New blogs are born & thoughts on our student blogging workship

Last week I co-facilitated a Wednesday morning professional development session on the topic of, "Student blogging." Click here to access the resource document that we created for our attendees. This was a part of a periodic series of workshops known as "Learning Exhanges" - this is something new that we're trying as a way to promote sharing of all forms in our school community. Our session was very well attended and we set out to answer the following great, big question: 

How can we use blogging and other online writing opportunities to provide opportunities for students to reflect on their learning, publish for a large audience, break the myth of perfectionism, and as a tool for formative assessment?

As so often happens in these types of tech-related learning sessions, the questions from our attendees seemed to focus around things like platforms and the 'how to' types. Not that these aren't important-they are-but as far as I'm concerned they're secondary in comparison to the ones posed in the big question. My co-facilitator and language learning teacher extraordinaire, Flaurie Imberman, summed it up well when she talked about the many challenges that we've experienced in using blogging our Latin American and Caribbean History course. She mentioned that our experience has been difficult because most of the work that we do with students in our classes is highly private. Very rarely do we ask them to open up and share their thoughts, processes, and final products with an audience that goes beyond the teacher. Blogging, if approached properly, certainly has the potential to serve as an antidote to the privatization of class work, teaching and learning.

In the context of this session on blogging, I'd like to link to five blogs that have been born over the past 6 weeks at my school.

Middle School online newspaper - this is the first online newspaper at my school, and it comes from our middle school students and teachers. Please leave a comment or two if you have a moment

Philosophy Class Lectures - Teacher Bill Smoot is posting all of his lectures for his semester long course on Philosophy. They are all available in iTunes as well.

Mobile Learning Group Blog - I mentioned this in a recent post. This is a group blog being authored by 16 colleagues at my school who were all given an iPad with the expectation that we'd engage in regular professional development around this topic.

Stories from Advisory - I started this as a tool to keep the parents of my sophomore student advisory (sophomores in USA schools are typically 15-16 years old). Parents can be so valuable in extending the conversations that are often times initiated in school activities like advisory - conversations at the dinner table can be dramatically altered and improved when parents have a little insight into the school day happenings.

Latin American Caribbean History Group Blog - this group blog was a compromise that we made with the students in this class who felt very insecure about blogging - generally speaking, the students didn't feel like they should be writing in a public space about a topic they weren't 'experts' on. So we compromised and they came up with the idea to co-author in a group blog. Posts should start appearing this week. Please comment!!!

School-Wide Web2.0 Platform for the 2008-2009 School Year

It has been an amazing past couple of years in my role as a middle school technology coordinator. Our pockets of web2.0 use are starting to expand amongst our teachers, our parents are gaining in familiarity with the tools, we have administrative support, and we're preparing for an in-house mini-conference day on "21st Century Learning" with Alan November in October of 2008.

As we start to expand our use of these tools, it is becoming important that we have some coordination in the tools/platforms that we're using. With only a few teachers using blogs, wikis, etc with students, it hasn't been so important to choose platforms or make decisions on how student accounts should be created. But now we're at the point where we want the students to keep their digital profile with them from year to year. As a result, we're going to pick a handful of tools that we'll be using at the discretion of our grade 5-8 teachers (eg-some teachers will NOT be using these tools next year, and this is perfectly fine. But if they do decide to use them, then we have a fairly powerful and consistent toolkit to choose from).

Our toolkit for the 2008-2009 school year at this point is looking like the following:

Student Blogging Platform-In the middle school we'll be going with the eduBlogs Campus product. While it isn't cheap at $2000 USD for our middle school, it also requires zero in-house IT support to setup, configure, maintain, etc. I looked at several possible solutions this year, and it just seems like eduBlogs Campus makes the most sense. It has tremendous flexibility and controls-some blogs can be set to private and some to public very easily (we'll probably have our 5th grade blogs set to private for starters while our 7th and 8th grade blogs most likely will be publicly visible). This will give us the opportunity to give every middle school student their own personal blog space that they can use in all of their classes and that they can use from grade to grade. This tool will also be a great resource to use for our students to post their podcasts, videos, pictures and other like media.

