Podcast Power: Listening Skills & Curriculum, part 2

Common Core Consultants' Corner Literacy & Technology

In my first post on the power of podcasts, I talked about their place in the ELA classroom.  Not only do they meet important standards, but they develop crucial listening skills.  And I talked at some length about Serial, a must listen to podcast.  So if you’re sold on bringing this medium into your classroom, what podcast do you choose and how do you effectively integrate it effectively from a curricular and skill standpoint?  Below are some ideas for how to think about choosing a podcast to work with what you’re already teaching.

Combine Nonfiction Podcasts with Narrative Reading to Study Theme

this-american-lifeThis American Life episodes are ideal to couple with fiction, especially if you’re focused on theme. The show is structured around a single theme each week.  So it’s quite easy to scroll through the archives and find a theme you might be looking for, especially because of the nice thumbnail descriptions TAL provides. For example:

Most of us go from day to day just coasting on the status quo. If it ain’t broke, why fix it, right? But when routines just get too mundane or systems stop making sense, sometimes you just have to hold your breath…and jump. This week, stories of people who leap from their lives, their comfort zones…even through time.  

from Episode 539: The Leap, This American Life

This episode pairs well with texts about risk-taking, the consequences of risk-taking, a desire to leave reality, and escape. I can imagine having students listen to it in conjunction with Into the Wild, “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,” Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie and even Romeo & Juliet.

Or perhaps you’re doing a character study on the morality of characters in a text like Hamlet, Atonement by Ian McEwan, or To Kill a Mockingbird.  Students could list to segments of TAL‘s episode called “Good Guys” and compare these real life stories to the choices made by characters in the fiction text they’re reading.

Lots of men think of themselves as “good guys.” But what does it actually take to be one? To be a truly good guy. Stories of valiant men attempting to do good in challenging circumstances: in war zones, department stores, public buses, and at the bottom of a cave 900 feet underground.

from Episode 515: Good Guys, This American Life

The other beautiful thing is that each episode of This American Life is divided into smaller acts. So you can select one act to have students listen to or several acts.  Regardless of how many acts they listen to, when pairing narrative texts and podcasts, you’re having students read across texts, a key Common Core Standard:

Reading Anchor Standard 9: Analyze how two or more texts address similar themes or topics in order to build knowledge or to compare the approaches the authors take.

Use Podcasts as Texts for Argument Analysis

themothWhen you use podcasts in this way in your classroom, students identify and analyze the implicit and explicit arguments being made in each “act” of a TAL podcast or other podcast, comparing the arguments within an episode.  They can then respond with their own written or recorded narrative argument about the topic. This American Life episodes provide listeners with a series of narrative arguments around a single theme.

What do I mean by narrative argument?  Each act delivers a compelling story, and that story and the producer’s reflection on the events in the story, create an argument.  The creation of an implicit argument via narrative and reflection is incredibly difficult to do, as students discover when they try to write a personal essay.  But that difficulty is all the more reason to listen to TAL episodes and to even have your students create mini-podcasts, which I’ll talk about in my next post.

Suggested Podcasts: 

  • Is This Thing Working?, This American Life – Stories of schools struggling with what to do with misbehaving kids. There’s no general agreement about what teachers should do to discipline kids. And there’s evidence that some of the most popular punishments actually may harm kids. (tags: school, discipline, inequality, education system)
  • “Partners in Struggle” by Grace Lee Boggs, The Moth – This Detroit native and nationally known activist is inspired to begin activist work in the 1940s and meets her future husband. (tags: Detroit, activism, love, diversity)
  • “Who Put the ‘Pistol’ in ‘Epistolary’?” from “My Pen Pal,” This American Life – The story of a ten-year-old girl from small town Michigan named Sarah York, and how she became pen pals with a man who was considered an enemy of the United States, a dictator, a drug trafficker, and a murderer: Manuel Noriega. (tags: unlikely friends, propaganda, international relations, Michigan)
  • “Prom,” by Hasan Minhaj The Moth – A high schooler encounters racism when he tries to go to prom. (tags: teenage experience, racism, cultural diversity, big events)
  • “Scene from a Mall” – This American Life spends several days in a mall in suburban Tennessee, to document life in the mall during the run-up to Christmas. Also, a rift in a national association of professional Santas—the Amalgamated Order of Real Bearded Santas (yes, there is such a group). (tags: holidays, working teenagers, suburbia, place/environment, subcultures, competition)
  • “Allure of the Mean Friend, “ This American Life – What is it about them, our mean friends? They treat us badly, they don’t call us back, they cancel plans at the last minute, and yet we come back for more. Popular bullies exist in business, politics, everywhere. How do they stay so popular? (tags: friendship, teenage life, contradictions, bullying)

Developing Close Listening Skills

So you’ve decided what podcast to use and how it works with your curriculum. But how do you scaffold and support good listening skills?

186957826Multi-draft Listening

Just as we ask students to read a text more than once, they’ll need to listen to a podcast more than once.  I suggest taking an approach similar to the one you’d use with close reading:

First Listen – Listen to the podcast all the way through to make sense of the story and get the gist.  Pause occasionally to have students jot down names of people, questions that come up and big ideas that are explicitly or implicitly stated.

Second Listen – With your students, develop a listening agenda.  What questions do you/they want answered?  What’s the main idea of the episode? What aspects of the episodes structure contribute to their understanding?   Chunk the listening by stopping every 5-10 minutes to allow students to jot notes and add to their graphic organizers (see the next section).

Third Listen – This very focused listen allows the class, small groups, or individuals to return to specific points in the podcast to re-listen for deeper analysis in order to confirm or test initial theories they developed based on their early listening.

