Clemson students are in a great position when the first arrive on campus to experience what it means to be digitally literate in an online world. Each new student is required to have a laptop, and many of them are required to take those laptops to class. Students also have access to a number of computer labs around campus, including more specialized labs in each department. For their English courses, the Studio on the 1st floor of Daniel has a wide variety of computer software for students to use. Even with all this technology available to them, our students still may feel lost when asked to complete an assignment involving technology that they aren’t familiar with. And this is often surprising to the instructor, who has come to believe that these incoming students should be “Digital Natives” and are thus much more familiar with computers than they actually may be.

I’d like to examine that term, “Digital Natives,” for a moment. First of all, I like it a lot. I think it goes a long way towards explaining a large cultural shift that is taking place within the realm of technology. I even have a post on this site, also written for 885, where I talk about my history with computers, and how I believe that I am a digital native. Our students, first years, are (most of the time) even more comfortable with using computers than I was as a freshman. So it is easy to give an assignment that requires the creation of a blog or managing a Google doc and assume that our students will know how to do it. In many cases, this is a valid assumption. Our students have their Facebook or Myspace sites, and they know how to use the web for a number of services…much more so than people who would consider themselves “Digital Immigrants,” at least. But as I use more and more types of technology in the classroom, I start to see more than just a black and white distinction between “Digital Natives” and “Digital Immigrants.” There seems to be another category that seems much more applicable to our students: “Digital Tourists.”

Like the map I linked to in my earlier post, students who may be natives of the Facebook nation may not be familiar enough with the Blogipelago, so they have to move slowly through it like a tourist–asking for directions, looking for the current Fodor’s guidebook, and commiting various cultural faux pas. If we, as instructors, are going to introduce our students to new styles of writing and communicating online, we’re going to disregard some of the assumptions that tie into the terms “Digital Native” or “Digital Immigrant.” In some areas of technology, we are neither completely native or completely foreign, we are simply tourists and we all have to learn as we go along, teacher and student alike.

This series of posts will focus on some specific topics that go along with the idea of a digital classroom. I suppose I should define that term, in order to avoid later confusion. A digital classroom is one in which the students are able to cohesively integrate the lessons they learn in their face-to-face classroom environments with an online classroom community, made up of blogs, collaborative writing tools, and other social uses of technology. This ideal classroom would be made up of students who creatively engage the realms of rhetoric and argument using all tools available, both online and off. The instructor’s role in this class would be to encourage students to seek out new and applicable uses of technology to fulfill their rhetorical goals, moderate the ongoing discussion taking place within the online community, and provide the students with physical classroom environment that acts as a staging point for learning and engaging in composition and rhetoric.

And with that definition in mind, this series of posts for this project will discuss some of the issues that come to mind when thinking how a digital classroom can work. This introductory post will also serve as kind of a table of contents for the rest of my work, so without further ado, here are my topics of discussion.

-Blogs and Community

In this post, I will talk about what makes a blogging assignment work, because in many cases, the blogs that are created by students are really nothing more than glorified web pages, because they don’t involve the level of community that good blog writing should.

-MultiModal Media

This post will deal with the varying aspects of multimodal media, and how our students can use the many tools available to them on the web to creatively engage in multimodal rhetoric.

-Concerns with Technology

This post will deal with some of the concerns that are present when using technology in the classroom: privacy, copyright, and the whole digital tourist conundrum.

-Our Students at Their Best

I wanted to close off this discussion with a look at what our students can do when they are at their creative best when engaging their rhetorical abilities with the online tools available to them.

The final element of this project will involve a podcast at the end of each post in this series that details my Jerry Springer-like final thoughts on the topics. That will do it for this post, so goodbye!

There. Its all so simple now, isn’t it? And yet it becomes extremely complicated when we try to establish a blog for a writing class. What I’ve found is that there are a few ways to do this, and the most common are The Corporate Blog, Individual Student Blogs, and the MotherBlog. Each of these methods has something positive going for it, and we’ll spend some time talking about them.

The Corporate Blog
This is one website with multiple student authors. The instructor acts as an administrator, but each student has the ability to post to this one blog. This works pretty well if the students aren’t going to be required to create specific assignments for the class, but may not be individualized enough to really allow students to creatively experience the full potential of blogging.

