be afforded the opportunity to explore the changing nature of literacy.

Learning centers play an important role in establishing active learning in early elementary education (Hohmann & Weikart, 1995) and teachers can create a multimedia book center to teach students the basic navigation of hypertext through interactive read-alouds. Fountas and Pinell (2006) identified six components to successful interactive read-alouds: selection and preperation, opening, reading aloud, discussion and self-evalutation, record of reading, and a written or artistic response. Each of these still applies to multimedia books, but they must evolve with hypertext.

First, there are many free and great resources online for teachers to select and prepare. For example, Storyplace, located at http://www.storyplace.org/storyplace.asp. The site has interactive multimedia stories leveled by student grade. The stories for preschool include text, sounds , and animations. Interactive sing-alongs are built into the story. The elementary stories give the audience more control of the tale by naming the characters and choosing the “hero” of the story. Starfall, located at http://www.starfall.org, has a wealth of activities for any level of early reader. The instructor should assist students in choosing multimedia books at the child’s independent reading level.

Second, while the software will take on many of the instructor’s role during the opening and reading aloud of the text the teacher still needs to define the goals of the center. The opening of an interactive read aloud sets teachers expectations and defines the students’ role, and if teachers are going to use multimedia book learning center these roles should be defined by the students. Furthermore the instructor should reinforce these roles before and during the reading.

Third, the discussion and evaluation of the text during a multimedia interactive read aloud should still focus on traditional text evaluation such as plot and character analysis. Students should make connections to other text they read. Learners , however, should also evaluate the hypertext features if they are going to build the navigation skills. Teachers should ask students about the animations an author included, how easy it was to navigate, and about any sounds or videos included in the story.

Finally, the record of reading and the artistic expression should also incorporate elements of online reading comprehension into the multimedia book center. The teacher should post links on her classroom website to any online narrative read by the class and include a summary of the story by the students. This summary could be written in higher grades or an audio recording in lower grades. This will not only share progress with parents, but it will build online classroom libraries outside of school. There is nothing more rewarding then encouraging students to read outside of classroom walls! Also the artistic expressions can be shared online. After reading a story students could use a simple paint program to draw their favorite picture or teachers could scan pictures drawn by hand. These images could then be uploaded to a classroom website and shared with the world.

Digital Fiction and Online Reading Comprehension

The combination of narrative elements such as character backstories, plots and symbols combined with play features such as fantasy and escapism make videogames an intriguing literary text (Squire, 2008). Video games are quickly becoming the new narrative and as the technology evolves these interactive stories become more autonomous with increasingly altering plots. For example millions of people interact in online communities such as World or Warcraft in a world defined by the actions of a player. Furthermore in games such as Jedi Knights of the Old Republic the plot of the storyline changes based on the decisions of the main character. Educators can expand on the multimedia book center and use the new narrative of videogames in the classroom for plot and character analysis.

Many simulations such as Oregon Trail, where students must successfully migrate West and SimCity, where students must manage a city provide opportunities to extend learning beyond the new narratives of video games. Video games provide opportunities to make connections using ICT’s and afford students the opportunity to think and reflect critically on the decisions they make during the narrative.

For example students can use blogs or other ICT’s to record their travels through the West or their stint as Mayor of SimCity. First students could be put into small groups and guide their family through the perils of western migration or work together to build their city. Then at the end of the lesson students could complete a blog detailing what decisions they made. For example, in SimCity students could blog about the tax rate they set, and to make the lesson more challenging teachers could have students write from the voice of a mayor responding to citizen complaints. In the Oregon Trail students could blog about the places they visit during their journey and the condition of the family, and once again this activity can become more challenging by assigning students specific family members. Students would then have to write from that point of view.

Each of these blogging activities can be expanded to include lessons to build online reading comprehension. Teachers could ask students playing the narrative of Oregon Trail to search for information on the Internet about families who traveled the trail. Students could then compare their families simulated adventure with that of an historical account writing a compare and contrast essay or a blog posting. Students could also read about the trials Native Americans faced during Western expansion and compare those historic accounts with the depiction of Native Americans in the video game for a critical literacy lesson. In SimCity students could research natural disasters cities faced and compare their outcome with the simulation. Students could also search the Internet for information about historical challenges actual cities faced such as pollution, traffic, and housing cost and compare those challenges with the game. These lessons not only require students to reflect and compare their experience in the simulation with historical accounts, but they will also require students to search, locate, evaluate, and communicate online information.

Collaborative Fiction and Online Reading Comprehension

Theresa Dobson (2006) explored the use of e-literature with older students. She took the opening paragraphs to Munro’s Love of a Good Women and then had students create their own hypertext stories using wikis, which are websites, which that allow multiple authors to edit. She found that none of the students’ stories progressed in a linear fashion. Using the traditional content of fiction, Dobson suggested that hypertext writing allowed students to adapt their imaginations to a more creative stance, and forced students to focus on more complicated narrative elements other than plot. She posited that this prepared students to comprehend the more complicated and complex narratives that are in print today. In other words, having students engage in an “activity” that highlighted the nonlinear language of hypertext, students developed the ability to further comprehend offline text.

In the classroom teachers can use a similar approach to teach hypertext fiction and as a pre-reading activity for a novel read in class. First teachers should sign up for one of the many free educational wikis such as http://www.pbwiki.com. Next place students into groups and set up a page for each group. Then read a passage at the beginning of a novel read in class, and post this passage to each page of the wiki. Ask students to expand on the passage by writing a short story predicting what the tale will be about. Students should be encouraged to use hyperlinks to words or background knowledge they feel the audience will need. For example if students are reading Armstrong’s Sounder they might want to have a link that brings the reader to websites about coonhunting. Other students may even want to expand on the nonlinear version of hypertext fiction and have hyperlinks that allow the audience to control the plot.

Teachers can also use collaborative writing to prepare students to write hypertext. For example students could be broken into groups and could use an online word processor such as Google Docs and Spreadsheets to write a story. Students could use these features to understand authorship of hypertext. First have students brainstorm the story elements such as characters, plot, and setting. Next have students create an online document using Google Docs and Spreadsheets. Then the students can begin to write the story. The authors could get feedback and critique from each other using instant messaging or email. Teachers could track progess of students by looking at the documents history to see who is doing what editing.

Using fictional content such as multimedia books and narrative games combined with instructional routines such as learning centers and collaborative writing may build both offline and online reading comprehension.

