Thanks to much support from my district (especially Tech Services and Communications) and a partnership with the US Attorney’s Office, my 2WebWatchers partner, Kathleen Watt, and I were able to spend the December 16 School Board meeting recognizing a group of students for their entries in our First Annual Internet Safety Video Contest. The winning entries and honorable mentions are uploaded and posted, so check it out!

If you are considering putting together a similar event for your school district, I encourage you in your efforts and invite you to contact me with questions and suggestions. You are also very welcome to adapt our contest flier, entry form, and guidelines (posted on 2WebWatchers) to suite your event. We tailored the guidelines to meet SEVA 2009 guidelines.

Based on this year’s event, we’ll tweak next year’s entry form to include the sponsoring teachers’ names – but still allow, even encourage, entries from independent filmmakers such as the talented, dedicated Tori W. (who has moved from 8th grade to 9th, still without being able to enroll in a video production class). We’ll also require a typed list of student names, rather than attempting to decipher names from handwritten entries. And the last tweak will be the requirement that all videos are submitted as a CD so that we can easily pull snippets for an Awards Night montage – unless we can find a software program that makes working with DVDs less of a hassle.

If you already have a similar event in place or know of other districts that are sponsoring Internet safety video contests, I would love to include your links on 2WebWatchers!

In October I started keeping a notebook by my computer. Into its pages go links, discussions, resources, and ideas gleaned from my Bloglines and Google Reader feeds that I want to be sure I don’t lose (and to which I had really intended to leave an appreciative comment, but never quite got around to it). Thought I would revisit and share a few:

• From Joyce Valenza – Historic Tales Construction Kit
• From Miguel Guhlin – Find a Story…Tell a Story…Map a Story
• From Tom Barrett – Creating an Emotion Graph (with The Piano)
• From Mike Temple – Tutorial on Search Me Stacks
• From Doug Johnson – Understanding Creative Commons

Note to self: Staring in 2009, add a little more detail as to what it is that makes a site, post, link, etc., noteworthy.

I love it when a city unites to celebrate the accomplishments of a group of students – especially when those students have overcome the odds to reach a goal. And so it was on Tuesday when the City of Sacramento cheered on Grant High School’s Pacers, the underdogs who had just defeated Long Beach Poly High at the state football championships, as they set out on their victory parade from Del Paso Heights to City Hall where our newly elected Mayor Kevin Johnson presented the team with the keys to the city.

While probably less than 20 miles from Grant High School to downtown Sacramento, the distance traveled is more than just miles when you consider the high dropout rates, the gang-related violence, and extreme poverty levels this group of student atheletes has clearly not allowed to stand in their way.

Now that Grant High School is in the limelight for its sports accomplishments, I would also like the public – especially Mayor Johnson and his frequent advisor Michelle Rhee – to know about a group of English/Language Arts teachers, whose passion for teaching and dedication to providing Grant students with an achievable and academically rigorous program may have a subtle but more important impact. While I am sure Grant has similar groups of remarkable teachers across the disciplines, I know this particular group first-hand through their inspiring leadership at the Area 3 Writing Project (part of the National Writing Project). Year after year, they share at a regional, statewide, and national level, lessons and strategies that have made the California High School Exit Exam (CAHSEE) attainable for “at risk” students.

But this group has also vowed to provide all students with the background, scaffolding, and requirements that will move them considerably past the CAHSEE and prepare them for the level of academic writing required to succeed at the university level. Each year, through the A3WP and California Writing Project, this team of teachers guides participating teachers through the highly successful ISAW program.

With Arne Duncan, Michelle Rhee, and others in top educational positions promising “to shake up education” and advocating merit pay for teachers , I suspect – and I certainly can understand why – a number of effective teachers, for monetary reasons, will transfer to wealthier school districts. But the Writing Project teachers at the heart and soul of Grant High School’s English Department, well…I hope not.

In the 140 classrooms studied, both low- and high-achieving students learned most in mathematics, reading, and writing, when teachers emphasized conceptual understanding, complex problem solving, advanced skills and performances, discussions of alternative solutions and points of views, extended writing, and student-generated ideas and products rather than restricted skills practice.” Linda Darling-Hammond, The Right to Learn

I pulled Linda Darling-Hammond’s book off my book shelf a couple of weeks ago, when I first saw, via Facebook, her name as a suggested candidate for US Secretary of Education. She has been one of my favorite voices of reason since I was first introduced to her research about 10 years ago. In a nutshell, she has her finger on the pulse of teaching in a test-driven climate. I allowed myself to be swept away with visions of “what if…” What if we had a scholar, a dynamic researcher, and a practitioner advising the President?!?

Since the announcement of Arne Duncan as our new Secretary of Education, I’ve been in a bit of a tailspin. Two recent articles by Gary Stager and Alfie Kohn (thanks to Nancy Ludu for sending me this link) sum up my disappointment.

I suspect Tom Chapin’s A Song for Students might make for the perfect theme song:-(

Last week’s Teacher Teaching Teachers Skypecast brought a group of National Writing Project teachers together for a discussion of Henry Jenkins‘ paper Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century. Lots of gems in his findings, enough to justify printing out all 68 pages. Jenkins defines participatory culture as one:

1. with relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement

2. with strong support for creating and sharing one’s creations with others

3. with some type of informal mentorship whereby what is known by the most experienced is passes along to novices

4. where members believe that their contributions matter

5. where members feel some degree of social connection with one another (at the least they care what other people think about what they have created).”

This paper is great piece to share with administrators, who will be happy to see that textual literacy still remains a critical skill for the 21st century; in fact, “before students can engage with new participatory culture, they must be able to read and write.” New literacies “build on the foundation of traditional literacy, research skills, technical skills, and critical analysis skills taught in the classroom.”

Jenkins’ includes the New Media Consortium’s definition of 21st century literacy: “the set of abilities and skills where aural, visual and digital literacy overlap. These include the ability to understand the power of images and sounds, to recognize and use that power, to manipulate and transform digital media, to distribute them pervasively, and to easily adapt them to new forms.”

Renee Hobbs is also cited in the paper. I recognized her name, but until reading Jenkins’ paper, had not looked at her work. Her My Pop Studio website “encourages young middle school and early high school aged girls to reflect more deeply about some of the media they consume – pop music, reality television, celebrity magazines – by stepping in to role of media producers.” Great resources for helping students to become critical consumers of media!

So what are the challenges of participatory culture?;

• Unequal access – I’m impressed with the ways in which Philadelphia is trying to address the access issues.
• Transparency – How do you show how media shapes people’s understandings and beliefs?
• Ethics challenge – Making ethical use of the Internet visible to students…that’s a huge issue!

I think what amazes me about the power of participatory culture is collective creativity, made so visible by groups such as Playing for Change:

Of course, it is availability of the Internet that makes participatory culture possible. Fourteen years ago, I stood before a school board and requested that the computer in my portable classroom be hooked to the Internet. A board member challenged me with “So will this change the world?” At the time, I wasn’t sure having a classroom connection to the Internet would change the world, so my response was “I don’t know, but it certainly reflects a changing world.” Wish I could continue that conversation 14 years later;-).