LiterateLife

I was not pleased with the products and attitude of my students with the career exploration project I tried. The first problem was that the Bureau of Labor Statistics website was to difficult for my 8th grade ESL students to access. It is text dense with high-level vocabulary.

 I did a search for careers on yahooligans, and found that the BLS has a site for kids 4-8 grades!

I didn’t think the students had a truly authentic reason for writing a letter to me describing what they learned about the career and if they still wanted to pursue it. The letters were not good at all. I also offered for a higher grade that the students create a brochure in MS Word that explains the career. Only a couple of students were interested in doing that. The info probably wouldn’t be that great because of the difficulty the kids had with the BLS website.

My idea is to have the students create a wiki. Each student (or pairs interested in the same career) create a page on the wiki.

I have gone to pbwiki.com and begun the creation of a wiki for us to use, but I am lost on how to really use this!

 I have posted onto the classroom 2.0 forum to see if I can get some help. I’m crossing my fingers that I get some help!!!

I followed a link today explaining web 2.0 technology being used in Australia. It looks great. I need training on how to take a unit of study and create web 2.0 activities to move the students through the unit. My 7th graders are reading Where the Red Fern Grows. What do I want them to bet from this book? Mostly I want them to engage in the story of Billy and his love for his dogs. I want them to relate to Billy.

We are reading this book together because it is above the independent reading abilities of my students; it is also part of my district’s 7th grade curriculum. There are maybe 2-3 of my students who could handle this text alone.

I could set up a page on my blog that outlines activities for the students to do. The primary one would be responding to the text in a forum, to engage in discussion that requires writing. Possibly personal response posts in their own blogs would work, with a requirement to respond to a specified number of blogs.

I would love to see examples of classroom applications of web 2.0 technologies on the web.

I set up a Word Count Journal. I must write!

Thoughts on this project so far:

1. The website is very difficult for my kids to understand. Find an easier one. Yahooligans, maybe?

2. Model notetaking step more clearly. Have a premade response page.

3. Emailing with someone actually in the field for information. Is it an option? Safety?

4. Creating brochure/powerpoint-model, show good/bad examples

I have been really upset about the recent actions of kids centered on MySpace and YouTube. Of course, the cheerleaders that beat up their peer were horrible and I hope they are prosecuted as adults for their actions. What makes me even more angry is watching the mom of the attacked girl. She made no reference to the fact that her daughter had any fault in the situation because of posts she made on MySpace that led up to the attack. The attack was wrong; no question, no matter what the girl wrote it was wrong. BUT to cry and act like her daughter was an INNOCENT victim and had no role in what happened galls me. When are parents going to teach their kids how to get along in this world, and take responsibilty for the consequences of their actions?

When does a parent sit down with a kid and say you messed up, too, what you did was wrong too (even if she LEGALLY had the right to post whatever she wants, MORALLY she was wrong.) Why aren’t parents teaching their kids how to be good citizens?

I found myself at the ISTE website last night. They have a whole section about Second Life and a virtual classroom. I visited with a docent there and hope to attend some training in the virtual classroom. I know as I introduce these technologies to my kids, they are going to want to play, just as I have been wanting to. I have no real purpose YET but to figure out how much of this works. I do have a higher goal in mind, which is to have use the technologies to engage my 7th and 8th graders in high quality reading and writing explorations.

I am not there yet. I also know that my students will probably experience the same desire to play, but will have to be nudged (assigned??) by me to explore higher purposes.

I was waiting for my 16 yo daughter’s second volleyball game to start today, so I took out Adolescent Literacy (Beer, Probst, Rief, eds.) to read. I picked up in “Tom Sawyer, Teaching, and Talking” by Probst, and a few thoughts came to mind. I thought back to a quote that I remembered from Dancing With the Pen: “Writing floats on a sea of talk.” I don’t have that book with me here at home as I write, so I don’t know who to attribute that quote to.

I am guilty of not promoting quality talk in my classroom. And I am an ESL teacher! I suspect if I teach my students how to communicate better orally, then their writing will naturally become better. It is already Sunday here, so this afternoon I am going to rework my plans for Monday through Wednesday to work on discussion as we explore The Devil’s Arithmetic (8th grade) and Where the Red Fern Grows (7th grade).

I’ll be thinking of what I need to do to scaffold the conversation to be worthwhile. I’ll update here later with any ideas I have. I will finish reading from AL to see if I get some more insight!

I have spent the last 3 hours surfing, beginning with the Edublogs home page and getting into Second Life and WikiEducator.

I am pretty overwhelmed! I do have lots of questions which I will record here, as I would ask my students to do the same when delving in to new information.

How do I get my voki into my sidebar?

What is up with RSS? I now have some RSS feeds in myyahoo, and some in explorer. I don’t understand why RSS feeds are different (interface?)

I can’t seem to log into SecondLife…I have had an account for over a year, just downloaded SL onto my laptop…wonder why I can’t play?

I want to follow and be followed on Twitter, but how do I get contacts??? And I have to be an edublags supporter to get Twitter on my blog, huh?

I want to create and avatar for my username and blog…the voki would be ok, but I can’t get it to work. Do I go to an avatar creation site?

 I don’t think my district will allow me to use student blogging.  I think, though, I can create pages with student writing published on it. Might be an option to get started, once I figure out how this all works.

It’s almost midnight and I’m pretty tired, but excited about what I am learning here.

In considering how to use a classroom blog to enhance my reading and writing curriculum, I’ve thought about a few things:

        I want my 7th and 8th graders to be proficient users of English, whether to listen, speak, read or write. Will a blog enhance the way that my students use English in these ways?

       What do I need to give my students authentic reasons to listen, speak read, and write?

      I don’t want the technology to be and end in itself. I want it to be tool that students use to practice their communication in English.

     What do they need to know about using technology to help them incorporate new technologies in the future?

     I am also monitoring my own exploration of the technology and how I go about learning it. I have needed the motivation to wade through vast seas of information available, research skills to locate the information  I need to accomplish my goal, time to mess with what I learn (time to make mistakes and try again).

     I went throught those processes as I first found out about Edublogs and saw the possibilities of using it in my classroom (motivation). Then I clicked a “start now” button and followed the walk through to get set up. I explored some existing blogs to see what was possible. I clicked through the Dashboard to see what was there, but still didn’t know how to “make it happen” in terms of creating my blog.

     I noticed the Edublogger and read a bit, then searched for some getting started info, which turned up a couple of intro manuals, which I skimmed because I already had done some of what was discussed. I identified those activites which I hadn’t done and tried them out.

    I clicked on the Voki link because it caught my attention and then played with it in the same way until I managed through trial and error to get it into my first post.

    Whew! That was work, but FUN work, and an experience of learning that I want my students to have. The process was important I think, since it was problem solving. I almost want to set my students up with the problem (figure out how to set up your blog) and see how they move through it. How much support from me will they need? Will the interest be maintained even with frustration? I could walk them through step by step, but would the problem solving really be a better lesson???

    Something to consider.

Happy blogging!!

I can put a Voki into my blogs now! Maybe I should put it on my About Me page.I followed the directions from The Edublogger and only had difficulty trying to decide how much code to highlight. How are teachers using these with their students?