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.

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman believes these changes will stand with Gutenberg’s printing press in impacting the world. Friedman says we now have a “global web-enabled platform for multiple forms of sharing knowledge and work irrespective of time, distance, geography and increasingly even language.”  That platform, Friedman says, “explains more things about what’s happening in the world today than any other framework.”

As a result, Friedman argues, we have to horizontalize ourselves and adapt to this new platform that more and more people can plug and play on.  He describes the process of horizontalizing as “having to learn to adapt our business practices and study habits,  our innovative approaches to this new platform, because we’re going from a world where value is created in vertical silos of command and control [top down] to a world where value will be created increasingly horizontally by who you connect and collaborate with.”

The phrase “value will be created increasingly . . . by who you connect and collaborate with” struck me most profoundly.  My personal experience with horizontalizing began in the late 90’s when I joined a lively and engaging group of English teachers via a list serv. In 2001, I followed Ted Nellen’s lead and started CyberEnglish at SFHS, a class that expressly strives to be horizontal: make it public, peer review, and pass it on. Ted is a genius! He understood convergence long before nearly everyone I know.

When Pat Schulze (from South Dakota) and I (from Wisconsin) used a Moo on Saturday mornings to plan a new unit, we were horizontalizing and we didn’t even know it. We just knew that what we were doing was really, really cool.

More recently I have seen how Web 2.0 tools like Blogs, Wikis and Nings allow us to connect and collaborate irrespective of time, distance, or geography. I manage two Nings and belong to four others. I cannot believe the collective wisdom in those Nings, wisdom freely shared.

Vertical silos have failed me for a long, long time. I realized back in those early list serv days that the people who can most teach me what I need to know are not my bosses. Because we are so stridently homogenized in our geographical space, even my peers, who are fabulous teachers, have not been the catalysts for change I have needed.

It is my Ning friends, my Blog buddies, my global connections who continue to drive me. They’re my teachers. Some days, maybe I am their teacher. We plug in and play in the wealth of ideas that the Web freely gives us, like genius flowing so fast through our fingers we cannot hold it all.

Convergence.

Friedman also says that nobody has told the kids about the shift in technologies that have flattened the world. But it seems to me that the Facebook generation understands the tools better than their parents, better, frankly, than most adults. Teens and young adults create and share content. They text in a new language invented for that purpose.  Even the verbs are new: text, tweet, friend, etc. They upload, download, and share files. Because they use the Web tools that allow them to connect and collaborate across time and distance, they understand the uses of this new platform.

But that may be the extent of it. They manage their profiles, post pictures, tag friends, friend friends’ friends, but do my students understand that the way they effortlessly communicate and collaborate on the Web means they are already at work in the new global web-enabled platform? I’m not sure. I doubt it. If not, whose job is it to present them with these ideas?

It is mine.

As teachers, we may tell our students that they are members of a global community in unprecedented ways. But what does that mean to them? It’s an idea far too abstract for the prefrontal cortext of most 15-year-olds. To be honest, the idea isn’t even quite clear to most teachers.  Sometimes I think teachers like to tell students pretty words. Instead, let’s have them read The World is Flat or Jenkins’ Blog? I love Romeo and Juliet as much as the next English teacher, and I do think Shakespeare has a lot to teach us, but I worry that we are helping to trap our children in vertical silos when we do not help them see just exactly how their cell phones enable them to fully engage in the 21st century.

The graphic is very, very cool. I wish I could reproduce it here, but it would be best not to. I love how the tools that achieve the skill are shown at that level.

But he called. He and his group were on the bus coming back to school from the conference and they had some questions. What does “sublunary” mean? How about laity? I had forgotten to suggest they take along a dictionary. You can’t send everything along on a field trip. So I defined the words for him, and as his partners wrote things down, he relayed other questions, and I realized, wow, we’re using technology to extend our teaching realm.

This is why I love technology. If teaching is helping students learn, then why are there any rules at all about how to do that? Why can’t students phone in their questions?

