Share More! Wiki

Cover It Live Blog

Notes

8:31

	Standing room only in Konrad’s session, pretty nifty.

Konrad is startin g up now. 8:32

	Konrad is sharing how 2 years ago, only 4 people showed up to his blogging.

8:33

	Konrad earned his phD on blogging with 13–15 year olds and while he will be a bit theoretical, he’s going to be sharing practical stuff. What he’s sharing can be done with wikis and other web 2.0 tools. Since he’s passionate about blogging, this is specifically about that.

http://www.teachandlearn.com is his web site.

• The blank page…still the most challenging environment there is.

INTRO

• THis was a print ad out by a company called Shell. I looked at it and I thought that the people in the corporate world and that when you’re confronted with a blank page, you have to solve a problem. In our classrooms, we give kids a blank page but then give them a prompt, constrain them.

Researching a Community:

• 32 grade eight students
• English Language Arts class
• Leave the kids alone and rely on Grounded Theory
• Grounded Theory allows you to enter the situation to blog, to observe.
• Give them blogs, share we’ll have a community and see what happens.
• Very quickly, students began to inhabit the blogosphere and define their spaces/voices
• Student participation necessitated a shift in my practice.

Three Steps

• Create a community - it’s not enough to get a tool and start using that with your students. You have to create a community…a sense of belonging. Not a physical space, not the online URL, but rather a sense of belonging that’s important.
• Extend Classroom Discourse - After you open it up, encourage students to write about what they’re interested in, but you also have to discuss producing work that is valuable…acknowledge the value of their work.
• Redefine Your presence - Become a reader.

Two Things to Remember

• If you have time to read everything your students write, then they are not writing enough. teachers think Konrad has lost it. sometimes, the most powerful thing you can say is when you stop them in the hallway, and tell them what you enjoyed about what they wrote. This can be more valuable than a grade
• Stop Marking, and Start Reading. Read as a reader, not always to assess and evaluate. Start reading as if you were reading a novel, as if something you were interested because you want to read…not because of what you’re getting paid to read.

Creating a Community

• Giving students a blog is not going to transform them into enthusiastic…writers.

Third Places

• Ray Oldenburg (www.pps.org)
• Informal public spaces where gather and interact
• Pubs, cafes, Community Centres, Parks, and Squares
• Ray explains that your 1st place is where you live, 2nd place is where you work/go to school, and the third place is where you go to hang out.
• How can we make our classroom a third place? How can we ensure that the classroom has that fun and interaction, where kids can enter any number of groups and interact with each other?
• A solid blogging community would allow more intimate conversations and smaller groups, interact with people they are really interested in.

third Place Examples

• Couple of chairs and a table
• Chair and tables

(Miguel: It occurs to me that setting up third places that are physical are not considered appropriate in schools)

Role of the teacher

• Encourage expressive writing
• Extend classroom discourse
• Freedom to customize, define and build. Students need to be able to define their spaces and customzie them. Freedom to add widgets, give their blog a funky name, etc.
• Showing examples of blogging…Victoria has a ballet web page, but has an entry on Sea Scorpions that include a link and a quote from a source site.
• Allow students the freedom to interact/form networks with others who share similar interests/goals
• Support these interactions by adopting a readerly and participatory voice
• Use instructional conversations/scaffolding to support student endeavors
• Promote all activity that happens online, making it visible and easy to access.
• http://lifetype.net - managing online blogging

This is posted on the district server (responding to questions). What you see here is visible to the public. I sure wish Konrad had included a link to the site.

Expressive Writing - Extending classroom discourse

• When you receive rich comments, it’s going to be more meaningful than the teacher giving you a score of 14/15.

School Writing

• Voiceless and generic
• Conforms to specific guidelines
• We teach guidelines first and expect students to follow
• Writing is pres as a skill that can be acquired and does not come from the self
• Teachers determine the content
• School writing is always written for one purpose
• Will be read by one person (audience of one)

8We make corrections to their papers and expect students to go home and study corrections we’ve made on their writing. In truth, students flip to the last page, look at the grade, then throw it away as they walk out the door.

• What upsets me about this is that there was potential opportunity to have a conversation about the presentation. But after traditional assessment, the conversation ends.

Expressive Writing

• Informal talk
• Content over form
• Language as a tool for shaping meaning.
• Lots of great student writing examples where their voice comes out.
• Writing Redefined: “When students in school are encouraged to treat texts, not as authoritative pronouncements, but as contribs to an ongoing discourse in which they can be active participants in the search for understanding, they will be more inclined to acquire the range of skills and strategies that are necessary….(Wells)
• Authoritative Pronouncements→Ongoing Discourse
• When you have a blogging community, you have ongoing discourse.

Redefine Your presence (towards a readerly and participatory voice

• “it’s very difficult to write a piece in which the reader can see so much of his or her own life, and you did it!” - Konrad
• Learning to write like this took me a year.
• Participate as a reader, not an evaluator. How do we teach ourselves to do this?