Student-created Graphic Organizers

Because students can’t annotate this audio text in the same way they can annotate a hard copy or even digital text, graphic organizers become really important.  Podcasts require a bit more work on the part of the student when it comes to annotation.  Below are some ideas for types of graphic organizers to help students structure their thinking:

  • Timeline of Key Moments/Events – A chronological list of key moments in the story that will help them later develop ideas about the episode’s structure.
  • Structure Picture – Students draw a picture of how they perceive the structure of an episode.  This might follow the more traditional text structure graphics we’re accustomed to or might be more of a mind mind.
  • People Map – As they listen, have students develop a map of characters and how they’re related — like this one on the Serial website.
  • Evidence Chart – Have students create a T chart.  For Serial, the two columns would be titled “innocent” and “guilty.”  As they (re)listen, they will record which evidence makes Adnan seem guilty and which evidence makes him appear innocent.  For another podcast, students might be gathering evidence regarding another question.  The columns might be labeled “pro” and “con” or “agree” and “disagree.”
  • Question Web – What questions remain unanswered? Students create a web of both factual and analytical questions, connecting those that relate to and generate other questions.

Have ideas to share about good podcasts for student listening and how to use them in the classroom?  Please share in the comment section.  In my final blog post on podcasting, I’ll provide some ways of thinking about having students produce their own podcasts, and possible pitfalls in the process.

Delia DeCourcyDelia DeCourcy joined Oakland Schools in 2013 after a stint as an independent education consultant in North Carolina where her focus was on ed tech integration and literacy instruction.  During that time, she was also a lead writer for the Common Core-aligned ELA writing units. Prior to that, she was a writing instructor at the University of Michigan where she taught first-year, new media, and creative writing and was awarded the Moscow Prize for Excellence in Teaching Composition. In her role as secondary literacy consultant, Delia brings all her writing, curriculum design, administration, and teaching skills to bear, supporting districts in their implementation of the Common Core via onsite workshops and consultations, as well as workshops at Oakland Schools.  She is currently spearheading the development of literacy-focused online professional learning modules as well as the building of a virtual portal where Michigan educators can learn and collaborate.

Podcast Power: Boosting Listening Skills, part 1

Common Core Consultants' Corner Literacy & Technology

podcastDuring the twelve hour drive from Michigan to North Carolina and back over the holidays, I listened to a lot of podcasts. I admit it: I’m a podcast addict. Any time I have to drive for an hour or longer, I listen to a podcast–This American Life, The Moth, Ted Talks Radio Hour, Radio LabSnap Judgment… All that listening and driving got me thinking about using podcasts in the classroom and why it’s a relevant medium.

Connection to Standards

The Common Core Standards prioritize speaking and listening skills in a fairly rigorous way.  ELA teachers have always valued speaking and listening skills and given students the opportunity to develop them in their classrooms.  But with the adoption of the Standards, these skills are now clearly defined and progress in complexity from year to year, meaning teachers and departments have to think about how they’ll address speaking and listening in a comprehensive way. Often when we think of the speaking and listening standards, our minds immediately go to discussion–how to get students to engage in rich and complex discourse.  But in this post I want to focus on the podcast medium as a fairly exciting way for teachers and students to explore close listening together.  Listening to podcasts as nonfiction texts (a great way to infuse your curriculum with more nonfiction!) directly addresses these two standards:

Speaking & Listening Standard 2: Integrate and evaluate information presented in diverse media and formats, including visually, quantitatively, and orally.
Speaking & Listening Standard 3: Evaluate a speaker’s point of view, reasoning, and use of evidence and rhetoric.

Why Is Podcasting an Important Medium?

484812177I remember talking to a colleague a few years ago who proclaimed that podcasting was not new media.  She said it was just recorded radio and that podcasting was over.  But podcasting is so not over and it’s a lot more than recorded radio.  Sometimes podcasts never appear first on the radio at all.  So why is this an important and popular media form?

  • Podcasts are available on demand via our mobile devices, thanks to iTunes and the websites of popular podcasts. So we can listen anytime, anywhere.
  • There is a growing library of free, high-quality podcasts on a wide range of subjects.
  • They run the gamut of nonfiction genres: storytelling, informational, and argument-focused podcasts ranging in purposes from entertainment to news to self-help (exercise, nutrition, spirituality, emotional health).
  • We can multi-task while we listen–drive, make dinner, walk the dog, exercise at the gym.
  • As with other digital texts, the general public (students!) can create and publish podcasts–and they are in fairly high numbers.

Start with Serial

serial-social-logoIn October, I was over the moon when Serial, a This American Life spin off that follows a single story for twelve episodes came out.  From episode one, I was hooked.  So rather than talk about strategies for integrating this medium in your classroom (that will be my next post), I’m going to make a pitch for using this new podcast.  I would suggest that for high school classes, especially juniors and seniors, Serial is a great place to start.  (I’m not alone.  A California high school teacher has replaced the study of Hamlet with Serial.)  Why?  Well, here’s the context for the start of this story…

It’s Baltimore, 1999. Hae Min Lee, a popular high-school senior, disappears after school one day. Six weeks later detectives arrest her classmate and ex-boyfriend, Adnan Syed, for her murder. He says he’s innocent – though he can’t exactly remember what he was doing on that January afternoon. 

Serial website

Adnan, a popular student with strong ties to the Muslim community, is later found guilty and sentenced to life in prison.  He was 18.  And as the very first episode of Serial unravels for its listeners, the evidence was contradictory and, in some instances, spotty.