Individual Student Blogs
Each student publishes and customizes an individual weblog. The instructor visits each student blog to observe and comment on the work done. This is possibly the most free-forming, but students can get lost in this assignment if they don’t have enough direction or if a solid community has not been established.

The Mother Blog
The instructor and each student sets up a blog. The instructor’s acts as sort of a highlight reel for the classroom. The instructor comments on and links to a few student posts each week. Students are encouraged to visit and comment on the instructor’s site. Each student site has a link on the instructor’s blog.

Each method has its positives and negatives, but only the MotherBlog seems to establish both the individuality that a blogging student needs and a central communal location to establish the blogging network. And if establishing a blogging community is the goal of a 103 blogging project, I would take that a few steps further. But that requires a really neat piece of technology called RSS.

What exactly is RSS? Well, it just so happens the folks at CommonCraft have a video for that too!

There, it all makes sense, right? Well, maybe. But what good is an RSS feedreader with class blogs? To give an example, here’s what my public RSS reader page looked like for this past semester. As you can see, I’ve separated my students into their sections, providing a link to each student blog. By clicking on the names in the left-hand column, anyone can view posts made by the students. Trying to encourage a blogging community for my students, I gave them this link so that they could read their classmate’s blogs, comment on them, and link to them. It sort of worked.

I talked about this with my mentor, Dr. Young, and we had a great conversation about the various things that can be done to establish a blogging community. He saw my RSS feed, and almost immediately came up with a way to improve it. The classroom subheadings are too big. Students can easily get lost by looking at a selection of 18 other students, but if that subsection is made smaller…perhaps creating groups of 5 or 6, students will be much more willing to read the postings of their groupmembers and contribute to their discussions. I will most likely take Dr. Young’s advice in the future when I set up these blogging projects with my classes.

I’ve also looked around at some of the thoughts posted by my own classmates, and I’d like to talk about some of them here.

Even though Jonathan was discussing a different topic within his series of blog posts on visual rhetoric, I believe he hit the nail on the head within his reflection post. Jonathan said:

“As a wrap-up to my discussion of visual rhetoric, I would like to consider a quote from Jean-Paul Sartre’s play The Devil & the Good Lord. The character Nasti says: “My brothers, we have no need of priests; any man can perform the rite of baptism; any man on earth can grant absolution; all men may preach. I tell you truly: all men are prophets, or God does not exist” (18). This quote, while perhaps not entirely relevant to the argument I am making about the inevitability of visual rhetoric and its applicability to today’s student, serves as a nice metaphor for the consideration of the rhetor as the one responsible for serving as a “gatekeeper” of meaning. If all students possess the power to construct arguments, if it is not a holy rite reserved only for the elite, then these students must also take responsibility for making sure they are not misleading their audience to erroneous conclusions by setting up arguments based solely on sentimentality and bathos.”

This, to me, is one of the keys to blogging–the idea that students now hold the keys for creation of meaning. That is an exciting and challenging idea for both teacher and student, as it implies a standard of quality in each work that is constantly expected, because students are constantly writing for an audience. Tess also touched on the ideas of blogging and audience in the conclusion to her post from last spring.

“When considering the actual quality of the work the students are producing it seems the most important factor was audience. The atmosphere is what is crucial. As long as a certain standard is set and maintained, there is no real reason to think students would not post quality work. Martindale found that students began to post longer and in some cases extra assignments. Clearly this article demonstrates that Blogs can be an effective learning tool that students may even enjoy using!”

I think Tess nailed it with that thought. Students will write better when they know they have an audience waiting to read their work. Jonathan’s take supports this with the notion that students must also be considerate in the nature of their arguments, making sure to present fully balanced ideas to their audience, and not resort to cheap emotional appeals.

And thus we get to the crux of the situation. Blogs in the classroom are useful in a number of ways, but in the end it boils down to a few significant aspects–audience and community. By establishing a community of discourse, in which our students know that their work will be read by their peers, students will have a sense of purpose to their online rhetoric and argument, hopefully improving the quality of their writing. I look forward to seeing how I can improve what I’ve done with blogging in my classroom next semester.

So what?

Does writing a piece of multi-modal discourse help my students? How does this apply to what they can accomplish within the 103 classroom? Well, the short answer to that last question is that it universally applies to what they can accomplish. In 103, we are encouraging our students to form arguments and write in multiple literacies, and projects that are multimodal in nature reflect that. I’ve tried to show my students multiple examples of multimodal literature, ranging from creative advertisements to movie trailers, and I think that they get the idea. But what I wanted to do with this blog post was look at some of my personal favorite examples.

