But, of course, it’s so much more than that. I revised an old assignment, something I had been using since 2001, called Intro to the Internet. It relied on Ted Nellen’s assignment as a starting point. The new lesson has some of the same objectives as the old, but the new one is more relevant and, I think, a better springboard to 9th grade CyberEnglish.

One thing missing from the new lesson? True collaborative writing, which we could do at Google docs IF we were permitted. Everything in its own time, though, right?

Oh, and there’s a cool wordle in this lesson, too. I love that tool.

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.

It would be cool to hand the Wordle out (nothing more, not even the title) to the class before reading have students in groups come up with the following:

• What is the story going to be about?
• Who might the main characters be?
• What will the setting be like?
• What is the tone of the story?
• What words might we need to define?
• What questions do you have about anything so far?
• Whatever else you can think of . . .

The groups should save their predictions and revisit them in journals during and after reading.

I think I will try this idea this fall and see what happens.

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.

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.