Other compelling reasons to use Serial in the classroom:

  • serialcollageIt’s great storytelling and relevant to your students.  The cast of characters is almost entirely high school students (or they were at the time of the murder) living through the things your students experience–juggling school and extracurriculars, navigating cultural differences between home life and school life, experiencing young love, making their way through the simmering stew of high school social life. This will seriously engage your students.
  • Serial has changed the face of podcasting.  It’s like the True Detective of radio (with a lot less violence).  People could not wait for each new episode of Serial to be released on Thursdays and there was no telling which direction the story would turn and if the producers would decide to declare Adnan innocent or guilty.  It has been downloaded more than any other podcast–more than 5 million times.  And unlike many mainstream podcasts, it was not orignially broadcast on the radio.  To read more about Serial’s popularity and possible reasons for it, check out this Salon article.
  • It has caused a stir on the internet.  People are blogging about it, arguing about it, and commenting non-stop.  There have been many articles published as the story has unfolded week to week.  The number of Serial-related threads on Reddit alone are a clear indicator of how this podcast has captured people’s imaginations.  And there’s a new two-part interview with the star witness whose testimony led to Adnan’s conviction and life sentence.
  • The Serial website contains all kinds of really cool visual artifacts related to each episode.  Using these in conjunction with the episodes means students can analyze across media–a Common Core dream!
  • Serial provides endless ways to study central idea/claim, argument and evidence, theme, bias, character development and text structure.

If you don’t want to commit to all twelve episodes of Serial, consider using only the first episode.  That 60 minute audio text alone will make for some very interesting and creative teaching and learning. In my next post, I’ll talk about developing close listening and annotation skills and other ways of using podcasts in the classroom.  I’ll also suggest specific episodes from other podcasts you might use.

Do you have any podcasts you love? Please share in the comments section.  And if you’re already using podcasts in your classroom, please share your ideas!

Reading Podcast Power: Listening Skills & Curriculum, part 2

Delia DeCourcyDelia DeCourcy joined Oakland Schools in 2013 after a stint as an independent education consultant in North Carolina where her focus was on ed tech integration and literacy instruction.  During that time, she was also a lead writer for the Common Core-aligned ELA writing units. Prior to that, she was a writing instructor at the University of Michigan where she taught first-year, new media, and creative writing and was awarded the Moscow Prize for Excellence in Teaching Composition. In her role as secondary literacy consultant, Delia brings all her writing, curriculum design, administration, and teaching skills to bear, supporting districts in their implementation of the Common Core via onsite workshops and consultations, as well as workshops at Oakland Schools.  She is currently spearheading the development of literacy-focused online professional learning modules as well as the building of a virtual portal where Michigan educators can learn and collaborate.

Genius. A Whole New Take on Audience.

Literacy & Technology Notes from the Classroom Oakland Writing Project

Part of my ongoing attempt to teach my students how to write in this century involves finding different platforms and hopefully audiences for them to write from. I am on the lookout for places  in the digital world they voluntarily write. Where are the cool kids writing from?  I say “from” because I’ve recently learned that when they write, my students don’t think about the audience. They think about the platform–Eli Review, Google docs, Tumblr, Twitter, and now Genius. They assign traits to the platform and then tailor their writing to the demands and pressures (their word) of the platform.

I’ve never thought of web publishing platforms like this.  As a writer and teacher, I try to think about people who might be using those sites and how I can best communicate with them. That’s how I was taught, and so it was how I was teaching my students. But it turns out that they don’t think like that. I ask my students who’s looking at their work and they reply with the name of the site.

genius-logoThis reality came to light during a class where I was talking about how we’re going to be using the site Genius.com to collaborate with a class from another state to annotate and talk about Macbeth. Genius is a social annotation site that covers multiple arenas: rock lyrics, rap lyrics, literature, law, news, film, etc. A colleague from South Dakota, Marissa Kleinhans, heard about the site at the South Dakota Council of Teachers of English conference and proposed that our classes collaborate on a piece of text. I’d never heard of the site, which started out as a place for Rap enthusiasts to annotate songs and squabble over references and word origins, activities not so different from what we do in class with literature. Posting to the site means fundamentally engaging in a close read. Mrs. Kleinhans and I had created collaborative activities using Google documents in the past. The idea behind Genius.com feels very much the same.

I had Genius.com projected on the screen while talking about expectations when I asked my students what they thought about the idea. It was a casual question. I wasn’t delving, and I didn’t expect that it would cause a wave of raised hands and excited chatter, but that’s what happened. It seemed like they all had something to say. I grabbed a notebook, unobtrusively I hoped, as I didn’t want to Heisenberg all over whatever was happening.

122570851What they said was that they liked Genius.com because it was “cool.” Great, what do I do with that? The quest for “cool” has always meant “cool until the adults find out about it” and that’s not what I’m looking for. But as I listened more closely, I heard them say other things. They talked about the design of the site, how the black background and yellow font was code to them that said something about the audience and what was expected. It was “looser” and “more casual,” which again was code that meant that they could write “like themselves.” They were talking about voice, authenticity, honesty. To my teacher’s ears, “like themselves,” too often meant sloppy arguments, careless grammar and generally bad writing–all the things I am trying to educate out of them. And sometimes it does mean that, but what they were talking about was the freedom to use their own authentic voices. They were talking about the freedom to take risks without being judged, not just by their teacher, but by the site itself.

It seems that “academic” sites, like Eli.review, look academic or, as one student put it, “like academic trying to be cool,” and that academic feel puts different pressures on the writing. The same thing happens whenever I set up a task for them on Google docs–reviews, feedback, backchanneling–the assignment didn’t matter. What mattered to them was that I, or another academic, had set it up for the purpose of teaching writing, and they were acutely aware of that and it affected how they wrote.