I am becoming increasingly fascinated with how people tell stories. I’m an avid reader of Neil Gaiman, and I appreciate the way that he describes himself as a storyteller first, comic book writer and novelist second. His work absolutely reflects that idea, and I completely respect it. Telling stories is an important part of nearly all human cultures, and I find it especially interesting to see how that has changed in the digital age, where we have what amounts to a kind of interactive storytelling. This interactive storytelling may take many different forms, but the two that I have the most experience with are ARGs and videoblog storylines.

The ARG that I played was part of an advertising campaign for the movie A.I. It turned into a wide-ranging and very addictive online game. I still remember the strange feeling of receiving a recorded phone message from one of the game characters, and helping solve the clues that advanced the game to its final conclusion. The trailer was posted on Aintitcool.com and within a couple days, a Yahoo Group had been formed (I read in the group for a few days before joining, but was still among the first to really take part, joining within a week of its creation), and a few other web sites had been created for those of us attempting to solve the murder of Evan Chan. The site Cloudmakers.org provides a detailed analysis of the game itself and how it all went down. But it all started with a mysterious credit in the first trailer for the film A.I., where they listed a phone number and the rather odd credit for a “Sentient Machine Therapist” named Jeanine Salla, and the search was on.

While I’ve spent some time in my classroom discussing inventive forms of advertising as a method of rhetoric, this Alternate Reality Game devised by the promoters of A.I. changed the way web advertising worked. And while the game rarely even touched on the events of the movie, it did take place within the film’s world, and it helped build word of mouth and excitement for the film. It also was successful on another front, as the game company that created “The Beast” (as the A.I. game was later known) were also preparing to release an ARG of their own, that would require participants to pay to play. But I think what interested me most in this project was how it was so involving for the audience, and it really felt like what we were doing was changing the story. And according to the puppetmasters of the game, we actually were. As an answer to the question on how significantly the players changed the game, the puppetmasters responded:

Tons. Players spotting typos were responsible for two entire characters (Jeanine’s crabby AI and the elusive Jason Fertors). Players spotting a re-used stock photo forced us to write The Step-Self thread.

Players also voted with their interests. The Red King was a random GK flunky as outlined and wasn’t supposed to be mentioned past the first week. But the web developers threw in a cool sound file on the Shado Paj, the players reacted, and a star was born! (The down side being of course, that we had to rewrite the story each time RK had a part.)

We had a variety of ideas about how the Loki problem might get solved, none of which involved a dream database, but once it was there, what a resource!

Our original plan for the game was quite different from the final product, which was written on the fly (in between marathon bug fixing-sessions and orange juice binging). That wonderfully dynamic interplay is entirely due to the players.

I just think that is incredibly cool, and it really opens up a lot of paths for true multimodal storytelling. I’m not sure how it can be adapted within the realms of a classroom, but it does make for an interesting study.

Over the last year or two, another example of online interactive storytelling has taken youtube and the current web-going community by storm, and that is the story of LonelyGirl15. What started out as seemingly another in the long line of teenage videobloggers on Youtube evolved into a video series of over 370 episodes, each adding to a story involving a terrifying cult and some innocent teenagers trying to escape it. This story took on a life of its own as viewers started noticing small clues in the videos that this wasn’t actually a real girl, and that there were some pretty strange things on the walls of her typical teenage room, including shrines to Aleister Crowley and various other symbols. As Bree explained her situation in regards to her religion, strange things started happening to her in regards to a ceremony she would need to be a part of. The forums of the site had people trying to figure out more and more info related to the show, as well as the ARG spinoff, until the finale of season one when Bree was killed by The Order.

Similar to the A.I. game, the audience influenced the direction of the video through their interactions with Bree’s Youtube account and the forums at lg15.com. All of it added up to an exciting interactive storytelling experience.

These are just a couple of interesting examples of how the internet can be an almost limitless tool in the realm of storytelling. And what is even more interesting for the 103 instructor is that these ideas can be translated into the field of argument and rhetoric, especially with the development of an online writing and blogging community.

