Sherpa Dani

Sherpa Paul C

Last class we had one of the better discussions of the semester. I didn’t think the subject of technology in the classroom would spark a spirited discussion. It’s usually politically correct to say that the more technology the better. Computers, the Internet, video conferencing, all aid the student, makes the class more engaged, and makes a student’s whole persona improve! How could anyone possibly disagree? A word wall in class highlighted diverse learners, multimodal, and visual. These are all things that come to mind immediately.
But in class the point was raised that prior to all the bells and whistles of technology students actually did learn! The fact that there was technology in the classroom didn’t necessarily mean it would be an automatic boost in learning. I think that the discussion probably could have gone on for another 20 minutes
Prior to teaching I had worked for IBM as an IT consultant. On my very first interaction with customers, the CIO asked our Marketing Rep why his company should spend millions of dollars in technology upgrades. The Marketing Rep responded, “You can’t afford not to!”
I thought that was awfully cliché even back then, not to mention evasive. It was a legitimate discussion item in class. The point then as well as now is that it’s very difficult to predict the success. It depends on the implementation, the skill of the user, the way it’s introduced, the “buy in”.
Think about the first time you used a computer, a VCR, or a Video camera. Was it frustrating? Were the rewards immediate? Could you afford not to do it?

Some tools for class on 4/10

I'm trying to get my head around imagining possibilities. More to explore:

For wikis:
A math wiki, a site that hosts several high school wikis (I've been told to look at East Side Community in NYC for some models) and a site to create your own relatively easily.

For podcasts:
I found two interesting applications for foreign language and for social studies.

Sherpa Gina 4/6/08

Last week was our first time meeting as a class to talk about writing to learn.

There was a discussion about how much writing to learn is applicable in some subject areas. For some, writing to learn is a more obvious connection in their content area than it is for others. As an example, in English and Languages other than English, writing to learn is inherently a part of the course, with writing even being a part of the standards given by New York State. However, for those who are going into Math and even those of us going into Science, on the surface, writing to learn can be a more difficult connection to make.

Sure, there could be more writing to learn in classes, and it would be helpful.

In class, we filled out a worksheet from Shanahan where we had to check what sort of writing was commonly used in our content area and what is not. After consulting with my fellow Science comrades, it seems that writing is commonplace in a Science classroom, but writing to communicate is far more common than writing to learn. From our class discussion, I think this has become the case in many subject areas, even those that inherently depend more on writing, like Mike mentioned in the Social Studies classes he has observed. As a student, I know I have done much more writing of analytical essays than anything that encouraged me to grow and learn.

What about students who “aren’t good writers”?

It has been mentioned by previous posters that some students are better at writing than others. However, writing to learn is designed to help yourself. Writing to communicate is designed to impart your knowledge on others. Writing to learn is reflective while writing to communicate is a way to perform. Therefore, I don’t really think it should matter what type of a writer you as far as writing to learn is concerned. Writing to learn isn’t meant to show off what a good writer you are, it is meant to reinforce and show what you know. Even if you are not a talented writer and have a hard time communicating through writing, writing to learn should be practice, and as with most things, the more that writing to learn is practiced, the better students will get at it. With any group of students, as mentioned in the Alvermann article we read a few weeks ago, there are going to be different abilities. Ideally, a student who is not a strong writer would have a chance to show their talents in other ways. However, this doesn’t mean that such a student should be exempt from, or should belittle the importance of writing, and writing to learn. In fact, introducing writing to learn by having students write about something that they are already familiar with or excel at, may be an effective way of introducing writing to learn. This is what Chandler-Olcott talks about in our reading for last week. Sometimes, it is appropriate to allow students to choose their own topic. It will help them “develop preferences as writers” and “create motivation and interest as writers”. Once students have had experience writing to learn about topics of their choice, they will be more familiar with the process and hopefully will be better able to write about topics chosen for them by others.

Is there another way?

I don’t argue that writing is a great way to provoke and produce learning. However, I do question whether or not writing is the only way for learning to occur in this sense. As previously mentioned, different students excel at different things; Alvermann talked about multiple literacies in her article. I cannot come up with anything that could replace writing to learn and I just wonder if there is something similar that could be implemented. Perhaps something that could bring those students who are "better" writers out of their comfort zone, and let different students show their abilities, while producing similar learning results.

As an aside, for my other three Science buddies in this class (or anyone who is interested, of course), I found another article by Alvermann that talks specifically about multiple literacies in Science classrooms: http://www.coe.uga.edu/lle/faculty/alvermann/multilit.pdf.

Finally, I nominate Katie as sherpa for next week.

Some links to check out for 4/10 class

For 4/10 class, we will be continuing our conversation about writing to learn but with a bit of a 21st century flair. I hope we can talk about what the limits and possibilities of emerging technologies are for the classroom, particularly in supporting the writing to learn process.

I want you to browse as many of these sites as you can ... I'd like to say check them all out but I know that there are some that you could spend hours on alone. So browse means spend a good amount of time exploring these sites and thinking about what the possibilities might be for your subject area:

These are some simple Web 2.0 tools to use with students (and there are so many more so these are just ones I chose because I know real secondary teachers using them - remember all this stuff was created AFTER I taught high school ... so these were just a twinkling in someone's eyes. I defer to those of you who are much more immersed in this to suggest other places): blogger - the free site we're using, a social networking site - ning.com, and pageflakes. None of these sites show you actual people using these sites - these are the just the set up and features ... maybe you can imagine the possibilities from these. In fact, you might want to search this catalog and see if there are some uses for your content area that you didn't think of. If you find any good ones, please comment and post the link below.

