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http://paulrallison.blogspot.com/2007/11/protest-or-acting-irresponsibly Link to audio

Today is one of several days out of the year when teachers are proctoring tests -- assessments that determine our school grade. This is so Orwellian that I don't know where to start to protest, so I just keep saying "No!" I don't do this loudly or even explicitly. My negative opinion about the testing-mandated-curriculum culture just seems to ooze out of me. Mainly I teach new things to students like blogging and podcasting and -- like now -- I'm setting up for a webcast tomorrow, instead of proctoring for a test. Unfortunately my attitude and teaching can't last long in a school, so I guess I need to be ready to keep looking again and again. Why can't I find a school that might be willing to re-think curriculum in such a way that computers are necessary to do the tasks we imagine for young people?

http://paulrallison.blogspot.com/2007/10/halloween-inquiry.html Halloween Inquiry

Here are some questions that we have begun to explore in our 7th Grade Technology class at East Bronx Academy for the Future. Please listen to our podcast, then add your answers to these questions:

What do you do on Halloween?
How does your community celebrate?
What are some of the best costumes you have ever seen?
Why do we celebrate Halloween?
Where does it come from? What's the history of Halloween?
Is it celebrated everywhere?
Is Halloween different in different countries?
What are some of your questions about Halloween?

http://teachersteachingteachers.org/?p=141 Download Digital Composing and the NWP Annual Meeting - TTT78 - 11.07.07 This is the first of two shows in November in which we are going to sandwich the National Writing Project’s Annual Meeting with two special Teachers Teaching Teachers webcasts/podcasts, one before and one after the Annual Meeting: Nov. 15"17, For this show [...]

http://teachersteachingteachers.org/?p=140 Download Participation is the Most Importat Part! TTT77 - 10.31.07 We were joined this week by Joyce Valenza and the co-founders of of Voice Thread, Ben Papell and Steve Muth (and many wonderful teachers in the chat room). In the spirit of producing content that is open to co-creation…
…we invite you add an interesting Voice [...]

http://teachersteachingteachers.org/?p=139 Download Information for All! TTT67 - 08.22.07 Here, finally is Teachers Teaching Teachers from August 22, 2007. My most sincere apologies for the delay. As you might know, the echo has long been fixed but the editing job of that evening remained for a long time! Thanks for your patience - enjoy the show. It [...]

http://teachersteachingteachers.org/?p=138 Download Coming and Going from Georgia, California, New York, Utah, Virginia... TTT76 - 10.24.07 Join our virtual staff room as we check in with a couple of 9th graders from Virginia–Victoria and Zack–along with teachers from these schools:

East Bronx Academy for the Future, New York City - Paul Allison
J. Frank Hilliard Middle School, Shenandoah Valley, [...]

http://teachersteachingteachers.org/?p=137 Download Lurkers from Kansas and New Hampshire Join Us - TTT75 - 10.17.07Our regulars–Paul Allison, Lee Baber, Susan Ettenheim, Bill O’Neal, and Chris Sloan–invite two new voices to join their conversations about building online communities of communication for students. Welcome Teresa, from Topeka and Karen from New Hampshire. Enjoy!