Literacy Crossroads

2010-02-05T08:07:00.000-08:00

Metaphors take the mind on a journey. They map out understandings by comparing the known to the unknown through an exploration of the senses. In many ways, the process of meaning making follows this format of introspection. As educators and researchers we often embark on this journey of meaning making by examining literacy and learning metaphorically. As the Internet becomes more integral to daily life literacy educators find themselves at a crossroad, and teachers must address the meeting of technology and literacy (Selfe, 1999) by metaphorically shining a light on the many paths to come.

Today, we still look to the metaphors of roads and journeys to luminate our lack of knowledge about literacy and learning. Nowhere is this truer than at the intersection of technology and literacy. Long before the Internet became known metaphorically as the information superhighway, Kozma (1994) and Clark (1994) debated the role of technology and learning with the metaphor of a truck traveling as a simple delivery system of knowledge. This metaphor, today, is invalid because the Internet, as a text, empowers the learner. The Internet’s complexities and challenges put our students at the crossroads of learning everyday. They not only take knowledge from the truck, but students drive the truck, and choose their path, while simultaneously having the option to rewrite the maps for other to use. All of this is done at lightning speed. For successful cartographers and navigators the Internet enables, what Jewish traditions long ago labeled, “Kefitzat ha-Derach,” or a jumping of the roads (Encycolpedia Mythica, 2007). Unfortunately for other students who do not have the skills, strategies, and dispositions to read the Internet they can be lost (Henry, 2007) at the crossroads.

The Internet, and other Internet Communication Technologies, have placed literacy at a crossroad not seen since Gutenberg invented the printing press (Leu, Kinzer, Corio & Cammack, 2004) and almost every aspect of life, learning, and literacy has felt the pervasive affects as the amount of information and images explodes. Educators, much like Trivia, and her Greek cousin goddess of the crossroads, Hekate (Encyclopedia Mythica, 2007) must oversee three roads of change constantly being paved by the Internet. Our roads as educators like our mythological predecessors still link the past, the present, and the future, but we must also understand how the Internet affects curricular, instructional, and assessment practices in the literacy classroom.
Literacy at the Crossroads

Literacy, has always stood at the crossroad, with a fixed gaze set on the past, the present, and the future. In fact reading and writing has always been about change, and today this shift occurs as words leap from the page to screen. Yes, humanity has come to this crossroad before…when text shifted from the scroll to the page. However, it took over a century to adopt the book, and the shift to the Internet has occurred in only a decade (Hartman, 2007). Our students echo this quick metamorphosis as they live in a world where the Internet has become the dominant text, and as learners they must adapt by developing new skills for reading and writing.
Internet as a Text

Recent reports (National Endowment of the Arts, 2007) sound alarm bells about the state of reading, but these reports ignore the reality that the Internet has become the dominant text. First of all, the Internet, with over 1.2 billion users currently online (Internet World Stats, 2007) has quickly become the most read text of today’s youth. Second students today spend an average of 48 minutes a week reading online compared to 43 minutes a week reading offline (Kaiser Family Foundation, 2005). Furthermore 70% of students turn to the Internet as their primary source of information (Pew Internet & American Life Project, 2001). All of these signs point to a road where students will need new literacy skills to comprehend complex and always changing texts of the Internet .
Adaptations to Reading and Writing

Many researchers have begun to add street signs at the crossroads of literacy and the Internet. These efforts are often framed by a new literacies perspective (New London Group, 1996), which recognizes that multitudes of emerging and constantly evolving texts require multiliteracies. The complexity of these changes has brought together a confluence of researchers from literacy, anthropology, sociology, and linguistics (Tierney, 2009) and therefore the concept of new literacies acts as an umbrella that encompasses many of these diverse perspectives. These explorations in new literacies mostly unite under four principles: (a) technologies require new skills, strategies, dispositions, and social practices; (b) citizenship in a global community require new literacies; (c) new literacies evolve with their defining technologies; and (d) researchers and educators must examine new literacies from multiple points of view (Coiro, Knobel, Lankshear & Leu, in press).

Reading researches, under this umbrella, have examined the crossroad of the Internet and literacy by developing a new literacies of online reading comprehension perspective (Leu et al., 2004). This lens defines online reading comprehension as an inquiry process that requires: “skills, strategies, and dispositions necessary to … use the Internet and other ICT’s to identify important questions, locate information, analyze the usefulness of that information, synthesize information to answer those questions, and then communicate the answers to others” (Leu, 2006p. 1).
The model of online reading comprehension differs from traditional reading comprehension because students must approach reading differently as they and not the author construct the text (Eagleton & Dobler, 2007). First searching for information based on reading that begins with a questions is a fundamentally different reading task (Dreher & Guthrie, 1990; Taboado & Guthrie, 2006 ) and students must continuously ask questions as they construct the texts they read online. This, of course, is further compounded when students who can not effectively search for information become bottlenecked (Henry, 2006), and unable to comprehend online texts. Second the locating of information within a text requires new navigational skills (Lawless and Schraeder, in press;). Third reading online requires greater evaluation, and very few students (Coiro, 2003) engage in this activity. Fourth synthesizing information from a variety of online genres with varying validity becomes increasingly complicated with online texts (Hartman, 2007). Finally communicating online requires young authors to constantly shift on a continuum of consumer and producer (author, 2007) while writing increasingly collaborative texts (Zaliwinski, 2007).

New Paths for Curriculum, Instruction, and Assessment

An examination of research and a close look at the narratives of our middle school students has revealed that literacy and the Internet have brought us to a crossroad. We are shifting from page to screen at such a rapid pace educators now stand at an intersection and must take different paths when they make curricular, instructional, and assessment decisions.

Curriculum

In order for our students to choose the right paths at the crossroad of the Internet and literacy, school systems need adapt their curriculum. Historically, the educational community viewed the Internet as technology issue from an information science perspective. Students interacted with the Internet in library classes where access, ethics, and evaluation were stressed and not the comprehension and communication of a new literacies perspective (Coiro & Castek, 2005). Furthermore students used technology as tool in computer classes. This model, currently found in most schools is not adequate for teaching online reading comprehension.

The Internet is not an issue of technology, but an issue for literacy classrooms. In order to teach online reading comprehension and communication students will need more than the crucial, but meager minutes allocated to screen time in library classrooms. In fact online reading comprehension needs to become a dominant factor in the language arts curriculum. The Internet, is afterall, the text our students read the most, and the first they turn to for information. Therefore it should be the primary text we teach.

