Edublogs: Making writing relevant

I hate reading essays! What a thing for a teacher to say, right? Language teacher are supposed to love it when their students produce pages upon pages of typed (or written) essays. For me, essay writing feels like the perfect example of the dichotomy between what we do in school and what we do for the rest of our lives out of school. I can just hear that imaginary student in my class that would ask me the question:

"But, when will I use this in my life?"

I remember being that student and wonder how often am was going to need to know the hypotenuse of a triangle or when I was ever going to need to write a Haiku. Now, here I am, on the other side of the argument. Gotta make it relevant!

My French Immersion 8 classes had just entered a unit on argumentative writing and I wanted to make sure they were learning more than just how to write an argument. I wanted them to learn how to interact with a writing form that is more relevant today. I decided this was the unit to use a class blog! "Ha!" I told myself,  "it's the perfect use of argumentative writing! They will have an audience and learn about tagging, linking, and copyright for images. Heck, some may even embed a video or two in their blog post. It will be great!"

My blog program of choice was Edublogs. I had used it before with a Grade 3 class that didn't go as I hoped. However, I was confident that the program was ideal this time. With Edublogs, I could create all my student accounts, moderate them, and control the flow of blog posts with one login. So, off I went!

For the name of the blog, I put my super-teacher thinking cap on and came up with "Waldie Français 8". So yeah, I probably could have given that a little more thought. Oh well. I got my students logged on, explained the project to them, explained they would be responsible for one post a week, and then put them off to work.

Well, they finished the project just before Christmas and boy oh boy, what a ride it has been! I will totally do this activity with my students again. However, there is a list of "if only I knew before" types of statements that would have saved me a whole lot of headaches and struggles. Let me share some of them with you right now.

1. Make sure to have student email addresses beforehand

A part of creating the students accounts is linking it to an email address. There is no way to skip this part and if you plan on blogging with another class, just using "teacheremailaddress+1@schoolemail.com" will not work. Fortunately, our students did each have a school email address that I was able to use. If not, that would have put a definite halt on the setup park of my project.

2. Make sure to a tracking method for student posts

Now, maybe you will be more organized than I was and be able to both read and evaluate each of the student posts the second they are sent to you. However, as my students were commenting on each others posts as well, I wanted to get them posted ASAP. This led to me sometimes struggling to keep track who had posted, which post this was (1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc) and had I already evaluated it. Where Edublogs does have a manner for checking blog posts for each student, it can get cumbersome when trying to constantly check for 50 students (I was blogging with two classes). Once I started keeping a paper tracking sheet, it all got easier.

3. The students will write slower than you think

Now yeah, all the language teachers reading this are saying "or course they write slow" and I thought I had taken that into consideration. They had the whole week to research, plan out, then post. However, where typing will speed up some students, it will significantly slow down others. After three weeks of blogging, I had a couple of students who had successfully completed their first post! Get ready for it to take some time.

4. Posting limits can be a pain

 With Edublogs, you are not able to post multiple blog posts in a short period of time. This is set up as a manner to combat spamming. However, when 30 students send you their post for verification and you have to try and space them all out over a few days, this can get confusing. To make matters worse, if you scheduled it to post at a time that is too close to the previous post, it will just return the post to a draft and not let you know. This led to some confusion on the part of the students, telling me "but I did submit that post to you....a couple of days ago". Next time, I may have them develop their own student blogs (which you can do under Edublogs as well).

5. The students are extremely capable!

Despite all these frustrations that I ran into, the students were incredibly engaged, picking up on the process very quickly. A single explanation of what tags were and the majority of the students were loading their posts with relevant tags. Many students added multiple pictures (all copyright free photos) with ease. Linking became an easy process for them. Also yes, I did have my amazing students who embedded videos in their blog posts as well. They were so impressive.

My conclusion

So, for those teachers out there looking for a way to get their students to write in a way that reflects a world they may interact with, consider blogging! I never had a single student ask "when will I use this in my life?"

Google Scripts

Google Drive is becoming like a second home to me! Anytime that I start a new project with someone, be it either in committee, learning team, or just between a couple of teachers, I create a new google doc, or google sheet. I have even turned our school's schedules into google sheets for everyone to access and adjust from anywhere. I use Google Forms for parent surveys and student questionnaires. If anyone knows how I can get some Google Drive swag, I'd love that!

However, the newest challenge for me has been Google Script.

It is essentially writing code in javascript for google docs, sheets, calendar, etc. Have you ever said "if only google docs would communicate with google sheets", well they do. I have been trying to figure out how to do it, and I am so far, not having so much luck. I really want to get better at this, but it really seems like an uphill battle for me. Time for me to show some Grit!