http://paulrallison.blogspot.com/2007/10/this-year-marks-my-25th-year-of
    This year marks my 25th year of teaching, and I feel like it's my first. This year, I've become a 7th Grade English Language Arts teacher for the first time. Two or three nights a week, I fall asleep while I'm trying to prepare my lessons, I'm so emotionally and physically drained by my current teaching assignment. Perhaps it's a good thing that I've been re-assigned away from my current classroom, and instead I'll be teaching an elective course in technology. But let's not get to the positive feelings so fast. Right now I'm feeling like I've been sucker-punched. I feel like my work isn't respected, and that I'm not liked. I feel like a failure.
    The hardest part of this story for me to admit is that I'm not a very good 7th grade teacher, at least not with the 115 young people that I've been working with for the past two months. My morning class, which meets from 8:20 - 9:25 every day has been going really well. I don't know how many times I've walked out of that class thinking, "I can do this! Maybe I can teach English Language Arts to seventh graders in a school in the Bronx."  Reality often hits an hour and a half later when my break and lunch is over, and I start three 65-minute afternoon classes of 27-30 students each. By the time I see them, these young people have been yelled at, berated, punished, and threatened all day. After their screaming lunch and three hours of academic classes, they have nothing to loose.
    How do I handle this situation? Not as well as the social studies teacher does. The students say that they like her, because, "She understands and can talk to us." I've wanted to sit in this teacher's classroom to watch how she does it. I have always had a lot of respect for middle school teachers, but never as much as I do now. The students tell me that I'm too "soft," and that I get angry too fast. They say that I need to be more "up there" or respected. I've been very open with my students about how I feel when they act out in class -- yelling, throwing paper, but I haven't figured it out yet. Perhaps I never will, but it's been helpful to seek their advise. I've been slowly building a respectful, demanding atmosphere in my class. It has not been easy.
    This week was going relatively well until the end of the day on Friday, when my principal came to me to say that I would be re-assigned beginning Monday -- just hours from when I'm writing this. Instead of teaching my 7th Graders English Language Arts, I would be given elective classes from several grades in this 6-12 school. Wow!
    Although my learning how to control my class was a part of her assessment, she agreed with me that the problem was not just in my classroom. All of the other 7th Grade teachers were struggling with discipline issues as well. Her answer was that she had to do something about English because there is a state exam in English (and in math) in January that determines whether or not these students will be promoted to the 8th grade. A literacy teaching coach is replacing me on Monday. She will not be using computers, and she will focus on reading and writing workshops as specified by a local college. These approaches, both the literacy coach and the principal argue, will get directly to the meat of what students need to learn to pass the state exam and be promoted to 8th grade.
    What have I been doing with my students -- faster with my first period than my afternoon classes? The first thing I did was to set up a Google Apps Education account, giving all of my students email, docs, spreadsheets, and presentations. Then I created Google accounts for each of my students to that they could use Google Reader and Blogger. I set up a Blogger account for each student and associated each of their blogs with their Google Docs. Further I enrolled each of my students in the Personal Learning Space, and I went into each account to make it easy for them to collect the data from their Blogger posts into their Personal Learning Space blogs. This way each student would have a public blog that they could keep long after my class ended, and their work would also be collected into the "walled-garden," social network where they would be able to find friends, peers, readers.
    We had begun with James Beane's notion of asking students to do personal inquiries by posing for themselves ten questions about themselves and ten questions they have about the world.  We also did a lot of work following Peter Elbow's descriptions of a freewriting / focused sentence / freewriting again... process of writing. In addition we had begun to explore reading together by reading and annotating (personal responses) the Wikipedia article about the Jena 6, and we did a "cloze" exercise with an article about Mychal Bell's (temporary) release from jail. The students had also written an essay in response to Sandra Cisneros' short story, "Eleven."
    Most all of my students had shared ten or more pieces of writing with me in their Google Docs by the time I was re-assigned away from them. Toward the middle of last week they had just started publishing to their blogs--after checking spelling, grammar, and sentence structure. It was all just beginning to come together! Of course there was plenty to fold in. This week I was going to show them how to find Creative Commons images and insert them into their Google Docs.
    Reading was an issue. I agreed with my friends who thought I could have started independent reading sooner, but their folders were set up. We were about to choose books, based on the themes (keywords and tags) from their 10 self and 10 world questions. And they were ready to begin Google Reader as soon as it seemed right. My vision was that students would be reading online in Google Reader or off-line in their books at least three times each week. Their responses to this reading would form the first of two-required blog posts each week. There's so much more to describe. My seventh graders had all learned their passwords, were responsible for one laptop, were learning how to use tabbed-browsing in Flock, and knew how to use Fauxto.com to create simple images.
    We were ready to roll, but the steering wheel has been yanked from my hands.
    It seems that I haven't been teaching an English Language Arts class in such a way that it would help my students to be successful on a state exam that looms over the principal's head. Seriously, it's not joke, principals must show improvement in their scores or they are going to be fired in NYC. You can imagine how hard it is for principals to take chances and try new things. So I don't blame my principal for wanting to go with an approach and an English curriculum that is more familiar to students, parents, other teachers, literacy coaches, and city and state evaluators.
    Tomorrow I start my new position. The principal, while expressing no confidence in my placement as a seventh grade ELA teacher, told me that she didn't want to loose me. I appreciate that. I don't know exactly what my program will look like right now, so I can't say too much, but I'm pretty sure that I will have both middle school and high school students, which will allow me to take a more active role in Youth Voices. Maybe I've been handed a gift, maybe it's not possible to bring so much of the 21st Century into a situation that is tied to a 20th Century test. Maybe I'll be happier in the margins of the school again. I wonder though, when this work will be the core work of our schools.
    At least for me, tomorrow I'll be able to teach students what I think is important for them to learn without the pressure of a standardized test or mandated curriculum.

