The art of blogging is something that few can understand unless they’ve experienced it for themselves. All the reading in the world, all the conversations with bloggers, and all the conference sessions can only give you so much. The practical side, the “street smarts” as some would say, comes from engaging in the process. While it is possible to offer great resources, suggestions, and even approaches without ever blogging, the key to making blogs a transformative part of the classroom requires an intimate knowledge of blogging not just the knowledge gained from “sitting on the sidelines.” Ryan Bretag

I stumbled onto the gold mine this morning when I checked the NCTE Talkies ListServ and clicked on Ryan Bretag’s responses about student bloggers. Ryan explains, “…my work with teachers and students on transformative blogging/connective writing/whatever starts with reading and commenting.” In reading his TechLearning article Get off the Sidelines and into the Game and his extensive reading list for bloggers, I thought about the one-day workshop I did last week for EDCOE on blogging. As has happened many times before, yet another group of teachers set up their Edublog sites as a class website. But I’m ok with that because at least they have taken a first step.

I currently offer a two-hour workshop for my own district entitled Blogging for the Absolute Beginner, during which teachers read blogs and do some commenting. I’m thinking of extending it to a full-day workshop, so that after they’ve had a few hours to read and comment on other educators’ blogs and to reflect on the personal and professional benefits of blogging, I would then introduce them to Google Reader, so they would leave the workshop with a self-selected community of blogging mentors. Day two would be the Going Live with Edublogs workshop (currently just a 3-hour session) - with breaks throughout the day to check their Google Reader.

The good thing about Edublogs, for instance, is also the bad thing because as Ryan points out “Blogging is challenging yet blogs are easy to setup. IMHO, this is part of the challenge because the needed investment in learning and potentially rethinking our thoughts on teaching and learning are passed by in the excitement to just get a tool in the classroom.” But that’s exactly how I entered the blogosphere. I was fully into three-years’ worth of facilitating student blogging projects before I became a blogger. It was a post by Wes Fryer that brought me on board. Suddenly I got it - that I could truly be a part of - and contribute to - conversations in ways not possible before “getting off the sidelines and into the game.”

*Image from Derek Wenmoth via Ryan’s blog.

NWP colleague Kevin Hodgson is a guiding light in many ways. For several years now, he has sponsored the Youth Radio project, a podcasting project connecting classrooms across the nation and world as students share topics and projects from their own classrooms, neighborhoods, and regions. It’s been my privilege to connect with the YR project locally by joining A3WP colleague Jim Faires and his students as they listen to, respond to, discuss, and even take to a worldwide audience YR topics.

In the blogging workshops I currently teach, I always direct teachers to Kevin’s classroom blog. In every session, there will always be a teacher or two who, after touring the Electric Pencil, has a whole new understanding of how blogging can benefit teachers and their students.

Now I have a new resource to share in my workshops. I’ll be directing workshop teachers to Kevin’s NWP article Bringing the World to My Doorstep: A Teacher’s Blog-Reading Habits article. Often in my workshops, I realize that teachers leave all setup with their own blog (an Edublog), but without an understanding that blogging is all about reading - reading other bloggers’ thoughts, ideas, and challenges - and responding. Kevin’s article makes visible “how the world of blogs enriches his teaching, supports his tech liaison work, provides opportunities for his students, and keeps him connected both to his NWP network and to a wider network of educators.”

His article also explains so well the power of RSS, another topic I rarely get to in a 2-3 hour workshop, but I think by having teachers read Kevin’s article, I’ll have a great starting point for introducing RSS early on in my upcoming day-long and week-long summer workshops. I’ll also be introducing the term social media literacy.

“Social media literacy refers to the ways in which bloggers connect and stay informed of each others’ work. One blogger, Chris Heuer , suggests that RSS could be “the fourth “R” in our conception of literacy , noting that RSS-based social media literacy “enables any individual to step into the conversational flow—to not only follow what other people are communicating, but ensure what the individual has to communicate is heard by other people who care about the topic.”

One more time, I want to thank Kevin for his innovative teaching practices, his commitment to bringing others on board with Web 2.0 best practices, and his willingness to mentor 24/7.

As I move through the 31-Comment Challenge (ok, I’m behind), I’ve been thinking about ways to help students improve their commenting skills. Via Donna DesRoches’s “Blogging and Reading Comprehension Strategies,” I found a great free resource to provide some scaffolding for young bloggers: Comprehension Strategy Posters provided by ReadingLady.com.

The posters are available in both Word and PDF formats and include:

• Asking Questions
• Determining
• Inferring
• Making Connections
• OWL (Observe, Wonder, Link)
• Repairing Comprehension
• Synthesizing
• Visualizing

If students were encouraged to focus on one strategy per week, and could refer to the posters, teachers might see less of the “I liked your post” one-liner responses and more of the thoughtful kind of writing the improves literacy skills - and bumps up the learning possibilities of the blogging project. I like how Donna explains the importance of encouraging better commenting: “Blogging is a great communication tool but it is the use of effective commenting skills that will extend and engage global conversations for our students.”

