Links by Dawn Hogue, Sheboygan Falls High School, Sheboygan Falls, WI
What is our responsibility to our students?
We cannot linger in the past any longer. In their video titled, Did You Know 2.0, Karl Fisch and Scott McLeod show how quickly American students could become irrelevant in the global marketplace if we continue to teach school as we did in 1950.
We must recognize that our students learn differently than we did. Just watch the video titled A Vision of Students Today at the Digital Ethnography site from Kansas University to see a typical reality for college students.
Who is school for? Politicians? Administrators? Teachers? Parents? Why do we teach what we teach? Why do we teach how we teach? What do our students need us to do for them so they will be able to face their futures confidently.
CyberEnglish, or CyberSchools, cannot solve all the problems facing American schools. But we are on the right track as far as technology integration.
And in CyberEnglish, we learn by DOING.
Levels of technology integration: Where is your school?
We were always Web 2.o
CE has always been, in some respects, a Web 2.0 "thing." Ted will talk more about this.
- User generated content: student websites.
- Interactive: online discussion, peer review.
- Websites are limited in interaction potential.
Changing Audience Changes Everything
Value of websites (or other public publishing)
Ever wonder why kids in band do so well? They love it. They learn by doing. And they show publicly what they know.
Making it public means:
- Not writing for my teacher only.
- Internalized need for revision.
- I'm part of something BIG!
Creating my own website means:
- I can express myself better with color, with pictures, with links, and more.
- I can make my product individualized.
What I can learn in a CE class:
- HTML or more
- web editors
- peer review tools
- What HYPERTEXT means and how it changes the roles of readers and writers (see Nancy Patterson's work on hypertext)
- Independence
- How good it feels to share and help others
- Fluency of expression
- Confidence (esp. LD students or those with chronic "I hate to write" syndrome)
- Web design
- Self reflection/metacognition
Overcoming CIPA?
No Blogs. No MySpace or FaceBook? No Wikis. No school email accounts? Pretty soon No Web Pages? Does this sound like your school? CIPA (Child Internet Protection Act) now requires public schools to record and archive all data that is transmitted via their servers. Is this causing havoc for you?
What can teachers do? Become part of the discussion. Know why it is important to stand up for technology integration.
Wikis:
Blogs:
Websites:
How to go Cyber?
- Be educated. Know why a CE approach is important.
- Be ready for all the administrators' "buts."
- Think of the benefits for your students.
- Find and emulate a good model.
- Make concessions when you have to:
- Moodle for online discussions.
- Stay firm when you must:
- Making it public is the key! Insist
on one of the following:
- Student generated Website
- Student generated Blog
- Student generated Wiki
- Making it public is the key! Insist
on one of the following:
Web publishing changes everything about writing. It is not just that students recognize a real audience. I see how the writing process itself changes as students write for the Web.
Certainly, when students consider
audience, their writing is more purposeful. Many of my students have commented
in their cyberjournals and in other reflective writing that they are concerned
with whether their reader will understand
what they are saying.
This is a powerful change from
their previous concerns. But what excites me even more is that I see the
traditional linear approach to writing supplanted by something more organic.
I see drafting, editing, and revising happening simultaneously.
And revising never ends because writing
on the Web is writing that is never finished. I see a more serious regard
for how writing will be perceived by others. Students do not worry about
writing for me; they know their audience is potentially anyone. From
CyberEnglish
CE is Fun
Megan wrote in her CyberJournal:
I think this class will be better than most classes because you don’t have to write a lot; you do most of it on the computer.
Hah! Megan,
You’ve just expressed one of the most interesting paradoxes of CyberEnglish. Students think that they aren’t doing much writing because it’s on the computer. But we actually do a LOT of writing.