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.

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’m going to be speaking at the Wisconsin State Reading Association on February 8 about using Blogs and Wikis in the classroom, so I decided this new/old blog should be a classroom management blog, something I had not really done before.

Plus, I just read Will Richardson’s great book Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms and was reminded of how I’m not practicing what I preach.

I know I’m stretched beyond the limits of my ability to attend carefully to my blogs. I am sure that some of them are wilting from neglect, but each has its own purpose and its own value, I hope.

I recently created a unit for my juniors called Writing Letters That Matter, for which teams of students research a political issue that they care about and write a letter to one of their national or state representatives. It’s a neat little unit and it meets all kinds of standards (not that I care that much about standards, but you know).

And because I like to integrate web resources, I have all kinds of links embedded into the unit plans. So it was with this in mind that I thought, “Oh, cool,” this morning as I listened to the story about Street Team ‘08 on NPR. Street Team is an initiative of MTV that gets college students across the nation to cover local issues as “citizen journalists” and blog, podcast, etc. about their experiences. The hope is that these embedded “journalists” can both explore political issues important to young people and also generate disscussions via Web 2.0 tools. Eventually they hope to get young people to care enough to vote.

Earlier in the year, I had hoped, in a class Blog, to show my English 11 students that bloggers are becoming truly democratic voices and this Street Team concept only reinforces that. This all sounds great, right?

Here’s the bad part. Today, when I got to school, I tried to get to the Street Team ‘08 site, but it was blocked due to its content: digital music, etc. And this is the story of the year: block, block, block;  federal law prohibits . . . .  I feel like all I hear this year is “no” or “we can’t.”

I still do not fully comprehend the vast paranoia about kids and the Internet. I know there are predators out there. I know that serious and dangerous situations have occurred.  But I also know that if we blind our kids and muffle their ears and refuse to teach them how to be citizens of the Internet world, they will be at a far greater risk than they would be than if we were brave enough as a nation to acknowledge that our kids are digital kids anyway who will find all kinds of ways around our blocks (ever meet a kid who has defied his parents’ ultimatum?) and will be in that world whether we like it or not. We would be wise to teach them how to navigate safely. And some of us like that world, the Internet world, fraught with danger as it is.

Is the real world not also fraught with danger? How many of us, as parents, actually fulfill our “promise” to lock our kids up until they’re 21. Of course we don’t. It’s silly.

In the same way it is silly to restrict Internet access in schools and thereby restrict teachers’ ability to teach their students.

Democracy is best when people engage with other people in discussion about who we are as a people and what is best for us and who will best lead us. The truth is that many of these discussions happen online these days.

Juniors are primarily 17-year-0lds who are on the cusp of full citizenship, ready in only a year to vote. How can I explain to them how important it is to write letters to their representatives when those same representatives do not respect their right to know? With all the new laws, are we protecting our children or are we muting their voices?