175285249 (1)Keep in mind that I use both of these platforms (Google Docs and Eli Review) as places for my students to interact with each others’ writing and ideas. I have been alternately pleased and frustrated by the results. But it had never occurred to me that although I expressly told them that they were to engage with each other–that their classmates were the audience–they felt pressure from me. Not because I said anything, but because I had created the space, given it my traits, so the space itself was whispering requirements to them, telling them that their writing had to be “schooly.”  Years of schooling have taught them that school writing has strict requirements. That to be  “scholarly” and “academic” they had to strip the personality, the voice, out of their writing. This lesson has become so ingrained that they could sense it lurking in these academic sites, and they weren’t about to be fooled into authenticity. They certainly didn’t trust me when I said anything to the contrary. The site told them the truth–that outside of creative writing in school, they had to be academic–dry and in many ways false.

Genius.com whispers different things to my students. Besides the cool yellow font (I could do that), the masthead (Don’t call it that–makes it instantly less cool.) lists all of the different types of texts being annotated, and it puts “Lit” third in line behind Rap and Rock, but ahead of  News, Pop, and several others. My students said that putting Lit with those others made them think that what we were doing “might be relevant,” because their work was part of what was happening on this site, and it was happening alongside of other relevant work. This site, the people using it, put what they cared about next to other serious work being done by serious people.

Click to visit Genius.com

Click to visit Genius.com

It’s important to note that the annotations we worked on were not public. I set up a private space for us to work in so that the only outside audience and collaborators were the South Dakotan students and the occasional monitor from the genius.com staff. My students’ work was being seen by the same people who had always seen their work. Their audience, at least as I saw it, hadn’t changed. But here again, they think about the site and the audience as one thing. They also said that the presence of those non-academic topics made it clear to them that they could “loosen up” and “be themselves.” I’m only asking them to annotate a text so I can see what they’re thinking, but even that carries some pressure when it’s their teacher asking them to do it in an “academic space.” This different space tells them that it’s alright to take  chances, to be wrong, to be smart. Genius.com tells them what it wants them to be and how to write for it.

That this same thing might occur in other sites leads me to think that I am talking about audience in the wrong way. Rather than me, as teacher, creating digital space for my students to write and then talking about the audience that we bring to that space, I need to work harder to find spaces that communicate their demands and figure out how to read those spaces myself. In truth, I have no idea how to do that. This presents me with significant challenges and questions, but I think the first thing I need to think about is broadening my ideas about writing. Am I locked into “school” writing forms that are forcing many of my students away from their own voices? I honestly thought that a digital space would be freeing for my digital natives, but it turns out I need to listen harder.

RICKRick Kreinbring teaches English at Avondale High School in Auburn Hills, Michigan. His current assignments include teaching AP Language and Composition and AP Literature and Composition. He is a member of a statewide research project through the Michigan Teachers as Researchers Collaborative partnered with the MSU Writing in Digital Environments Program, which concentrates on improving student writing and peer feedback. Rick has presented at the National Advanced Placement Convention and the National Council of Teachers of English Conference. He is in his twenty-third year of teaching and makes his home in Huntington Woods.

Going Paperless, Part 1: Google Classroom

Literacy & Technology Notes from the Classroom Oakland Writing Project

google-classroomAt the end of last year, we found out that our district, West Bloomfield, would be going 1:1 in grades 5-12, with all students having the option to use a district-issued Chromebook, buy their own Chromebook at a discounted price, or use some other device.  As soon as I heard this, I reveled in the fact that I would no longer have to deal with trying to get time in the Media Center or check out the school’s set of iPads for my middle school students.  Research and word processing could be done right in the classroom, which is great and makes my life significantly easier.  That’s about where my ideas about integrating these devices into our daily routines ended, mostly because I just didn’t know how to fully integrate Chromebooks into my daily instruction.

As the summer progressed, and I got to know more about my Chromebook, the idea of having a paperless classroom began to form in my head.  The techie part of me loved the idea because I would no longer have to make copies, everything would be stored in one place, and kids wouldn’t lose their papers.  The reading and writing workshop teacher part of me hesitated with this idea, fearing that something intangible would be lost if kids didn’t use a paper-based writer’s notebook–that something about the process of brainstorming and drafting in a notebook is magical (more to come on this topic in Part 2).

Right before the school year started, Google rolled out Google Classroom, and I anxiously waited for it to be available in our district. After a number of emails with our instructional technology specialist, I was finally given the OK to try it out.  Google Classroom is a course management platform, but its beauty is in its simplicity.  Each class you create is closed to everyone except the teacher, the students and anyone you give the unique class code to, which keeps your students safe and their documents private.  Teachers can create assignments that include Google Docs attachments, web links, and YouTube videos.

Google Classroom homepage showing how a teacher creates an assignment

Google Classroom homepage showing how a teacher creates an assignment

When I create an assignment in Google Classroom, I have various options for how students will receive it; my favorite is to assign each student a unique copy.  This means that instead of me handing out a copy of a graphic organizer, for example, I assign each student his/her own copy.  Google Classroom then attaches each student’s name to the unique copy, allows them to type in whatever is required, then “turn it in.”  Once students turn in the assignment, it is all neatly organized in one place, which lets me see at a glance who is finished and who is not.

Teacher view of an assignment, which shows how many students are finished

Teacher view of an assignment, which shows how many students are finished

When I assign a document using Google Classroom, I am the “owner” of the document, allowing me to see students’ work as it progresses.  I can comment and “conference” with students while they are still working on a piece of writing–whether they are at school or at home.  In the past, I could only see a students’ progress when I had his/her notebook, and if I had a student’s notebook, it meant that student could not be writing.

