According to The Style Manual...

by Shelly Blake-Plock

Just caught myself commenting on a student's blog to make sure to cite sources at the end of the post in APA format.

Which is fine. If it's APA format that I want the kid to learn.

But this is a blog post I'm grading. And so, I realize: oh, yeah... I'm using the internets!


And thus I amended my comment to read: "Please remember to link to your sources within your post".

Links make the Internet, well... the Internet. Links are the only thing that gives the Internet the right to be capitalized (well, that's my rationale; and, on a side note, the history of the capitalization of Internet is actually fairly interesting.)

And while as a history teacher, I'll continue to teach and expect the use of APA format and in-text citations in essays and research papers, when it comes to blog posts -- whether in the less formal ones or in totally straight-laced academic-tone posts -- I'm going to remember to teach linking as a fundamental part of writing.

Because you teach good networked writing by teaching the value of links... and the style that goes with it.

2010 Edublog Awards

Just wanted to thank folks for nominating my post Why Teachers Should Blog for the 2010 Edublog Award for 'Most Influential Blog Post'.

Personally, I'm not that into awards. Actually, I take that back. I do watch the Oscars telecast every year. But that's more a habit than anything else; I like production numbers, what can I say? But as far as awards themselves go, I'm relatively ambivalent.

What I like about the annual Edublogs Awards, however, is not so much the awards themselves, but rather the nomination lists. Those nomination lists serve as a compendium of a lot of good writing and a lot of the most positive activity to have occurred over the course of the year. That's not to say that the lists represent everything, nor is it to say that everything in the lists is uniformally of the highest quality. But it's nice to see what our peers have nominated -- and it's nice to see that our peers have nominated. In other words, in these busy times, it's nice to see folks actually taking the time to offer up props to edubloggers where ever they may be and what ever they may be writing.

Check out those lists. The grab-bag starts here. Take a bit of time to look over all of the blogs. It's striking to see just how much quality thinking and serious debate is going on. Kudos to all you bloggers out there.

More on Why I Want Students to Blog

Yesterday, I posted about a Freshman who had published over 100 blog posts in a single semester of my West Civ class. A few readers asked if he was one of those outliers who stand apart from the crowd.

That's a tough one to answer. Because in one sense, yes of course any kid who writes that much over the course of a semester is an 'outlier' of sorts. But so are the kids who only produce a dozen posts. In my classes, over 80% of the students posted more than what was required. What does that mean? "Why" are some kids compelled to write so much and put so much time into their blogs? I come back to the idea that a student writes 100+ posts in a semester because the student owns the learning.

I've posted here screenclips of blog archives of four students in my Latin III class. These are high school juniors in a year-long class. Collectively, they produced five-hundred-and-fourteen posts in a single semester. They comprise everything from notes on vocab to student translations of Latin primary sources to pieces that consider current events from the eyes of ancient historians.

And by-and-large, few of these posts were instigated by me. Rather, the students decided what, when, and how to blog. Each student used her or his blog in a slightly different way. Some use them as their primary 'notebooks' while others use them more for personal reflection on issues both within and without the classroom. The students post tests, translations, and bibliographies directly to their blogs: this way, they have easy searchable access to all of that material available on the Cloud via any computer or device.

As a blogger myself, I certainly subscribe to the notion that our blogs are extensions of our personalities and windows into our thought processes. On a personal level, blogs are searchable web-based archives of our own formation and development as thinkers and learners. In recognizing that, we come face to face with a new reality about the way that we should be assessing our students -- as well as ourselves.

Why I Want Students to Blog

Got a screen-clipping I'd like to share with you.

This is from the blog of one of my Freshmen in West Civ class. You can see the titles of his recent posts: "Exam Practice", "Battle of Tours Wiki Source", "Notes West Civ 5/20/10", "Is Monarchy More or Less Effective Than Democracy?", etc.

You'll also notice the number of posts this student published in 2010. He published 113 blog posts.

One-hundred and thirteen blog posts.

During a semester long course.

The required number of blog posts for the course?

65.

What is going on here?

What's going on here is a case where we've got a student who OWNS his blog. We've got a student who has turned his blog into a veritable compendium of West Civ that he is going to be able to use as a searchable reference throughout his high school career.

He is going to eat AP Modern Euro for lunch. He is going to pwn British Literature in his senior year.

Because he owns his knowledge. He owns his understanding. And he's made something authentic: his own personal resource... and a record of the history of his own ideas.