Middle schools should take steps to integrate the Internet under the domain of the language arts frameworks and instruction of online reading comprehension should take place in all content classrooms. First this will require a shift in the type of texts schools purchase and provide to students. Student constructed Internet inquires must become the dominant informational text. Thus it will require a greater investment in one-on-one mobile laptops labs versus traditional textbooks. Second allocation of classroom minutes may have to be reallocated to include a minimum of ninety minutes of language arts instruction to ensure students are afforded the opportunity to build both offline and online reading comprehension and communication skills. Third curriculum writing and unit planning must encourage and hold teachers accountable for the inclusion of online reading comprehension. Finally middle schools may want to move to a model that moves the technology teacher from the lab and into a model of collaborative teaching with literacy teachers. All of these paths will require an examination of teacher development and support for teachers in the field. Educators must understand their own level of online reading comprehension and undertake the same journey students face at the crossroads of the Internet and literacy.

Instruction

Teachers must also take new paths of instruction to navigate the crossroads of the Internet and technology. Boling, (2005) after completing a study of literacy and technology integration, found that teachers were apprehensive when they view technology as another component to an already crowded curriculum. Teachers can draw on the efforts of other educators and researchers to teach middle school students traditional curriculum and content by integrating technology. Such efforts do not add new components to the curriculum, but access traditional texts while also teaching students to develop multiliteracies through important inquiry learning (Harste, 2004). Two examples of instruction to teach new literacies include poetry and biography.
Poetry makes a perfect partner for instruction in multiliteracies and online reading comprehension. Kuroly (2004) discussed how using poetry and powerpoint can open new paths to learning for technophobe teachers. Tierney and Rogers (2004) detail how students can create videos of their own poetry recitings to understand literacy as a social practice.

I created a lesson to teach students about the transactional nature of literacy and technology by having students create multimedia poetry posters. Students will enjoy these and the many more ideas of educators while creating an online community of poets and also develop critical new literacies skills.
Biographies also lend themselves well for instruction in online reading comprehension.

The Hero Inquiry Project (Eagleton, Guinne & Langlais, 2003) is designed to empower students by having them choose a personal hero and then use the Internet to research the person, and then transform an Internet document to communicate to others about that hero. . According to the authors the, “hero inquiry project enables teachers to meet multiple instructional objectives and literacy standards while also integrating technology” (pg. 34). The Hero inquiry project affords students the opportunity to build online reading comprehension in a collaborative environment.

An instructional shift must also occur that moves responsibility of strategy and skill development to the learner. The New Literacies Research Lab at the University of Connecticut and the Internet Reading Reseach Group at Clemson University (TICA team) are developing a model of online reading comprehension instruction based on Palinscar and Brown’s (1984) reciprocal teaching (visit the project homepage at http://www.newliteracies.uconn.edu/iesproject/index.html).

The study tested a model developed through classroom integration over the last two years. Researches have noted that instruction in online reading comprehension takes a gradual release of responsibility through three phases of instruction: a) teacher led instruction; b) collaborative modeling of strategies; and c) inquiry learning. Instruction in online comprehension also differs from offline comprehension in the fact that students must take a greater responsibility of modeling strategies for more heterogeneous classrooms (Leu et al., in press). This fact, that students may become the most effective teacher in the class is the biggest crossroad educators face with instruction.

Assessment

Mandated assessments guide much of the research and realities of classroom literacy instruction (Pearson, 2007) and right or wrong, online reading comprehension will never become a focus in the classroom until it is included on national and state assessments. Currently not one state test, mandated under No Child Left Behind, assesses online reading comprehension, and if the United States hopes to remain competitive this must change. After all for the first time the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) will include tasks to assess Information and Communication Technologies skills (OECD, 2007) in 2009. Sixty-two countries have recognized the importance of developing ICT skills and if America wants to transition to a global information economy we must also recognize the importance of online reading comprehension.

Efforts must also continue to develop classroom assessment of online reading comprehension. A common method to develop and assess Internet inquiry skills is the development of checklists (Fitzgerald, 1999). Researchers investigating Internet Reciprocal Teaching created checklists to act as exit measurement tools for the aforementioned three phases of IRT (download checklists at http://www.newliteracies.uconn.edu/iesproject/documents.html). Other tools are also being constructed that assess individual performance on outcome measures. Middle school teachers must help formulate and use formative and summative assessments to measure online reading comprehension if they are to understand the challenges students face as they approach the crossroads of the Internet and literacy.

Conclusion

The Internet has caused such a fork in the road that as we approach the crossroad almost every aspect of human life changes. This change is not new to humanity, and educators can look at the intersection of the Internet and literacy as a crossroad: a journey taken by many before into the unknown. This road can be seen historically as a path to knowledge. At the intersection of the Internet and literacy the students and teachers are on a super highway together, and the students are often on the lead car. Travel has accelerated to such a pace that we have to prepare middle school students for online reading comprehension. Middle school teachers need to choose new paths for our curriculum, instruction, and assessment. If the literacy community does not soon address these changes students will not be “jumping the road” on the information superhighway. Instead, youth will be left stranded and singing the words of Robert Johnson, “Yeoo, standin' at the crossroad, tried to flag a ride….Ooo eeee, I tried to flag a ride….Didn't nobody seem to know me, babe, everybody pass me by.”

In Defense of Interactive Whiteboards

2010-01-28T07:59:00.000-08:00

In many of the blogs that sprung from the aftermath of following an #edchat discussion on Interactive White Boards these nifty tools have taken quite the beating. Bill Ferriter, the latest blogging brawler, recently took on IWB. In his article in Teacher Magazine Ferriter claimed that IWBs are an "under-informed and irresponsible purchase."I could not disagree more.

Reaching All Learners
I admit this isn't coming from a ludite (pardon the cliche) perspective. I was the first in my school to score an IWB. In fact I wrote a grant and helped our school secure three Smartboards (the Kleenex of IWBs). Yet I still believe, as I do now that IWBs help reach the needs of all learners.

First of all an IWB extended learning beyond my classroom. Each day I would print all of my notes to PDF documents. Then I dolled out a coveted job of weekly webpage editor to a student. He or she would scan handouts and other materials I created and uploaded all of my documents to my classroom webpage. Parents were more than grateful to have these resources. This few steps, made possible because of my IWB, also provided me some protection. When students would complain they lost some activities, or a parent would ask how I was meeting a students 504 plan I could point to my repository of learning.

Discovery and Collaborative Learning
Ferriter also claims that IWB are not an effective tool to reach all learners beacause the reinforce a teacher centric model. I believe that is not an issue with the tool, but with the teacher. Contrary to Ferrier's claims, IWB's can be a powerful tool that promote individual discovery and collaborative learning.