One of the biggest changes in my classroom has been students’ ability to collaborate with each other and my ability to give quality feedback while students are writing.  One of the best features of Google Docs and Classroom is the ability to share documents and have multiple people working within one document.  Students can easily share their writing with other students and get feedback, a task that is now much easier than it is with traditional notebooks.  Students who are protective of their writing don’t have to worry that someone is going to irrevocably change it, as they can determine what editing permissions the other students have.

Commenting feature in Google Docs.  This is how I give feedback to students with altering their writing.

Commenting feature in Google Docs. This is how I give feedback to students without altering their writing.

This change took some getting used to for students as well because they are not accustomed to me having access to their work all the time.  The first time I had a guest teacher this year, students were working on assignment in Google Classroom, which allowed me to pop into their Google Docs, look at their work, give feedback, and answer questions.  My students have now come to expect that when I am gone, it’s very likely that I’ll be online during their class time, and they use that to their advantage to ask questions and get clarification from me.

Although much of our work has moved to Google Classroom, I do feel myself missing the paper-based writer’s notebook every now and again, and I haven’t totally given up on it yet.  Google Classroom isn’t perfect, but neither is the writer’s notebook.  Going paperless requires a new set of routines and is a journey that my students and I will take together.

JScreenshot 2014-09-26 at 12.44.07 PMianna Taylor is an ELA and Title 1 teacher at Orchard Lake Middle School in West Bloomfield.  She is a member of the AVID Site Team and Continuous School Improvement Team at her school, among other things.  She is also a MiELA Network Summer Institute facilitator and member of the OWP Core Leadership Team.  Jianna earned her bachelor’s degree from Oakland University and her master’s degree from the University of Michigan.  She also writes reviews of children’s books and young adult novels for the magazine Library Media Connection.

Students: I Am Not Your Audience

Literacy & Technology Notes from the Classroom Oakland Writing Project

178742843Several years ago, I went in search of an audience for my students, although at the time I didn’t know that was what I was up to. I’d seen enough student writing to know I wasn’t doing something right in my instruction. My students were smart, interesting and capable of all manner of argument, but their writing didn’t reflect that. However, they were willing to risk suspension by breaking through the district’s internet firewall to reach sites like Myspace and Facebook where they wrote (Wrote!) about things they cared about in ways that reflected their personalities. This was what I was looking for. So I started a website where my students and I could build on the conversations we were having in class, and they could write in the same way they wrote on social media sites. I envisioned a free flowing forum of ideas and enthusiasm, a place for authentic voices like I’d seen on Facebook and Myspace, like I’d heard in my classroom. Yeah, I was wrong.

Our website quickly became a place where my ideas went to die, or where students would respond to my prompts as if they were short answer questions, writing in a dull, mechanical, and predictable way.  I asked for modern examples of  Holden Caulfield thinking I’d inspire students to write about alienation but got lists of “bad boy” actors and links to a band called “Holden Caulfield.” In my students’ defense, that’s how I wrote the prompts. They were prescriptive and came from my ideas about what the students should find engaging. Every now and then we’d spark a little discussion–but not really. The site was more of a bulletin board than a forum. Still, I was determined to use this new internet realm for something.

181407018This all happened at the turn of the century, but the idea of 21st century literacy wasn’t on my radar. I wasn’t thinking about how drastically teaching reading and writing was going to be impacted by the World Wide Web. I just wanted to be in on what was happening.  Though my first failures did send me in a new direction. My students were using platforms like MySpace to say things about themselves, to give their opinions, and to challenge each others’ ideas. It was entirely social, but what they were doing was writing, sometimes with letters and words, sometimes with images. But it’s all text, and that’s what drew me in. So I tried again.

Dipping  my educational toe into social media in a few places didn’t bring  much success. Individual blogs I had my students set up felt isolated and formal. I gave them assignments to be completed on the blog, which they treated like electronic paper. The writing didn’t change much, but they were more careful and deliberate with their work. Discussion boards or chat rooms were too fast and too informal. They were conversational in nature and didn’t leave my students time for a carefully considered response. They had to get ideas out quickly or be left behind. Still, I had little glimpses of what I was after: a sustained and thoughtful conversation in writing and images. But when this occurred, I didn’t know why. I didn’t know how to recreate it.

What was the difference between what I was doing and what I wanted? The answer is audience. I hadn’t been aware of just how much weight audience carries. When I was the audience, even the perceived audience, it changed 128930844the way my students wrote. Their voices faded. Those few times I did manage to spark something good–thoughtful, honest writing with authentic voices about a text we were looking at–then their writing became self supporting. Students abandoned me as audience and wrote for each other, fed off each other and it had very little–actually nothing–to do with me. In fact, I was very careful not to enter into the conversation because as soon as I said anything, their writing changed course and was directed at replicating the thing I’d praised. The writing even changed when students knew that I was lurking but not writing anything.  Many of them would lose the nerve to be the writers they really were. It didn’t matter that I told them that their audience was each other; my mere virtual presence changed how they wrote. When I became their audience, they tried to write like students. But when their audience was other students, they wrote like writers. They had more confidence, took risks, and tried to engage the each other. In short, they did what writers do.