That's why I want students to blog.

What's Your Favorite Blogging Platform?

Set up a new site to act as a sort of 'nerve center' for all of the work I've been doing in education as well as the arts. Even started posting some of my photography.

I tell you this not so much to bore you with the ins-and-outs of the Chesapeake freak life, but rather to urge you to check out a site put together using the options in Blogger-in-Draft -- featuring some nice template alternatives and customization options in addition to experiments like the 'pages' feature which allows you to run separate blog pages off your main Blogger page.

I use Blogger as our primary platform in class both due to its ease of use as well as the super-simple integration with Google widgets, Feedburner, and 3rd party stuff. Of course WordPress offers these things to varying degrees, but when working with large groups of students (like setting all of our 12th graders up with blogs for documenting their senior projects) I've found it's easiest to keep with one system; for me that's the set of tools offered by Google.

Would love to hear what blogging platforms you prefer -- especially with students.

Because the History Classroom Just Ain't What It Used To Be

No sooner did I ask you all to check out my students' new West Civ blog than Andrew B. Watt delivers a comment that turns our student editor's argument on its head.

Fantastic.

Imagine being 15-years-old and putting your work out there for criticism and argument. And imagine receiving criticism and argument almost immediately from some source -- some real person -- beyond the walls of your classroom. Imagine having to think about that and deal with it. And having to do all that in a public sphere.

This is what learning looks like in the 21st century.

I was talking to @schickbob about it earlier, and he nailed it: "The learning starts when commenters start disagreeing with them".

That's what it's all about.

Authentic experiences. Real blogging. Authentic learning. In public.

And learning that you've got to back up what you say and that there's more than one angle to every story.

We can't just pat kids on the head for making a blog. If we do that, we're gonna end up just as inauthentic as the teachers who patted us on the head for writing crappy poetry and putting together cookie-cutter science fair tri-folds. Rather, we've got to use blogs and the connection to the world that the Internet provides to engage our students in real ways to live up to the potential of their convictions while likewise having the humility and sense of civility to provide a forum for discourse.

Thanks to all of you who have supported us along the way to initiating this project and thanks to those of you today who commented on the posts. We plan to post often and we've got some surprises in store as well.

Our tagline is: "Because history just ain't what it used to be". But it might as well be: "Because the history classroom just ain't what it used to be".

639

That's the number of posts I knocked out here on TP in 2009.

639.

Here's a link to the first post I wrote way back when I was still a total newb in the ways of the ed tech community. A year ago, I was a guy bound by the walls of my classroom. I had a bunch of ideas and a bunch of solutions (some good, some not). What I didn't have was a real community with which to share my ideas and from whom to learn. Prof Dev at school wasn't cutting it for me on a personal professional level. I was a bit at sea as a classroom teacher.

All I was sure of was that it could all be done differently.

What a difference a year makes.

I'd like to thank the community that's developed around this blog and around the ed tech PLN on Twitter. Not only do I now realize I'm not alone, I realize that many of the thing I'd thought were weird quirks in the way I was looking at the profession were in fact just a tiny part of the shift going on in the lives and classroom experiences of teachers across this country and throughout the world.

Thanks to the students, teachers, admins, and parents of John Carroll School for giving me the perfect conduit within which to bring many of my paperless dreams into reality; thank you to all of the folks I met in conference this year at NECC, AP/College Board, SocTech in Ed Con, and (soon) at EduCon; thanks to all of the folks who take part in the education discussions and events on Twitter, Elluminate, and Second Life; thanks to the gamers for ruining my 'free time'; thanks to Johns Hopkins for giving me multiple fora in which to present and explore ideas; thanks to the guinea pigs in my first group of paperless/socialtech TFAers; and thanks to all of the readers of this blog.

Hopefully I've lived up to a few of the goals I set out in that first blog post. Here's to 639 more!

Break Starts Now

Winter Break starts now!

I'll be blogging as usual daily through the break, and I welcome any suggestions you have for topics and conversations.

I'm particularly interested in hearing some more global perspectives from readers as I have relatively limited experience in that vein and I've been getting more requests for discussions with a global perspective.

So, all you teachers outside of the US: please share your thoughts, ideas, visions, and observations. Because paperlessness is borderless.

Parents Dig Social Media

Had the opportunity to speak with several parents today about the ins and outs of a paperless classroom.

And two things struck me.

