Luca Michael Stankovich Enters the World
As promised, I’ve included in this blog some photos of my brand new nephew who was born at 5:04 p.m. on Thursday evening. He is a diminutive 6 pounds, 11 ounces. I’m so used to looking at his older brother Patrick, who will be three in March, that I was completely unprepared for the tininess of his body and his facial features.
Fortunately, the birth went smoothly, and my sister seems to have endured the delivery unscathed. My sister makes delivering a baby seem easy. She was very calm and collected, with not a hair out of place, when I visited her after the delivery. Of course, when I asked her if it hurt as much as everyone said it did, she said that it hurts worse than any other pain.
Thanks to everybody in my blogging class for understanding why I couldn’t attend class on Thursday night.
Questions for Student Blogging
Hello,
In response to Drew’s question about what types of questions I’ve asked my students to respond to in their blogs, I thought I would post these questions to my blog so that everyone could see.
I thought that it would be best to try blogging first with my seniors, so I registered my College Prep Comp classes to blog on Blogmeister.com. I began having my students blog in October, when the upcoming election and the canididates were on the news and talk shows every day and night. I wanted to accomplish two goals with these questions: 1) get my students writing to help them generate ideas for their essays; 2) increase their awareness of the upcoming election and the candidates.
Before I asked students to resopnd to this question, I had to have a discussion with them about how to argue/discuss in a civil manner about politics. Students had more difficulty than I thought they would about distinguishing between a statement that attacks a person and a statement that critiques a position on an issue or a policy. For instance, I had to explain to them why saying, “Anyone who votes for so-and-so is stupid,” is not only offensive, but not persuasive.
The first question I asked them to respond to in their blogs was the following: “Many are claiming that this is a historical election because for the first time we have an African American man running for office, and the U.S. is facing some complex problems right now that are affecting everyone from Wall Sreet and Main Street. What are your thoughts on the upcoming election and on the candidates running? What are your thoughts on the issues being debated?” I was surpirsed that some of the students genuinely had no idea what issues were being debated, even though I had asked them earlier to compare the two candidates’ webpages and each of the candidate’s position on a key issue.
For the second question I wanted them to reflect on the debate that had occurred a couple days previously. But this time, I knew that most of them had probably not viewed it. Therefore, I asked them to first skim the debate (published on a website) before they responed to the question. The second question I asked was the following: “What are your thoughts about the debate a couple nights ago? What do you think about how the candidates presented themselves and argued their positions? Do you think there was a clear winner of the debate?”
Delinquent Blogger Am I
I want to apologize to all the members of my blogging cohort! I have not blogged in the last couple of weeks. I guess this makes me a cyber-slacker. I have somewhat overextended myself this year. I am participating on several committees, I’m attending a class, and I’m tutoring part-time.
I’m going to make an effort this weekend and next week to make up for the lost time by writing several blogs. My online presence will make your head spin!
Today, I’m going to give all of you an update on the blogs I’ve been having my students do. I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how much my students enjoy blogging. They particularily like the interactive aspect, the fact that they can comment on other students’ blogs and that they can receive comments from students.
I’ve also been impressed by the way the blogging has created a stronger sense of community among my students. For instance, I have two students who always seemed to get annoyed with each other in class. They sat on opposite sides of the classroom, and whenever we had a discussion in class they always took opposing sides of the issue. Well, after students began blogging, one of them responded to the other one’s post, and after that they actually had a real-time conversation about their thoughts on the topic.
My Instructions for Blogmeister
Hey Everyone from Drew McAllister’s blogging class! I’m sorry it’s taken me awhile to get this on my blog.
I just wanted to let you know that what follows are the bare bones version of the instructions I gave my students to simply log on for the first time and begin blogging. Before we began blogging, we discussed the ethical guidelines that they should follow when they blog. I also had them sign a contract that they would adhere to these guidelines. Warlick provides a reproducible contract on the back page of his book. I later gave them instructions on how to post comments and read student comments. I teach high school students, so they are written for an audience of teenagers.
As you can see, students can’t begin to blog until I’ve registered them. This helps to keep the site secure.
—————————————————————————————————————
Your Password: ____________________(should be 6-8 characters and should include
one capital letter & one number).