So, this post is just a way of saying that everyone has their new thing they are trying to get better at. This one is mine right now. I find it pretty hard and I have had little victores. I just recent followed Alice Keeler's (If you're a tech-loving teacher, you should follow her) tutorial and I had my first real success!

So, good luck to all of you trying out new things!

Let's try another one!

FreshGrade

Learning portfolios are great! They enhance parent-teacher communication and give the parents a window into the classroom. They become the portal where learning is documented and celebrated! But what program to use?


5 years ago, I waded in the idea. I did not have any clue what options there really were, but I had found something that could work for me. I used Evernote! I would create a folder for each of my students, share that folder with that particular parent, and violà! The beginnings of a portfolio! I loved it! My parents loved it! My district....not so much.

You see, Evernote is a program with servers based in the US. For BC teachers, that's a big NO NO for student information (FIPPA). So, I went looking for an alternate. Then, two years ago, FreshGrade walked into my life and I have not looked back!





I can honestly say, I'm a FreshGrade fanboy! If they would give me a flag, I'd run around my school district waving it. For those of you who haven't used it yet, FreshGrade is a Canadian-based (servers in Vancouver) online portfolio program to enhance Parent-Teacher communication. It goes way beyond that, adding in a user-friendly Gradebook as well. It supports, text, image, audio, video, pdf, weblinks, etc! It is also mobile friendly with apps for iOS and Android.

We see our students perform greats tasks everyday and can usually only share that with parents by writing them about it or telling them about it after school. However, imagine the power of having a video of that learning, sharing that with the parents on their child's portfolio along with all their other accomplishments. This is power of FreshGrade. Their portfolio becomes a living exemplar of their child's development and can also be a place where the students themselves can see how they are learning and growing.

This year, I have only activated the parents connection to the portfolios. I have not yet tried the student access (that will be something for next year). However, I encourage my parents to share FreshGrade with their children. After all, it is all about them!

If you haven't tried FreshGrade yet, take a look at it here! https://www.freshgrade.com/

The "yeah, but that is YOU" excuse

Source: Corey Dalh (Flickr)

Okay, time for a little rant. I am very passionate about education technology...well, technology in general and whenever I find something amazing or have success with a new tool, I gotta share it with other people. I love when people share their great ideas with me, especially when they are so easy to access. However, there are still many teachers who are just not interested. Here are a few of the responses that I hear:

• That is interesting. Maybe next year.
• That is interesting, but I don't see it working for this class.
• That looks like it takes a lot of extra time that I don't have.
• Is it really worth it?

Many of those are reasonable responses and I can sympathize. Each class is different and what would work for one class would not necessarily work for another. I have had great plans and tools that have been amazing for one class and then fallen flat the next year with the new class. However, there is one excuse that just drives me nuts. It's this one:

• Yeah, but that is YOU.

The problem that I have with this statement is that it shuts down the conversation! This is a teacher making the statement "I can't do that and will never be able to". We encourage students to always try new things and believe in themselves and yet, at the same time, some teachers will not practice what they preach. What it is really saying to me is more like "I don't want to".

Okay, enough ranting for one morning...I need another coffee.

What's with the title "Teach 47"?

 So, how difficult is it to choose a name for a blog? It's harder than you would imagine!

Image by Peter Alfred Hess on Flickr

It is a really tough process thinking of a blog title. It's like an online elevator pitch. I am sure any blogger could talk about the time spent anguishing over the right title for their blog. It sounds like a simple thing to do, but man, does it take time to be right. If you have never done it before, let me share with you some of the though process that had gone though my mind:

• It should be something that has a personal feeling to it.
• It needs to be something that sounds professional (but not like I'm some kind of corporation).
• Do I use my own name in it? ("The Waldie Blog"?)
• Should I tie it into a particular theme (technology)? What happens if I want to write about something different? Wouldn't that be misleading?
• All of the good ones are taken!
• It needs to have some meaning in connection with the blog itself.
• Can't be too long.
• Can't be too casual.
• Can't be too formal.
• Did I mention that all the good ones are taken?

So, after lots of pacing about my house and going through a variety of previous incarnations, I settled on "Teach 47". The "teach" part of it is a simple connection as most of what I will be writing about will be on my experiences in teaching. But, what is the meaning of 47? Why not 35 or 28 or any other number? The answer goes to, of all places, Star Trek.