First was that they almost seemed to 'expect' that we'd be using social tech and blogging in class. It really didn't so much come as a surprise to them as it did a relief. This confirms what I've seen over the last two years: parents by-and-large are comfortable with their students using social tools in school. And as social media has become mainstream, parents have come to accept it as just another part of culture.

Second was the thing that almost every parent said was the best the about a paperless classroom: the opportunity to turn daily blogging into a digital portfolio of academic growth. Fundamentally parents understand this. After all, we are the ones who collect bits of our kids' lives in baby-books, scrap-books, and photo albums. The blog is an extension of this habit. The big difference is that the blogs are produced by the kids themselves.

Too often we teachers treat parents as 'the other'. In fact, we should remember that they are usually the ones who want the best for their kids.

So if you are willing to give their kids your best, they're willing to give you their trust. And that's a partnership worth blogging about.

On Blogging and Connections

Reader Cathy writes:

When my students first started blogging, they weren't using each other as potential resources, and I found that they weren't even reading their classmates' thoughts. Part of me thinks that's because they're programmed to work individually for so much of their school lives.

It's not enough to blog.

It's got to be a matter of commenting. It's got to be a matter of sharing posts on Twitter and making other immediate connections. I completely agree with the reader in that sense.

There's a group of young teachers I've been working with, many of whom remain confused about how to grow their PLN into something both useful and helpful. I think part of the difficulty has to do with understanding the relationship between real-time sharing and blogging.

Because a PLN is only as strong as the individual contributions of its attendant members. In other words, you can have 2000 follows on Twitter yet never engage in meaningful interaction there if the follows are folks who aren't actively engaging the network itself.

The same goes for blogs. You can produce a brilliant post, but if there's no one there to share in it, well...

Blogs live and die by their readership. Not in the old financial sense that's killing many newspapers. But rather in the sense of building community. That's the lifeblood of any blog. It's about connecting and getting that readership to play an active role in continuing the life and value of the blog.

Note to new bloggers: your blog is what your readers make it. (And this is a humbling thing, a counter-intuitive thing, and ultimately a good thing).

And so, both students and teachers new to blogging need to understand that the life of a post doesn't depend on it's being published, but rather on its being transmitted throughout the network. The value of the post depends on the network and the reaction of the network. (For those of you savvy in Structuralism, this is the definition of 'meaning' being defined by 'difference').

Blogging is one part writing, one part community building. In that way, it's sort of like theatre. After all, you can have the actors on the lit stage reciting lines, but it's not really theatre until an audience is filling those seats. Because the art of theatre is an art of give-and-take between performer and audience; and it's no different with a blog.

So teach your kids to comment; and not out of a sense of duty, but out of a commitment towards building community and fulfilling the role of active audience member. Teach your kids to Tweet links to blogposts they love -- as well as blogposts they hate. Teach them to use the network structure as a means of exploring their own ideas and challenging their own opinions.

Well done, blogging produces a symbiosis between individual and communal. It's a way to find yourself in others and to find others in yourself.

Reader Responses

In response to my call for reader input, here are some of the responses:

Reader Elise:

I follow you because I feel like the Elementary students that I work with are heading to a paperless system. I struggle, however, with how to balance their need to learn to read and write with books and paper with how to read online and type in the digital age.

I would love to hear more about how teachers might move to less paper at the elementary level.

Reader D.:

I'm interested in many things but especially how to entice the technophobes to march with us in the parade.

Reader Heather:

The tools have not been difficult; in fact, I love them. However, joining the conversation has been challenging for me.

Reader Foxdenuk:

Wondering if there is anything that you can find in books which you can't find on the Internet.

Reader Erik:

The process of getting students to listen to each other, even with tools like edmodo and google docs, has been my challenge.

I'll keep these comments in the front of my mind as I blog over the next week. As always, thanks for the discussion! Blogs without reader input and response aren't blogs; they're vanity mirrors.

You all make this more.

What I've been Reading

Every now and then, I like to show you all what I've been reading, so here's a little trifecta of posts that caught my eye over the last 48 hours or so.

Katie Ash has got a couple of questions about Iowa State's decision to pull landlines.

Nash tries to teach landlubbers about sea life.

And Dean comments on comments.

Good stuff all around.

Tales of a Third Grade Blogger (or, The Year Social Tech Broke)

My twin boys have been blogging throughout the summer.

They've got lists of favorite books, reviews of favorite video games, and a variety of stories and poems about bunnies, battlefields, and everything in between that an eight year old boy might dream about.