Educational Voicethread-Our teachers really have done some great things with this tool over the past year. Unfortunately, the management of it has been a little tricky. All students in grades 7 and 8 have their own regular voicethread accounts, but they are limited to a maximum of three voicethread projects. Ed.Voicethread, which will cost around $600 annually, will allow our students to create as many voicethread projects as they'd like, and they'll be able to maintain their account from year to year which will serve as a kind of digital learning trail/portfolio.

Wikispaces-We've been using this tool for the past two years and we couldn't be happier. We don't pay for this service, but we do have our students create accounts and many of our teachers have their free educator service. We definitely need to standardize on the way we create accounts for students, because now the scheme isn't too consistent from grade to grade (which of course creates some confusion!)

Googe Aps School Edition-We got this up and running at the start of the school year for all of our middle school students and this has been quite successful. Many students haven't used it as they're so accustomed to using MS Word, but the upside for those who have made regular use of Google Docs has been extremely positive. We're going to really push all of our students toward making use of their school branded Google Docs accounts next year.

That is pretty much the web2.0 suite of apps that we'll be standardizing on with our students next year. Of course there are dozens of other apps that will be used along the way, but these are the web2.0 tools we'll be offering in grades 5-8.

Am I missing anything? How does this compare to the web2.0 platforms that your school is using? What do you think about this strategy?

Students as Bloggers

Dear Parents-

It has been great to see such an active interest in our 5th grade students this year in blogging. Blogging has the potential to teach and foster a wide range of writing skills and of course it gives us the opportunity to have meaningful conversations with our children about what it means to be a good digital citizen. Clearly many students seem to be quite motivated to write on their blogs and I think this is absolutely wonderful!

My only concern with blogging is that the tool of choice seems to be blogger.com. This is the blogging platform that many teachers (including yours truly) utilize as our professional work spaces. One of the best things about blogger is that it incredibly easy to use. However, the terms of service state that users need to be 13 years old to use blogger. Blogger.com is a great platform for students to use as long as you are actively involved with your child and the development of the blog resource. We are in the process of finding a productive and developmentally appropriate blogging platform that will work for our teachers and students in the middle school. Stay tuned for more information.

Here are some general rules of thumb that we like to pass along to our students when they participate in online communities like blogs, voicethread, social networks and wikis:

1. Be selective about the kind of information you reveal online. You don't want to create a bogus identity because people in the online community will not come to trust you. However, you don't want to reveal everything about you either. To say something like, "My name is Bobby and I am a student from Wisconsin and I like football, fishing and playing golf," is much better than, "Hi, my name is Bobby Simmons and I am a 7th grader at Stevens Middle School and I live on Bedford Avenue in Stevens Point, WI." Last names, specific locations, date of birth, addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, etc are all examples of things that middle school students shouldn't post online.

2. Be smart about the kinds of images you use. Generally speaking, it is better to use a cartoonish digital avatar for your profile image than a true photo of yourself. Adults can use a a true photo, but middle school students should use an avatar. Create and use an avatar that is in good taste and is a positive representation of yourself and others around you. Check out the digital avatars that the 5th graders created for their educational Voicethread accounts and the avatars that the 6th graders created for their participation in the "Protecht Digital Citizenship" project.

3. Use the "Golden Rule" when leaving comments on blogs and communicating with others in the digital world.

4. Use your best writing! Of course mistakes will be made, but really try to put forth your best effort! Your blog and online profile is an extension of you!

5. Consider making the blog private for starters. Invite parents, teachers and a few friends to be readers and provide feedback. After you get comfortable with the blogging platform, then you can go public for the world to see.

Thank you very much for taking the time to read this post. If you have any questions or comments, feel free to leave them in the form of a comment or contact me directly.

Finally, I just ran across the following article that asks the question, "How Dangerous Is the Internet for Children?" I like this article because it provides a level overview and examination of this issue. It has some relevance to this whole notion of participating in online communities, blogs, etc. I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on it.