I have seen hundreds of presentations on powerful uses of IWB at local, national, and international conferences. To assume they are nothing more than an expensive projectors ignores this evidence. To illustrate I will share a few examples from my classoom.
Writing Instruction
Early on I found my IWB to be an indispensable tool for collaborative writing instruction. No matter the genre we were modeling the IWB became a significant tool in the class. I would start by working with the class to model specific paragraphs. We would write a good, better, and best example. The students would call out sentences or edits and I would add them in. Then in small groups we would repeat the same process. If we were in the computer lab students would email me their parapgraph, if not they would use pen and paper. Either way I would display the results on the smartboard and my students would have to identify common elements in the , good, better, and best versions.

Creative Drama
I also used my Smartboard for creative drama. The preloaded screenshots included with the Smartboard made wonderful backdrops. This saved invaluable instruction time that was often eaten up as students spent more time on props than content. Some of my most creative students even used the images and backdrops in combination to use electronic puppet shows.

The screenshots provided with the software are invaluable. Science or Social Studies teachers have a field day with the maps. Staying with creative drama, why not have students film forecasts using maps. You could meet your standards, as students demonstrate knowledge of isobars and pressure systems, while recreating a more authentic learning experience than a simple chapter.

Online Reading Comprehension
An Interactive Whiteboard also became central to our Internet Reciprocal Teaching model for teaching online reading comprehension. As we move from Gunther Kress calls the shift from page to screen I believe how we use literacy tools is shifting. An IWB helps to model these new skills, strategies, and dispositions to learners. In our classrooms we would often project student computers on the screen using a management software. We didn't use the programs to spy on students but to higlight experts. When we witnessed a student using a good strategy or they wanted to demonstrate they could go up to the IWB click on their computer and model the strategy to the class.

Granted this was in a 1:1 setting but Interactive Whiteboards can be just as useful in the one computer classroom. Ferriter claims that the lessons he created could have been easily replicated in one of his computer centers, but not every teacher has this option. Many classrooms come equipped with just one machine. An IWB allows teachers to model online reading comprehension strategies with just one machine. You can click on links, and have access to unlimited free content.

Expense
Bill Ferriter, has a legitimate concern about the expense of IWB. Yet they are coming down in costs as more competitors develop and market cheaper products. Ferriter claims them to be under evaluated in their use. This may not be the real issue. A quick scan of Google Scholar reveals that some research based evidence is starting to emerge.

Second why are we once again evaluating the tool and not the teacher? Much of the #edchat talk revolved around the need for time and training. Maybe that is not the issue. Maybe teachers do not adapt to new media because they do not have to. It might be a time to include technology integration into teacher evaluations. I understand for many such a Byzantinium approach is too harsh. Understandable...use teacher evaluation as a reward. In my former district we budgeted for three whiteboards a year. Teachers had to submit an application for a competitive grant to be awarded the board.

Finally as the recent Kaiser study pointed out students' life is media driven.If the literacy events in their lives are not static why should their classrooms be? Maybe the question about interactive whiteboards should be not "Can we afford them?" but "Can we afford not to?".

Current Events and Internet Inquiry

2010-01-19T06:56:00.000-08:00

I was amazed at the students response. We were doing interviews after our twenty week Internet Reciprocal Teaching unit and we asked, "Do you prefer laptops over using books?". One of our students simply replied, "Yes, we have to spend all this time learning about old stuff. With the laptops we get to learn new stuff. We get to use what is going on now."

I never thought immediacy of information would have been a motivating factor, but then I thought back to some of our best lessons and they usually involved current events.How a discipline approaches internet inquiry changes based on both content and pedagogical needs. We found the teaching of current events to be a great tool for modeling, practicing, and using online reading comprehension skills. In our class we focused specifically on using specialized search engines and synthesis.

Specialized Search Engines
Google News can be a great tool. Too often when teaching with the internet students get bogged down in the search process. If your lesson is not teaching locating skills you could simply add additional scaffolds through Webquests or you could teach students specific locating skills. One of these skills is the use of specialized search engines. We introduced students to Google News as a means to find information probably written by a somewhat reliable source.

In our lesson we poached from Dick Wolf, and ripped an activity right from the headlines. A few years ago, over the the Winter break, two people were attacked by a tiger at the San Fransisco Zoo. TIGER ATTACKS! A perfect lesson for middle school. We demonstrated to student show to use Google News and then had them read articles about the attack. They had to formulate an argument and decide if the tigers were to blame, the zoos, or the victims.

Synthesis
We all know how current events are usually taught: 5 W's, an H, a summary, and then your own opinion. In the age of the internet how we interact, summarize, and respond to media is different. We do not simply summarize an article and add a thought. Now in blogs, and discussion forums readers use block quotes, find viral videos, and post hyperlinks to summarize an article.

This idea of taking multiple streams of information and making them your own is a difficult skill to teach. Students need multiple strategies to mesh video, websites, and blog discussions. Once again we turned to current events to model these skills and strategies. When we were teaching IRT it was in the midst of the Democratic primary for President. During a televised debate Hillary Clinton accused Barak Obama of plagiarizing a speech by Deval Patrick, an Obama advisor, To teach synthesis across multiple modes we took a screen capture of Youtube (blocked in our school) of the debate, and Patrick's original speech. Then we had students find multiple websites on the issue. Next using graphic organizers, we had students use elements of each source in their response.

Teaching Perspectives
Deborah Tannen, in The Argument Culture railed against the everything is war metaphor. This perspective has gone viral with the Internet. I have been following the posts in response to the Brown-Coakley election on the Boston Globe. They are down right nasty and often cut and pasted from other sources. Viscous at every level..on every side. Part of digital citizenship is formulating a well-written and respectful argument in small bits of language. Central to this ability is understanding diverse perspectives. Current events and internet inquiry provide teacher an opportunity to create opportunities for students to express these types of values.

First using a specialized search engine such as Google News allows students to see a news event from international perspectives. It would be great for students to study the Israeli-Palestinian conflict not just from history books but from the pages of newspapers from all over the region.

Second current events can provide wonderful models for persuasive writings. With news aggregators you can find multiple perspectives on any given topic. How does the editorial board of the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal differ on an issue?

Finally current events and internet inquiry provide students a chance to respond with succinct grace online. We can not simply block any website with interactive features from schools. If we want students studying the 5 w's they better be able to summarize their thoughts and add additional thinking to the WWW.

NetGeneration or iGeneration and the death of email

2010-01-11T09:41:00.000-08:00

Is Email Dead
In a recent article, quickly making its rounds across the internet, Brad Stone discusses the emergence of mini-generational gaps when it comes to technology.

