You made great comments and am in complete agreement with you. I struggle with what to have my student’s blog and am trying not to just replace my traditional assignment with a www assignment. Instead I am replacing many of my assignments in favor of PBL or authentic activities. These will be easier to blog about though my students prefer the wiki.

On my post, I discuss the need to change the way we teach science. I need to learn to blog my own experiences in crafting these activities and hopefully get feedback to strengthen what I do and also share. As we educators circle around and comment on blogs, my students circle around each others to comment too. They are encouraged to ask a question that the blog author can go back and address.

Thanks to Dean for bringing the point of sharing out front. Even if our lessons aren’t brilliant, there is a lot of learning opportunities for the author and others.

When I first read this post 3 weeks ago, I have to admit that my first thought was, “Cool, I’ve been quoted on Dean’s blog!” I then thought about your call for teachers to share, but must have been bleary eyed from the first week back at school and not commented. Seeing this same quote on Louise Maine’s recent post led me back here to take a look.

I just want to clarify; I enjoy sharing what I do as a teacher. I love networking with other teachers and seeing what they do. For me, deciding whether or not to have my students use blogs for their science work is not about whether I want to share. Here’s the thing, though. When I got the blogging bug my first impulse was “how can I get my students to blog!”. Not too different from when my son got his first hammer and all he saw were nails! I’m glad I didn’t act on that initial impulse, because at that point in time I just had a surface understanding of what blogs were all about. Had I come up with a blog assignment then, it wouldn’t have looked too different from a traditional assignment, just that it would have been posted on the www.

Right now I see blogs as tools for communication and exploration of ideas. A student blog post on the cell cycle, to use my initial example, could be worthwhile if it took advantage of the blog medium. I’d want the final product from the students to elicit thoughtful comments that spark conversations about science, not just “great cell cycle guys!” And I think that this might get at what Darren is referring to when he says “How do you know what your students know or understand if they don’t tell you? What I’d really like to do is have every single kid summarize their learning each day in their own words so I can get some insight into what they do and do not understand and help them learn.”

Another concern for me at the time was who was going to read the blogs? I have small groups of students in each grade working asynchronously. Now, a whole 3 weeks later , I feel that I can tap into the network of educators that I have met on-line to get the word out and have students from all over check my students’ work, comment on it and start those science conversations that I so love to hear.

Clay, thanks for your early and eloquent defense!

Darren, thanks for stretching my thinking on this topic.

And finally Dean, thanks for starting this particular conversation. It’s definitely helped my thinking on student blogs, and teacher sharing, evolve.

I’m thinking I should (jokingly) reassure Angus that probably no one in his own district will read what he’s writing anyway, at least not until he gets “discovered” and by then, he’ll have had time to hone his writing and sharing. (hm, maybe I need more coffee since I’m sounding a tiny bit cynical!)

But seriously–I think this is a major obstacle for teachers–the idea that people might like to share our ideas or know what we are doing just doesn’t seem to register. The idea that we can even go watch other teachers in our own buildings and learn from them often doesn’t happen either!

I sometimes wonder if it is partly the whole cultural thing with teachers perceiving that education isn’t really a respected profession in the “outside world” so why would anyone want to see what they are doing?

In any case, watching this conversation evolve, you know what I’m thinking–that it’s like the comments you see “within a class” of students who know each other and how they tease one another within their own discussion boards or class blogs, and the fact is, you’ve all developed that via Twitter, blogs, and networking, not through seeing one another face to face.

Do we as educators forget how to have fun–forget how the idea of camaraderie can lift and support us and inform us? Our students very much know how to learn in a community. What happens in schools that makes that so difficult for teachers and why do educators get so isolated?

Ok, I must need a refill….

Is it the infection of the Twitter banter into the blog thread?

Who knows?

One thing is for sure, though – that comfortable rapport is indeed an amazing thing, coming as it does – and as you point out, Dean – from simply reading each other, sharing ideas one-way or two-way or multi-way in comment threads, twitter, skype calls, what have you.

I was thinking about the old, hopefully dying, objection that online interaction robs us of valuable social time. I have never socialized so constantly in my entire life, and all of it willingly, since getting networked. And I’ve never had more thoughtful social time in random bodily space-sharings either.

It makes me dream of a day when we look back on the forced incarceration of strangers in schools on the strange bases of age and physical location – and nothing more – as the invitation to boredom and torment it so often seems to me to be.

Can I have a refill?

@Tammy: You should hear us f2f. We were once chased out of two rooms and three hallways because we kept getting louder and louder.

All in good fun, although Darren and I have met, I only know Clay through blogging and twitter and had a brief conversation with him on Skype. And yet it doesn’t take all that long to establish a fairly comfortable report …all a result of sharing.