http://paulrallison.blogspot.com/2007/10/profile-posting-responding.html

I've been trying to describe my curriculum in simpler and simpler ways. Recently I've been saying that there are three strands:

* Blog Posts - responding to literature and journal-writing/research
* Profile building - description of self, community, and culture using multimedia
* Responding to others in the Personal Learning Space, a school based social network.

Of course there are a lot of other goals, and I'm concerned that my students are following me.

http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=7051061315

http://teachersteachingteachers.org/?p=136 Download Building Online Communities - TTT72 - 09.26.07This is our presentation for the K12 Online Conference.











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Click Read More to find notes, links to more audio and a video.
Notes for our audio presentation
by Troy Hicks, Moderator
A turning point
Take us back… before you began building this community, at [...]

http://teachersteachingteachers.org/?p=135 Download From Big Ideas to the Nitty Gritty - TTT74 - 10.10.07Early in this podcast we were joined by Sheryl Nusbaum-Beach to share with us some of the big ideas and vision behind the K-12 Online Conference 2007:
Sheryl Nusbaum-Beach, a 20-year educator, has been a classroom teacher, charter school principal, district administrator, and digital [...]

http://teachersteachingteachers.org/?p=134 Download TTT73 - 10.03.07 - Connecting in a WikispaceListen in as the Teachers Teaching Teachers crew continues the work of publishing our students’ work in ways that invite other young people to respond.

Paul Allison, East Bronx Academy for the Future, NYC
Lee Baber, F. Hillyard Middle School, Broadway, Virginia
Susan Ettenheim, Eleanor Roosevelt HS, NY, New York
Bill [...]

http://paulrallison.blogspot.com/2007/09/feeling-good-vlog-092207.html

Why aren't more teachers using weblogs, wikis, podcasts, and social networks in their classrooms? For a few years now, I've been doing technology and literacy workshops and summer institutes and presentations in the New York City Writing Project. A variety of teachers -- some young and savvy tech users, some who have avoided computers for many years, some "old-line" tech teachers who are more familiar static websites than blogs and wikis -- participate in these workshops and institutes. Yet only a few do the work once they get back to their classrooms.

This year, I've returned to being a regular 7th Grade English teacher in a pretty normal school (with a bit more technology support than usual). For the past five years I've been a technology teacher who has been given a lab of computers and a lot of support in keeping these computers up-to-date and working. Many of the workshops for other teachers that I've done have been in this lab. When teachers who are enthusiastic about doing this work go out into their own classrooms, they often run into infrastructure problems.