Encouraged but still confused, I went looking for a platform that allows the immediacy of a conversation but encouraged more thoughtful and deliberate writing. A couple of years ago I came upon Tumblr.com.  At the time, it was a kind of hybrid hipster blog with lots of art and music. There was plenty of careless writing, but there were also blogs with very good, clearly professional writing. I started by following blogs on Tumblr that both interested me and fit with what I wanted the students to see like Blake Gopnik On Art,  The Paris Review , The Nearsighted Monkey. These blogs are all clearly written for a specific audience–Tumblr users–and decidedly too cool for most of my students and their teacher. That’s was part of what I was looking for. I wanted to connect my students to a fairly sophisticated audience in hopes that they might adopt the characteristics of that audience. (I was wrong about that but not for the reason I thought. That’s grist for another post.) Tumblr looked promising enough to try, so I set my first class loose.

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11th grade post on “what is art?” Click to read.

I traditionally assigned some kind of evaluative essay where the students had to make a case for including something in the curriculum or extolling the virtues of a new technology. It was an okay assignment. It let us look at different ways to advance an argument, what counts as evidence, warrants–all of the things I wanted my students to learn. The essays were fine but lacked passion and voice because they weren’t writing about anything they really cared about, and they weren’t writing to anyone they cared about. It was an exercise to them, nothing more. Why work hard when they didn’t care about the subject or the audience?

With this question in mind, I asked student to find examples of and talk about what they thought was art (hanna art, animation). And I turned them loose in the Tumblr world. They followed, promoted and wrote about things they liked. Things they were interested in. As I watched voices emerged, I learned what my students were interested in and why they liked what they liked. I saw arguments. I saw rhetoric in action. I saw some real writing and I heard authentic student voices.

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11th grade post on “what is art?” Click to read.

Why did Tumblr work?  The audience had changed. Students were writing for themselves and trying to write in ways that would attract attention from other writers and readers in that world. This was three years ago, and I was just starting to think about how the ways that students will read and write is fundamentally different than how I read and write thanks to the new media world. That first year I took what my students did on their Tumblr blogs and kind of wedged it into an existing curricular format. It wasn’t a great fit and moving from the blogs to an essay cost them some voice, or the tone was too casual for the classroom. I didn’t do a good job of explaining how a change in audience or situation, let alone both, required some serious rethinking of rhetorical strategies. It’s an ongoing conversation I have with my students. We talk about…

  • What are the characteristics of the platform and how do we adapt our writing to fit its conventions?
  • Is the platform the same as the audience?
  • What counts as evidence in a setting that seems to demand visual arguments?
  • How do we warrant and cite a picture? A video? A gif?
  • How can I make my writing stand out?
  • How do I grab the audience’s attention and then hold it long enough to engage them in my writing?
  • What kinds of arguments hold sway with this audience?

These are all very good, important questions that deserve serious consideration. I can’t answer them now. I usually turn the questions back at my students. They are the experts, the digital natives whose interest drew me into this world in first place. I have 20th century knowledge. They have 21st century experience.

I have only just begun to really consider what students writing in the 21st century might require  of me as a teacher. It is exciting and a hot mess. How do I manage all of this? Evaluate it? Channel it?  The Tumblr experiment continues into it’s third year. I’m a little more sure of what I’m doing–a little. In my next posts, I’ll share more about what’s going on–successes, failures and everything I learn.

RICKRick Kreinbring teaches English at Avondale High School in Auburn Hills, Michigan. His current assignments include teaching AP Language and Composition and AP Literature and Composition. He is a member of a statewide research project through the Michigan Teachers as Researchers Collaborative partnered with the MSU Writing in Digital Environments Program, which concentrates on improving student writing and peer feedback. Rick has presented at the National Advanced Placement Convention and the National Council of Teachers of English Conference. He is in his twenty-third year of teaching and makes his home in Huntington Woods.

Student Voice & Choice in the Digital Writing Workshop

Literacy & Technology Notes from the Classroom Oakland Writing Project

“Why do we have to write these stories about ourselves, Mr. Joseph? I mean, what’s the point?”

During class with my fifth graders, I found myself facing characteristic skepticism and a key question from my student, Tate, that speaks to the heart of the question of student voice–that of audience. What Tate really wanted to know was: Would anybody care about this story? Would anybody see his piece? Would it have any meaning beyond simply building a skill that he’s supposed to possess? 

153911435As teachers, we all have students who are compliant and willful, who will readily produce whatever output we ask or demand of them to please the teacher or earn a desired grade. There is no question that narrative and non-fiction writing are critical skills that must be taught explicitly at all levels every year. Increasingly, however, in an era of online publishing and digital content production on social media sites, students need to know that whatever they are asked to generate will have a meaningful audience and make a difference to someone. In 2014, kids have never known a world where they haven’t been able to reach out around the globe in seconds and make an impact with words, pictures, and video on Instagram, Twitter, or Facebook. The ability to publish at the click of a button has provided a liberating opportunity for students to receive swift feedback and effectively measure the impact their writing has on their intended audience.

Central, of course, to student voice is student choice. When I ask my students to write a small moment narrative each fall in writing workshop, I also give them the opportunity to not only write traditional text-based stories using words, but also to create a “performance piece” that involves a demonstration of the story through some digital medium. Some students choose to make digital stories, matching their own podcasted voice to images and create a movie. Others choose to learn the ancient art of storytelling and video record their performance. Some reenact their story as a movie and film the experience. Still others use animation techniques to tell their stories. Each year, the possibilities generated by the students and the products that they ultimately produce far exceed anything I could imagine.

83405387We all know that technology tools are constantly evolving and changing. What will remain immutable, however, is the architecture of story–problem, solution, characters, and setting. As long as we enable our students to make choices about the multi-modal output they would like to try, they will be motivated to learn the fundamental writing skills they need to grow and develop as writers. Students are empowered by both multi-media tools and the allure of a wider audience.  Their work will have meaning for the maximum number of people possible, as it should. Kids care about writing and creating when they know people pay attention to and care about their work, that their writerly voices will be heard.

