Courage?

Yes, courage.  I am a control freak and an introvert, two qualities which seem diametrically opposed to running a writing workshop.  Managing twenty-one students as they work independently on various digital creations gives me a lot of anxiety.  However, I am determined to give students the same chance to develop as writers as I give them as readers.  Just as I allow students the freedom to choose their own books to read, I will allow students to find their own topics, genres and  voices in which to write. Incorporating technology on a daily basis will enhance students’ abilities to become content creators for the 21st century.

These are the professional resources I have at my disposal for planning and implementing the digital writing workshop:

• Troy Hicks’ book The Digital Writing Workshop – I was in the middle of planning the workshop when I heard about this book, so I ordered it immediately; it should be here in a few days.
• The Digital Writing Workshop Ning Group
• My Twitter personal learning network – please feel free to join and share your experiences with me
• The educational blogs I follow via Google Reader (see the list in the right sidebar)
• And my favorite books on writing workshops in general:
  • In the Middle by Nancie Atwell
  • Writing Workshop: The Essential Guide by Ralph Fletcher and JoAnn Portalupi
  • How’s It Going by Carl Anderson
  • Assessing Writers by Carl Anderson

The students will have access to the following technology:

• Each student will be working on a 13″ Macbook with iWork and iLife.
• The class has one digital camera and one digital video camera.
• I have a Zoom H2 portable digital recorder that students can use if they need it.
• Students also have access to blogs, wikis and the school YouTube account.

Wish me luck, and please share your thoughts, advice and resources with me.

Megan Pavelich

Megan Palevich of Middle School 101 has a must-see project for teachers who want to tap into students’ use of social networking to bring literary or historical people to life. Students create fake Facebook, Twitter and instant message interactions between characters or historical people. Everything is done with templates that students work on in class or at home, so there’s no need for them to actually log in to the social networking sites. It’s an innovative, motivating idea, and one that students are sure to love.

The original instructions are posted as a Google Document here, so be sure to check it out and let her know how you like it.

Thanks to Kelly Tenkely’s Stories of Learning blog for posting the article that introduced me to the project.

The main point of the article is that Google forms now support branching surveys, so that survey-takers can be routed to different pages dependent on their answers.

It’s been so long since I used Google Docs, I wasn’t even aware online forms could be created.  Thanks, Wesley!

In summary, you’ll need the following materials:

• A bluetooth enabled computer
• An LCD projector
• A Wii remote
• A homemade LED pen
• Johnny Chung Lee’s free software available on this page

I haven’t personally tried this yet, since I’m buried deep in converting our entire school from PCs to Macs, but I hope to try it this summer.

Let me know how it works for you.

A scene from The Yellow Admiral

Doc Savage

Electric Light Orchestra – Out of the Blue

Electric Light Orchestra – Discovery

Gandalf the Grey

Kansas – Point Of Know Return

A Pre-Raphaelite Painting

A Library

The Moody Blues – The Present

Don Quixote 01

Don Quixote 02

Don Quixote 03

Streets Of Fire: A Rock & Roll Fable 01

Streets Of Fire: A Rock & Roll Fable 02

Tad Williams – Stone of Farewell

First, does the following description of the the Hitchhiker’s Guide remind you of anything?

In many of the more relaxed civilizations on the Outer Eastern Rim of the Galaxy, the Hitchhiker’s Guide has already supplanted the great Encyclopedia Galactica as the standard repository of all knowledge and wisdom, for though it has many omissions and contains much that is apocryphal, or at least wildly inaccurate, it scores over the older, more pedestrian work in two important respects.

First, it is slightly cheaper; and second, it has the words DON’T PANIC inscribed in large friendly letters on its cover.

Sounds a lot like Wikipedia to me. In the words of Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, “Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That’s what we’re doing.” Wikipedia has always struck me as very similar to the Hitchhiker’s Guide–occasionally inaccurate and sometimes irreverent, but always extremely useful. The only difference between Wikipedia and the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy has been the fact that to use Wikipedia you need a computer, cell phone or pda with Internet access. Not any more.

Amazon’s new electronic reading device, Kindle, is nothing less than a Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. A lot has been written about Kindle in the past few days, some positive and some negative, but I think people have overlooked how amazing the Wikipedia access is. For less than $400 you can carry around a book-sized device that weighs 10 ounces and that gives you access to every single article in Wikipedia from wherever you are without paying a monthly service charge!

The Kindle requires no computer, no Internet access, no Wi-Fi hotspots, and no monthly subscription. Out of the box, you can access Wikipedia from wherever you get cellular phone service. Amazing. And that’s without even mentioning the main purpose of the device, which is to function as a electronic book reader.

The Kindle is a portable book store and a portable library. You can read books and buy books from anywhere you have cellular reception.

Of course, the Kindle isn’t perfect. As an electronic reading device, it’s still in its infant stages, and I expect it to undergo many refinements and price drops. But the concept is mindblowing.

Imagine students sitting at their desk with a notebook and a Kindle that contains every one of their textbooks. No more lugging heavy backpacks home; no more going to their lockers after every class; the ability to instantly get the definition of any word in their text by selecting it on the Kindle.

Imagine taking students on a field trip to Washington, D.C., New York or places in your own town and having instant access to articles on the Lincoln Memorial, the Empire State Building, or your own local landmarks.

If you can’t tell yet, I love the entire concept. But I do have a few suggestions for Amazon as they go forward with the Kindle:

• Make sure that public domain texts can be converted and used on the Kindle at no charge. Users should be able to take out-of-copyright texts from place like Project Gutenberg and read them on the Kindle without having to pay for them.
• Send ME one, so I can really review it and show it to my students.
• And finally, print the words DON’T PANIC on the cover.