But there is something to the idea that our students need to have at least some level of instruction in the confusing realms of the Internet Social Network world, but is that to come at the expense of valuable writing instruction and rhetorical practice? I’m not sure. I think it is important that my students are as prepared as they can possibly be to contribute to whatever online activities that the class involves, but I also think that the best way to learn how to do something is to simply do it. There are probably limits to this sink or swim thought process in regards to using technology in the classroom, but there are definitely ways to get around them. Involving groups of students, combining those that may not be as comfortable with technology with those that are is at least one thing that I’ve done in the past when presenting students with an assignment involving computer technology that students are unfamiliar with.

And so this question of digital tourists, immigrants, and natives is something will continue to be a problem within the classroom. All students are not going to have equal access to computer technology, and so the chance of asking a student to do something they have no experience with is pretty close to 100%. But students can adjust and learn and a lot of that responsibility rests with the instructor. So what is the balance? I’ve found that I can be pretty constantly available for technical questions from my students through email. We do the basic things in class, and through office hours and email communication, I can provide whatever support my students need to get their projects off the ground. This balance can really only happen when there is a valid digital community present within the classroom.

Another area of trouble can easily arise in the classroom when the issue of copyright comes up. We’re encouraging our students to create pieces of visual rhetoric, and they may not always use copyrighted material correctly, and this conversation inevitably comes up. The issues related to Copyright and Educational Fair Use is something that I’ve started to pay attention to recently, and it is a topic that is important for our students to learn about and address. One of the ways I’ve done this is by showing this really impressive video done by students at Stanford University.

This video proves its point through both the form and content. By creating the video with short clips of Disney cartoons, the creators exhibit their own interpretations of fair use, and they do it in a pointed manner. Disney is a company that aggressively pursues any copyright violations, almost to the extreme. And so this video tackles the argument right at its very heart. My students loved this video when I showed to them, and I think it helps teach an important lesson…something that is needed when they start to do their own projects that may need to use copyrighted material. They know that they can be protected with educational fair use for parodies and various other reasons, leaving them free to contribute to the general idea of a mashup culture that is becoming popular these days.

Without the exceptions for parody and educational fair use, students would be unable to do work like these two excellent parody videos.

and

As great examples of video mashups, these two fake trailers reflect a growing trend in digital rhetoric: creating something new from something old. This ties in with some of the oldest ideas of literary theory, as Roland Barthes said in his essay on “The Death of the Author,” that “a text is not a line of words releasing a single ‘theological’ meaning (the ‘message’ of the Author-God) but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash.” With this in mind, this concept of “remix culture” is something that is as old as literature itself. Explaining this idea to our students is important, but they have to understand it within the context of the current overaggressive copyright environment.

That should do it for this post. Next time, I’d like to talk about what our students are actually doing, and what they can aspire to do.

I can’t claim the first example, as it was something that I saw online last year that was highlighted by a few of the education blogs I was reading regularly.

This student created a remake of Othello using WoW machinima, and it is great! This shows a level of engagement with the work that most students don’t show with typical writing assignments. Yet his interesting take on the play, through a multimodal format, exhibited creativity, originality, and some dedication to the work, as it had to have taken some time to record and prepare the scenes, record the voice-over, and edit it all together into a finished product. That’s the sort of of engagement that a digital classroom should create.

In my high school Film Class, I had students go above and beyond what was required from them in a film editing project. These two projects are from students who were at opposite ends of the grade spectrum, yet each group produced something original and of very high quality.

and

I had a lot of fun watching my students experiment with some new technologies, and I think they enjoyed the process of creation as well. Both showed something different in their videos, using different editing techniques and styles. Yet they both had the same assignment, which was just to create a narrative using editing techniques. Their only tools were a digital still camera and Windows MovieMaker.

But that was last year. How have my students this year worked through their technology questions? For the photo essay, I gave them a range of possibilities for how to complete the project, ranging from very basic photo blogs, to photo slideshows, to video projects, and I had the full range of assignments turned in. I’ve decided to show a couple of them as examples of slide shows and videos.

Kacey used his own musical skills and his Mac laptop to try something new with his slideshow. He uploaded the finished product to Youtube, and its something very cool and original…and definitely very Kacey.

Brinley’s slide show was interesting in that she used a website I wasn’t familiar with to create her product. I gave my students a few sites to check out, like Flickr, Google Presentation, and Zoho Show, but Brinley (and a few other students who also used this site) found an option that worked well for her.