Instructions for Blogmeister.com
1. Go to the following website: http://classblogmeister.com. Look at the right of the page.
Under the heading on the right side “To Edit Your Blog,” you will enter your Username &
password.
A. Your Username: Your first and last name. Make sure that you include a
space between the two names and that you capitalize the first letter of your first and last
names with just one space between them.
B. Your Password: Write in the password that you gave me. If I have registered you,
you should be able to sign.
2. The first page you will see is your “Edit Page.” You may change the background of
your blog by clicking on Templates at the top center of the page.
3. To access your first blogging assignment, click on “View My Blog” link in the
center of the page. This is the page that visitors to your blog will see. On the left-
hand side will be listed blogging assignments. Click on the blogging assignment
listed.
4. Copy the assignment by highlighting it and pressing control + c. Then, click on
the black Edit link on the upper left-hand side. This will take you back to the Edit
Page.
5. To write your blog, click on the “Article” link in the upper center of the page. Then,
paste the assignment so that you can look at it as you type your response. Then,
type in your blog.
6. After you’ve finished writing your blog, you must make sure that you’ve
completed the following steps. If you don’t complete these steps, your blog
will be lost in cyber-space.
a) Give a title to this blog post.
b) Click on the drop-down menu below that says “Assignments,” and then
click on the assignment to which the blog responds.
c) Click on “Request Approval” and click on “Save.” The blog will then be sent
to me and I will approve or not approve the blog to be published to all
students’ blog pages so that everyone in the class can read them and comment
on them.
7. After Ms. Dolan approves the student blogs, they will appear on all your blogs. To
view them, when you enter your blog, click on “View My Blog.” Then click on the
assignment. Now I’d like you to read your classmates’ blogs and comment on 3 of
them. Your comments should be substantive. Remember to be civil, respectful,
and school-appropriate.
Happy Blogging!! J
When the Rubber Hits the Road
I’ve introduced my students to blogging, but I ran into some glitches. I really wanted them to use Edublogs.org because I thought my students would like using the widgets and the different design patterns to personalize their sites. However, after investigating the site, I realized that, as the teacher, I wouldn’t be able to control who views and comments on my students’ blogs. Clearly, this is a huge security issue.
So, I decided to use Blogmeister.com. This site gives teachers a great deal of control over the blogs his/her students write. For instance, when my students write a blog or a comment to a classmate’s blog, the blog/comment will not be published until I approve it. This ensures that nothing offensive or inapproproate will get posted. I’ve already had to ask a student to delete something he wrote about one of the presidential candidates. The site also allows me to restrict the audience of my students’ blogs to just the members of the class.
However, the site lacks all the cool widgets and design patterns of Edublogs.org. The interface is also much less user-friendly and is not very intuitive. For instance, I gave my students explicit, step-by-step directions for posting a blog, and some of them still had trouble.
I thought that classroom blogging would be easier since, as a member of the Technology Demo Committee, I will be sharing a mobile lab of laptops with two other teachers. However, I discovered, after I rolled the unwieldy lab into my room, that the lab only has 20 computers, and I have at least 22 kids in most of my classes. Why can’t anything be easy?
Web 2.0, Here I Come
On Friday, I attended a professional development session on Web 2.0 features such as Google docs, Delicious, Wordle, Shelfari, and Jing!. I felt truly inspired, thinking of all the ways I could motivate my students, reluctant and eager learners alike, to write by providing them with an authentic audience, each other.
Specifically, I’d like to engage my students in blogging. I already have my students write journal entries, but most of them are very uninspired by them. The thought of putting pen to paper makes them cringe. I thought that the blog format would be more to their liking. They could choose the design of their pages, and they could add images, auidio files, video files, and other applications. This is right up their alley. In order to interest students in writing and reading, I think we simply need to tap into their interests–social networking (Facebook) and expressing themselves in a multimedia context.
However, I have had trouble connecting to Edublogs at my school. Does anyone have a way to resolve this problem? I’m going to try again tomorrow. Maybe the wireless connection isn’t strong enough to allow for all the applications to load.