Click on over to Amazon.com to watch several videos about how the Kindle works, and to watch Toni Morrison, Neil Gaiman, Guy Kawasaki and others rave about it.

1. Browse to Vixy.net or Vconvert.net
2. Enter the page address of a YouTube video that you want to download (i.e., http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ACUxJ6fq2IY)
3. Select the file format in which you want to save the video (.mov, .avi, etc.)
4. Click the “Start” or “Convert and Download” button.
5. Wait while the file is converted, and then download it to any location on your hard drive when the download window pops up.
6. Transfer the file to a thumbdrive or CD-ROM, then bring it to school and play it for your students through a projector.

If you have a laptop that you use at both school and home, you might consider installing Miro, a free, open source video viewer.  Miro works a lot like iTunes, but for video content.  With Miro you can search for, download, play, and organize video content.  You can learn more about Miro by watching the Miro demo video.

The K-12 Online Conference invites participation from educators around the world interested in innovative ways Web 2.0 tools and technologies can be used to improve learning. This FREE conference is run by volunteers and open to everyone. The 2007 conference theme is “Playing with Boundaries”. This year’s conference begins with a pre-conference keynote the week of October 8, 2007. The following two weeks, October 15-19 and October 22-26, forty presentations will be posted online to the conference blog for participants to download and view.

Here’s a small sample of what’s been presented already (and available for free download):

• Inventing the New Boundaries by David Warlick, author of Classroom Blogging: A Teacher’s Guide to the Blogosphere: “For decades, education has been an easy institution to define. It consisted of a set of accepted literacy skills, a definable body of knowledge, and the pedagogies for teaching those skills to willing students who were arranged in straight rows. Today, for the first time in decades (in generations of teachers), we are facing the challenge of changing our notions about teaching and learning to adapt to a rapidly changing world. We are struggling to rethink what it is to be educated, to reinvent the classroom, and redefine what it is to be a teacher and a student. There is much that has changed, and for much of it, we have responded to by attempting to ignore, filter, or to block it out. This presentation, by 30+ year educator, author, and technologist, David Warlick, will explore some of these changes and challenges and arrange them as a set of converging conditions that might just help us to redefine and retool the 21st century classroom.”
• Travel through Space and Time by Lanie Ritter Hall: “Global awareness is making its way into the educational landscape. We are recognizing that our students are growing up in a ‘flat world’ and cannot afford to live isolated from learning about other languages, cultures, traditions and points of view. The presenter took over 400 students and their teachers along…virtually…as she traveled physically half way around the world to China. Learn how, through the power of web 2.0 tools, she seamlessly combined a blog, podcasts, photos and videos to educate students about cultural universals, while addressing curriculum standards.”
• More than Cool Tools by Alan Levine, Brian Lamb and D’Arcy Norman: “There is no shortage of ‘Cool New Web Tools’ out there and all three of us are guilty as charged for presenting them to teachers via the firehose effect. In our session, we will begin with a nostalgic nod to our presentation past where just 3 years ago we were talking up “Small Pieces Loosely Joined” – blogs, wikis, and a little RSS. Now there is so much more, almost too much. So we may talk about some cool tools, but more at a level of looking at the affordances which make them compelling, and why these and future breeds of tools and platforms matter to K12 teachers.”

And check out these workshops yet to come:

• Step by Step – Building a Web 2.0 Classroom by Drew Murphy
• Sustained Blogging in the Classroom by Jeff Utrecht
• Learn to Blog: Blog to Learn by Anne Davis

Run, don’t walk to the K12 Online Conference 2007.  To get free audio and video of the presentations, subscribe to the following feeds in iTunes, Google Reader, or whatever blog reader you use:

• Audio podcast feed
• Video podcast feed

• They’ve already indicated to me their area of interest: blogging, audio production or video production.  Fortunately, there are an equal number of students interested in each area.
• Right now they’re in the process of developing the mission statement of the site in order to have a clear focus when it comes time to create content.  They’ve looked at various mission statements from around the web, including the mission statement from SQPN, the model for our project.
• After they’ve developed the mission statement, the class will brainstorm domain names and we’ll go through the process of seeing what’s available.  We’ve already done some preliminary work on this, so it shouldn’t take too long.
• Once the domain name has been chosen, students will get into their groups to develop an editorial calendar.  The blogging group will decide on recurring content for each day of the week, and the other two groups will develop a production schedule for their weekly podcasts.
• As they begin working on content, they’ll also have input on the appearance of the site and we’ll begin to make some decisions about what it should look like.  We’ll use freely available blog themes to begin with, as we don’t have money to pay a designer, and none of us are experienced enough with template design to make our own.
• Our target goal for publishing our first content is October 12, but our public launch will be November 1, All Saints Day, since our school is All Saints Catholic School.  We hope to have several weeks’ worth of content before that time.
• In the days leading up to November 1, students will learn how to market their site to the Internet community, as well as to their own school community.

This is the first time I’ve ever done anything like this, and I’m a bit nervous about how it will go, but I’ve got great faith in the students.  My job will be to function as the editor-in-chief– approving stories, suggesting rewrites and edits, helping them learn the audio and video software, and so on.

You can be sure that the readers of Teen Literacy Tips will be a part of our public launch, so keep checking back for stories of our progress.  Better yet, why not subscribe to Teen Literacy Tips.  You can get every article via email, or you can have the content delivered to your blog reader.

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