The Polliwog Journal

Pam sent me this question and I thought it was worthy of public discussion:

I read your blog frequently for inspiration to share with our English teachers. Today I went to it to mine for free advice. Since I didn’t see any posts alluding to this question, I thought I would ask you directly.
What qualities do you think are necessary for an effective English Dept. chair in the era of Cyber-English? I’ve just been approached to consider serving as an interim English Dept. chair this year and would really appreciate some insight from someone not even remotely connected with our school.

This is such a great question, Pam, and it hits home with me. I was department chair at our school from 1995-2003, when our principal decided department chairs were expendable. CyberEnglish, for me, was born in 2001, so I had two years to be the kind of person you’re asking about. I failed dreadfully.

For one thing, when we began CE, or when I began CE, the rest of the department believed that CE would have two main results:

• force teachers to change the way they teach (they would have to learn new technologies)
• create a division in the “fun-ness” of classes, CE being the fun class and the others being the “boring” classes

I truly think that the rest of my department at that time felt threatened by CE. I was treated with some subtle hostility, and my protection mechanism was to retreat to my sanctuary and do what I knew was right. I had few tools to help me convince my department, other than my anecdotal experience that CE works.

If I had been in the same place today, I would be engulfed in a rich, tech savvy Internet community that is screaming the value of technology integration. There are so many resources to support CE now, that my gentle bombardment of the department with the truth would be impossible to write off as the ravings of a English teacher turned computer geek.

I think of the book Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts by Will Richardson that is so compelling about using Blogs and Wikis. Bloggers like David Warlick, Bud Hunt, Ryan Bretag, Ted Nellen, Gail Desler, and Scott McLeod are voices that cannot be ignored.

Studies from PEW/Internet and the National School Boards Association give credence to what CE teachers know and do in the classroom.

Videos like Pay Attention and Learning to Change–Changing to Learn (posted in Polliwog Journal) help teachers see that change is NOT an option.

The CE department chair no longer needs to feel alienated. I imagine that in many districts the directive to change is coming from administration, not just the department chair. In a way, the situation in 2008 is perfect.

And yet, the main thing is to (and I hate this phrase) “walk the walk.” The CE department chair must be a teacher for the department so that they can be teachers for their students. The CE department chair must use and play with all the new tools. She/he must read the blogs, must read the books, articles, surveys, etc. She/he must have a passion for technology in education, but especially in English where it so perfectly aids teachers in their academic goals to increase language arts skills and higher order thinking.

I am no longer department chair, but in the past few years I have had more success than ever in convincing my department that integrating technology is imperative to our success. Our roadblocks now come from other, less manageable sources (see my post on blocking).

Best of luck to you, Pam.

I created AP English Connections yesterday, replacing an old website that did not offer interaction. I hope it will become a place for community and growth for AP teachers.

Thank you Ted Nellen for the link to this video, “Learning to Change-Changing to Learn,” which is further validation of everything I believe about the future of schools. I am so proud to be a CyberEnglish teacher, which I owe again to Ted and his vision.

We’re a revolutionary classroom, and yet, we are not anywhere near where we could be or should be. And our classroom only engages one quarter of our students for one year.

Nonetheless, I am excited to be a teacher in the days when people are actually talking about radical and true change in schools. We think we’re past the one room school, but we’re not. We’ve got big box schools instead. One building, isolated from the world, isolated from community, teachers isolated from each other, with books that are prescriptive, with curriculum that is so standardized that it stifles creativity.

Arrggghhh! No wonder kids are bored. School is such a drudge compared to their outside-of-school life.

The teachers and leaders in this video say some really smart things that every educator should not only be listening to but also finding ways to make real changes for the students in their own schools:

• We have to develop a narrative that sustains 21st century learning.
• Kids are very rich content developers today through their social networking sites; they’re big communicators through email, instant messaging, and text messaging, and yet all of those things are banned from their schools.
• [Schools of the future are about] relationship, community, connectivity and access.
• The “nearly now” [Facebook, Twitter, etc.] is a great place for learning–allowing time to reflect, retract, research.
• We’ve got a classroom system when we could have a community system.
• Skills of future call on [students'] artistic abilities, abilities of synthesis, ability to understand context, to work in teams, their multidisciplinary, multicultural, multilingual abilities.

And my favorite:

• “Now we’re looking at a whole different range of schools that are producing ingenious, collaborative, gregarious, brave children who care about stuff like their culture and to build schools like that is a whole other challenge . . . . it’s a very exiting time for learning. It’s the death of education but the dawn of learning.”