Elluminate is a good product but very expensive. I’ve had conversations with the U of S on using it occasionally.

I’ll get right on that latte.

There was no option for comments or links but I wonder if there’s some way for them to include at some point…those are some major oversights.

I’ll have a latte, actually. No foam. Now move it.

(Darren, do you think the math teachers in my school will hate me if I fwd them that pdf? I downloaded it…. But waitaminnit – education ain’t about being popular.)

Off topic: Dean, that blog-book of yours: there’s no way for it to be published to _include_ comments? If so, somebody needs to tell those folks that they need to add it, else they look like they don’t understand where the heart of a blog often resides. Seriously! And does it at least include link URLs?

If you guys are going to continue to loiter here, I’m going to have to start charging rent.

You’re bang on about the assessment bit. More and more I find assessment and teaching/learning at odds with each other. On the blog I try to stay away from granular assessment and (you’ll like this) focus on the “big ideas”. What that means here is that if they leave a comment that is relevant and to the point the get a mark, no comment, no mark.

I recently read an interesting research article by Dylan Williams (of Black and Williams fame; Inside the Black Box) called Keeping Learning on Track: Formative assessment and the regulation of learning, Williams (2007). Williams showed that, in math, students assessed using comments pointing to the steps required for improvement can result in improved standards test results of up to 30%. Students assessed using traditional grades see no such improvement, and perhaps, a decline in their learning.

I’m still thinking about how I’m going to put these results into practice next semester.

It’s all good. It also seems to point to how difficult all this can be, how varied, and how difficult, too, the whole composition process on blog threads can be.

And I like that “comment on the other four groups” approach. I”ve done s.th. similar in the past, but doesn’t the management of giving the freaking grade for that kill you? Grading and assessing, in general, kill me.

Thanks for the response, and keep trailblazing and teaching us all.

Clay

Point (1) You’re right I’m wrong. I completely misread your comment (even though I read it twice) .

Point 2. No, it not a subject specific thing, I have the same problem in math. Post a problem and have them all comment on it. After the first few comments it’s all “Cindy’s right.” I still think this is a bit of a push back on us as teachers. One idea I’ve tried with a little success was having groups publish the results to a similar set of 3-5 questions. The other students are graded on the comments the leave on posts of people not in their group. Something like: 5 groups means each kid has to leave 4 comments, one on each of the other groups posts. I found this a little more dynamic than having them all comment on one post but the comments still quickly degenerate … still puzzling this one out.

Point 3. My apologies for the aggressive tone. There’s room enough in th4e blogosphere for both perspectives. I found myself nodding along in agreement as I read you last comment. Thanks for the clarification.

Cheers,
Darren

No worries, dissent extends!

1. I’m talking about student time, and how much we might take from them by forcing them to do digital (and thus take longer to do) what could be done more quickly – and arguably with the same amount of learning – with pencil and paper. Was I unclear on that first point? Re-reading it, it doesn’t seem awfully unclear to me.

2. I think your reception of my second point might be a math teacher unfamiliar with the types of discussion used by humanities teachers. I never ask the same question from year to year (honestly, I don’t even like to teach the same works from year to year). But any reader-response question of any work in a forum gets pretty easy to bluff your ways through after the first few posts. As I said in my original comment, it’s a danger for which there are preventive measure, but still a concern. (And again, go to my Ning – it’s open – and you’ll see endless forum discussions. I’m just sayin’.)

3. It can be about students wanting details, or it can be about students wanting metacognition, big pictures, relevance, and real-world audiences of more than others wanting an online textbook. It can be both. Again, I think this may just be a humanities disconnect. Audience – consciousness of audience and the writer’s relationship with and responsibilities to the audience – is key to a writing teacher. But we use blogs and wikis and such for different reasons. You have your students attain mastery (ideally) by teaching the content of your classes, and I agree, that’s a wonderful way to get them to learn. But I have my students attempt to develop their writing – their real writing skills, not their homework-writing ones – in my classes by writing about whatever interests them. It really boils down, I think, to us teaching from two different disciplines and with two different visions of the possibilities in these tools. Maybe that’s why I put value in students writing about the why and wow of science, as a reader, more than about the what of it (the details). Differences b/w us w/o either of us being wrong, though your tone suggests that you think I’m wrong by saying “it’s not about [me]” (which is fine, srsly – I’m a big boy and like a good debate, and totally, totally respect you for your early adoption pioneering )

Anyway, you can probably tell it’s an hour after school ended, I’m still in my classroom, and overdue some sleep.

I don’t think we understood each other very well, but maybe this helped?

Take care