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.

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.

“Make it public” is one of the main tenets of CyberEnglish. It is, in fact, the most important one, I think. Because CE students publish their writing on the Web, anyone could read it. We have agreed that “anyone” includes me, their teacher, but also it includes their parents and other relatives, and of course, their peers. I’ve told this group about Mary Stillwell in New Brunswick who is beginning her CE journey this year. I told them I imagine Ms. Stillwell’s students might be looking at their sites, too.

With this wider audience comes a greater responsibility also. No one wants to look or sound dumb in public, so students generally attend to detail and revise with care. What eventually occurs is the sense that “I am writing for them, but I need to be satisfied with the result myself.” Gone are the days of writing just to please the teacher.

And because the writing is on a Website, presentation (that always fuzzy trait, the plus one trait that seemed so inconsequential) takes on a much greater significance, too.

This week we spoke about readability on the Web. Akin to having good penmanship, I suppose, making design decisions about font and color do affect readability. We never want our audience to be squinting to read.

My daughter, Laura, who works for the Kohler Company as a technology support specialist, is reading a book called Letting Go of the Words: Writing Web Content That Works, by Janice Redish. As I am the only other person in the family (besides her grandfather) who is geeky about Web design, we were looking at it last week. I was pleased to see many of the same concepts I “preach” about in my CE classes included in this book for adult professionals.

For example:

• Text should not be too big (screaming); plus it’s hard to read. We laughed about this as she told me the story of a woman who only had a small paragraph for a page so she thought she should make it really big to fill the page. Of course, I’ve seen memos on paper created out of that same misapprehension.
• Colors need to enhance text and readability, not interfere. Dark backgrounds make it harder to see text. And certain colors are simply too harsh. For some reason, after reading a student essay on a lime green background, my eyes feel as if I have been staring at the sun.
• Sans serif fonts are easier to read on the Web. Conversely, serif fonts are easier to read on paper. I think it’s interesting and don’t know why this is so, but it’s been studied apparently. I do agree. I think it may have to do with the fact that a computer screen is actually moving constantly. Maybe the serifs have a trailing effect that, while nearly imperceptible, does tire our eyes more.

There are many more important design aspects that good Web designers should keep in mind. The key thing for my students to know is that their design decisions affect their audience.

I know that English teachers talk to students about the importance of audience all the time, but honestly, if students are just writing a daily journal entry in a notebook, their only audience is the teacher and hopefully, themselves. The real power comes with a real audience. And no artificial audience from class workshops to bulletin boards can come close to the power of the Web.

Change is life.

So I think it is my responsibility to make web pages that are beautiful and designed for easy reading and navigation. I try to put into practice all the things I tell my students. Therefore, it annoys me to find so many teacher made sites that are horrible examples of good design. And many of them from intelligent people whose sites otherwise are content rich. But part of web content is visual.

The MAJOR offenders in bad web design are as follows:

• Text upon a graphic background (especially one that looks like your old maid aunt’s sofa)
• Text that goes across the entire page; use columns (tables) for goodness sake
• Text that is too bold, too big, too “loud.” I hate screaming text.
• Flashing gifs or anything moving. Too much animation is just annoying.
• Dark or black backgrounds with text that is not really readable. No one should ever have to squint to read anything on the web.
• Pages that scroll side to side.

Too many techno “geeks” who teach web design, actually only teach web creation, html, etc. They have no design sense whatsoever.

Time to retire this diatribe for now. But short of making my own “web pages that suck” list, I’ll continue to do whatever I can do to educate the teaching profession about good web design.