I’ll admit that a text message at 9:30 p.m. asking “can I have an extension on my essay” isn’t exactly what I have in mind when I suggest we should consider extending our teaching realm, it’s not that far off, not really.

When we need our teachers we need them, whether it be during our class time or not. I know that it is unlikely that all 125 of my students will need me at once (can you imagine???), so I just like to be there, by phone, by text, by whatever means technology allows us to break down our communication barriers.

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.

What if we took that idea and turned it into an analysis activity for literary characters. Instead of just listing the search returns, students would need to qualify each list item based on their understanding of the character.

For example, here’s my list for Scout Finch (the qualifiers follow in italics):

1. Scout needs community support to combat racism in Maycomb.

2. Scout needs to review with [her] parents or guardian the reasons why school is important after all.

3. Scout needs to understand that it is important to stand in someone else’s shoes, to see things from his or her point of view.

4. Scout needs help with [the] project she is working on for the fall pageant. Her ham costume is too constricting.

5. Scout needs a-bath! She is too much a tomboy, according to her Aunt Alexandra.

6. Scout needs communication with her cousin Francis; fighting never solves anything.

7. Scout needs division between herself and the Radleys. She needs to let them live in peace, without pestering them.

8. Scout needs to give Arthur gentle reminders that she has not forgotten him. She could bring him flowers on May Day or send him notes in the mail.

9. Scout needs help remembering that there is good in everyone, even Mrs. Dubose who called her ugly and Mr. Cunningham, who, as a member of the jury, held out for Tom as long as he could.

10. Scout needs to reach out on [her] own to become the strong, independent woman she has the potential to be.

Then of course, there is the 25 random things about me meme/tag game. This activity can also be used as a sort of character sketch. I love the randomness of the order, the quality of each list item. Just 25 things, randomly posted.

Here are 25 things about Atticus Finch:

1. I am a widower. My wife died when our son, Jeremy, was six and our daughter Jean Louise (Scout) was only two. I miss her.
2. I realize that being in one’s fifties means I can’t do everything I used to, like play touch football with Jem.
3. I have the most wonderful children who bring me joy even if they think I’m old. They don’t think I know what they’re up to half the time. Strip poker? Hmmm.
4. For the past three summers, a little guy named Dill has been a constant companion of our family. I think that boy is an imaginative little guy, and I like him quite a lot.
5. Our neighbors are wonderful, kind people. Although some seem intolerant.
6. I can shoot a gun, really, really well, but I have such an unfair advantage that I choose not to hunt.
7. I have no strong religious feelings one way or the other. My religion is that we should treat everyone fairly and justly, no matter their race.
8. I love roast beef and collards, but no syrup, please.
9. My family has lived in this area for a long time. Our oldest ancestor was Simon Finch, who came from England. Unfortunately, he owned slaves, something I’m not at all proud of.
10. I served the Alabama legislature for a time. I like working one on one with people more than trying to convince politicians to do the right thing.
11. My friend Judge Taylor and I play cards on the porch on summer evenings and talk about our concerns. We are worried about racism. It’s just not right and keeps people from being their best.
12. I read every night and love having Scout perched on my lap, though she’s getting a bit big for that.
13. My sister Alexandra still lives on our family homestead, though her husband doesn’t seem to care to keep it up. But I am so busy that I can’t complain.
14. I have an old, old watch that I am saving to hand down to my son Jeremy. He is my pride, so fierce, so inventive. He made a snowman once out of very little snow by building a dirt base first.
15. I rarely drive a car anywhere. My town is so small I can walk just about everywhere.
16. I don’t like criminal law, but prefer to help people with things like wills and entailments.
17. I have fond feelings for a neighbor woman whom I should ask out to dinner, but I am too shy.
18. I am so proud of my brother who is a doctor. He’s going to do important things with his life.
19. My job keeps me busy, but I am able to come home each noon for dinner and each night for supper.
20. I have a hard time teaching my daughter how to settle disputes with words instead of fists.
21. I believe in justice. The courts are the great levelers of our time.
22. I worry about my kids. They fight for my honor even when it is confusing for them.
23. I have a tough job ahead of me, to defend a negro who is clearly innocent of the absurd charges against him. I don’t know if a Maycomb jury can be blind to their prejudices.
24. I think change is coming. I’m not sure why, but I feel it coming soon. I wouldn’t be surprised if great things happen yet in my lifetime.
25. I am tired. I can’t think of one more thing interesting about me. I’m just not that special.

