College Essays On Google Groups

Michele, Lauren and Anne each teach a senior level English Literature class. As part of that class, students work on their college essays. But this year that looked a little different:

We wanted them to connect with one another and see what their peers were saying. Last year, Michele had used Google Groups with her seniors to submit their essays online so that their classmates would be able to provide valuable feedback to the posted work. After discussing how to do this, we came up with the following criteria so that our combined 5 sections of seniors could upload, comment, and read their peers' work. We had some basic criteria in completing this assignment:

Post one final essay

Students can choose to post anonymously. We actually came up with a coding system of the teacher�s last name followed by a number (Smith 4).

Students could choose to use their names to post, but no last names. (Anne S)

All students needed to post their essay by the same date.

Students need to give constructive criticism and valuable feedback to at least 5 other essays. (These essays need to be students in other classes)

Constructive criticism needs to be memorable and helpful. Try not to comment on essays that have already received feedback. If an essay has received 3 comments, move on to another essay.

While it certainly didn�t go perfectly, all three teachers felt like it went pretty well and they learned a lot about what they would like to do differently next time.

From Anne:

Some suggestions that we need to think about next time we do this: What does constructive criticism look like? Some kids received valuable feedback while others had no comments. Clearer identification of who is in what class. Do we want to open up the essays to a larger audience?

From Michele:

I would like to have 3-4 things for the students to critique in particular: voice, narrative, word choice, and getting to know the student. Students, for the most part, were specific with their comments, but I think it could be more focused.

From Lauren:

For next year, I will have students comment on three essays instead of five so the feedback is more authentic; several students felt like five comments were too many and that peer readers started getting lazy with their feedback. In addition, I would spend a class period talking about how to give good, specific constructive criticism based on the final rubric on which their essays were graded. Another student suggested that teachers comment on the essays of students who are not in their classes so writers not only receive feedback of students outside of their class, but also receive the opinion of another teacher.

Feel free to check out their essays and leave your own constructive comments, or leave comments and suggestions on the blog post.

Creating Personal Learning Networks: Part 2

Earlier I posted about our nascent efforts to help our students create Personal Learning Networks. I thought I�d take a few minutes and update everyone on our progress so far.

But first I wanted to address some things that came up in the comments on that earlier post. As usual, the comments were excellent and helped us refine our thinking. First, Michele suggested and others agreed that perhaps we had it backwards. Instead of starting with some �seeded� feeds from us and then moving into personal feeds, we should do it the other way around (more of a �personal� learning network). While on the one hand I don�t disagree, I responded with:

I've struggled a lot with this and, as a result of your comments, will revisit it again and struggle some more, but let me give a few of the reasons that � at least at this point � this is the way we've decided to go.

1. This gives them a chance to get used to the idea, the tools and the process before really going after it on their own.

2. These are incoming freshmen and they often need some more concrete direction to get started. If it's too open-ended, many of them will struggle mightily. While that�s not always a bad thing, we do have a limited amount of time in class to do this (and help them), so we wanted to provide some structure up front.

3. Please note that they do have choice from the beginning. We have limited their choice to three categories (education, local news, world news), but they choose the feeds from within those categories. We'll give them a list of suggested feeds to choose from, but they can decide whether they want to read David Warlick or Will Richardson or somebody else they find that fits in the education category. And they will choose which feed to read from our local newspapers (or some other source), and so on.

4. Finally, there's the practical/political aspect of all this. It's much easier to "sell" this to stakeholders if students are reading feeds about education, local news and world news. It's much tougher if we start with their personal interests and one student chooses skateboarding, another chooses 90's grunge rockers, and a third one chooses swimsuit fashions. Please note that I'm not saying that those aren't legitimate interests for those students to pursue, I'm just saying it's tougher to convince folks that we should be doing this in school if that's the case. Our hope is that by starting with more "traditional" or "school-worthy" categories and feeds, both the students and the community will begin to see the value and power of this. Then it will be much easier to make the case for pursuing personal interests alongside those more "school-worthy" topics, and the case for Personal Learning Networks in general.

Patrick Higgins then asked if it�s possible to do this in a school that�s not 1:1. We are not 1:1, although Anne Smith does have laptops in her classroom so is sort of 1:1 (since the laptops stay in the room and the kids don�t have them 24/7, I don�t think it�s truly 1:1). Certainly a 1:1 situation makes this much easier, but I think it can be done without it, as long as there is a decent amount of access at both school and home. I have at least two other teachers exploring this, and neither one has laptops in all their classes. We are lucky enough to have very few kids without access at home (and most of those with broadband access) � and a large number of computers at school for kids to use. For me, this is another argument for figuring out a way to provide access to all kids 24/7/365.