I agree in many ways. AOL Instant Messenger launched when I was in college. My peers quickly adapted to the new tool. I, however, was a latecomer to Facebook. It just wasn't around, and once I graduated it was was still a tool for college kids. Nowadays younger and younger kids get involved in social networking.

Stone, summarizing recent reports from the Pew and the Kaiser Family Foundation, highlights the fall of email among the younger iGeneration. I think the major difference between email use of people in their 20's and those younger boils down to one major factor: employment.

It is too early to tweet email's eulogy to the world. Yes, younger students may prefer social networking tools, but email skills will still remain crucial for a 21st century workplace.

In fact, I believe that a dichotomy of formality is emerging between email and other social networking tools. When I was in junior high we were taught two forms of letter writing: the formal and informal letter. One used commas in the greeting and the other a colon. One was personal, and the other succinct. This is becoming true for email and social networks. Email has evolved as a place for formal communication and social networks have become the playground where email once swung.

The workplace will not eliminate email. It provides a secure and storable record of communication, allows for documents to be quickly distributed, and is easily supported by inhouse tech support.

I do worry, however, that as kids turn to social networks rather than email they will not be prepared for the workplace. Therefore educators must teach email skills and include these composition lessons in any writing curriculum

Email Skills

We have all been there, trying to decipher an email from a colleague and wishing for our little Orphan Annie decoding ring.
In fact, like me, many of us are guilty of mixing up discourses and ambigous messages in our email responses. We need to teach students how to email. More importantly, students must be provided authentic opportunities to use email.

Email skills:
-Sending, receiving, and adding attachments-Not much more to be said about that.
-Formatting subject lines-What is major purpose or the email?
-Providing one or two sentence(s) summaries in beginning of email-State your organizational strategy upfront.
-Recognizing discourses for appropriate audiences.
-RBU-Reading Bottom Up. A challenging reading comprehension task that involves students looking for an idea across a conversation.
-Formatting-The easiest to read emails use formatting tools. Long messgaes may provide headings or bullets. Responses to questions may use different fonts or colors.

Conclusion
We live in an era where new literacy tools emerge everyday. Unlike the past, however, these tools coexist, they do not simply supplant each other like the book replacing the scroll. This provides a unique challenge educators. We must prepare a knowledgeable populous that has the flexibility to apply thinking to novel situations. One situation I am sure this iGeneration will face in the future is use of email in the workplace. Before we line up for the funeral procession lets make sure our students can attach the death announcement in an email.

Iron Age to the Information Age

2009-12-21T09:00:00.000-08:00

The first stories we told tried to describe the unknown while developing a sense of the self with tales of great heroes, ferocious monsters, disastrous floods, and lands of unsurpassed beauty. For millennia, these tales were passed from mouth to ear. Then, as writing emerged the first stories ever written regaled the adventures of Sargon and Gilgamesh. Now with the flood of new technologies students can navigate the vast seas of information and enjoy the journeys of epic adventurers online. Folklore and myths, provide an opportunity to connect the oldest known narratives with the newest text to emerge, the Internet.

Technology has always acted as a catalyst for literary change (Leu & Kinzer, 2000), yet the ancient tales of oral traditions remain the same. As a result the same traits of mythological and folklore heroes first identified by early folklorist such as Edward Taylor, George von Hahn, and Vladimir Propp (Segal, 1990) have spread through the Internet. These yarns are no longer bound to cultural of physical boundaries. Audiences today have access to the written and oral traditions from infinite resources and many cultures. Readers can use these online resources to develop an understanding of mythology and folklore, which Dundes (1989) called, “crucial to establishing a sense of identity or senses of identity” (p. vii). In this weeks post I describe a mythology unit I taught that utilized the internet.

Looking back three years later, I see how the lesson not only introduced the affordances of the internet but also allowed students to develop and share their own voice.

Creation Myths

As teachers we can use narrative hypertext to introduce students to new literacies (Castek, Bevans-Mangelson, Goldstone, 2006). First, literacy classrooms have a strong focus on literature and this can allow children to dedicate more cognitive energy into the development of new literacies skills. Second, reading and writing online motivates students. (McNabb, 2006). Therefore, online narrative texts, like creation myths, offer opportunities for students to interact with ICT’s. Students can analyze an author’s use of hypertext features, and reflect on how their comprehension skills change because of digital texts. In order to do this in my class I had students read myths using offline texts, static webpages, and multimedia flash stories.

We began by first reading the Greek Creation myth in D'aulaires' Book of Greek Myths . We discussed the myth and created an interactive storyboard. Basically I would retell the myth as we read. The kids loved when I, in the role of Cronus, would puke up my children. Granted I added plenty of green goo and audio effects.

Next we read Murtagh's Common Elements of Creation Myths When previewing the Murtagh website with students I asked questions like, “Why does the author link words in her text to other pages? Which buttons did you use to navigate the text? Did you choose the hyperlinks in the text or those listed at the bottom? What caused confusion during your navigational choices? Can the author have made it easier for the reader to find the creation myths?” These questions had the student evaluate the decision the author made and lead to an understanding of how to effectively navigate online text.

Finally we moved from a static website with hyperlinks to ineractive multimedia stories on bigmyth.comThe interactive website http://www.bigmyth.com provides students a launching point for the study of creation mythology. The website, created by Distant Train and the International Association of Intercultural Education provides flash videos of creation myths from around the world. The videos contain animation, text, and sound while they retell creation myths from every corner of the globe. Along with each myth, the authors created a series of activities for students after they finish reading a myth. When choosing a myth students must select buttons that overlay a map of the globe. Some buttons, those in red, are free, and other grey buttons only work with a subscription. I started conversations with questions such as, “Why do you think the authors use a map as a navigation menu? How does geography affect a culture’s outlook? Why would the author’s choose to provide some myths for free and charge for others? Why and how did the author’s choose one culture for the free version and decide to include other cultures as part of a subscription?

After we had read texts using a variety of tools we discussed the formats and how they Internet changed reading for the students on a class discussion board.Some of their responses are below:

Thread 15 Posted by Mr. Mac
How is reading a a book different from reading a static website (no animation), and an animated website? How are your reading comprehension skills of predicting, summarizing, clarifying, questioning, and connecting used differently between medias. Compare and contrast.

In media myths (animated), static online myths, and books are different because they both affext how you have to think. For instance, in a book you have to read the text by yourself, picture the characters in your head, and
predict what will happen on the next page or two. In an animated myth you can have the computer read the myth to you or read it yourself, there are pictures and you don't have to picture it in your head like when you read a book, you also have a variety of links on the web pages and you have to narrow down the choices that will help you, you have to predict what will happen on the next page that you go to just like when you read a book. When you read a static myth you can't picture the scenes and characters in your head like you can when you watch a myth online, you still can have the
computer read the myth to you, you are also forced to predict the same way
you have to in the other media types. When you connect to the real world I
think that it is easier to do it in a book that you have to read than in any
type of myth online.

