A bit old, but still interesting.

Blogging in the classroom: replace or supplement writing practice. NYTimes article, esp. first comment. Guardian article.

Online MLA Tools

I'm currently subbing in an English department near me. Just before the winter break, I taught a lesson about how to make an MLA works cited page. When I first started teaching, only six or so years ago, 11th grade English had a min-unit about how to do this. At the end of the unit, students were given various sources to document on as a formal assessment. Today, students have Easy Bib and Citation Machine. In about 30 minutes, I walked students through the book entry for their novel, which included a few idiosyncrasies. Most students now have the ability to create a works cited entry for almost any source. No manual needed, no memorization. The student does still need to double-check formatting and accuracy, but the "heavy lifting" is done for them.

Easier still, when students use articles from research tools like EBSCO and Proquest, they can select which style guide they need to use and the site will generate their works cited entry for them. With a fairly small amount of work on their end, the student has all of the relevant data, in the right format, ready to use almost instantly. I'm of two minds about this.

One side thinks that students are currently able to correctly document their research in an easy and quick manner. These online tools take the guess work out of documentation and reduce the amount of time needed to complete the task. Rather than skipping the assignment, students just have to do a little bit of copying and pasting and they're done!

The other side worries that the limited need to actually learn the type of information needed for documenting your sources will result in a limited understanding of the values and relevance of the publication information. If you don't need to find the date of publication, are you really thinking about the currency of the information? Teaching critical thinking is and has been one of the greatest on-going challenges of the English discipline, but it has been added by the exploration of source documentation.

On a related note, we teach students to document sources because of the importance of intellectual property. We teach students to give credit to the creator of the ideas. Do online tools enhance the value of this lesson or limit it? Food for thought.

Prezi

A friend at work recently introduced me to Prezi. The site has a nice educator package, so I thought that I'd give it a try. My Honors 9 Communications (English) class created digital poetry for their unit final, which allowed for a great last day of school! We munched on treats and watched our poetry unfold on the board. Lovely!

Anyway, back to the purpose of this entry: using Web 2.0 in the classroom. Prezi is an interactive presentation site. Much like PowerPoint and like software, the site allows you to enter text and images, then animate their entry onto the screen. Unlike the software programs, Prezi functions online and uses Flash to animate more visually-interactive presentations. As with many Web 2.0 tools, you can share content, both in editable and non-editable forms.

So, I made a Prezi in lieu of a handout for our project. Because prezis can be imbedded in blogs, I've included it below. My students then made their own and shared them to our Honors 9 group. I would love to share some of their creations, but I forgot to ask them to give me editing rights, so I can't remove their names... . Perhaps I'll get ambitious this summer and track down a few students about sharing theirs publicly.

The students were very responsive to this project, and maneuvered through the site fairly well. I did some direct instruction about how to use the site, but I only covered the basics. While this put the more tech-savy students at an advantage, I felt that the purpose of the project was to play with communicating a poetic message in a new medium, not mastering the medium itself. Overall, the students did a nice job of working with constructing visual- and movement-based meaning. Some dug in deeply, which lead to very rewarding content in the classroom. :-)

Overall, I think that Prezi has some great academic potential, although I don't feel that it is a "must use" tool. Besides this, it is quite fun!

Intellectual Property & Technology

I have been very quiet for quite some time. Today, however, inspired me to ponder a "technology in the classroom" question, so I decided to do so where others might offer some insight.

At what point does a student's class-generated ideas become intellectual property to be protected? Is an essay always theirs? Is there a point when it becomes "public domain?" I ask because I use Turnitin and have a parent who is concerned about privacy & intellectual property. I don't have any answers, as I've never considered this side of things. My intent with using Turnitin is to reduce accidental plagiarism in our easy-to-access-anything world. It is also to reinforce the value of finding your own ideas & your own voice. However, in using the site, students are submitting their information to the larger, potentially unprotected, world. Yet, they do just that whenever they blog or make a wiki or post on Facebook. What is the role of the school in the Web 2.0 era? Does the concern about privacy negate the value of the learning tool? Again, I have no answers, just a lot of questions.

Thoughts?