The students in my workshop all have blogs, so they post both their stories and the digital counterparts online. They use first names only, are well-versed in safe digital citizenship and receive parental permission to use online tools. They are asked to send the link to at least three people in three different states or countries around the world and solicit feedback. In this way, the students see the exponential possibilities of global sharing, and how their work does, indeed, make an impact–however large or small–on the lives of people, often countless individuals beyond friends and family. Their voices are not only honored, but broadcast on the widest possible stage.

STUDENT WORK

Hear Shin Be tell her story with passion and purpose.

Watch as Tate reenacts his paint ball battle in dramatic fashion:

See how Nicolae brings his story alive through Legos.

 

9.21 face shot JoeRick Joseph is a National Board Certified Teacher of 5th and 6th grade students at Birmingham Covington School in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. He believes in the power of multi-age education to break down barriers in traditional school settings. Rick advocates for the meaningful use of digital tools on a daily basis to help create meaning and relevance for all learners.  He is a member of the Core Leadership Team of the Oakland Writing Project.

 

Blogging Bumps & Best Moments

Literacy & Technology Notes from the Classroom

So here we are…a month into 5th grade and four or five blog posts under our belts…depending on the student. I’ve learned a few things about blogging, and I’m hoping my students have as well. I can see that this will be a year of trial and error, of refining and redefining as we move through this process together.

Bumps 

I learned very quickly that I needed to give parents a thorough explanation of how I want to use the blog this year with their children. Specifically: This blog will be a digital archive of your child’s writing and will show their progress from the beginning of the year until the end. If I had said this upfront, perhaps I would not have had parents writing their child’s blog posts for them, or editing them to the point that I could hear adult voices and see complex sentence structures not evident anywhere in the student’s usual writing. This issue became a newsletter item that will now be part of my introductory conversation with parents next year.

Another lesson I learned was that I should’ve taken more time to show my students how to navigate the blog in terms of finding my blog (where their assignments are posted),  locating their own dashboard, and using the toolbar effectively. I’ve grown so used to most of my students being able to navigate technology effortlessly and intuitively that I left behind those kids without experience and technology skills. The good news is that I noticed this issue pretty quickly because blogging is a weekly exercise for us, but I felt badly for not paying attention to my former principal’s new school year mantra: go slow to go fast

Best Moments 

Click to read.

Click to read.

In spite of the above trials, there have been so many bright spots for me. Students are beginning to notice and wanting to correct spelling errors. I can’t count the number of times I’ve been tempted to comment about misspellings but continuing to look beyond the errors has forced me to continually ask myself, “What does this student do well as a writer and  how can I help them grow?” This kind of thinking is making me a better writing teacher and helping me deliver targeted instruction that meets the needs of my students where they are at the moment. When I hit the craft lessons or skills I see lacking, my students are able to practice and grow as writers.

We’re wrapping up our narrative unit and many students have been struggling with adding sensory details to their  stories. So this past week they had to blog about the experience of walking outside using as many sensory details as possible. The results were a perfect formative assessment: I know exactly who has got it and who needs small group or one on one work. The best teaching moments for me came through student writing, as always. There are always those students who you know will do a beautiful job, but then there are those unexpected gems that come shining through:

Click to read.

Click to read.

These students aren’t the most confident, the most skilled, or even children who profess to love writing. I don’t know if it was the assignment or the technology or a combination of both, but the results make my teacher’s heart happy and strengthen my resolve to continue blogging because for me, this is best practice. Will there be more bumps? I’m sure of it. But I’m just as sure there will be more bright spots than bumps…and I will learn from both.

I’d love to hear from other teachers who do regular blogging with their students. What bumps have you encountered along the way? Have you learned to anticipate them? Advice?

 

beth croppedBeth Rogers is a fifth grade teacher for Clarkston Community Schools, where she has been teaching full time since 2006.  She is  blessed to teach Language Arts and Social Studies for her class and her teaching partner’s class, while her partner  teaches all of their math and science. This enables them  to focus on their passions and do the best they can for kids. Beth was chosen as Teacher of the Year for 2013-2014 in her district. She earned a B.S. in Education at Kent State University and a Master’s in Educational Technology at Michigan State University. 

 

Student Blogging: Benefits & Challenges

Literacy & Technology Notes from the Classroom

Week one in my 5th grade classroom is almost over, and I am exhausted, inspired, and excited! We started blogging the first day of school (yes,I actually tackled it on the first day – a half day!).  It is Thursday night and I still have students who have not posted–the hiccups of technology and password issues, but we are getting there.  When I sat down to read and respond to posts two hours ago, it crossed my brain that I must be crazy. Now, I am so glad that I made the decision to have my students blog. The prompts I gave my students were–tell me about your favorite book & why it’s your favorite and tell me “what is reading?”

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Student blog post – click for an enlarged view.

The responses I’ve gotten have helped me to know my readers in ways I might not have otherwise for weeks. After one week, I know:

  • what books resonate with them,
  • where their thinking is in terms of what they believe reading is,
  • who they are as writers from the voice (or lack thereof) in their posts;
  • and what grammar lessons I should teach first and what skills are fairly solid.

Being able to respond quickly to each post allows me to connect with each student as well. All of this from one blog post per student! I resisted the urge to give corrections in my comments as I might have done in the past; I recognize that I need to connect and encourage at this point. I also did not make corrections to my students’ posts — I left the misspellings, even as I cringed while I read. I don’t want to shut down their writing process by giving criticism, even if it is constructive. These students don’t know me yet, and we need to establish a relationship of trust before they will be ready to receive this type of instruction. By forcing myself to ignore the grammatical errors, I find that I am intentionally looking for what my students do well as writers. This is a shift from our normal practice of evaluating what is wrong so we know what to teach (though I still do this with their pre-writes).  With these blog posts, I am focusing on my students’ thinking, asking myself: how can I help them grow and develop as thinkers in addition to growing as readers and writers?