This is one of the better resource sites - socialstudies central-- I've found on Web 2.0 tools and, though this is posted by a social studies teacher, this is a general resource site for anyone wanting to learn more about this. And, finally, here's a little short article to give you a glimps of how blogging might relate to writing to learn - what can these tools help us think about in terms of extending learning and possibly bending time ... the demon that plagues all teachers? I am also posting about some work using digital video here that I find intriguing. Finally, here's a colleague's active middle school science site. Can you find other uses in your various content areas to share?

If you want to connect any of this with things we have seen before, take a look at the multiliteracies sites on the links to the right of this post.

If this inspires some ideas and questions, please comment to this though that's not required. If you have something to share, please comment here and share either your experience, your observation, and/or a link. Have fun!
(And thanks Jack and Anita for the tutorial on links!)

Sherpa Jen 3/27

Writing is an effective tool for learning in virtually any subject matter because it forces students to examine content in greater detail than during a class discussion. Writing reveals misconceptions and errors that teachers may not be able to accurately evaluate for individual students under normal discussion conditions. Additionally, writing skills will improve when students have to think critically while integrating correct content information into their writing.

Perhaps one of the most effective ways to encourage deeper thought on content and nurture writing skills concurrently is a blog format. Building on others ideas allows you to refine your own through use of incorporating others’ perspectives with your own rationale, through your own lens. Individuals can often overlook conceptions that may come quickly to others which can be resolved by the open forum. Do students take more time to gather their thoughts and express their ideas in their blog posting because they know it will be read by a much larger audience composed of their peers rather than just their instructor?

The blog may be a good alternative to traditional methods of writing assessment. On page 47, Zinsser argues, “Eagerness to read and correct student writing, however, is not a commodity that grows on trees; it’s far easier to just check right and wrong answers.” It would be wonderful if every teacher had the time to correct 125 essays for her five periods of class with 25 students in each of those classes. It would be great if every assignment could be a long, written assignment so the teacher could more accurately assess what learning has taken place for each and every one of those 125 students. However, realistically, even though students may gain knowledge from writing the papers themselves, teachers face the pragmatic problem of time constraints.

To remedy the problem of inherent time restrictions, the blog may be a valid solution. It is a reasonable assumption that classrooms consist of two types of students. On one hand there are the students who more concerned with their grades than what others think of them. In contrast, there are students who value the image their peers have of them to a higher degree than the letter grade they receive. My question is: Would a blog be a novel approach to encourage both types of students because their grade would depend on it AND it would influence the perception their peers had of them?

On a different note, Raquel mentioned how some people are naturally good writers. I believe that those people are good writers because they have metacognitively mastered the writing checklist throughout their education. They may have acquired these skills more easily than other people or because of more explicit instruction. On page 45 Zinsser states, “In history we’ve paid great lip service to the need to write, but we haven’t taken the time in our classes to tell students how it’s done.” I agree with Raquel and Professor McRostie that writing is important across the curriculum, however how does one find the balance between adequate subject matter instruction and fundamental writing reinforcement? At some point, should a teacher be able to assume students have the basic and appropriate writing skills necessary for that level of study?

Please do not hesitate to respond to any of my questions. All your thoughts are welcome. For next week’s sherpa, I nominate Gina “the chemist” Rothwell.

Sherpa Raquel 3/27

Since there was no class today, this sherpa blog will be about the Zinsser reading, and thinking about the essential question "how can writing help students to learn?" Before reading, what automatically came to my head was the story of a man who suffered from amnesia. He was at the hospital and he couldn't remember his name; this was a huge dilemma because he was brought in by a good Samaritan who saw him get hit by a car and nobody knew who he was. The man woke up in a haze, not knowing anything about his identity, and the doctor cleverly thought of a way to have the man remember his name. The doctor gave the man a pen and paper, asking the man to sign it; sure enough the man, without thinking, signed his real name. The doctor knew that the connection from brain to hand in itself is a strong memory; we have short term and long term memory but the hands memory is a little different I guess.
Some people are naturally great writers, they know how to get their point across, to be precise, and demonstrate their understanding with a wide range of vocabulary. Others aren't so fortunate, they tend to ramble, not able to make a point etc. For example, the students of Norman Walbek mentioned in Zinsser's excerpt. tHis students rambled until he gave them guidelines or a rubric on the paper, then he said they did much better when they knew that clarity, logic, precision, common sense were all at hand while grading.
Another important professor in this excerpt was Professor McRostie- an International economics and management teacher, taught how to write in his first three lectures. He said that without reasoning and writing, economics won't take you very far which is true. His theory is everything that we've been learning in this class so far; even though some of our content areas dont have much to do with writing, it is a necessity and without literacy, one doesn't have much of a chance for success. Every student needs to be a good writer for all their subjects because writing shows what they know
Writing is a way of understanding, writing is physically getting our thoughts out on paper. Our hand is the tool. "A piece of writing is a piece of thinking." p. 50, I believe this to be a strong quote. Every time you pick up a pen to jot something down, are you not thinking about what you are writing? regardless if it is something short like a "To do list" or a compare and contrast essay on Dante and Petrarca you are putting thought into it. Writing is a thoughtful process. So by teaching writing, you're teaching how to think! And what is thinking? thinking is learning, thinking opens the door, opens the mind to take in knowledge.

The person who i nominate to be the next sherpa blogger is Larry D.