Need a reference! (If you know the origin, let me know)

Star Trek has had many inside jokes in its time, but one of the longest running ones is based around the number 47. While Star Trek writer Joe Menosky attended Pamona College there was a club there called the "47 Society" which claimed that the number 47 occurred with greater frequency in nature than any other number. It was, in this society's mind, the quintessential random number. Menosky therefore started referencing the number 47 while writing for Star Trek The Next Generation. Don't believe me? Take a look here:



The number caught on and has been making appearances in every Star Trek television series and movie since then. There is even a website called "The 47 Conspiracy" dedicated to cataloging these instances.

So, what does this have to do with my blog? Two things:

1. I like Star Trek. I wanted to get a good reference in there that only the really geeky trekkers out there (like myself) might get at first glance.

2. The magic of this in-joke was that it was invisible. Most people didn't even know it was there, nor was it the focus of the show. It was simply something that existed to enhance the show from the background. This is something at the core of my feelings regarding technology integration in the classroom.

Technology Integration Rule Number 47

Good technology integration in classroom is something in the background that enhances the learning, but it is not meant to be the show in itself. In my classroom, I try to use technology on a daily basis.  I love technology and what it can bring to the classroom. But, it should not be the focus of the lesson. Like the number 47, it may be all around us, but it is not the focus of what is happening.

So, there you have it. I Teach 47.

So, who am I?

How do people know what their passions are? For me, it seemed to come from other people. I went about my days and my life doing what I thought to be normal things.  However, as time went on, it seemed that some of these habits had became my defining features. Let's talk about two of the most prominent: French and Technology.

 French Speaker? Me? I guess so...

I hated French class!!!

Like all Canadian students, I studied French in school. I studied it and I hated every minute of it. For me, it did not seem to have any purpose. Growing up, there were no local French communities in the Kootenay region of BC that I was aware of. Outside of those 55 minutes a week, I never used French. My only other interaction with French was in the grocery store on cereal boxes and soup cans. I just turned them to the English side and everything was good! Finally, when French became an option in Grade 9, I seized the opportunity and dropped it like a lead balloon.

Then came a trip to France with my grandmother. This was my first REAL experience in another language and boy did I feel helpless. I decided to tour around on my own for a while and I planed to meet my grandmother in front of Opera House at later time. I walked around and avoided talking to anyone unless I heard English first. I just took pictures and read the brochures (the English ones). When it was time to head to he Opera House, I had to take a taxi. I found myself trapped in a car with a person that I couldn't  communicate with! My French couldn't even get a single useful word out of my mouth. After a few minutes or so of trying to even say "Opera" and almost in a panic, the wonderfully patient taxi driver tried his best to understand my gibberish and finally took a chance and drove me to the Opera House. This trip solidified the importance of other languages to me. I began studying Spanish in university and later spent a year living in Chinese, practicing Mandarin. I am not fluent in either of these languages, but I could get by.

Then I started studying French in Quebec. I took multiple summer courses in French and felt that if I met that taxi driver again, I would certainly be able to explain l'Palais Garnier to him. However, from what other people told me, I had a knack for languages. I would not have identified myself this way. I felt that I stumbled through the grammar and often confused the languages, but to others, I was someone who was multilingual. This even led to me teaching French Immersion in a public school in Prince George. Imagine that! The student who hated French and dropped it in high school is now a French Immersion teacher!


Tech Genius? Not even close!
 

Image from lgb06 on Flickr

I'm an early adopter, for sure. When I was a child, I enjoyed testing the extent of my computer knowledge. I used to play around in DOS on our old 16-Colour PC. My favourite command (because I knew how to use it) was "dir". I loved listing folder directories in all the different ways: dir/w, dir/n, dir/x, or when I wasn't too sure, dir/?. Did I need to always list the directories like that? No, but it sure made me feel like I knew what I was doing. It also let me feel like I was keeping up with Jamie.

Jamie was one of my best friends and he was a computer genius. No matter what new thing I learned on the computer, Jamie was always one or two steps ahead of me. In my group of friends, I was not the computer guy. I was the affable side-kick who tried, but failed, to keep up.

As we grew up, we each followed our own path and went our separate ways (Jamie is in network administration now, still light years ahead of me on the IT front). However, since that time, an amazing thing has happened. In my new groups of friends, I have become the "go to" person for technology. Amazing! In my childhood competition for technical knowledge, I may not have surpassed Jamie, but I had gained a lot of knowledge that has now made me the tech genius in other people's eyes. If only they had met Jamie..



So, that's how I became that French-speaking tech guy to others. I still don't see myself as a French speaker. I'm just getting by with the language. I don't really see myself as an IT guy since I can hardly write JavaScript with any real success. But, to other people, these are my passions and I guess they have become that for me as well.