I led a session on Web 2.0 tools today for the K-12 ELA team at Sturgeon Bay.

As always, there are  a few tech hang-ups, but overall, even spam filters could not keep us down. The practical result of the day is that there are 2o new bloggers and 20 new members of Teaching English in Wisconsin.

Beyond that, who knows?  Who will the ripples touch? Where will the ripples lead to?

I loved the energy in the room, the willingness to try and become engaged.  I hope these teachers continue to satisfy their curiosity and click on links, read blogs, post comments, start discussions, and share their knowledge with all of us.

For awhile I thought that FrontPage would kill CyberEnglish in the same way that video killed the radio star.

We’d been using FrontPage as the web editor for our students to create their websites since 2001, but FP is no longer supported by Microsoft. Also, our server was a Microsoft system set up to do live editing on the server, and if we moved to an open source web editor, we’d need to find some way to ftp pages, or whatever the lingo is for publishing. Also, our security is tight. We adhere to the extremely stringent Wisconsin Open Records Law in our school, so whatever new tool we decided to use, it would have to keep us in line with the law.

I have wanted to move to blogs for quite awhile,  and a convergence of factors this year propelled us somewhat last minute to do just that.

We installed WordPress MU on a local server (when I say we, I don’t mean me). My CE9 colleague and I and a brilliant technology teacher in our district worked on customizations. It has taken us awhile to manage it all, but this week our students were blogging like crazy. And they love it.

Moving to WP MU and blogs did give us some advantages over websites:

• Students can login to their blogs from any Internet computer. They can create new posts and submit for review. This means they aren’t “confined” to the school building or the school day to accomplish their goals. This is great for students who need more time as well as for students who are absent. Students could not edit their websites from home.
• I can edit my classroom blog anytime. I can only edit my www.mshogue.com website from home. Sometimes I want to publish up-to-the-minute announcements. I can use my blog for that.
• Peers, teachers, parents, mentors, or anyone, can post comments on our blogs. This is one of the main reasons I wanted to move from static websites to blogs. Comments connect us. When students generate content (a book review or a journal post) and publish it, a comment means someone has read their work and is engaging in conversation about it. This means a lot to them and for me continues to drive a wedge into our old idea of audience. I want student to write for everyone, not for me, so that eventually, they’ll write for themselves.
• As the teacher, I have much more administrative control over the blogs than I did over the websites. This is nice for our tech specialists. They don’t need to devote as much time to us as in the past. On the downside, it means I devote a lot more time. C’est la vie, I guess. No system is perfect.

There are some disadvantages to using Blogs over Websites:

• A blog is a truly linear looking format, whereas students websites were a bit more fluent. That is, there was a more natural “back and forth” linkability in the websites. This class of 2013 has not had the Website experience, though, so they don’t know the difference. They love their blogs.
• Our students can only edit posts and pages prior to publishing. They cannot go back to revise once a page or post is published (made public). This is a tremendous disadvantage in teaching a recursive writing process, but is a fact we have to live with due to the law. Because of this situation, students are encouraged to compose in Word first, to run spell check, to share with peers when needed, or teachers when needed–all before submitting for review. The blue submit for review button is one we only click after serious consideration. I’ve told my students that they don’t want their work wandering out in the world sleepy-headed  in its jammies. They want what they write to go out in public well dressed with its hair combed and its face fresh. They get the idea. We will work hard on knowing when to push the blue button.
• There are limits to how much students can customize. This is good and bad. I like how their websites of the past were truly unique. I’ve had over 500 CE0 students in the past and each student created an individual website. No two were the same. This is not so with blogs. This year, students can choose from about 20 themes. We upload the themes for them to choose from; they can’t go out and get their own. We will try to add more later, so the choice is wider. Most students are happy with the variety of themes. Others wish they had one all their own or that they could customize their theme.  The upside of this limitation is that students really won’t have a reason to play around with customizing, which some did to a distracting degree in years past. It is true that messing with code is good play because we can learn a lot from doing it. But if our goals are to write and communicate, then the theme is secondary to that.
• Getting things set up in the beginning took an incredible amount of time, probably 30 hours, no joke. In the future, this work could be done in the summer, not during the school day like this year. Also, in the future we won’t have to learn as we go or create lessons as we go. We’ve already done this–next year should be a breeze.