But what exactly do we mean by "infrastructure problems?" It isn't really true that computers aren't available. The schools are generally wired. So where is the rub? This is what I'm trying to pay attention to this year as a 7th Grade English teacher at East Bronx Academy for the Future.

As I say in this video, my focus this Fall is to keep track of all the things I am doing to make Web 2.0 work in my classroom. I want to be clear about the kind of commitment, vision, and hard work it takes to accomplish this. And, I want to demonstrate that it is possible.

What are the hurdles a teacher has to clear to teach with blogs, wikis, podcasts, and other Web 2.0 tools? What does it take to clear these hurdles?

This is an early report. So far I'm feeling pretty good.

http://paulrallison.blogspot.com/2007/09/setting-table.html It feels far away, because I've got to get computers set up -- and connected to the Internet -- and I keep running into problems like Skype not working because of something the Department of Education put on the computers.... I can get it off, but doing that thirty times becomes a pain. Still, I feel clear about what I want the students to have available, and how to get them started, but I need to figure out how the students can do parts of this set up -- while still being accurate.

Link

http://paulrallison.blogspot.com/2007/09/while-running-in-nj-i-discuss-m While running in NJ, I discuss the many elements of a complex job, from managing computer hardware, to having big ideas and goals, and from developing curriculum to manage the classroom and build community to inviting students into meaningful inquiries. While on my run I map out my curriculum as I begin my new job as a 7th Grade English Language Arts teacher at the East Bronx Academy for the Future. Thanks for listening.

http://paulrallison.blogspot.com/2007/08/seals-and-fox.html
You can see them if you look closely -- wait -- see!

http://paulrallison.blogspot.com/2007/08/courtney-is-so-smart.html

I really like the consensus that Courtney McGough has found in response to my babbling about databases. I'll have more response, I just wanted to say that this felt warm.

http://paulrallison.blogspot.com/2007/08/are-state-library-research-data This month, over at Teachers Teaching Teachers, Susan Ettenheim, Lee Baber and others are looking into how and why to use state library research databases, and they have given us a homework assignment:

Find you own states database collection (paid for by your taxes!).... Now, think of something you are wondering about. Is it your aunts newly diagnosed illness, is it a question about Iraq, is it the history of a neighborhood fixture, is it something about a book youve been reading this summer? Search in these state funded free resources and see what you find. If you can, wed love you to do the same search in some other places too, maybe Google, maybe findarticles.com, maybe Wikipedia...

Its time to walk the talk! TTT67 - August 15, 2007

Here's the results of dipping my toes into the New York Online Virtual Electronic Library (NOVELNY). These are just my first impressions, and they leave me wondering whether a more careful study has ever been done than the one here that we are doing for oursleves. Has anyone ever more carefully studied and described the differences one finds between searching in publically available sources, and these protected databases?

Last month I used the the keyword "relationships" to show how to set up subscription alerts for on-going searches in Google Blogs, Google News, EveryZing (audio), and FindArticles. By using the same word to do a NOVELNY databases search, perhaps I can compare resusts. On the search page, I choose "Full-text articles only," then I ask for a search in "All Resources," and I do a search for the the keyword, "relationships." This gives me almost 45,000 hits in 14 databases.

1	EBSCO Animals
65	Funk & Wagnall's New World Encyclopedia
949	General Science Collection
15	Health & Wellness Resource Center
326	Primary Search
225	TOPICSearch
15687	MasterFILE Select
170	Business & Company Resource Center
24142	Custom Newspaper Database
62	Informe Revistas en Espanol - Spanish
2058	New York State Newspapers
1194	National Newspaper Index
10	Twayne Authors Series
43	Gale Virtual Reference Library (All)

After changing the display mode to "Relevancy-ranked," I begin to scan through the 188 results that appear on the first page. Each result has a subset of bibliographic information, such as: Title, Author, Journal, Source, Date of Publication, Number of Pages, Number of Words, Pages, and Database. Many also contain a description that provides an abstract, summarizing the article.