I’m looking forward to collecting some more interesting student work over the next year and a half in 103. Should be a lot of fun!

I love computers. I’ve had a fascination with computers ever since my first Apple II. It has been interesting to look back at how computer technology has grown up with me over my lifetime. My generation can truly claim to be the first true digital natives. And that is something to be proud of, I think. We are comfortable with the ever-changing world of technology, because rapid change is normal for us. Many older people tend to be uncomfortable around new uses for technology. And using new technologies in any field can be daunting. Education, a field that is dominated by a much more traditional establishment, may even be the most resistant to drastic technological changes. So this puts my generation in an interesting position. We are digital natives living in a world dominated by digital immigrants. And it is up to us to provide the sparks of change in our respective fields. At least, that is one of my goals. I definitely feel like I tried to do some of that during my time as a high school teacher.

Education

A little over a year ago, I really started to research some of the ideas behind using computer technology in the classroom. I was a high school English teacher, and I was looking for something groundbreaking. My research really began during the spring semester of 2006, when I first heard about DOPA, a piece of legislation ostensibly designed to protect children from on-line predators, but which could have prevented schools from capitalizing on many new Internet technologies in the classroom. In the previous year, I tested out a few ideas of using discussion forums and blogs with some of my classes and the results showed a lot of promise. So this legislation really affected some of the things that I wanted to use in my classroom. Especially since I wanted to use the next summer to prepare some really adventurous ideas for my classes in the fall.

After seeing legislation that might prevent me from even exploring the options of using social networking websites in my classroom, I simply had to learn more about the pros and cons of using Internet technologies in my classroom. I knew that people are often afraid of things they don’t understand, and since online social networking was such a new concept to everyone, I was sure that my district would be extremely cautious in allowing me to experiment. So I made sure to cover my bases. I began reading the blogs (and even books) of some great educators who have used multiple Internet resources in their classrooms. I took note of what worked and what didn’t work and tried to come up with some of my own ideas to try out with my students the next year. Over the summer, I prepared a teaching demonstration through the Upstate Writing Project on using Wikis and Blogs in the classroom. I later presented a variation on this demo to my department at Hanna and also to a group of teachers studying technology and education at Daniel. I prepared an extensive memo to my District Office describing the technologies that I would be using in the classroom and the importance of using them. That was a battle I had to fight, as my district had blocked any website that included blogs, forums, or photo sharing. My memo did not convince the district to remove the blocks altogether, but it did provide a precedent for using social networking sites in the classroom. I felt like I had a success in convincing some people who were intimidated by the technology that I wanted to use. My preparation over the summer was absolutely worth it, as I had an amazing year in technology with my students. We created an online Wikibook for our Film studies elective, posted video narratives on Youtube, and blogged about seminal films in various genres. Every day, I learned something new about the exciting opportunities available for an educator online.

Now, I have an opportunity to take what I have learned while teaching high school to students at the college level. My GTRs and I are using blogging technology as the bridge between the lab and lecture sections of 103. One of my goals is to see my students become comfortable with blogging. They should understand that blogging isn’t simply about writing your thoughts on a webjournal, although that can be part of it. Blogging is about community. Commenting, linking, discussing. If the students are able to do that, then I’ll consider this 103 blogging experiment a success. And I hope to learn a few more things, as well. I’d like to get better at facilitating that blogging community. And I have a couple ideas for how to do that. One of my favorites is to use a blog of my own to highlight specific posts and comment threads. Use my blog as a sort of central forum for the others. As the semester progresses, I’ll see how that idea takes off.

Fun and Games

Growing up around technology, I’ve always enjoyed the entertainment opportunities that computers and video game consoles have provided. I can’t remember a time in my life when there wasn’t a computer of some kind in our house. I was born in 1981 and by 1982, my parents had one of the first Timex Sinclair computers. I’m not sure exactly what they could do with it other than some basic programming, but it was just the start of a long chain of computer technology in the Bevill household.

The first system I remember was the Atari 2600. I was very young when we had this gaming system, but I still remember some of the great games on it. From Pitfall to DigDug to Dr. J vs. Bird, I loved playing some of those classic games. But that first console didn’t quite measure up to my first experiences with an actual computer.