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Student blog post – click for an enlarged view.

I am hopeful that by the end of the year, my students will look back at all their blog posts and be surprised and pleased by their growth. I am also hopeful that they will begin to correct their own errors because they are writing for a larger audience than just me: initially we share with our two 5th grade classrooms; then we will add in parents as audience members; finally, in March, we will participate in Two Writing Teachers Classroom Slice of Life challenge, which opens us up to a global audience.

There is a constant struggle for teachers these days to find balance between district mandated curriculum and expectations and making a professional decision because you know it is best for kids. Blogging these first days has been one of those decisions for me.  My official workshop “launch” looks different this year with the inclusion of blogging. Some colleagues have questioned my choice. I am okay with this because what we have done with this blogging is so valuable and foundational for this school year. It is writing in a real-world context. My expectations are no different for blogging than they are in writing workshop. If anything, the bar is raised because my students have to employ what they have learned about digital literacy and internet safety. Still, I am sensitive to the criticism. I’m wondering how other teachers handle this type of conundrum? I’d love your feedback in the comments section below.

Where will we go from here? Honestly, I’m not sure yet. But I’ll keep you posted!

Beth Rogers is a fifth grade teacher for Clarkston Community Schools, where she has been teaching full time since 2006.  She is  blessed to teach Language Arts and Social Studies for her class and her teaching partner’s class, while her partner  teaches all of their math and science. This enables them  to focus on their passions and do the best they can for kids. Beth was chosen as Teacher of the Year for 2013-2014 in her district. She earned a B.S. in Education at Kent State University and a Master’s in Educational Technology at Michigan State University. 

Beginning Again

Literacy & Technology Notes from the Classroom
my classroom reading corner for mini-lessons

my classroom reading corner for mini-lessons

It’s August, and even though school doesn’t officially start for two more weeks, most teachers I know are getting back into the classroom, dusting off binders & computers (literally) and thinking about the upcoming year.

No matter how many years I’ve been teaching, there is something exciting about the beginning of the school year: new students, new supplies, often new curriculum, and new possibilities. This year, I decided to re-do the color scheme in my 5th grade classroom. Before it was rainbow colors everywhere, and I was ready for something more serene. I defended this decision to my husband by saying that I spend more time there than I do at home during the school year, so it should be a space that makes me happy. (Luckily I could back it up with “extra” money I earned this summer!) But there is more going on here than just aesthetics, I find. This re-doing of the classroom is causing me to re-evaluate and revamp the way I teach.

This summer, I’ve been reading favorite blogs, sifting through professional books, attending workshops, and having deep conversations with colleagues in an attempt to constantly do what is best for my learners. I am blessed to work in a district that embraces a Culture of Thinking and is training us in project-based learning. My principal gives us books like Mindset by Carol Dweck. I am collaborating with teachers in other buildings on a project for the beginning of the year. All of this pushes me to be a better teacher and a deeper thinker about learning. My expectations are higher not only for my students, but for myself as well.

One of the changes I’ve decided to make this year is in writing instruction. In the past, I have had my students blog for  the Two Writing Teachers classroom Slice of Life challenge in March, but this year I am making the commitment to have them blog all year long. While this may not sound like a big deal, allow me to elaborate: this will be in addition to writer’s notebooks and writing workshop. Having fifty 5th graders blog multiple times weekly means that I will be spending hours reviewing posts and approving them for publication, as well as managing the comments that I am requiring of students. Their comments will have to go beyond the typical 5th grade “awesome,” or “cool,” but will have to reflect back to the writing process and the content.

481399781This is a huge undertaking that is born out of reflection and the desire to do what I know is best for my students. I know that having an authentic audience and getting consistent feedback inspires and motivates my learners. Our district Ed Tech Specialist just gave me a link to a site called Quadblogging that allows us to connect with other classrooms for a collaborative blogging experience. I’m still contemplating this leap..I think I’ll get to know my learners first, and we will decide together  if Quadblogging is right for us. This is new thinking for me as well: in the past I would have made the decision, but now I want feedback from my students; we are a team in our learning. I will update our progress in future posts!

As these final days of summer draw to a close, I look around my “new”classroom, and I find myself truly excited for the learning that will happen here.  I’m wondering how other educators are embracing the changes that inevitably come with a new school year.  Please share in the comments section what changes you’re making to your classroom and teaching this year.  As for me, I simply can’t wait to meet my new students and begin again.

 

BethBeth Rogers is a fifth grade teacher for Clarkston Community Schools, where she has been teaching full time since 2006.  She is  blessed to teach Language Arts and Social Studies for her class and her teaching partner’s class, while her partner  teaches all of their math and science. This enables them  to focus on their passions and do the best they can for kids. Beth was chosen as Teacher of the Year for 2013-2014 in her district. She earned a B.S. in Education at Kent State University and a Master’s in Educational Technology at Michigan State University.

 

Detroit Pistons Make ELA Videos for Oakland County Teachers & Students

Literacy & Technology News Video

The Detroit Pistons have produced two videos, starring basketball legend and sports commentator Greg Kelser, for Oakland Schools.  As part of their outreach efforts in public education, The Pistons filmed the two videos focused on important literacy concepts.  The videos are embedded below.  The first concerns how to defend a claim with evidence and the second one is about point of view.  Please feel free to use these short clips in the classroom to introduce these ideas to your students.