The idea of “ingenious, collaborative, gregarious, brave children who care about stuff” is a heartbreaking idea. It’s heartbreaking because this is how kids are born. This is who they are as children before they go to school.

It is a moral imperative for us to make our schools worthy of them.

I had created my del.icio.us account quite awhile ago, but never played with it until this week (spurred by Dawn Sahouani’s reminder to try it).

The real value of del.icio.us is the connectivity it provides. I like that I can save urls and find them easily later, from any computer, but what’s really cool is to explore what other people have saved.

Here’s my process. I click the link that says “saved by ## other people” and from there I try to find interesting or familiar names. If I find people I know, then I add them to my network. But I also find other people who share a fervent interest in technology in education and they’re reading some cool blogs and sites.

Like RSS, in a way, this aspect of del.icio.us connects me with blogs and sites that I would not normally think to seek out.

BUT, then I also need to read those sites. I can see how I could easily get buried under the avalanche of information that I myself started. Right now though, I am just amazed at how much there is to discover.

I am adamant about the fact that teachers who integrate technology into their classes must use the tools themselves to truly understand their uses. As a teacher of writing, it is also important for me to write. And since I expect my students to make their work public, I must expect it of myself.

Spurred by a creative nonfiction writing assignment for English 11, I wrote Rebby Lee, a personal essay. It seemed to want a home beyond the paper page, so hurling words was born.

In a recent Web search, I found a pretty cool Cyber English blog:  Matt Thomas uses a WordPress blog to manage his work for East Hollywood High School.

Kate Says has posted the results of a survey on blocking of educational Web applications, like blogs, YouTube, social networking sites, etc. In a very impromptu survey of one class today, I asked, “how many of you were using the Internet for a legitimate school assignment this year and got blocked.” I was not surprised that all of the students said that they had.

Just because a block of cheese has one green spot on it, I don’t throw away the entire block of cheese. I just scrape it off and use the rest.

Schools (by which I mean those in power to control the actions of the members of the school, such as governments, school boards, administrators, etc.) are blocking more and more these days and are less and less able to explain why, or less and less willing. Some of them realize they’re in an uncertain catch 22.

Schools block indiscriminately: all blogs, all social networking sites, etc. Blog is not an evil concept. Exceptionally brilliant people with a lot to teach us write blogs.

The real irony lies in the fact that students know how to unblock the blocks. They know how to play the system. A report from the National School boards Association calls these smart kids “nonconformists” and says that these early adopters of new technolgies who “step safely outside of online safety and behavior rules . . . are on the cutting edge of social networking, with online behaviors and skills that indicate leadership among their peers” (2).

These kids (about one in five) who ignore rules and bypass the blocks and use the tools in spite of the rules, may have their computer privileges suspended or be assigned detention or may even be suspended from school, but these students actually possess the intellect and leadership skills required to be successful in the 21st century.

We can tell our kids that it’s dangerous across the street and put a fence up in our yard, but they’re going to sneak out eventually. Human beings are going to do what someone tells them they can’t. That is just the way it is. And besides, what do we gain by making our kids afraid of the world?

When schools block web applications, especially the newer Web 2.0 tools, the opportunity to use and teach how to use these tools is blocked as well. What would be better than simply blocking everything would be to acknowledge that there are some risks associated with accessing information on the Internet and in creating an online presence and teach students how to be responsible Web content generators. For example, student bloggers should know the foundations of journalism if they’re going to be practising it.

Blocking everything means we are throwing out the entire block of cheese. The future will not be kind to those who were too blind to see the huge waste of opportunity and intellect that resulted from their policies.

Instead, school leadership must courageously embrace the Read Write Web. Administrators should adhere to Prensky’s Principles for Principals, which Ryan Bretag discusses so well in his blog. The National Association of School Boards recommends “using social networking for staff communications and professional development” (8). Teachers could use blogs to reflect on their professional development. Superintendents could use blogs to communicate with the community and to promote the school.

Imagine trying to teach reading if you had never read? Imagine trying to lead students into the future with your feet resolutely planted in the past.

It is the fifth year for this project: Living Histories Multigenre Web Projects. I still love “teaching” the project that Pat Schulze and I developed in 2004. Not just a paper, not just hypertext, not just multigenre, this project seems to do it all. I like how layered in skills it is. I have long thought that it serves as an excellent year end assessment for many of the skills we’ve been teaching in 9th grade English, but it includes new skills as well. It may be the perfect springboard project for 10th grade.

The true test of its value is the positive feelings it engenders in students. Most groups go into the the six week adventure with some little excitement but mostly trepidation. In the beginning, the “to do” list seems overwhelming. But at the end of that six week period, there is a great deal of satisfaction in having done a good job.