In the first fifty (English language) results there is a considerable variety of sources.

It's true that I could have limited my search by choosing more keywords (e.g. adding "family" to "relationships") or by selecting fewer of the available databases, but part of my purpose here is to see what is available, and I think the more general, open search serves the blogger well. The variety of sources that seem to be available through NOVELNY -- low-brow/high-brow, popular/professional, conservative/liberal, primary sources/secondary sources, current/historical, news items/encyclopedia articles, chaff/wheat -- is something to celebrate! This list of sources also begins to answer some of my questions about whether or not these databases give our students access to materials that they wouldn't be able to get any other way.

For me, databases start with three strikes against them:

• they aren't easy to access
  
• sources from them can't be collected in an RSS reader (EBSCOhost seems to be an interesting exception, but how do you become a member of EBSCO?)
• links to sources found in a database won't work for the general reader.

Given these problems, what makes library databases worth the effort? The answer is usually that databases contain many more high quality resources than is available on the general web, or even that databases have sources in them that are in some way different in kind. Perhaps, but my initial uses of NOVELNY suggest that what gets indexed there is as topsy-turvy a mosaic (to mix a few metaphors) of resources as anywhere. This is not to say that that research databases are not valuable. They do expand the range of sources available to students, but I'm not finding that they are a significantly special resource.

My brief experience with searching databases using NOVELNY suggeststo me that the metaphor of an open container is rather apt. I started thinking about these matters a couple of weeks ago when toward the end of Teachers Teaching Teachers #66 - 08.08.07 (Play at 42 min. 18 secs.), Susan posed a "big question":

What really are these databases? ... They must have some purpose. Are they really just more information or are they really some different kind of information? And just as we're really anxious to include video in our resources now and audio in our resources... Maybe instead of thinking of these [databases] as just more, maybe we need to think of them as a little treasure and something a little different that need a little tender encouraging too.

Courtney McGough, a GALILEO database specialist from Georgia responded that she has tried to clarify for students what databases are by calling them "containers with really good stuff in it." Although this would seem to agree with my initial findings here -- that databases are important, but not unique genres of information -- Courtney later clarified:

In answer to the question about whether the content of the databases is "more content" or a "diferent kind of content," I was making the point that databases are more content that is known to be quality content -- content that has been peer-reviewed, edited, and/or fact-checked. Students have difficulty distinguishing between online content that can be found through search engines such as Google and content that is located in research databases -- in the "hidden web" or "deep web." In trying to help them understand the difference, I have compared databases to a container that holds quality information that they can use in their research.

By contrast, although there is a great deal of good information freely available on the open Internet (and therefore can be found by search engines), it is often more difficult to locate reliable sources as anyone can post anything on the Internet. Many databases include articles from books and journals that are peer-reviewed or edited in some way. Databases have clear citations for each book chapter, magazine article, newspaper article, journal article, dissertation, etc. However, items in a Google search can come from anyones blog, a news aggregator, an online discussion forum, a non-profit organization, a for-profit organization, or anything that anyone can put online. There are varying degrees of expert knowledge and editorial control in any of these sources.

Weblogs & Wikis & Feeds, Oh My!: Databases and Research

Courtney had a lot more to say, and I've returned to her response on my blog several times, and I learn something new with each reading. But I worry that Courtney, like many librarians and database specialists, has created an unnecessary distinction here between general online content and that which can be found in research databases.

I think we have to be careful about how we value some content over other content. One we've learned over the past several years is that "peer-reviewed, edited, and/or fact-checked" does not equal quality. On blogs, wikis, and podcasts, we are all peer-reviewers, editors and fact-checkers. Although I would agree with Courtney's point that a Google search can bring up sources with "varying degrees of expert knowledge and editorial control," my search in NOVELNY gave me an equivilent mix of expert knowledge and editorial policy. I think it's confusing to suggest to students that what they find in a database is more reliable than what they find in a Google search. In both places the search results are just the beginning of lessons to be learned about how to identify bias, reliability, purpose... of any source, no matter where it was found.