Our first official home computer was an Apple II GS that we got in the mid to late 80s. By this time, I was old enough to actually know what to do with a computer, so I remember it vividly. We had some fantastic games on that machine, like The Oregon Trail, Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?, Spirit of Excalibur, and Scorch. My dad was still pretty big into text-based adventures. I wasn’t a huge fan of those. Being eaten by a Grue in the dark wasn’t quite my idea of a fun game. But trying to save Johnny from Dysentery was the pinnacle of video gaming.

Our first IBM PC came soon after the Apple II. We could play many of the same games, but the DOS-based 486 was a different experience from the earlier Apple. Learning how to navigate a DOS command line was challenging, but worth the effort. I added more games to our library including Civilization, Colonization, Castles, and even started branching out into RPG games like Ultima and Might and Magic. By the early 90s, my taste in computer games had been firmly rooted in strategy and rpg titles. Even today, I rarely play anything else.

This may have been my favorite part of this assignment. I loved those old systems and games. I also had every member of the Nintendo console family (and still do), but there was just something charming about those early computer titles. Remembering some of these titles has been an absolute joy. So much so, that I downloaded an emulator called DOSBOX last week to play some of my old favorites. I’ve had to brush up on some of my old DOS commands to do it, but it has been a lot of fun. And those games are as great now as they were back then.

A Digital Lifestyle

For me, the most exciting thing about technology is learning something new. My most recent example of this is my switch to Linux. Over last Christmas, I decided to try out a Linux operating system just to see how it would go. So I backed up my wife’s computer (of course, I wasn’t going to try this on my computer yet), and gave Ubuntu a whirl. I used as much information as I could find on various forums and wikis and finally had a working Linux laptop. After trying things out for a few weeks, I decided to get a little more ambitious and set up our desktop as a dual-boot machine with XP and Ubuntu. It worked like a charm. I even tried to do some things on the bleeding edge of open-source technology by installing desktop effects like Compiz-Fusion. I eventually purchased a new laptop for myself with the sole intent of installing Ubuntu on it. I made sure the hardware was compatible and took the plunge. Today, only one of my computers uses any proprietary software, and that is the dual-booting desktop (try as I might, I just can’t get any Total War games to work correctly on Linux). With the ease of use, security of the system, eye-candy, and overall wonderfulness of Ubuntu, I wouldn’t go back to a Windows world for anything. It was challenging to learn the quirks of this new operating system (including relearning some terminal commands that I hadn’t used since the DOS days), but very rewarding.

Learning new things and changing with the times has been a theme of mine in relation to technology. I was the first kid in my class to bring in typed homework assignments in elementary school (my favorite was a story about “The Greatest Knight in the World”, complete with Print Shop Pro graphics and Old English font!). I grew up on Ami Pro, Works, Word, and now OpenOffice. I remember making the switch from the Mac O/S to DOS to Windows 3.1 to Windows 95, 98, 2000, XP, Vista, XP again, and now to Ubuntu Linux. Today, I use computers as my main source of news, communication, banking, shopping, bill-paying, writing, education, archiving, and entertainment. I can’t even imagine how I could start over in an off-line home.

I still remember having to install a second phone line in my parent’s house so that we could connect our 14.4k modem to Prodigy and talk on the phone at the same time. Now in my own house, I have a desktop, two personal laptops, my wife’s work laptop, and the Nintendo Wii all hooked up to a wireless network at broadband speeds. I first saw the Internet through Prodigy 16 years ago and the changes since then have been immense. But I think I came in at just the right time. Technology was growing up right alongside me. I’m proud to be among the first generation that can truly call themselves Digital Natives.

Life on the web can be frightening to those who haven’t grown up with it. But I have the map. And I’m enjoying the ride.

I’d like to keep the focus of the presentation on this site and encourage you to read through what I’ve posted and offer your comments on anything that catches your eye. Over the course of the afternoon, I’d like to see some discussion take place on how to implement some of these technologies in our classrooms. So please, feel free to use my site as a forum for your comments. Just click on the comments tag at the bottom of my post to write your thoughts.

Web 2.0 Applications

Click Here for my post on Blogging and RSS
Click Here for my post on Podcasting and Vodcasting
Click here for my post on Wikis and Online Collaboration

Purpose
The purpose of today’s presentation is to introduce you to many of the online tools available for your classroom. In the past, I’ve done presentations where I’ve guided other teachers through creating a blogsite or a wiki, but that’s not really my goal today. One thing that I’ve discovered is that these projects take a bit of planning. Just making a wiki or a blog without any plan can be a frustrating experience. So my goal today is to show you some resources and allow you the chance to come up with ideas on how to use them. If, during the course of the class, you would like to get started on one of these projects, feel free. But please let us know through the comments section what your ideas are…and how you plan to implement them.