I’m on the Tech Demonstration committee at my school, so I’ll have access to laptops for my room, which means using Web 2.0 tools to engage my students is a definite possibility. However, one of the logistical problems is that I have to share laptops with 2 other teachers.
In response to Drew’s question about assessment, since I teach literature and writing, I’d have to say that the main way I assess higher-order thinking is through writing assignments. However, as any English teacher will tell you, just because you ask students to analyze a text and move beyond the literal meaning of the text does not mean that they all achieve higher-order thinking. Some of them remain at the literal level of the text. I still struggle with this problem, and I’m endlessly revising how I teach in order to scaffold for my students so that they will be able to achieve higher-order thinking.
Crying in the Classroom
This weekend I had so much grading to do, but I didn’t end up accomplishing half of what I wanted to do. I find that it’s often difficult to fit everything into 2 days: having some fun, doing some housework, and grading. Unfortunately, this weekend I accomplished the first two, but didn’t spend as much time on grading as I wanted to.
However, I’ve learned that having a social life is important to keeping sane. As a result of trying to remain sane, I don’t think I’ll have one of my class’s essays back tomorrow. This will probalby result in some gnashing of teeth–theirs, not mine. The 6-week term grading term ends this week, which means that students become somewhat anxious about their grades. Sometimes this can result in unpredicatable behavior–acting out, anger. These aren’t my favorite times of the year.
Regarding grades, I had a student cry in my classroom this afternoon about a grade she received on an essay. Usually I can turn these situations around by discussing a strength in the student’s essay and making the student feel that he/she can improve in the future, but this time the student was inconsolable. She kept repeating the fact that it frustrated her that she worked really hard on the essay and received an unsatisfactory grade while someone she knew didn’t work hard on the essay and received a good grade. I explained to her that sometimes certain subjects will come easy to us while other subjects will be difficult. I told her that I always struggled in math classes and that I couldn’t seem to earn better than a C in Algebra.
I can’t help but think that the student would not have raised this objection–that she deserved a higher grade because she worked hard–to a math or science teacher. For instance, if she received a C on an Algebra, I can’t imagine that she would have complained to her Algebra teacher that she thought she should receive a higher grade because of the many hours that she had studied for the test.
Frustrations with Widgets
Today I’ve been trying to refine the design of my page, but some of the widgets and links I’ve been trying to add will not appear, even though I’ve saved them multiple times. I’ve also refreshed the screen several times. I’m a perfectionist, so I find it very frustrating when I can’t get something to look the way I think it should look. I think I’ll probably try adding the widgets and links another time. Perhaps there’s some kind of Edublog cyber-delay today, although I’m almost certain there is no such thing.
As I was looking at my classmates’ blogs, I noticed that their paragraphs are much more readable on-screen than mine because mine are very long. It’s a bit of a challenge to think about paragraphs in this way–that they must be short enough so that readers will not groan when reading them online or simply abandon reading the post because of the length of the paragraphs. This is something I’ll have to work on.
As I mentioned in someone else’s blog, I really like the idea of the blog as an online journal that invites feedback. It seems to be a great way to introduce newly-hatched ideas to an audience and elicit feedback about these ideas before actually implementing them.
Full Swing
Now the school year is officially in full swing. We just had our Open House, I’ve tackled some of the behavior issues that inevitably crop up during the first few weeks as the dynamics of the class become apparent, and I have taken home for weekend reading 75 essays. Everything is as it should be.
I teach three sections of College Prep Compoisition, one section of AP English Literature, and one section of English II. I’ve realized that teaching all of these essay-heavy courses, I’m going to have to find a way of more effectively managing the paperload while still providing students with quality feedback. Specifically, I’ve decided that I’m going to have to find a way of commenting on their rough drafts without taking home and reading the entire rough drafts of all my students. Because I prefer to focus on issues of Ideas and Organization when I provide feedback on students’ rough drafts, I’m toying with having students explain to me in writing their main ideas–thesis and main points–and the organizational structure of their essay. That way I can read a brief synopsis of each of my student’s essays and provide quality feedback on the ideas and organization of the essays. I always have students edit each other’s papers, but they usually want and need my feedback, as well as their peers. I’d love to hear feedback from others about how they manage the paperload.
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