I don't have time here to go into a more careful analysis of the differences between a Gale Encyclopedia entry and one found on Wikipedia. I'm not sure which one would be more useful to which student at a particular moment, but I know which one is easier to access, link to, and therefore become part of accountable discourse on a blog in a social network. And most of what came up for me on the NOVELNY search seems available to me on the open Web.

Oh... there's so much more! I think we can have both blogs, wikis, podcasts, videos... AND databases. When we see the quality that can be found in all of these places, perhaps we can begin to make better distinctions and help students to identify what makes different sources of information important to them.

http://paulrallison.blogspot.com/2007/08/databases-and-research.html The issue is, of course, complicated. The only way to keep this information locked and expensive is to claim that it is special, but I still need that to be demonstrated. Is it really true that the information in these databases is significantly more complex, thorough, considered than can be found elsewhere? What about http://FindArticles.com? Also, we need to consider how much an adolescent can comprehend in evaluating resources. I like the direction Susan Ettenheim was taking at the end of Teachers Teaching Teachers #66, where she tried to get folks to describe what it is in these databases that is unique. Oddly the response was a story about how someone (from Georgia?) had started calling them empty containers. Freeing the databases is important, but getting rich statistics, peer-evaluated articles... (and this is the list that I think needs to be developed) ... to our students is even more important, and may or or may not be related to the "free the databases" movement.

http://paulrallison.blogspot.com/2007/08/coast-guard-beach-eastham-ma.ht The Atlantic Ocean has a way of quieting everything else.

http://paulrallison.blogspot.com/2007/08/is-blogging-dialectical-note-ta

At the beginning of my first year of teaching in September 1984, I read Ann E. Berthoff's five-paragraph "Facets" in the English Journal. The "dialectical or double-entry notebook" that she describes became an important tool in my classroom that year, and it has has remained so since, especially in the last few years as blogging has become central to my curriculum. In her short essay, Berthoff describes a writing process in which "students and teachers alike... are discovering that journals need not be limited to personal or 'expressive' writing but that they can be used to record that inner dialogue which is thought." Over twenty years later many teachers and students have begun to use blogging the way we've been using the dialogue journal.

Berthoff describes dialectical note taking like this:

On one side of an open notebook, writers take notes, copy texts, record observations; on the facing page, they respond to those responses, taking notes on their notes and commenting on their comments, observing their observations and thinking about their thinking.

Bloggers can respond that they also enact a productive reiterative process when they spin another thread in the webs that make up the blogosphere. Many bloggers also describe their art as a one that "helps develop the habits of reflection which constitute critical inquiry and creative thinking." Creating places for students to make similar connections the classroom is more of a challenge, but many of us are finding this possible as well.

Berthoff could have been talking about what happens when teachers blog when she writes about the impact of double-entry notebooks: "Teachers become reflective writers and thereby more imaginative, freed at last from the compulsion to find an assignment to follow the one on how to tie-dye tee-shirts or on what to do about skunks under the porch." I'm not sure about those examples, but many of us who have put personal blogging at the center of our writing practice have felt the freedom that Berthoff speaks of here. Blogging allows us to put the student firmly in the center of his or her own inquiry over time.

Just like double-entry notebooks, blogging "can teach everybody the value and usefulness of looking--and looking again."

http://paulrallison.blogspot.com/2007/08/adding-freire-to-beane-videocas
Take James Beane's "10 self and 10 world questions." (See this Trailfire for more information.) Mix in a healthy dose of Paulo Freire's "generative words" and "generative themes." (See a description of "generative themes that discusses images in a book, Brave New Schools. And find "generative" in the third chapter of Pedagogy of the Oppressed.) And I think we've got the makings of a really powerful curriculum! I'm planning to write more about this soon. Maybe I can make it sound coherent?