Web 2.0: It's All About the Products

Despite my best efforts, I just can't seem to get an out-of-class community going with my students. There just isn't enough interest. Between sports, music lessons, and other extracurricular activities, they just don't seem to want to get on the Internet late in the evening to complete anything extra for school. This is supposed to be the Net Generation, kids who grew up surrounded by digital media. For years I have read about how much time they spend on the Web consuming and creating information, interacting with one another, and playing video games. Yet, I'm not seeing all of this enthusiasm.

My students come to school as seasoned users of technology. I teach in an affluent school district where the vast majority of my students have access to the Internet. However, by all indications, playing on the computer does not seem to be at the top of their list of free time activities.

So what is it that gives me this impression? This year I have continued two of the projects that I started in my math class last year: the Scribe Post and Photo of the Week. The Scribe Post was a popular activity for my math students last year; however this year my students have very little interest in completing them (they are not graded assignments for me). And even though I offered incentives for completing the The Photo of the Week, very few of my kids complete it. Outside of these two projects, many kids are using Think.com to post interactive features like surveys and debates that the other students in my classes can respond to. Many of them do not get any responses. The fact that there is an audience (outside of me) for their work also does not seem like a motivator for my students either.

There are a few kids who are very enthusiastic about Think.com. My impression is that because the work relates to school though, the vast majority of my students are not interested in it. What gives?

All of this leads me to believe that for teachers and students, the real power of Web 2.0 is in how it allows us to create such phenomenal products so easily. My students just completed a variety of products for a project in social studies. There were digital stories, PowerPoints, posters, dioramas, essays, webpages on Think.com and much more. In my opinion, the best products were the webpages. It was easy for students to combine visuals with text, add links, and even insert interactive features.

So far, Web 2.o has been a disaster for building a community, but a blessing for creating products.


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What does it mean to blog?

Check out the recently added Rainforest Webquest at misterteacher.com

So I've been thinking quite a bit lately about the direction I want to go with classroom blogging. After reading Will's book this summer, I decided that I would try to turn my student's into bloggers--remixing content from other sites and linking to them, commenting on each other's blogs, and collaborating with others to create products with their blogs.

But since the school year started, I've found myself questioning the role of blogs in the classroom. Not if they belong in the classroom, because I definitely think they do, but what their best uses are. I've always thought that blogs are most effective when students use them to create products, as in project-based learning. Now that I can have students use blogs, dioramas are extinct in my classroom. However, a lot is written by the edubloggers out there that says that blogs should play a different role. Here's one from Will:

"I’m attempting to synthesize a lot of disparate ideas from a variety of sources into a few coherent sentences that I can publish for an audience and wait (hope?) for its response to push my thinking further. That’s the essence of blogging to me, and I can’t do it without a Weblog. That’s the distinction. That’s what tells me this is different. And that’s what makes me think so hard about the effects that blogging, not just using a blog, might have in a classroom."

Believe me, I agree that this is essence of blogging, but I wonder how I can get my fifth graders to do this when getting some of them to complete a simple project on their blogs is sometimes impossible. It's also difficult to get them to leave a comment on each other's entries that has any substance whatsoever. So how can I get my students to do the kind of work Will is talking about? I thought the Scribe Post may be the way to get them to do the work of real bloggers, but like many assignments, it simply turned into just that, another assignment.

I plan to spend the next several weeks trying to figure this whole thing out. What is the magic assignment going to be that gets my kids to want to go to their blogs and post about something they have learned, or read the blogs of their fellow students and comment on an entry? How do I make it an assignment that doesn't turn off my students to blogs? An assignment that, as Will said in another post, will have them "...actually employing all of the information gathering, critical thinking, linking, and annotative writing skills that Weblogs bring to the equation."


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Scribe Posts: The Fifth Grade Version

This year my goal is to take my students' blogging to the next level. Instead of using their blogs as repositories for project-based learning, I've decided that I want my students using their blogs as bloggers do--to communicate and connect with another. I want students publishing thoughts on the days work, linking to other websites and student posts, and to dialogue with one another through comments.

These are big goals for fifth graders, so I've decided to start with my accelerated math classes. These kids are pretty sharp and extremely motivated, so I feel like they could take these goals and run with them. I've decided the best method for reaching these goals is to have them begin doing Scribe Posts, similar to the ones that Darren Kuroptawa over at the A Difference blog has had his students doing.

Below is how I described Scribe Posts to my students:

Scribes were highly valued members of Ancient Egyptian society. They studied for many years to learn to read and write and were hired to keep careful records of everything produced. As a result, almost all of our known knowledge about the Ancient Egyptians came from the work of the scribe.

With this blog, you will be performing a job similar to that of the Ancient Egyptian scribe. You will do this through what are called Scribe Posts. In a scribe post, you will account the day's activities from math class. Each post should contain:

• The day’s learning target

• An example problem

• A short lesson on the topic

• Some media: a link, a photo, some audio, etc.

Each day two people will write the scribe post. The next day two different people will write it and then so on until we get back to the original two and they will start the cycle over again. The day that you do the scribe post you will have a reduced amount of homework; just enough to get some practice with the day's learning.

As of now, I've also planned to have each student buddy up with three other students in an effort to get them commenting on and linking to each other's blogs. It'll take quite a bit of guidance at first, but as is often written in the educational blogoshpere, the benefits should be enormous.

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