I think that reading a book is different than using a computer by that when using a computer you are more motivated to actually read and pay attention. Also, when using the computer your reading skills are different because you can read longer or shorter versions of stories, you can understand the stoy better when you have animated picttures of scens so you know what's going on, and sometimes you can have a recording read the story out loud to you while you read along so, you can understand the story the way it is supposed to sound. In a book you only have pictures that can be sometimes complicated. and you have to read it when you might not understand it. Predicting is different because on a computer you have to predict what a page is going to be about, where a different page will take you, and if the information on that page will be important to you.In a book you have to predict what will be on the next page of the book. When summarizing on a computer you can use animated pictures and different pages or sites to help you, where in a book you have to use the detailed descriptions to help you. when questionning a book you want to find your answer in the pages and detailed descriptions of the book to help you where on a computer you have many differentways to find an answer to your question. A computer may be easier for most kids.

Reading a book is different from reading a website without pictures/animation because on a website you can take notes on a document and look up words, phrases, or things that confused you, or you ask someone. Where as, when your reading a book, you tend to just try to figure things out on your own using the text, instead of looking them up or asking someone. On an animated website you tend to use the animations to figure things out instead of using the text, looking it up, or asking someone. Your reading comprehension skills are used different because when you predict in a book you usually tell someone else who has read the book, or keep it to your self. You also predict on what will happen next/to the main character. While predicting on a website you predict where links will take you, what will happen in the animation, and what will happen next/to the main character. When you summarize a book you either write it all or self, or copy off the back. When you write a summary of a webpage, you usually
copy and paste it into a word document.

From the responses it is evident that many comprehension strategies do change as texts move online and that students prefer to have the tools of the internet available to them as they read.

Finally to measure how students understood how comprehension strategies evolve as text changed they created their own multimedia poems using PPT. The students had to pick a myth or God/Goddess not taught in class and create a retelling. The PPT had to include the myth, a family tree, use action buttons, include a quiz, and also prompt students to use comprehension strategies. I wish I could share the products they came out great!

Writing your own Creation Myth

The next part of the unit had the students write a creation myth for a fictional world of their own design.

Returning to BigMyth.com we explored the understanding that literature cannot be separated from its historical context. For example in the Inuit creation myth berries and animals are spread far apart to reduce over hunting. We also used the Inuit creation myth to explore gender roles. What are the implications when women are created to cure the boredom of man? Why is the woman the helper and companion of the man? These gender roles, along with other elements of culture, could then be contrasted to other creation myths.

The students identified common elements of creation myths from the list provided on Murtagh's Common Elements of Creation Myths. They also contrasted creation myths. For example the Inuit myth was based on hunter/gatherer culture while the Incan myth had a clear connection of the divine right of rulers.

Next the students, using an adapted version of the graphic organizer provided by BigMyth.com planned a fictional culture. They then wrote a creation myth that this culture would believe in. I assessed them on the fictional connections between their myth and their culture (also on the hero archetype, but more on that lesson later. The stories came out great.

Fiction and Agency
More importantly than their content learning, what I loved the most was the expression of student voices throughout the unit. For example, Lauren (pseudonym), an adopted student of Haitian descent, wove the mythology she read online with her own sense of identity to further explore culture and identity through writing literature.

After spending time reading multimedia versions of creation mythology, Lauren created a fictional nation where the people had a culture that revolved around the sea. She, then wrote a creation story of a people kicked out of their planet who had to travel to another galaxy on a ship. On the way the boat crashed and became a new planet, which the people inhabited. In her brief myth elements common to her culture and identity are evident. The ship may represent a common theme from mythology she read, a connection to Haitian culture, it may serve as a metaphor to the greater African Diaspora, or build upon her sense as an adopted child. She used the Internet and literature to explore her own identity and, as a reader, make connections to the stories she read online.

Lauren’s adventure began by reading an online multimedia myth about the Voudon creation myth, which developed in Haitian culture. After enjoying the tale she went to the Internet and found many people discussing links between Caribbean mythology and African mythology. She became very interested in looking for connections between the myths of Western Africa, the myth she just read, and her own beliefs. After exploring the Yoruba creation myth she noted the common elements of water that exist in both myths. She then spent time comparing the Vodoun and Yoruba cultures and commented that it was nice to learn about “where she came from.” As an adopted child who did not share the same culture of her parents she used online literature to explore her sense of identity, culture, and place in the world.

Other students also expressed themselves through the creation myth unit. One student, who fancied herself a comedian, wrote about a haphazardous culture that worshiped a porcupine god (her world was modeled after Vail, CO) and everyone was ordered to constantly shop. Many of the boys chose to write about empire cultures (although it was hard to convince them that in a short story choose a battle not the entire war). These worlds often focused on adolescent ideals of sports such as motorcross or ATV's.

Conclusion

I know this is way too long for a blog post, but I wanted to share this lesson. When I tell teachers I was studying common elements of creation myths and hero archetypes with sixth graders they are amzed, but my students loved it. Below is a list of mythology resources online. I haven't checked the links so many maybe dead. Good luck and have fun using the oldest stories with some of the newest literacy tools.

Common Elements of Creation Myths
http://www.cs.williams.edu/~lindsey/myths/myths.html
A student created website that explores common characteristics in creation myths.

The Big Myth
http://www.bigmyth.com
A collection of creation myths from around the world retold using Flash movies.

Online Mythology and Folklore Collections Encyclopedia Mythica http://www.pantheon.org/
An online encyclopedia of world mythology organized by continent.

Timeless Myths http://www.timelessmyths.com/
A collection of Norse, Classical, Celtic, and Arthurian Mythology.

In Search of Myths and Heroes
http://www.pbs.org/mythsandheroes/
Companion website for PBS television show. Contains many myths from around the world and an overview of the hero archetype.

African Mythology and Folklore
http://www.mythome.org/Africa.html
A dictionary of African God/Goddesses and a collection of African myths and folktales.

Cutting to the Essence
http://www.fa.indiana.edu/~conner/yoruba/cut.html
A description of the West African Yoruba people’s Gods, arts, and mythology

Chinese Myths and Fantasies
http://www.chinavista.com/experience/myth/myth.html
An overview and history of Chinese mythology.

Crystal Dragon of Taiwan
http://www.cdot.org/history/chinese_myths.htm
A collection of Chinese myths and fables.