Reasoning
The Internet community is undergoing a change. Surfing the web once entailed passively reading and consuming the information that was available. Today’s savvy websurfer is not only a consumer, but a contributor. Our students are adapting to this new socially driven web. In my classes, it is the rare student that isn’t on Myspace or Facebook or hasn’t visited Youtube or Flickr. As Will Richardson said in his book, they are “digital natives.” In many cases, as their teachers, we are “digital immigrants.” We’re trying to keep up with all these changes when we’ve just finished learning the previous ones. But we have to keep up. We even have to innovate sometimes. And we most definitely have to understand this technology so that we can teach our students how to use it safely and responsibly.

I hope you enjoy the presentation. Please leave any comments or suggestions for how I can improve it. You may download the powerpoint portion of this presentation here. Thanks!

If you’ve ever been to Wikipedia, you have a pretty good idea what a Wiki is. At its most basic level, a Wiki is a collaborative website that anyone can edit. Now editing can be restricted to registered users or approved authors, but the principle is still the same. If two heads are better than one, than 6 million heads are better than one.

One of the key elements present in all of Web 2.0 is the idea of collaboration. No application puts this principle to the forefront like a Wiki. When using a Wiki, the reader can become the critic, the editor, or even the new author with a few clicks of the mouse. The grand idea is that multiple people working together can create something better than a single author. One of the “backronyms” for Wiki is “What I Know Is…” You write what you know…someone else writes what he knows…I write what I know…and all of us are smarter because of it.

Wikis in the Wild
If browsing Wikipedia is your only connection to Wikis, then you may need to take a look at how people are using Wikis for all kinds of things. The Librarian Chick is one of my new favorite sites. It is a Wiki, collecting links to various resources all around the Internet that are useful in research, writing, and education. If you know of a site that could be added to her collection, feel free to do so. It is a Wiki…that’s the point. Another one of my favorites is from Will Richardson. He uses a Wiki to collect and organize as much information on the uses of Web 2.0 in education as he, and his readers can find. Maybe one day I’ll add my own blog to the list. Bud the Teacher also uses a Wiki to display his blogging rules and student resources.

I used a Wiki to set up an online textbook for my film class. It was a really promising idea, and making that textbook probably could have been the main focus of the course, but I didn’t use it as often as I would have liked. I was still able to get some really good material from my students on the lab days where we focused on the site.

Starting a Wiki
Like Blogs, there are many online resources available to start your Wiki. Some of the best include PBWiki, Wikispaces, and Wikia. Some of the sites are easier to get started with than others, but all are pretty self-explanatory.

Other Ways to Collaborate on the Web
One of my favorite new web applications are online office suites. Google and Zoho are two of the most popular providers of online office applications right now. Both allow for collaboration and full integration with Microsoft Office files. Zoho has a few more options, including a notetaking application, and an online powerpoint application. All of these can be open to collaboration with the public or to private users.

My Wife Eve uses Zoho Show to archive her Powerpoint lectures on her websites for her students to review. Zoho provides a stripped down, easily accessed version of her Powerpoint slides that is much easier than converting a presentation into a webpage.

At my school, Kris Turner and Amber Owen use Google Docs to enable peer revision of pieces of writing. This provides almost a virtual writer’s workshop…where students can edit, change, and comment on each other’s papers. All changes are tracked through their user accounts. If these students have a Google account for the documents, they can also integrate that account with their weblogs from Blogger.com, further expanding the online community.

Ideas
There are many ways to foster collaboration through online applications. How would you do it? What would you use? What could work in your classroom?

I was honestly surprised with the results. Some groups took a more fun approach, others made serious pieces of art, some slacked off (typical seniors), but I think they all learned something with their videos. Here are a couple of the winners that were posted on Youtube. Each of these videos currently has over 400 views on Youtube…so they haven’t hit the big-time yet…but I’m sure it’ll happen soon. :)

So what does this have to do with you? Your classes aren’t studying film (maybe they are, I don’t know), and you can’t think of any reason to use technology like this in your classroom.

Well, I’m here to set you straight.

