Launching Blogging During Book Clubs

My last blog post on March 16 discussed our new tech integration idea for English Language Arts: blogging during the nonfiction reading unit. Last week we launched it, and already I give it a resounding thumbs-up!

We launched the class blog on the last week of the third quarter, the week before our two-week spring break. In previous years, when we've only had a one-week break, we've gotten kids started reading their NF book club book; but a two-week break seemed too long to interrupt the reading. Instead, we decided to do some background knowledge building first and get them started reading in their books after the break.

We took the first day to introduce the unit, go over expectations and assessments, introduce and choose books, and explore the Social Justice Essential Questions.

The second day, we set up the blogs using Kidblog, a very easy platform to use, and one that keeps the blog private within the class structure (keeping the "garden walls" closed is important to our school). They used the day to remember the "academic language" expectation, upload their avatar pic, choose their blog background theme, write an introductory blog post with a tag, and then read and comment on others. Being eighth graders, there was some level of silliness in posts, titles, and comments, but that just allowed us to discuss "appropriate" versus "inappropriate" uses of the blog.

The third day was a research day to develop schema. The nonfiction books in this unit all deal with Social Justice issues from US History. Through my Adapt and Adopt philosophy, I found some excellent primary sources and related lesson plans, which I structured on a google doc as a series of viewing and thinking activities for each group:

child labor: looking at and reading about photos by Lewis Hine and viewing a short video to connect to

• Kids at Work: Lewis Hine and the Crusade Against Child Labor by Russell Freedman

Japanese Internment during WWII: looking at the removal poster and short videos to connect to

• Farewell to Manzanar by Jeanne and James Houston

gender equality through Title IX: reading short background essays about equal educational opportunities and looking at a short video by the White House to connect to

• Let Me Play: The Story of Title IX: The Law That Changed the Future of Girls in America byKaren Blumenthal

from Amazon.com

civil rights movement: reading the Six Principals and Steps of Nonviolent Resistance, looking at images and short videos to connect to

• Freedom Walkers: The Story of the Montgomery Bus Boycott by Russell Freedman,  

• The Voice That Challenged a Nation: Marian Anderson and the Struggle for Equal Rights by Russell Freedman, 

• Getting Away with Murder: The True Case of Emmitt Till by Chris Crowe
• We Are the Ship: The Story of Negro League Baseball by Kadir Nelson

The fourth day was blogging day again. Students wrote about their understanding of, and reaction to, the information they researched the day before. The mini-lesson focused on viewing exemplars of blog postings at 4 levels, from poor to excellent, and noticing the characteristics of each. Since the best ones included pictures and hyperlinks, there was a quick lesson on the "how to" of this tech skill (written up in a blog post on my page for future reference).

The third and fourth days were very very quiet and focused, especially considering they were the days immediately proceeding a holiday. In teacher-speak, you know you've hit on a winner when that happens! The short primary source documents, photo images and videos quickly caught the students' attention. They found them very interesting and worth the effort to dig through the difficult language (definitely examples of CCSS's close reading of challenging texts!). Writing up their understanding and reactions was harder--pulling the pieces together and writing in a new genre--but the format was engaging, and the information provocative. My quick sample of some posts showed me that they were successful, for the most part.

We will come back to these posts when we return from the break, and read and comment on each others' learning. That's when the true power of the blog will hit them. Right now it's a new way to show the teacher their learning. But when others read and learn from them, they will really see the "3 C's" of 21st Century learning--Creativity, Collaboration, and Communication--come alive.

Blogging in Book Clubs

Third quarter is winding down, leaving only 8 more weeks of lessons to plan and assessments to grade. As the light of the Spring Break tunnel looms, I am feeling weary. Weary of the pace, weary of new professional learning, weary of piles of grading, weary of classroom management issues that just won't go away no matter how many tricks I pull out of my bag. And yet I am about to jump into another new technology activity, still working on my Framework for Growth professional goal of enhancing instruction through the use of technology: student blogs. Fool that I am...

Next week, my teaching partner, the technology integration specialist, and I will sit down and hammer out how this new tech project will work. We are going to use student blogs during our nonfiction reading unit as a replacement for some of the Reading Notebook work, and possibly for some of the Book Club discussion sessions as well. We'll see.

I can see the benefits of having a forum for publicly thinking "out loud" about reading. I can see the benefits of reading others' thoughts as a way to build on, challenge, or change our own thinking. I can see the benefits of having a way to bring in links to videos and articles that enrich the schema behind the issues within the nonfiction books they are reading. I can see the benefits of equalizing the air time between all members of the class, so that the overbearing have the same amount of space as the meek.