Greek Mythology
http://edweb.sdsu.edu/people/bdodge/scaffold/GG/greek_myth.html
An online dictionary of Greek Gods/Goddesses, myths, and heroes.

Greek Mythology Link
http://www.maicar.com/GML/
A comprehensive website with biographies, topics, stories, and Spanish versions of Greek Myths.

Mythweb
http://www.mythweb.com
A collection of animated Greek Myths.

Winged Sandals
http://www.abc.net.au/arts/wingedsandals/
An Interactive flash sites with fully animated movies, games, and many extras.

Hawaiian Mythology
http://www.ahuimanu.k12.hi.us/tqjr99/hawaii/index.htm
A website created by students at Ahuimanu Elementary School containing a collection of Hawaiian myths.

Indian Divinity
http://www.webonautics.com/mythology/multimedia/
An animated flash adventure detailing Hindu creation mythology.

American Folklore
http://www.americanfolklore.net
An anthology of American folklore.

Legends of America
http://www.legendsofamerica.com/
Comprehensive collection of Native American myths, American folklore, and tall tales.

Mexico Connect
http://www.mexconnect.com/mex_/cultureindex.html
A collection of Mayan, Aztec, and Mexican myths and fables.
Mythology of the Inca and Maya
http://www.yale.edu/ynhti/nationalcurriculum/units/2006/4/06.04.08.x.html
A collection of myths from Central and South America and lesson plans for the classroom.

Native American Mythology
http://www.yale.edu/ynhti/curriculum/units/1998/2/98.02.02.x.html
A collection of myths from Native Americans and lesson plans for the classroom

Windows to the Universe
http://www.windows.ucar.edu/tour/link=/mythology/aztec_culture.html&edu=high
An overview of Aztec mythology with Spanish and English Versions and three reading levels,

Ten Technology and Poetry Ideas

2009-12-15T07:28:00.000-08:00

As a sixth grade teacher I pushed the boundaries of technology integration. You know the type of teacher. They come in early and sign out the computer labs months in advance, they spend hours on building teachers websites, and they integrate digital texts into the literacy curriculum. The first two units I taught that focused on digital literacies centered around mythology and poetry. I just found it so rewarding to juxtapose the worlds' oldest genres on emerging texts. This week I share ten ideas to integrate poetry and technology.

Too often teachers view poetry as unit of study. Its a two week assignment that has to be done. Often students are even worse. They view poetry with disdain, loathing, and fear. As an educational community we must share the idea that poetry is a text for life, not a unit of study. Technology provides an avenue for such an understanding.

Online Communities
The first place to start is to include a discussion board or classroom blog in your poetry units. In my classroom the poetry discussion page received the most monthly when compared to my other webpages.

In a class forum you can create different threads for specific genres of poetry. For example have a page for antithesis, haikus, etc. You can also create a spot for collaborative poems where students add a line at a time. Teachers will quickly discover the threads developing a life of their own.

On a classroom blog emphasize the growing voice of poets. Have each student create a poetry blog, or a page on their blog specifically for poetry. The young poets can add poems and others can offer feedback and advice using the comment features.

Poetry Mash Ups
Students will find mash-Ups, or the idea of taking content from many places as the ingredients in a new recipe, as a perfect tool for developing an appreciation of poetry. Using PowerPoint, Imovie, or Moviemaker kids can easily take an entire poem, a specific stanza, or even a word and create a new work. For example students could select a poem by a canonical author and then rearrange the words with images and movies found online. Then using one of the tools online create a digital mash up.

Twitter Poems
I never tried this as a teacher, but follow some wonderful Twitter poets. Having students try to write a poem in 140 characters or less is a great way to teach students that the power of words often resides in both their scarcity and in the silence between stanzas. First (bacause Twitter is blocked in most schools) print out some great examples. Simply search for #twitpoems or #twitterpoems. Then model with the class writing a poem. Finally give students a chance. For an extra challenge try writing Twiakus!

Lyric Hunt
teachers have used song lyrics for poetry instruction for years. The Internet, however, has given access to unlimited titles and allows students to find texts that interest them. Song lyrics are a great way to teach poetic devices and reinforce Internet searching skills. Simply challenge students to find examples of poetic devices in the lyrics of their favortie songs.

Found Poems with Google News
So many teachers bemoan our cut and paste culture. I say when it comes to poetry why fight it. Use Google News and the idea of found poems to teach students both poetry and the use of specialized search engines. Students can search out specific topics, take words from the headlines, and create found poems.

Respond to Poetry with Images
This lesson is always a hit with teachers (for materials visit our NCTE presentation. Basically you have students circle words in a poem that affect the meaning. Then they search the Internet looking for images that capture that meaning. Finally they arrange images on a tableau to represent the meaning. This is a great lesson that not only focuses on poetry, but also introduces the idea of design affecting meaning.

Xtranormal Slam
The folks at xtranormal proudly say if you can type you can make a movie. I always thought it would be fun to do an animated poetry slam. Students could write poems, then have their characters challenge each other in a virtual poetry slam. Xtranormal really makes it that easy. If you can type you can create a wonderful movie.

Multimedia Metaphor Poems
This is another lesson that students love (for materials visit our NCTE presentation). Basically students create an extended metaphor poem and use both words and images to share their poems. I found, when teaching this lesson, that often it is the images that drive the words, and not words driving images. It was a great way to introduce the idea of design literacy.

Internet Inquiry
Internet can also serve as a tool that establishes a community of poets that links to the bards of the past. Another learning activity that highlights the efficacy of the Internet as a text for traditional content while building offline and online reading comprehension is a comparison of poets and their work. Students can build online reading comprehension strategies while developing an understanding that poets and their writing are products of their time and environment. For example, a teacher could assign two somewhat contemporary poets such as Langston Hughes and Robert Frost and contrast the role urbanization had in their work. Hughes captures the jazz beats and tribulations of urban migration, and Frost writes in a style that resembles the windy roads he traveled to escape the city and recapture rural America. Students could search for works by these two authors, and synthesize their critique with information found on biography pages and history pages of the early twentieth century.

Doink Poems
The final technolgy and poetry activity I share today involves a great tool I was introduced to at NCTE. Doink is a wonderful collaborative tool for sharing, uploading, and using animations. Like xtranomral it is easy to use, but has many applicatio0ns. One of my favorites is creating illustrated poetry projects that involve animations created by others. Your students will love thins.

Learning to Read

2009-12-08T07:32:00.000-08:00

I had promised everyone a list of ten poetry and technology activities, but that will have to wait. Something more important and way cuter has come up.