Establishing a multimedia presence on the Internet can be as simple and straightforward as writing a blog or publishing a webpage. Many of the tools you need are at your school, or easily acquired, and don’t even have a steep learning curve. If you can use a blog, you are not too far away from establishing your first Podcasts…or even Vodcasts.

How do I start?
The Equipment necessary to create a Podcast is minimal. You need a computer with an internet connection…a microphone…and that’s about it. To make a video, add a digital camera to the list (can be a still or digital video camera, doesn’t matter). For audio, you can use the free software Audacity on a Windows PC, or Garageband for a Mac. For video, you can use Windows Movie Maker for your PC or IMovie for your Mac. There a multiple “Howto” guides on the Web to help you get started. This is one of the best I’ve found.

Once you have your materials, begin!

What do I talk about?
Well, anything really. But it can’t hurt to look around and see what is out there. The Education Podcast Network is a great place to start to see how other educators are using podcasts in their classrooms. Look at LibriVox to see if your class would like to perform a Radio Style reading of a classic piece of literature. Take a course at UC Berkeley without leaving your office. Or spend some time browsing on Youtube, where I’ve seen reenactments of Twelve Angry Men, Macbeth, and Othello. While some of these options seem more performance-oriented than you may wish for, there are many other ways to use Podcasts in your classroom. You could provide recordings of your lectures on your website to students who miss classes or are on homebound or allow stage-shy students to give presentations through a video. Your options are wide-open.

If the idea of podcasting seems a little clearer to you now, what are some of your ideas? How could this be useful in your classroom?

So let’s begin, shall we?

Why use blogs?

My biggest reason for using blogs is the idea of an audience for student writing. My students simply write better when they understand that someone other than their teacher may be reading it. By posting their writing on blogs, students are publishing their work for a theoretical world-wide audience. Another reason is the collaborative nature of blogwriting. Through links, trackbacks, comments, and RSS feeds, students can create a virtual community in their blogs. This adds a strong social context to their writing. It is more realistic to students that their classmates will read and respond to what they wrote than the mostly theoretical worldwide community. So when they do get a comment from an outsider, it really adds a level of depth to the existing conversation. Like this example with a student taking a high school civics class…and his mature response to the comment by someone he doesn’t know.

A benefit for me as a teacher is the archiving capabilities of blog posts. I can look back and see which posts were made on which day without cluttering up my file cabinet. When my students are supposed to be writing a journal entry for each day of research, I can check my class RSS feed that day and see each entry as it is posted. (Sorry for only linking to an image, some schools block social networking sites, like blogs or RSS readers…here’s the real link).

What can I do with blogs?
Lots of things! There are a few methods for blogging with your class that you may want to start with.

The Corporate Blog
This is one website with multiple student authors. The teacher acts as an administrator, but each student has the ability to post to this one blog.

Individual Student Blogs
Each student publishes and customizes an individual weblog. The teacher may be added to the site as an administrator.

The Mother Blog
The teacher and each student sets up a blog. The teacher’s acts as sort of a highlight reel for the classroom. The teacher comments on and links to a few student posts each week. Students are encouraged to visit and comment on the teacher’s site. Each student site has a link on the teacher’s blog.

Practicalities
Amazingly enough, some school districts aren’t completely sold on the idea of social networking. To many people, social websites = Myspace. That simply isn’t the case. Not all blogsites are havens for online predators. Most unknown visitors to your students sites will be respectful and courteous. But there are steps you, as the teacher, can take to make your online experiment a safe one.

-Establish some ground rules. There are lots of examples online of other teachers who set up class blogging projects, and their rules are pretty easy to follow. Mine are included in my parent letter.

-Speaking of which…write home to the parents. Let them know that you are starting this online-oriented project. My letter spells out what we’ll be doing online and providing specific reasons behind it. You can use mine as a guide, or adapt to what suits your classroom and your students best.

-You may also need to convince your district that your project is worthwhile. Many schools block blogging sites, so you may need to get special permission to give your students access to the specific site you would like to use. I wrote a proposal to my district for my projects this year. You may take a look at it and use it if you need to for your own class projects.

Ideas
What are some of your ideas for using blogs in the classroom? I’ve used them for weekly reflections and writing assignments, research journals, portfolios, creative writing assignments, and presentations in my classes, but I’m only scratching the surface of ideas. What are some ways that blogs could be useful in your classroom? Please, leave a comment and respond!