On the other hand, I also see the continued benefit of face-to-face discussions. There is still an art to expressing your views orally so that others understand your meaning, moderating vocal tone and volume to make a point, and reading others' nonverbal messages to understand what they are really trying to say. I don't want to lose that by introducing a tech-based discussion forum.

My hope is that we can balance the two, have the best of both worlds. That by having both blogs and discussion groups, learning will be enhanced, communication skills will be enhanced, and 21st century skills will be enhanced.

So I'm revving myself up for this new thing, getting excited so the students will see it as an exciting idea. I guess I am a glutton for learning myself, never content to just do things the way we did them last year! So class blogs, here we come! Woo Hoo!

Adding Relevance to American History

Teaching early American history to non-American eighth grade students living in the Middle East can be a challenge. The question "Why do I have to know this?" hangs over my lessons, and I know the answer "Because we are an American school with an American curriculum" does nothing to add relevance or satisfaction.

image of Boston Massacre taken from firstclass.rfsd.k12.co.us website

But teaching early American history to non-American eighth grade students living in the Middle East also provides a great opportunity to connect to current events. After working with the essential question "When is it necessary for citizens to rebel against their government?" within the context of the events leading up to the Declaration of Independence, it was time to link it to something a little closer to home: The Arab Spring revolutions around the region. Here were modern examples of citizens rebelling against their own governments for the same reasons the American colonists did: governmental tyranny, no say in their government, and basic rights abused. Many of my students were from, or had relatives, in those countries. Time to add relevance!

I wanted to do a group research project using 21st Century Skills. One of the 21st Century Skills is collaboration, but I disagree with group grades. I needed to find a way to have a collaborative project that also allowed me to assess individuals on their content knowledge and contribution.

In my "Adapt and Adopt" mode (see previous post), I found an article from the National Council of Social Studies called "Reporting the World: Teaching Current Events from a Global Perspective", written by Toni Fuss Kirkwood-Tucker. Using Toni's ideas, I set up News Teams that investigated four of the major Arab Spring rebellions: Tunisia, Egypt, Lybia, and Syria (I considered including Yemen, but I didn't have enough students). Each News Team consisted of 5 students who had distinct roles:

• News Reporter: Reports the basic facts of how the rebellion started and its main events
• Geographer: Explains where the main events occurred and any statistics that connect to the events (e.g., GDP, religious groups, educational levels, etc)
• News Analyst: Explains how the events affect the rest of the world, including any foreign involvement in the rebellion itself
• Editor: Forms an opinion about the event, supported with factual details
• Photojournalist: Works with the other reporters to find images to support their information, and puts together a slideshow to show during the live newscast
• for Syria (because I had an extra student in one class), I also included Field Reporter: Updates the News Reporter's story to included very recent events

image taken from kindreda.edublogs.org website 

Each News Team had one shared Google Doc for note-taking, which was also shared with me and the secondary librarian who supported the research. The Team needed to be collaborative in several ways: 1) their information couldn't overlap each other's too much so that the reports were not repetitive, so they had to know what the others were covering 2) their information had to cover all the important parts without big gaps, so they had to know what the others were covering, 3) the Photojournalist had to work with the other 4 to understand their stories and find images to correlate, and know when to change the images based on their reports, 4) the News Reporter, Analyst, and Editor could only use 6 sources between the 3 of them, so they had to talk together if they found a good one that several of them could use, and 5) the final News Cast needed to be organized with the sequence of stories and with an "anchor" to introduce them and move the presentation from story to story. These collaborative elements were graded with 2 bullet points on the rubric: group bibliography, and overall creativity.

Each student was graded individually on their News Cast presentation for 1) quality of research, 2) quality of information, 3) accuracy of language skills (Photojournalists did not talk during the News Cast, but had to write a justification for each picture on their notes), and 4) quality of oral (or, for the Photojournalist, visual) presentation. As each News Team presented their News Casts, the audience took notes. After all the presentations were finished, the students used those notes to answer the essential question, "When is it necessary for citizens to rebel against their government?"with examples from each of the four Arab Spring rebellions.

Student feedback after the project was overwhelmingly positive. They had heard about these conflicts, but hadn't understood what was going on until they did this project. They liked knowing what was going on in the countries where their parents or grandparents came from. They loved the News Cast format. They thought it was interesting how modern countries rebelled for the same reasons the American colonists rebelled 250 years ago. They wished they'd had more time (always the most frequent suggestion).