And now, after a talk with their teachers, they've got an audience.

Turns out their teachers (same ones I wrote this letter to) are crazy about the idea of their students blogging. And so, they've given my boys permission to do their weekly home/school connections via their blogs.

Not just that, but they want the boys to teach blogging to the rest of their classmates.

Raising a literal bevy of third grade bloggers.

My wife was the one who talked with the teachers during parent night and relayed this information to me; I meanwhile was Mr. Babysitter handling the after-school kid crowd. I can't express how happy I am and how proud I am both of my kids and their teachers. I feel like my little corner of the world just tripped into the 21st century.

This afternoon, my principal wrote a blog post about the changing nature of education and the worthiness of social media in the classroom. Earlier in the day, Bob -- who you should be following (and helping) -- showed me the latest article on Facebook and social tech ubiquity. And now this. All in one day.

Makes me feel like 2009 is the Year Social Tech Broke.

Comments on 'Five Ways to Stop Cheating'

Reader Sam's got issues with my recent advice on ways to stop cheating:

I disagree with many of your statements. What's to prevent a student from posting a plagiarized rough draft on his/her blog (or one written by someone else). Also, not giving tests is not feasible, in the sense that less people are able to cheat on tests than on homework (or other forms of evaluation where they're not supervised)

Thanks for the comments, Sam; here are some practical classroom techniques that might alleviate some of your concerns.

First: on the issue of plagiarizing a rough draft. I have my kids do the majority of their prep work (collecting and evaluating sources, etc) and do the writing of the majority of their rough edits during class. That way, I can roam around and chat with them about their work as they are doing it. This personalized approach goes a long way towards fostering mutual respect. And as I've said before -- particularly with regards to graded blogging -- the kids by-and-large find cheating on blogs to be way lame. It's a matter of finding a balance between tone, attitude, and personal responsibility for one's work.

In terms of your second concern, about the non-feasibility of not giving tests, please suffer this brief anecdote; I understand that personal tales aren't always the best way to demonstrate a point, but I offer this one nonetheless.

Last year I decided to can our AP Art History curriculum (or more precisely the manner by which we approached that curriculum) and start new. I'd taught the course for a few years and although students seemed to enjoy it very much, they always earned marks well below the national average on the AP exam.

Now, the way I used to teach the course was by lecture with weekly slide ID tests -- much as I myself had learned Art History in college.

Well, as a new approach, I decided to can the tests.

Instead, I opened up our classes to more casual conversation about the material ("conversation" as a way of describing class actually came from a student and not me).

And then I replaced weekly tests with bi-weekly blogging.

And guess what?

Every student passed the AP exam and my average beat the nationals.

All without giving tests.

And did I mention to say that there are no prerequisites to get into my AP Art History class? That is, I never cut a student from the roster based on previous academic work; instead I tell them that if they are interested in Art History, then this is the place to be.

So this wasn't a class of "geniuses"; rather it was a class of kids of all academic stripes who loved art.

As for the reader's concern that "less people are able to cheat on tests than on homework (or other forms of evaluation where they're not supervised)", well I'd just have to say that not giving tests forces you to give assignments and approach material in ways that are more open and less "cheatable".

After all: building a quality and authentic assessment is part of what teaching is all about.

Why Teachers Should Blog

I've never been too big on Descartes.

That whole sort of essentialist argument has never been for me. I'm a guy who's built furniture out of science fiction novels and travel books and who's played concerts with nothing but a roll of tin foil and a microphone.

So I've never been too big on the idea that things exist because they have some fundamental essence.

Consider blogs.

There is no substantial qualitative definition of a blog. Blogs, or rather blogging platforms, just exist. The quality or essence of a blog is given meaning only via what the author does with the blog and how the blog is responded to.

And in my mind what this means is that I blog and what I blog -- and how that message is received by others -- tells me what I think.

And it tells me how I think.

My own blog confirms my suspicions that I'm not the most polite person in the world. My blog confirms one of my old professor's observations that in many ways my arrogance is my most important attribute. My blog reminds me that I'm boneheaded and tin-eared. My blog represents me not as an edited professional voice, but as a human being struggling to express ideas, thoughts, reactions, dreams, and general b.s. via a means that uncompromisingly allows for the immediate feedback of strangers and fellow wanderers.

And that's why I think all teachers should blog.