My son (14 mo) recently decided that books are for reading and not simply for eating. Watching him interact with language has reinforced my connection to Street's idea of literacy as a social practice.

Baby John's favorite book is "Spot Loves hiss Daddy" by Eric Hill. While I would like to proclaim his love for the book is a result of pure favoritism that simply is not true. In fact, linguistically, John still uses mama and dada indiscreetly making no distinction between myself, his mother and a lampost. Spot Loves his Daddy just had a tale that wove in his first three discrete words: ball, dog, duck. He can recognize these words in pictures, real-life, and illustration.

This got me thinking about how comprehension and literacy is so tied to prior knowledge and past experiences. John received a ball for his first birthday and loves to play. We have two dogs: a border collie named Esteban and an Aussie mix named Thali. Finally my college roomate, on the day John was born bought him a set of bathroom rubber duckies. These quickly became his favorite chew toys.

It is very interesting watching his language and interactions with texts (in the writ large sense) evolve. Makes me think about the connections to the classroom. Teachers should question deficit models of reading and understand that literacy has more to do with language use and experience with Gee's (1989) primary and secondary discourses rather than lack of skills.

I will keep you folks updated. Hopefully John will soon remember that books are once again for devouring and and that every word can provide a bitter taste or a juicy morsel.

Reflections on NCTE Blogging Session

2009-11-24T07:48:00.000-08:00

This year was our third session on blogging at NCTE. Each year provides us with new insights. Overall my general impression is that teachers want to blog (yipee!!), but are unsure of their purpose, and have little idea of how to use formative assessment to inform their practice. To that end we had a lively discussion about the affordances of blogging, skills bloggers need, and how to assess blogging skills.

We began the session by letting participants hear from a teacher, Scott Meyers, who recently began to blog. Scott is a third year English teacher and department chair in a Camden, NJ high school.

New to Blogging
Scott wanted to blog in his classroom to motivate students to write. He opened with a wonderful metaphor about writing being like vegetables. His two year old daughter hates vegetables, but loves juice. He found that he could get her to drink her vegetables using V8 Fusion. In his class students moaned and groaned as if writing instruction was a plate of steamed beets. Yet when Scott did anything online they sucked the writing instruction down.

It is this fusion of instruction and technology where many teachers get bogged down and Scott was no different. His biggest challenge was first convincing school administrators to let him blog. Surprise, Surprise. As Scott said, "I was literally stalking the IT guy and leaving notes on his car." His next great challenge was access. The computer lab was signed up weeks in advance and many students did no thave Internet access at home. These problems affected Scott's instruction and his classroom blog only materialized into a classroom newsboard sharing events.

Purpose of Classroom Blogs
I feel Scott's story will ring true to many teachers who use blogs in the classroom. In fact a colleague, Lisa Zawilinski, in her H.O.T. Blogging article identified the four most common blogs used in classrooms: classroom new blogs- for sharing events, mirror blogs-for reflecting on topics, showcase blogs-for showing off student work, and literature response blogs.

While I agree with Danah Boyd, that the definitions of a blog is defined by social practice I feel many teachers still are not unleashing the power of blogs. If you want to share classroom news or school work...create a website. If you want to hold online discussions...use a discussion board. Clasroom blogs however need to move beyond the simple question and comment format and view students as authors and not as repositories of answers.

Blogging Skills
What skills do blogger need and how do we teach and measure these skills. To begin this discussion we started with Jenna McWilliams list of blogging skills and then looked at different student blogs:

Graduate Art Student: http://www.kesmit3.blogspot.com/
6th Grade Blog
4th Grade Blog
7th Grade Blog:
11th Grade Blog:

As a group then we wanted to break into focus groups and create criteria that could be used in rubrics for formative and summative assessment.

The discussion on assessment started off with the annual debate debate about citations. One teacher said linking a picture to the source was enough, a librarian felt full citations were always necessary. I quelled the debate before violence erupted with three points:
-First do not equate synthesis with citation. No way one of the least understood cognitive processes could be reduced to putting a comma in MLA.
-We do not scaffold citations. You can not expect high school students to pay attention to sources when they are not taught K-8.
-Different genres have different discourse practices for citations. A blog is different than a research paper just as an academic blog is different from published research. Different texts, different rules. This last point won her over.

Once the annual fight over citation was over the discussion was very fruitful. Using a GDoc we brainstormed a list of possible criteria that could be used to assess studnet blogs:

Writing Blogs:
Voice
Use of multimedia
Use of hyperlinks
Central focu, thesis, or idea
Aesthetics
Frequency
Content Knowledge
Original
Style and Grammar match audience

Comments:
Depth of comments
Offering insight or critique
Follows threads
Uses examples/details from post
Uses examples/details from outside sources.

We did not have enough time to duscuss what expectation s the group felt there should be for a 4th grade blog, 7th grade blog, or the 11th grade blog. Overall though the participants left with criteria they could us in their own rubrics.

Do you have rubrics you could share? Is our criteria list missing anything? Let us know.

New Spaces for Writing: Using blogs to promote writing in classroom settings

2007-11-15T08:45:00.001-08:00

I never thought a technology would be new to me. Yet, here I am about to deliver a presentation on blogging and I am about to publish my first post. How could this be new to me? After all, I grew up with Atari; I remember designing spaceships out of keyboard characters and launching them with the "if, then" commands of BASIC; I spent countless hours in middle school study halls reading posts on prodigy when I found time to leave the Oregon Trail. The World Wide Web was born when I roamed the halls of my high school and students began to chat synchronously with AIM when I entered college. Still I had never blogged....until now.

Today, as a type my first blog, I realize that today it is almost impossible to keep up with the changes in literacy. The blog has metastasized from texts that have evolved from the past because new texts will always emerge with new technologies. For example once a few years back i am sure some cereal farmer notched a stick or a stone to keep track of surpluses of the agricultural revolution Also just yesterday cursive writing gained popularity as speed was needed to dictate the first synchronous messaging system to emerge during the industrial revolution, the telgraph. That brings us to today, when new texts emerge with every spiraling advance of the Informational Revolution. The blog has risen to the forefront of these texts as the virtual soapbox. As an educator and researcher I hope in my journies I visit some students and collegaues who are willing to climb onto their Ethernet connections and engage in discouse.

I will see how this journey goes. I will see if anyone wants to come along. After all the author and the audience has never been more connected. Sure Rosenblatt coined the transactional nature of language and literacy long ago. Language as we are beginning to realize been contextual. She wrote in her book,

I knew I had to start blogging because I had to understand this phenomenon. The blog has forever changed how we write and new writers will always change how we blog. It is the essence