National Day on Writing: Kylene Beers Leads By Example

Today is the first (hopefully annual) National Day on Writing. It includes the National Gallery of Writing, a live webcast from 9 am to 8 pm EDT, a U.S. Senate Resolution supporting it and, most importantly, lots of writing and smart folks talking about writing.

One of the smartest folks I know talking about writing is Kylene Beers. She’s done a lot of thoughtful work around reading and writing and is currently serving as the President of NCTE. Now, in addition to her tireless efforts to help us all become better readers and writers, Kylene has launched a blog of her own. As she says in her first post:

I’ll be using this space for an on-going conversation about literacy in the twenty-first century.

I really appreciate the fact that Kylene is not only talking the talk, but walking the walk. She is leading by example even though, and I think she would admit this, blogging does not come naturally to her. But see, that’s the thing, I don’t think blogging has to come “naturally” to any of us. It sure didn’t come naturally to me. But what does come naturally to Kylene is the ability to write thoughtfully about these issues, and blogging allows her to not only write about, but learn with, other really smart people thinking and working on literacy. As she says to conclude that first post:

We do write to be heard because it is in listening to one another that we do become a part of a community. Perhaps what this space is really about is community, a community of learners in the twenty-first century. Welcome!

I couldn’t have blogged it better myself.

It's a Different Era

I continue to find the Rocky Mountain News’s approach to the read/write web very interesting. Today’s paper was a case in point. John Temple’s column (he’s the Publisher and sporadically blogs himself) talks about their version of “live blogging.”

Our Washington correspondent, M.E. Sprengelmeyer, had the idea to plant himself in the middle of the stream of candidates flowing through the first state to vote in the first presidential nominating contest. His goal would be to chronicle what it takes to land on the podium at the Democratic National Convention in Denver or the Republican National Convention in Minneapolis.

. . . M.E. arrived in Iowa on Easter Sunday and has been a writing fool ever since . . . The guy has written more than 160,000 words on his blog and more than 130 newspaper stories since he arrived in Iowa. The Des Moines Register was so taken with his approach that it wrote a story about him.

. . . We've experimented with live blogging on major news stories before, such as the excellent work by Jeff Smith, David Milstead and Sara Burnett on the trial of former Qwest CEO Joe Nacchio. The goal with M.E.'s blog was to go even farther, making it clear that the blog was the center of what we were doing.

The result is not just that the Rocky has provided, in my view, a perspective on Iowa and the presidential race worth paying attention to. It's also that we're going to approach other major stories in a similar way, starting with the Colorado legislative session beginning next week.

Traditionally, we've had one reporter cover the House and another the Senate. This year, we're going to have one reporter blog throughout the day, under the direction of a seasoned political editor, Jim Martin. Some of the accounts from the blog will be edited for the next day's paper, just the way we have with some of M.E.'s blog postings. The other full-time legislative reporter will focus on providing more depth and insight into the goings-on under the dome.

In addition, we'll also be sending knowledgeable beat reporters to the Capitol to report on stories falling into their area of expertise. So you'll likely hear from our environmental reporter or energy reporter and many others as issues on their beats arise. Developments they cover will make their way onto the blog before they're published in the paper.

On another, sadder note, the lead story in the Rocky this morning was about Major Andrew Olmsted, who was killed in Iraq on Thursday. Major Olmsted had been blogging for the Rocky since May (when he was in training) and since July from Iraq. (Update: His full last post posted posthumously on his blog.)

His goal was to share his front-line experiences with the American people.

The Rocky has also had YourHub for quite some time and I just discovered an offshoot of that titled YourSpace:

Welcome to Your Space. In this section you can submit photos of your baby, pet, or your latest vacation. It's also a place where you share news about your community through our partnership with YourHub.com.

We encourage you to have fun. That's why we give you the chance to vote on your favorite photos submitted by RockyMountainNews.com visitors. This is just the first step in what we hope becomes a major part of this Web site.

Have suggestions about what you want to see in this area? Send us a message at talktous@RockyMountainNews.com

At the end of Temple’s column he talks about sharing stories with two other papers in Colorado, but then says the following – which I think applies to the newspaper’s foray onto the web as well:

It's a different era. When editors from these papers sat down with us to discuss whether it would benefit their readers more if they shared stories and photographs than if they kept them to themselves, the answer seemed obvious . . . If we help one another, we actually help our readers.

I do have one suggestion for Mr. Temple – the online version of his column didn’t link to the different blogs he mentions (and the print version didn’t include links either). That seems like an obvious thing to add. (Back Roads to the White House and the Nacchio Trial are available, they apparently don’t have the link up yet for Live from the Colorado Legislature.)

I will continue to watch the Rocky with interest, as they seem to be actively going after using the web to provide a better product to their readers.