Right now, despite the time it takes to review and publish, I am pleased with the change. What’s more important, my students love blogging. Their cyberjournals sound a lot like their peers’ from the “old days,” which means that while the tools have changed, the pedagogy has not. We still learn best by making it public, by passing it on, and by peer review.

Times have changed.

I find myself in the mentor role again, as we have a new part-time English teacher, who is not only new to our school, but new to teaching as well. What I admire about Addie is her unflappability. Truly, she seems always so calm. This is a good thing because, as you all know, the first year of teaching can be nuts. But also, I need that influence. I am easily “flapped.”

Addie has begun a blog, at my urging, to reflect on her professional development. Plus, she will be my CyberEnglish9 teaching partner this year. I know that teachers must use the tools they hope to teach, and she is excited by the prospect of using technology tools in her English classes.

What does it mean to mentor in the 21st century? It means that my role is not so much to give a tour or to explain fire drill procedures or to talk about the importance of parent teacher conferences. This is all important stuff, of course. But, it is much more important to help Addie in other ways.

• explore Web tools, like blogs, wikis, nings, Google tools (docs, reader, etc.)
• join Diigo and engage in social bookmarking
• join EC ning and explore ideas with a diverse, energetic group of English teachers from all over
• help her integrate her ideas for integrating technology into our classroom (photo story, podcasts, and more)

Mentoring means teaching, but for me, at least, it will also mean learning, and I look forward to a fun year.

The other thing I like about this little video is that it is a great exercise in compare/contrast, a skill my students have difficulty with.

Watch CBS Videos Online

I created the ning as an extension of my presentation on the same topic at the Wisconsin State Reading Association in Milwaukee, February 6.  It’s a small group now, but please join us and help us learn together.

So it is with great pride (and a good deal of prejudice) that I make this link to my former student’s new blog: A New Ecology. It will be obvious to anyone who takes to reading Kimberly’s blog regularly, that I am proud of her for much, much more than a little blog. She is an amazing young woman who has taken on “a new ecology” for herself in Honduras, teaching AP English to students whose native language is not English. And this is her first job.

And yet, she welcomes the challenges that lie before her. She will struggle as we all did in our first year, as we all do even in our 20th or 30th year. Teaching is an ever-changing consumption of our abilities and intellect, and we wouldn’t have it any other way. Neither would Kimberly.

She was my student and now we are hers. The best thing about blogging is that we can learn from each others’ rich experiences. If you have a moment, or the inclination, please join me in welcoming Kimberly to the blogosphere by leaving a comment for her.

What students begin to see are patterns and repetitions, which are, of course, (theoretically) clues to the meaning of the passage. I ask students to consider dominant patterns. Ask them to discuss what they might mean.

I copied the url for Google News into Wordle because I wanted to see if any dominant patterns would emerge.

I don’t know about you, but to me, the news seems to be filled with violence. Just “wordling” the news daily would be a great springboard for discussion.

But it would also be a good tool for finding dominant word patterns in a literary passage.

I had set up some wiki pages for the course, and it mostly went well, mostly.

We hit a snag when not everyone could access an email account to get their edublogs password. There were a few who never did get to open a blog and play with it. If this would have been me, I would have been very disappointed. I wish I had remembered that they would need access to an email account and had them all get a gmail or other web mail account (some tried to get gmail from the school but were denied).

On the more positive side, I think everyone left with a better sense of what they can do with a blog or a wiki or both. I promised to update the wiki site with resources for them.

We had three hours. We could have used three days. In the future, I would probably not try to do both blogs and wikis in one class. It’s too much!

If you’re out there, SITA class, let me know how things are going and what I can do to help.

A wordle is clever in a number of ways. The word “wordle” is just funny; it kind of tickles the tongue, makes the tongue vibrate just a bit.

Ms K has some ideas about how to use Wordle in the classroom. I may have to try some of them, IF we aren’t blocked!

What I like best is the random word associations that Wordle makes. For example, words from the Polliwog Journal are juxtaposed, adjacent, or otherwise associated in ways they were not intended to be. This word juggling creates a new order for the brain to consider. It seems there would be some discussion starters as a result.

There is something fun and new on the Web every day!

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.