[The list in itself is interesting. There are various levels of understanding here: literal, inferential, even ironic].

There were a variety of factors that propelled me to open my own facebook account this summer. The strongest was that I knew I could not talk intelligently about something I personally knew nothing about. Joining the vast social network has been an enlightening experience.

My friends include NCTE colleagues, a few colleagues from my school, a few family members, former students, a few current students, and a couple of actual friends. It’s kind of fun when someone writes on my wall or sends me “flair.” What I have learned in only a few weeks is that facebook is a huge deal to the young people of my school community. It’s where they socialize when not face to face. It’s where they stay connected with each other.

Recently a teacher at school who knew I had a facebook account asked me if I ever “talk to” students on facebook. It was not a question I expected.

Two things crossed my mind.

One, well, as a matter of fact, yes. Just recently I had a nice little real-time chat with a current student about a book we were reading in class. It seemed like a conversation we might have had just before the bell rang or in the hall as we were heading home for the day. It was not too formal, but not too casual, and it was definitely teacher-student. He was polite, sincere, and we had a nice, short chat.

The other thing I thought was, hmmm. Why? Shouldn’t I? Does it cross the line? Am I not supposed to?

I think the second response kicked in because I answered her that I mostly communicate with former students and we sort of left it at that. I didn’t really answer her honestly, and I wondered later why I lied.

My reaction nagged at me.

Lately I am more and more annoyed at the assumption that all things “social networking” are the tools of online predators or silly teens wasting their time. Blogs, nings, facebook, MySpace, etc. are blocked at most schools, I imagine, because their connotation in the media is so negative. There is the perception that they are dangerous and our students need to be protected from them. It would also not be productive for students to be posting to facebook profiles via their iPhones instead of paying attention to their science experiments to keep them from bubbling over onto the floor.

Facebook takes measures to protect its users , but even so, anytime we enter willingly into the Web, we take some risks. There are some really questionable groups on facebook, but I don’t join them. I know how to stay safe online. If we want our students to know how also, we must teach them to be responsible Netizens. They need to know that public communication is “public,” and posting to one’s facebook profile is not that different from making a public proclamation, except that what gets posted to the Internet is there “supposedly” forever.

When this teacher asked me about facebook, I wondered what she thought it was. I know I wasn’t quite sure until recently. I think too many people base their opinion of social networking sites on a few sensational stories in the media. How else are they to know what reality is unless they, like me, open a facebook door to find out. I found out that facebook is not a seedy, back-alley teen club where hoods in leather jackets smoking cigarettes hang out, waiting to harass unsuspecting passersby. It is more like an annotated address book with pictures. It is even a bit like a magical (think Hogwarts) newspaper featuring the latest headlines from everyone you know or care to check up on now and then. It’s a place where old college roommates can stay in touch even after their jobs have taken them miles away from each other. Even families can connect on facebook and share pictures.

Facebook, MySpace, blogs, nings and others are not evil by their nature, though some will subvert them for salacious use. At their best, they are tools for networking, social networking, professional networking, personal networking.

Now and then, even teachers use them for improving their practice. Professional development in the read write web can be amazing!

from Jessica A.

In all the classes I have ever had, we have never been able to have a great opportunity like this one. The only things we have ever created to reflect ourselves would just be posters or essays. I’m really looking forward to this class, partly because it isn’t the same English class I have every year.