Blogging: In Their Own Words

At the end of the school year we were asked to try to get a video together about blogging to show at a conference for administrators in our state. The idea was that we were going to introduce them to live blogging and then actually have some folks in the audience live blog the keynote, with the keynote speaker being occasionally fed questions/thoughts/ideas from the blog. The details were a little fuzzy but, nice guys that we are, we scrambled to try to get something together.

So, about two days before finals, we hurriedly videotaped some students and teachers talking about blogging and then tried to figure out when we'd have time to put this together before June 13th (the first day of the conference), not to mention how to setup the live blogging, make sure they had enough info for it to work smoothly, get the wireless working, etc.

As it turns out, they decided to not go with this idea, which I think was a good thing given the compressed timeline - I think there's a good chance it would've been a disaster. They are considering doing it again for their next conference in August, which would be cool since the keynote speaker is supposed to be Daniel Pink, although I still worry about all the setup issues.

In any event, we had all this footage sitting around and I wanted to do something with it. I spent a little time editing and came up with the following. Please keep in mind a few things. As I mentioned, we hurriedly filmed about two days before finals, so we were only able to grab kids from a couple of classes and a few teachers that were available. So we don't have as wide of a selection of folks as I would like, and the quality of some of the video/audio isn't the best. (We had a wireless lapel microphone, but it didn't always work - meaning a good portion of the audio was just from the built-in camcorder microphone. You may have to manually raise and lower the volume sometimes to hear.) Obviously, I decided to post it anyway, so I guess it comes under the category of "good enough to criticize." I hope that - despite some of its shortcomings - some of you might find it useful.

Also, keep in mind that we've only been blogging for about a year and a half in my school, and many folks really only in the past six months or so, so we're still learning. We're pretty much still in the stage of moving and extending traditional classroom activities online, which I think can add value and enhance the learning when done well, but our next step is really to help our students develop their own personal learning networks through blogs and various other Web 2.0 tools. I hope that we will make some progress with that next school year.

I'm posting two versions, the long version, which is 15:30 (I have a hard time cutting students when they say such thoughtful things), and a shorter version (where I slashed - it was painful for me). I'm embedding the Google Video versions below, but you can also download Quicktime versions of both of them (320 by 240).

Long Version (Quicktime, 15:30, 67.3 MB)
Short Version (Quicktime, 8:16, 38.1 MB)

Part of the video talks about the fishbowl discussion technique (no relation to me!) used in conjunction with live blogging, you can learn more at these posts (1, 2 and 3).

Google Video Long Version (15:30)




Google Video Short Version (8:16)

Blogging 1984 - with Parents

Both Maura Moritz and Anne Smith have their ninth grade honors classes (Maura's class blog, Anne's class blog) blogging about 1984. I think that’s good – and a little ironic – in and of itself, but the really cool thing is that they invited the parents to read the novel and blog along with them. The reactions from parents were interesting. Some were very supportive and excited, others were, well, defensive I guess (“I don’t have time”, etc.). Both Maura and Anne made it clear that this was optional on the part of parents, but they highly encouraged them to participate if they could. Both to get a better idea of what their students were learning about, but also to be able to provide a different perspective for these students, most of whom were born in 1991 or 1992. Keep in mind that not only was that over forty years after 1984 was written, and seven-plus years after the year 1984, but they were born after the Berlin Wall came down.

Maura and Anne started out by having the students watch Apple’s 1984 commercial, then watching the Hillary Clinton 1984 attack ad on YouTube. It was very interesting to read the students’ take on these (pretty unaware of the context of both of them), and then have some parents chime in with more information. It will be interesting to see how the parents who have chosen to participate keep up over the course of the unit.

I also like how the students provided some blogging expectations for their parents. The students are also doing some nice scribe posting for this unit.


Image Citation: 1984, originally uploaded by Mushroom and Rooster.

Presenting at NECC, Palm Beach, TIE, and ?

There are a couple of interesting side effects that have arisen as a result of this blog. The first is that we are being encouraged - and sometimes even invited - to present at conferences and school districts. There are three that we are definitely presenting at, and several more that have made initial contacts.

First up is the School District of Palm Beach County 2007 Technology Conference on March 19th. This looks to be an impressive annual conference that the school district (in West Palm Beach, Florida) puts on. It's a non-student contact day, and they put on quite an event, with hundreds of sessions and even a vendor area. Anne Smith and I will share our staff development efforts and what teachers have been doing in the classroom at Arapahoe, with two sessions for teachers and one for administrators.