Connecting historical conflicts to modern day conflicts added relevance to the unit. It also reinforced one of the historian's most important skills: finding patterns and generalizations across historical events. And it was done in a way that was engaging for every student.

Is Shelfari Right For Eighth Graders?

I am a Shelfari user. I use it to keep track of my young adult lit reading. I enjoy adding books to my virtual bookshelf, tagging them as "to-read", "reading now", or "finished", rating them with a 5-star rating system, and writing a comment when I'm done. I like seeing all those books lined up with their virtual covers facing me, and searching for books that are like other books using the tag system. I like seeing what other people are reading and reading their reviews. You can see a sample of my shelf on the right side of this blog.

This year, our secondary librarian, in cooperation with our High School English department, signed up the grades 9-12 non-IB English students with Shelfari accounts. They are required to read books of their choosing at home and write comments at regular intervals, which are graded. Independent reading, a hard sell for teens with busy homework and activity schedules, has soared.

Middle School English Language Arts also has an independent reading requirement. We use a paper Reading Log where students track the time and number of pages for their reading. They track their thinking about their home reading books in their Reading Notebooks. For some students, the system is drudgery. They just want to read and enjoy and be done with it. I get that. But as their teacher, I also want to see proof that the reading is happening, and that they are thinking critically about their reading.

As mid-year approached, my 8th grade teaching partner and I decided to introduce Shelfari to our students. We waited until second semester for a couple of reasons: 1) the paper Reading Log is a very structured, visual account of their reading habits, which is useful for the beginning of the year, and 2) Shelfari's terms of use state that it is for ages 13 and up; enough of our students were still twelve during the first semester that we decided to hold off. As teachers, we were excited about introducing the technology to our students. We were sure the visual and social nature of the site would appeal to young teens. We also saw it as a way to back off from the tightly controlled paper Reading Log, and reduce the amount of homework kids were doing, while still holding them accountable for reading volume and tracking thinking.

We asked them to continue reading 100 minutes per week as a minimum. The Shelfari requirement is to write one comment per week (rather than two Reading Notebook entries) using this structure: date at the top, number of pages read or "page ___ to page ___" (they should be reading about 100 pages per week-- this is how we track volume), and then write either a "Reading Notebook"-like response if they are mid-book or a book review if they finished it.

During January, we got the students signed into Shelfari and set tightly controlled privacy settings. Since we were in the middle of a Book Club, students put their novel on their book shelf, and had an opportunity to put other books they'd read and enjoyed on their shelves as well. They "followed" each other. Our Mid-Book formative check was a comment on Shelfari responding to one of the unit's essential questions, and our January Reading Log was a book review on their novel. This was a good way to introduce the technology and requirements in a structured, guided way.

In February, the reigns loosened completely. They were expected to read and respond weekly without in-class guidance. After two weeks, I checked in to see how things were going. Hmmm... lots of kids did not have two comments, although most had added their home reading book to their shelves. I went over the requirements again in class. After three weeks, I checked again. At this point, students should have had 3 comments recorded about their home reading. Shocker: 33 out of 41 students had at least 1 comment missing, and 8 students had nothing at all! Time to re-think.

Maybe Shelfari was too independent for 13-year-olds? Maybe Shelfari was too loosely structured? Maybe Shelfari was confusing or difficult to use? Was there not enough teaching behind it to help students know how to use it? Should we abandon it and go back to paper Reading Logs and Reading Notebook entries? Is it fair to yank it away for those students who actually were using it and did like it?

I had a serious talk with my classes. I shared my questions. I wondered aloud if 8th graders were not yet ready for the level of independence that Shelfari required (in actuality, the old system was just as independent). I gave them an ultimatum: There will be a two week trial in March. Those who demonstrate they can handle the higher independence level can keep going with Shelfari. Those who show they are not ready for it will go back to the paper system. If that doesn't work, their parents will have to sign off every week, just like sixth grade (was this too harsh? To be fair, I did teach many of them in sixth grade before I moved to eighth, so it was more a reference to our shared past than a comment on their maturity level). They asked if I could wait until Sundays (the first day of our school week) to check for their comments on the previous week's work. I agreed to that schedule.

So we'll see. I still think Shelfari is a great site to use for 8th graders. I think with every new system, there will be glitches. I also think middle schoolers are at various organisational and maturity levels, and those struggling kids might need scaffolds to hold them up as they ease into higher levels of independence and self-management. Ultimately, they will need to know how to manage this system in ninth grade. Better to grow into it now than fall flat in six months!