Students commonly report in their self assessments that once they get going, there is plenty of time for everything. They also report that they loved their interview experience. For some, the interview experience is emotionally meaningful.

“Old” Skills

• writing hypertext (creating links to extend, support, or clarify ideas)
• creating folders, pages, and saving files in FrontPage
• designing readable, user friendly Websites
• writing expository prose in 3rd person, stating claims and supporting them
• writing multigenre to add depth

“New” Skills

• interviewing a primary source
• researching a topic using print, Web, and electronic database sources
• notetaking
• weaving secondary source material from research into text
• citing sources in text
• creating annotated bibliography
• preparing a photo in Photoshop Elements for the Web

And more. . .

• teamwork and collaboration
• time management (meeting deadlines, making and keeping appointments, etc.)
• organization of materials and resources
• email and phone etiquette

In the future

• find more topics for which primary sources are available (WWII veterans are leaving us daily)
• use Web 2.0 tools to help students truly experience collaborative writing process

Please visit students’ sites: Links to students’ projects for 2008

You know how sometimes you just grab onto something, like a little analogy and it sort of fits? Well, the other day I was explaining the Living Histories project to my ninth graders and reminding them that they needed a minimum of 10 hyperlinks throughout their project. I told them that I did not want them to think of their hyperlinks as an afterthought, like sprinkles on the cupcake, but rather as an organic part of the cupcake. So, I asked, where do the sprinkles have to go? “In the batter,” one student said. “You make funfetti cupcakes,” said another.

Exactly!

I love how thinking connects to thinking if you’re open to it. So today as I was reading Bud Hunt’s article for the September 2007 English Journal, Linkin’ (B)Logs: A New Literacy of Hyperlinks, I thought again of my cupcake idea.

Bud writes that the true power of blogging (as a verb) in the classroom is the connections it allows students to make through hyperlinks. As a CyberEnglish teacher, the very first assignment I wrote for my students seven years ago was a hypertext lesson. Based, in part, on the work of Nancy Patterson, I saw that one of the astounding aspects of Web writing was the ability to make links. When I teach hypertext, I tell students that links do several things:

• connect to similar ideas
• expand on a topic or idea
• define or clarify an idea
• take audiences to original sources

Beyond those attempts at explanation, I see that hypertext allows writers to extend their thinking, to take it “off” the page in a way, to draw their audiences to what’s meaningful through a click of a mouse.

Bud lists several types of links in his article:

• Connecting to locations
  • Websites that illustrate concepts and help explain information
• Connections to ideas
  • Linking to original sources or “linktribution”
• Connecting to self
  • Linking back to things you have previously published (as I have in this post) to reflect and reconsider
• Connecting for attention (links to blogs, wikis or something the intended audience might be keeping an eye on)
  • Links using an RSS feed to “feed” posts of specific interest

Bud is right about all of that, but it was something else he said that made even more sense to me. He said

“thinking about how the technology connects the pedagogy is important. We can’t learn how to write connectively, to get into blogging, without first learning how to make those connections. Hyperlinks take you from page to page and bring you back again. Linking is how you crystallize those connections. . . .”

“Once i began to use [hyperlinks], I began to think about hyperlinks and more importantly, connections, in all aspects of writing.”

Sometimes people who don’t understand CyberEnglish criticize what we do. They cannot see the value of integrating Web technology because to them all we’re doing is typing. The problem is that until you use the technology yourself, like blogging, or creating a website, until you write hypertext and make for yourself these powerful connections in thinking, you cannot understand how the technology changes your thinking.

When we talk about 21st century literacies, we’re not really talking about some new program or a new curriculum. We are talking about how new technologies change how people think and learn. This is a fundamental shift in education.

I love what I do. I am a CyberEnglish teacher. I teach reading, writing, and NEW thinking. How will I know if I have succeeded? One way I will know is when my students begin to think in links, or when their cupcakes are funfetti, when their sprinkles go in the batter and not simply on the top.

It’s spring, well nearly so, and in Wisconsin where we are stretched to the limits of our endurance with cold, snow, and dull, grey skies, we are giddy when spring arrives, almost insanely so.

And because we are of hard-working European ancestry, we make productive use of our new daylight hours by cleaning, refreshing, and renewing, much in the same way the ancients did–spring was a time they were simply glad to still be alive.

So–a new look for this blog. I liked the old look, but I wanted three columns. I wanted an image that reflected a shift from old technology to new. I found this great picture at iStockPhotos (relatively cheap and wonderful images).

I am happy with the new look, but maybe next spring, when the urge to make new hits me hard, you may see the next iteration of Polliwog Journal.