*Note: Image from http://classroomtechtips.files.wordpress.com/2008/05/readingstrategies.jpg

Since today is already May 4, I’m doing a little crunching to catch up on the 31-day Comment Challenge, following the guidelines in the wiki.

Day One Activity: The kick-off is a commenting self-audit and a reading activity:

1. Answer the following questions:

• How often do you comment on other blogs during a typical week?
  On an average week, probably 1-2 comments (but that’s not counting Twitter responses;-)
• Do you track your blog comments? How? What do you do with your tracking?
   OK, the whole concept of co-mment is new to me. So up to now, no, I haven’t been tracking my blog comments. (Oh, my, so much to learn!)
• Do you tend to comment at the same blogs or do you try to comment on at least one new blog per week?

2. I’ve read through Gina Trapani’s comment guide and realize I should be more aware of whether I’m actually contributing new information in my comments (ok, even if there are already 57 comments, for instance, I need to read through them before adding my 2 cents worth).

Day Two Activity: Comment on a new blog:

An hour later, I’m just now emerging from a scroll through the Comment Challenge Wiki list of participants. I was drawn in by the scope and depth of topics posted by the unemployed Intrepid Teacher, with his passion for teaching for social justice and his straight-from-the-soul writing style.

Day Three Activity: Sign up for a comment tracking service:

I am a total newbie to Co-mment, but I’m sure that if Sue Waters recommends it, it’s worth exploring.

Three activities into the Comment Challenge, I am envisioning what a powerful model this would be for students.

I’m joining the 31-day Comment Challenge, which I first read about this morning in my friend Kevin’s blog. In a way, I think Challenge organizers Kim Coffino, Sue Waters, Silvia Tolisano, and Michele Martin have added structure to a direction I’ve been moving in the last year or so - moving away from reading “first wave” bloggers, who are typically convention keynote speakers, published authors, etc., and, instead, reading blogs of fellow teachers, from near and far, who work directly with students. Twitter, I think, somehow has much to do with my switch in blog reading habits. It’s so easy and fast to read 140 character microblogs, and from a Tweet, I’ll often click on the Tweeter’s link and journey over to their blog. What I like about the 2nd wave of bloggers is that, unlike the 1st wave, conversations are more likely to happen, as opposed to a zillion people posting comment after comment. I feel a sense of community. With this idea of community in mind, I look forward to joining the challenge to becoming a better blog citizen.

Heading off to read Gina’s Guide to Weblog Comments and to figure out the best way to jump start the challenge (since I’m beginning in Day 4;-)

Four days ago, I clicked on a link in an email from Steve Hargadon, via Classroom 2.0, with an invitation to celebrate blogging’s 10th birthday by posting a Voice Thread.

“Some of us believe that blogging, as one of the great entry points into ‘read/write’ web (or “Web 2.0″), is having a transformative impact on education and learning, and that we are at the start of a new renaissance that will be defined by the participatory, contributive, and collaborative nature of the Web.”

At that time, Steve and three others had posted. Since it was already late, I jumped in the next morning (I think I might have been the 6th person to add a comment). Just checked back…to find 28 people have added their thoughts. I am still in awe of the participatory possibilities of Web 2.0!

I saw the “transformative” impact of blogging on teaching and learning five years ago, when I delved into my first student blog project and discovered that a group of disengaged high school students (already “dismissed” from the traditional high school and attending a continuation school) were reading a posting after school hours - when they did not have to. The new tools, such as Voice Thread, Slideshare, and podcasting, continue to make a good tool even better.

Happy Birthday, Blogs!

For some reason, I feel the need to end this post with a slightly different Happy Birthday wish (?) for Web 2.0 - from THE Journal’s Steve Weinbstock - http://thejournal.com/articles/21374.

Technorati Tags: blogs blogging 10th-Birthday Web2 transformative_learning

I followed my friend Kevin’s trail into Mingle2’s How Addicted to Blogging Are You Quiz…

81% for me…

I’m not sure if I am surprised or not at my score. Several months ago, I had a phone conversation with Steve Hargadon, who was helping activate my Classroom 2.0 ning account. When I mentioned that an important PD source for me are the Wednesday evening Teachers Teaching Teachers Skype casts, Steve asked a question that I am still thinking about: “How do we keep up with it all?” Certainly a news aggregator helps. I readily admit that I’m addicted to my morning cup of coffee…at my computer …catching up on a growing list of bloggers with their fingers on the pulse of things I care about. Just wish I could always remember, hours later, from exactly whose blog I gleaned which gems

If you haven’t seen the National School Boards Association’s Creating & Connecting: Research and Guideline on Onliline Social - and Educational - Networking, it’s a fast (12 pages) read that might provide your site and/or district administrators with a new perspective on the value of blogs and blogging as a tool for learning.

The attention-grabbing statistic for me was that nearly 60% of online teens and ‘tweens say they use social networking to discuss education-related topics, with 50% stating they actually discuss homework! And I quote:

“ In light of the study findings, school districts may want to consider reexamining their policies and practices and explore ways in which they could use social networking for educational purposes.”

Thank you to SCOE’s John Fleischman for sharing this report during last week’s K12 HSN meeting.  Discussion of the report findings prompted #1 IT guy Bob Carter to share how his whole understanding of the value of social networking changed during a recent workshop with Alan November. 