A student in my ed class last night -- a young 2nd year teacher in a Baltimore City public school -- said that he didn't feel like he had anything to offer on his blog or on Twitter. He couldn't think of anything in his classroom that he thought would advance the discussion.

It is in a way frustrating that he doesn't realize how obviously wrong he is. But, more so, it is indicative of his mindset that he is thinking too much. To blog, you can't always allow yourself to be burdened by overthinking. At times this will lead you to a scary place. A place without a safety net. A place full of prat falls.

Because to blog is to teach yourself what you think.

And sometimes what we think embarrasses us and we must then confront our thoughts and consider whether there are alternatives.

This is real maturity. Because real maturity is not about having the right answers, it's about having the audacity to have the wrong answers and re-address them in light of contemplation, self-argument, and experience.

This is made perhaps even more evident by the public nature of the blog, and that is one of the foremost reasons all teachers should in fact blog. Because to face one's ill conclusions, self-congratulations, petty foibles, and impolite rhetoric among peers in the public square of the blogosphere is to begin to learn to grow.

And to begin to understand that it's not all about 'getting it right', but rather is a matter of 'getting it'.

We live in a culture that tells us that you learn from your mistakes, yet which continually punishes and shuns those who make mistakes. It is teachers who have the power to change this. It is teachers who have the power to teach a generation that to fully live and to fully know one's self is to fully live and to fully know one's self in the public conversation. And that to be wrong or to come off as shrill is not always a bad thing; because those too are forms of experience and in reflection they too are to be learned from.

And so, we should teach this new generation to move beyond embarrassment and fear. This is not to condone manifestly insolent behavior online, rather in teaching the qualities -- the unique qualities -- of the globally connected public square, we should be instilling in students both a strident determination to take part in the unadulterated public debate and yet have humility.

I think both are achieved through the crucial practice of critical thinking and earnest self-analysis. And no where, if sincerely met with daily conviction, can both be better employed than in the practice of blogging.

And so, I firmly believe that all teachers should be bloggers. Because if Descartes is wrong, then the thrust of our identity is determined not by our inalienable and essential state of being but by the differences in idea and sense that we demonstrate through our interactions with others.

And teachers, perhaps more than anything else, are the medium -- or have the potential to be the medium -- through which students learn about all that which is 'other'.

The Complete Change.org Guest Posts

Here are the links to the past week's series of guest posts I wrote for change.org.

Thanks to Clay and the folks at change.org for having me over and for helping out with a few technical things.

Be sure to subscribe over there and follow what has proven to be a consistently great blog. Definitely a place on the web for telling it like it is.

Here's the posts:

Disconnected: Romeo and Juliet would have made out just fine if they’d only had a pair of iPhones between ‘em.

Talking 21st Century Skills Blues: We do a disservice to our students and our future if we pretend that we can use 19th century methodologies to facilitate 21st century learning.

Go Geek: We don’t need Teach for America. We need Geeks for America.

Books Were Nice: Don’t get me wrong. I liked books. They were great.

We Are All Health Professionals Now: When I was in eleventh grade, our class was marched down to the auditorium for a presentation on penises.

Goin' Mobile: We need to stop complaining about the time away from classroom learning that fieldtrips represent and start complaining about the time away from fieldtrips that classroom learning represents.

What a Difference a Century Makes: We have already produced babies who will see the calendar flip from the 21st to the 22nd century.

ps -- If you are a registered at change.org or just want to check out some great organizing work, click through the petition and campaign drives; some great work happening there. And stop by my new profile and friend me!

Last Guest Post at Change.org

A post entitled: 'What a Difference a Century Makes'.

Special thanks to Clay for giving me the opportunity to reach a wider audience. It has been extremely valuable to me to be able to dedicate time to some pretty intense stuff; I'm becoming more enamored by the power of blogs every day.

Next week, I'll be going out on the road. I plan to have a series of 'best of' posts running through the week and I hope to get in at least one post daily from out there on the highway.

Best,
Shelly

Day 6 of Guest Blogging at Change.org

Two words: Goin' Mobile.

Day 5 of Guest Blogging: We Are All Health Professionals Now

Today is Day 5 of my romp through the Education Blog at Change.org. Been thinking alot about digital citizenship since getting back from NECC and this guest post reflects much of what's been on my mind.

Day 4 Guest Blogging at Change.org

Day 4 of the Guest Blogging over at Change.org's Education Blog.

Today, a little post I titled 'Books Were Nice'. So, you be nice and head on over there and check it out.

Comment away!