Next up is the TIE Conference in Copper Mountain, Colorado in June. TIE is Colorado's statewide technology in education conference. Will Richardson is the keynote speaker this year. (I don't know how much credit I can take for that, but I did suggest him to the TIE Board and then "campaigned" via email once or twice - so until somebody tells me otherwise, it's all because of me!) Anne Smith, Barbara Stahlhut, Brad Meyer, Brian Hatak and I will be presenting on Wednesday, June 20th, from 1:00 - 3:00 (in Wheeler A in Copper Station for those of you who might be attending).

The third conference that is a definite at this point is NECC in Atlanta in June. Once again all five of us will be presenting, and it will take place on Tuesday, June 26th from 3:30 - 4:30 pm (location TBD).

While all three presentations will be similar, I think they will end up being quite different due to the different audiences and formats. It looks as though Palm Beach will have a wide mix of teachers in terms of both their technological background and their knowledge of the read/write web, plus we do one session with administrators (probably 50-75 principals plus a few other folks - yikes!).

TIE tends to draw folks that are fairly knowledgeable about technology and come every year, although there are always quite a few educators that are there for the first time. It also has a couple of advantages over most other conferences. First, most sessions - including our session - are in rooms where everyone has a computer, so we can give them some time to explore some of the technologies (and even if we don't give them the time, they will anyway). Second, it's two hours instead of the typical 50-60 minutes that we'll get at Palm Beach and NECC. That's good, since we have about 8 hours worth of "content," plus another 8 hours or so of "conversation" we want to have. So it should be much easier to squeeze sixteen hours into two instead of one.

I'm not sure what to expect at NECC since I went for the first time last year myself. I think this tends to draw fairly tech-savvy folks as well, plus the expectations are different - and probably higher - since this is a national conference. I also don't know whether to expect 20 people in the audience - or 200. One thing I definitely did not like about NECC last year was that the majority of sessions were in large rooms with rows and rows of chairs crammed together. One of the things we're struggling with as we are planning these sessions is how to create a conversation among such a large group of people in a short amount of time, while still sharing some of the "stuff" that we want to share. I know many other folks out there have struggled with this as well, so any suggestions you have would be greatly appreciated. And if anyone out there is planning on attending NECC and doesn't have anything better to do at the prime time of 3:30 in the afternoon (nope, nobody's going to be tired, worn out, and sleepy from lunch at 3:30 are they?), please stop by so the room isn't completely empty, would ya?

It will be interesting to see how these go. I was hesitant at first to even entertain these conversations with folks about presenting, because I feel like we still have a whole lot more questions than answers, but I think that may be why they are asking us. It's because we are asking those questions about what learning should look like in the 21st century, working hard at figuring them out, and sharing both our successes and failures on the blog. We ultimately decided to go ahead for pretty much selfish reasons - we hope to learn as much or more from the conversations when we present as the so-called "audience" learns.

And the second interesting side-effect? Job inquiries. I've had several nice conversations with folks who've made initial contact with me wondering if I'd be interested in a particular position they had available. These were certainly not job offers, just initial contacts, and so far nothing that would make me consider leaving my wonderful position at Arapahoe High School (just in case my principal is reading this - Hi Ron!). Seriously, I think I'm doing important - and hopefully good - work here, and it would have to be something that was more important and where I could do more good to make me even consider it. (Cue violin music.)

Now, this is interesting and - yes, somewhat flattering. But what I find most interesting is that I mostly write on this blog about what other folks are doing in their classrooms. While I'm in classrooms pretty much every day, none of them are my classroom. It's been a few years since I've had a classroom of my own. All the great - and sometimes not so great - things you read about on this blog are happening in other folks' classrooms. (This is also why when I'm approached to present, one of my first questions is, "Can I bring at least one of my teachers along that is actually doing this in their classrooms?) I think - and hope - that I have helped a lot of those things happen in those classrooms, but it sure seems like those teachers are the ones who should be getting the job inquiries, not me. Now, having said that, if anyone was reading along and about to offer me six figures and unlimited use of the company jet, I'll be happy to delete the previous seven sentences and take your call - operators are standing by.

So, I guess I'm still processing all this but, to me, this is just another example of the way the world is changing. I wrote a grant and got it. I started this blog in support of our staff development efforts as part of that grant. I wrote a second grant and got it, which allowed us to bring even more folks into the staff development effort, which of course gave me more to blog about. The blog got noticed by some folks and people started reading it. They apparently found value in it, so many of them subscribed in their RSS aggregators. I apparently blogged something interesting at least often enough to keep them from removing it from their RSS aggregators. Now we're getting invitations to present and job inquiries.

This couldn't have happened to me/us ten years ago, or five years ago, or probably even three years ago. The tools may have been there (although they've improved tremendously), but the critical mass of audience wasn't in place (and the key tool - RSS - wasn't known to enough people). This is an important idea that I need to think about a lot more, but I think it holds a tremendous lesson for our students about the flattening of the world and the power of the read/write web.