Thank you Nat’l School Board.  Thank you Alan November. 

The front page of the Sunday Sacramento Bee features the first of a three-part story that I wish every educator - across the state and nation - had access to: Tackling Life - South Sacramento Raiders. Bee staff writer Jocelyn Wiener has followed former team members of the 1992 south Sacramento Raiders Junior Midgets football team to see what paths their lives have taken in the 15 years since the photo was taken. For the most part, their stories are filled with obstacles associated with living in low income, crime ridden neighborhoods, starting with dysfunctional, broken, or nonexistent family ties, moving on to the pull of escalating gangs and peer-related drug dealings, and ending all too often in incarceration and/or early death.

The story is played out in the Elk Grove Unified School District (my district) and Sacramento City Unified School District (Alice M’s district), but I think the two areas featured in the article could easily and accurately be replaced with countless other urban school districts nationwide. When I look at the annotated map of the south Sacramento area that Wiener has included in the article, I am sure thousands of students in similar social-economic areas could create compelling stories using Google maps to make visible to an online audience what poverty really looks like. I say this after four years of connecting high school classrooms across the state and nation through blogging and interactive videoconferencing in projects that invite students to share, discuss, and ponder social actions revolving around challenges they face on a daily basis in their local communities. For students living in communities such as south Sacramento, the challenge is not so much how to survive four years of high school, but rather, how to survive four years of traveling to and from school, along with the in between weekend events and confrontations.

I am wondering if any of the survivor or success stories from the 1992 team are due to a teacher - or two - along the way who made a difference. For the many that dropped out of school, I’m sorry they never had the opportunity to learn from dedicated, talented teachers such as Bob LeVin, an English teacher at Florin High School, one of the high schools a number of the 1992 Raider members would have attended. Bob LeVin is a teacher who understands the enormous challenges faced by many of his students just getting out the front door each morning to attend class. He cares deeply about their present realities and tries to offer a curriculum that is engaging, while at the same time challenging and geared to preparing students to live, learn, and work in the 21st century. Always looking for new ways to package literacy skills, in the 2003 school year he invited me to his classes to introduce the students to Enrique’s Journey, a blogging project that connected his Florin students to a group of high school students in Lompoc, a small farming/military community in southern California. Pleased with the way the Enrique project offered a voice to many students who rarely participated in the face-to-face environment, Bob was definitely up for continuing the journey. And we did, with the 2004-05 Youth Voices Coast to Coast project. To illustrate how this project took students beyond the walls of the classroom and the confines of the Florin community, I’ve included a picture from a videoconference session during which Bob’s students joined students from San Francisco’s Galileo High School to co-present with me to a group of educators at the 2005 CUE Conference about the Youth Voices project. I’ve also included some clips from the session so you can hear first-hand how Web 2.0 technologies directly impact students and teachers: one student’s take on the project, another student’s take on blogging; Bob LeVin’s wrap-up.

In addition to involving last year’s students in the 2006-07 iteration of the Youth Voices project, Bob also introduced filmmaking into his English classes, empowering students to document local histories and events. Within months of putting cameras into their hands, many of his students submitted entries in local and regional film competitions. All finished the year with an appreciation and understanding of multimedia literacies.

But the deal is Bob LeVin mainly teaches 12th graders. Regardless of whether they are in the Elk Grove or Sac City School District, I hope the members of the 2006 south Sacramento Raiders Junior PeeWees will have the mentors, supporters, teachers, and positive school experiences necessary to ensure that they stay in school all the way through to their senior year.

I want to acknowledge Jocelyn Wiener and her team for documenting and sharing a story that needs to be told. With schools re-opening over the next few weeks, I think this series is an timely reminder of how important it is for every student to feel that he/she is a valued member the community, especially the school community. I look forward to Part 2 and 3 of Tackling Life.

Note: 1995 and 2006 team photographs by Bee photographer Anne Chadwick Williams.

Technorati Tags: sacbee, south_sacramento

Thanks to some year-long mentoring by Paul Allison and Susan Ettenheim, I am now fully on board with students having their own blogs. I logged off Wednesday night’s Teachers Teaching Teachers Skypecast with some concrete ideas for providing students with the scaffolding to incorporate and share research in their blog posts. Paul has set up a wiki with the instructions for getting Youth Voices 2007 students up and running with Google Reader. I can see how this common thread will help connect readers and writers within the elgg setup and community and stretch their thinking/reading/writing skills as they post and respond.

I am also remembering an NECC conversation with Mark Wagner, who mentioned a student blog he added to his reader: My Year 8 English Blog. After reading Casper’s piece on plastic bags, I sincerely hope this young writer will continue posting when he enters his 9th year.

And thanks to Karl Fisch’s recent post, I discovered 7-year old Abby’s blog. I’m looking forward to following her through the school year. Abby’s will be a great site to share with teachers. This is definitely not MySpace! And check out her ClustrMap!

Hence a new category in my Blogroll: Student Blogs.

Technorati Tags: student_blogs, readwriteweb, web20