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.

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?

How Twitter Will Change the Way We Live

One of the teachers in my building brought an article from TIME Magazine to my attention recently: How Twitter Will Change the Way We Live. We plan to use the article as part of our Fahrenheit 451 unit, which is focused on technology and society. I am curious to hear how my students feel about this topic, both before and after reading this and other related materials. One of the things that I want to draw their attention to is the fact that our district is now on Twitter. While I am a bit of a technology nut, I have chosen not to join this 140-characters-or-less publication site. I wonder how many of my students "tweet," and if it is meaningful for them, or for their parents, to follow their school on Twitter. I know that this short post is a bit disjointed, but my ideas are still forming. School starts in a week, and my brain is still spinning. We'll see how this unit goes! :-)

Blogging in the Classroom

As I reflect on the last school year and prepare for the next one, I find myself considering how blogging did and could work in my classroom. This past year, all of my Media Lit. students blogged. I tracked their posts in Google Reader and assigned standard journal grades. Here are some of the things that I noticed:

1. I did not see a marked increase or decrease in the number of students who did the work. Most of my seniors wrote something, although there were still those who just didn't do it.
2. I did find that it was easier to have students make up missing blogs, as all of the topics were posted online. At the end of the semester, I had two students who had not written a single blog post, even after several interventions. Both students were going to fail without this semester long assignment, so I called home (again) and gave them one more shot. It was really nice to be able to say "go to X address and email me when you've responded to all of the topics." Upon receiving their emails, I simply logged into to Google and read their posts. They both passed, without a single "I don't know what to do" or an exchanged paper.
3. There are a lot more students who don't know how to use blogging sites than I expected. I spent more time troubleshooting with some students, which bogged down things on my end. However, once they figured out how to blog, it simply became a "normal" assignment.
4. Students paid no more attention to their writing skills than they did on paper.
5. Some students really got into using the online tools. They personalized their sites, inserted links to relevant sites, found images to include, and actively commented on their classmates posts. :-)

This brings me to a major snag. One of the key factors in using blogs in the classroom is the interaction between students that it creates. I assigned commenting, which some students did do. I read some very insightful, engaged comments. A few students even ended up with threads of conversation, as intended. However, Google Reader does not track comments made on Blogger--at least not as far as I have discovered. This means that I can't easily track who is and who is not commenting, which makes grading comments very, very time consuming and difficult. Without the tangible incentive, most students don't bother to do the extra work. Honestly, I don't blame them.

So, how do I use the blogs as more than just an electronic journal?

One thought that is still stewing in my brain: Create cohorts within or between classes. Blogger allows you to have more than one administrator, so a team of four or five (larger? smaller?) could have one blog. They could rotate who is responsible for the initial post, then converse about that post. I would then track less blogs, which would make grading comments easier.

Another thought: I could play more with WordPress, as the comments posted there do show up in Google Reader. I am much more comfortable with Blogger, and feel like it is more student user-friendly.

I need to do more research about what other teachers are doing to make blogging an effective educational tool, as well. One thing that I think is invaluable about blogging, regardless of the other dilemmas: If my students don't know how to use Web 2.0 interfaces, or if they only see them as social networking tools, they will be at a disadvantage in the work force. If nothing else, teaching my students to blog empowers them to use the communication tools of the online age.

A bit of a leap, but related nonetheless

Yesterday, my students read David Foster Wallace's commencement address to the 2005 graduates of Kenyon College. Today, I read a friend's blog entry that happened to be expressing very similar sentiments. While this is neat, it isn't necessarily a "technology in the classroom" topic. Then again, it is. Kenyon College is in Ohio, I'm in Minnesota. The speech was delivered orally in May of 2005, roughly three and a half years ago. Were I teaching ten, fifteen years ago, I would not only lack the transcript-from-a-video-recording, I wouldn't even know the speech had been delivered. The Internet may not be a "latest and greatest" topic, but it is certainly one that brought a relevant, real-world text to my jaded, yearning-for-a-break (we still have two days of classes) seniors. My students had substantive, thought-provoking discussion this morning because the internet brought a college commencement address into their world. Sometimes, it's the "simple" things that enrich the classroom the most.

Wikispaces as storage

I've recently been contemplating the challenges of working without a laptop at school. While the larger screen, separate mouse, and full-size keyboard of a desktop computer is wonderful, it's hard to beat the portability of a laptop. Although I do have a flash drive and the ability to email myself documents, I wish that I had better access to my files. During a discussion about class websites and storage, a friend reminded me that you can upload and download files via a wiki. Her suggestion was to post class materials on the wikispace that I've already created, which led me to think about using the wiki as a way to make my files more accessible. So, I created a "Documents" page, where I post files that I may want at home or elsewhere. There is much refining to be done, as the comment about posting files for students is also valid. We'll see where things lead....

Mind Meister

While brainstorming reading strategies for my lesson cycle on "Civil Disobedience," I tried out Mind Meister. I started a map for Thoreau's ideas about taxes. Now, however, I have a dilemma. How does this help students? Do I simply use it as a glorified organizer on the SMARTBoard? Do I spend the time having the students set up accounts and then working on the map at home? A little bit of column A and a little bit of column B? As with all new technologies and Web 2.0 tools, I struggle with the balance between enhancing student learning and playing with fun, flashy toys....

YouTube & Censorship

A colleague and I spent some time grumbling this week about YouTube and censorship. While there is a lot of content on YouTube that isn't school appropriate, there is also a lot of content that can supplement learning. However, our system is set up so that no one computer has a consistent IP address (no permanent logins to sites like Google Reader). Therefore, my computer can't be granted access to a site that is otherwise blocked. As an emerging Web 2.0 educator, this frustrates me. However, there are enough other things occupying my time, so I have choosen to not explore solutions.

Until today. Thanks to Dana Swier Huff for posting a solution on her blog! There are free, legitamte ways to access the appropriate material, even without work-access to the blocked site.

WIkis in Education

I started using wikis last year, when I stole the idea of wiki book reports from SWC Geek Girl. You can see my ninth grade students' work (of the expected variety in quality) by visiting the AVHS-Omega-English wikispace. This individual/interlinked project went fairly well, while the tenth grade literary group discussion pages where less successful. A blog site would have been a better starting place for the group discussion project. Both sets (9th and 10th) linked their pages to the master index. My current twelfth graders are using a wiki page as a links bulletin board for their individual blogs. The set up was a bit rocky, but it's now helpful for finding each other's thoughts.

I still haven't figured out how to best show my students the ins and outs of the wiki. How much do I, as the teacher, show them versus just cutting them loose to figure it out on their own? I tried setting my senior loose, but they struggled with lost material due to overwriting each other. In the end, the content made it up for everyone to see, but I still feel that there is (as always) finessing to be done with the creation process.

Media Lit.

My Media Literature classes are going to journal online this semester. While writing with pen and paper is very valuable, so is mastering the art of communicating online. Therefore, each student will keep a blog.

To those in my courses (and others who have educational projects), remember to leave out personal information, like first names and hometowns. Even saying the name of a school creates a potential security and safety issue in our modern era. While we want to trust the world, we must be cautious about how much we reveal to the global audience of blog.

On the other hand, blogging is an opprotunity to sound out ideas on a much larger scale than ever before. Put your best “foot” forward, express your ideas, and respond to the thoughts of others.