There is a novelty involved when we put a computer in front of students each day in an English class, so there is, initially, excitement or expectation that the class will be fun. Ted, Pat, Nancy and I address this in our article, CyberEnglish. Even once we start really working on reading, writing, and thinking, and that fun turns into serious business, students are still more engaged in our work than they were in my traditional English classrooms.

The other thing I love about what Jessica writes is the idea that she’s able to create something that reflects who she is. In seven years of student webs (over 600 students in that time), no two were ever really alike. Each one reflected the personality of its author. We live in times where substance always trumps style and serious beats silly, hands down. And while I do want my students to be serious thinkers and writers, I also love that their websites allow them to be playful, creative, and expressive.

from Charlene W.

. . . we hardly ever write in this class. We type almost all of our assignments.

This is one of my favorite recurring comments. Several students say this every year. It proves to me that students don’t equate writing with typing. When students type, they are writing. Also, the act of typing improves the fluency of writing. I can get my thoughts down faster with a keyboard (even as slow as I am) than I can with a pencil. I still write with pen/pencil, but I can be more fluent with a keyboard. Think of how this may be even more true for someone who “grew up” with a keyboard.

Not only does the keyboard improve fluency, but it facilitates revision so well that revision becomes the natural companion of composition. With computers, we don’t compose first, revise second. We compose/revise, compose/revise, compose/revise–all at once. Just watch, without commenting, someone writing on a keyboard. There is a lot of backspacing and deleting going on just as the keys put words on the screen.

from Jeff B.

In my old English classes we worked with a lot of grammar, and spelling words. We also read stories from a literature book while using different reading strategies. But in CyberEnglish we will be writing a lot and publishing it on our own websites. In CyberEnglish we use computers pretty much all the time. It organizes our different pieces of writing rather than just writing an assignment on a sheet of paper and worrying about losing it. From my past experiences with English my classes did some group work and group discussions, but in this class it seems more like we do things individually. My other English teachers stood up in front of the room and talked and discussed points and hints. It seems to me that in CyberEnglish the teacher tells us what to do and where to find it on the CyberEnglish cite. So, it makes us have to work and find things independently for ourselves.

I am not even sure I explicitly made the point that I expected individual responsibility from students, but that is one thing I am hoping for. This student seems to intuitively know that CE = independent learning. Not that I’m not there for them, but CE is designed with so many choices and variables that the teacher cannot possibly direct every single aspect of learning. It has to be individual. Self directed learners know how to find what they need to know. My CyberEnglish site empowers students because I publish everything I can to help them learn.

from Kaitlyn L.

Never before have I had a class that specializes on writing more than grammar.

Maybe this is perception is attributable to a high school model (over a middle school model) and not simply CyberEnglish, but I like it anyway, because, I really do think we focus on writing. We write all the time: fun creative pieces on Fridays where we play with genres and perspectives, expository paragraphs, literary analysis essays, multigenre research papers, self reflective cyber journals, and more.

When we need to address conventions errors, we do. But grammar worksheets are not going to help students write better. Writing for a real audience will.

from Kelsey T

… in CyberEnglish9 we are learning new ways to use the computer by making our very own website. We even publish our work on this website. This pushes me to do better work on my assignments and really put time and effort into them, because I know my peers can see my work and what my peers think about how I write means a lot to me.

Yes! Make it Public. Changing the audience changes everything. Others have written/studied how publishing makes writing authentic, but only web publishing is really authentic. A class anthology is great, and peers do see it, but on the web anyone could see it. Now, in reality, do our students have a huge following for their school assignments? No, but more of their peers see their work than otherwise. Teachers peek in. Administrators sometimes have a look. And so do parents. The audience is vastly different when we publish on the web, and because of this, students stop writing just for the teacher and start writing for themselves.

Please visit the students’ websites and their cyberjournals and send them an email if you’re inclined to comment on their work. They’ve been told they have a global audience, but that is only real if they have contact with people who are interested in what they’re doing/saying.