So, what have we done so far? I have at least three teachers (Anne Smith, Jessie Comp and Michele Davis) that have begun exploring how to do this. (These are all Language Arts teachers, but Barbara Stahlhut � a math teacher � is beginning to look into this as well). I will briefly link to some of what Anne has done, but Michele and Jessie feel free to jump in with some additional description/links.

Anne describes her initial thinking in this post, and then shares some sample entries from students in this one. (Interesting, one on a post by David Warlick, one by Will Richardson, and two by me � home field advantage, I guess). Also, if you take a look at the right side of Learning and Laptops, you�ll see a blogroll of the student�s blogs (Smith 9th PLN). You might take a few minutes and look through some of their posts and offer constructive comments if you wish. On the technical side, one thing we did was create an OPML file of the feeds for the student blogs so that students could easily import all those in without having to add them one by one. They did/will learn how to add feeds as well, but this helped get them started so that they could easily track/access each other�s blogs.

One other thing that I forgot to mention in the previous post was my attempts to make this more visible to our larger community. Starting last January I switched to Google Reader mainly for one feature � the Shared Items feature. That allowed me to easily share items I read and then � using Javascript that Google provides � display the titles (and links) of the last ten things I�ve shared (you can change the number of items you want). In January I just put those items on the initial page that our web browsers start up on when staff are logged in (we have one local page that browsers start up on for staff, a different local page that browsers start up on for students). This was to try to help spread the conversation to staff members not in my staff development (and, frankly, to many of those in my staff development that weren�t actively participating). I titled it �Join the conversation . . .� and hoped the increased visibility would help. Then, in early May I added that to the student start page as well, to try to bring them into the conversations more. Finally, this summer our district began migrating to a new web page platform (DotNetNuke � open source software) so I had to move our website over. So I took that opportunity to create a Learning Network tab on our website to try to bring our entire community into the conversations.

The majority of the items I share are from the blogs of my teachers in staff development, but I also share other items that come through my aggregator. (Right now it�s almost exclusively from our school blogs because I just haven�t had time to read anything else � my Google Reader is embarrassingly full.) I don�t know whether any of this has been tremendously successful or not - I haven�t seen an upsurge in comments from new folks - but I thought it was worth sharing.

So, how are we doing? I think it�s a good start. The feedback I�ve heard from Anne, Jessie and Michele is positive and promising. The key will be, however, if it lasts and then if the students really take charge of finding their own feeds, build and maintain their own PLN�s, contribute to the conversations themselves, and � of course � learn and grow.

What Matters?

We�ve spent a lot of time at my school � both in my staff development efforts and outside of them � talking about what�s essential for students to learn. As part of this, several teachers are thinking hard about asking the "big questions" in their classes as a way of focusing students on the "essential learnings."

Anne Smith has focused her first semester English 9 course (9th grade English, 14 and 15-year-olds for those of you outside the U.S.) around the question of �What Matters?�

Last year, I had my freshmen all focus on the question of what matters. I was really glad to have one question on which they could focus all semester. Every project, assignment, class discussion all came back to this question.

. . . The first part of the What Matters project is a creative, visual illustration of what matters to them. They always seem to struggle with this question at first, asking me, "Well what do you mean what matters?" I simply respond with, "I don't know, what matters?" They, of course, are confused and perplexed. This year after going through the same conversation with them as my last year's 9th graders, I decided to create my own example of what matters. I think this gave them some better direction, but I still have my reservations. Many of their posts seemed similar to mine (I am not trying to be egocentric here). I am just having a difficult time trying to find the line between feeling like I am leading them to the answer I am looking for (i.e. my what matters example) and having them struggle to find their own understanding- what I feel like they should be looking for.

You can read Anne�s own �What Matters?� post, as well as read through many of the students� posts on her class blog (you may have to scroll down a little to see their posts as newer posts are on top). As always, comments and constructive criticism on the students� posts are welcome.

On a technical note (because I often get asked when I link to work like this so I might as well answer it up front), Anne and the students used Picasa (another piece of the G.A.) to create their photo collages.

Creating Personal Learning Networks: Part 1

One of the things we really want to explore this year is the idea of both students and staff creating personal learning networks. (Note: Clarence Fisher has a much better handle on this than we do, we're just getting started here, so you may go want to read his blog to get a more advanced education). For this post, I want to focus on the students. I have at least one teacher (Anne Smith) that�s ready to do this with some of her freshmen in their Language Arts class. I�m sure this will evolve (in fact, partially why I�m writing this is to get more ideas), but at the moment here�s what we�re thinking.

She�s going to help them set up an aggregator (more on the tool question below) and we�re going to seed them with a few feeds to get them started (suggested feeds in the comments, please). Then, once they're comfortable with that, Anne�s going to ask them to find some feeds of their own, on any topic they are passionate about (school appropriate but not necessarily school-related, if that makes any sense). At this point I�m thinking that�s plenty to get started with. From my own experience, it�s very easy to get overwhelmed, so while we won�t limit them, I think we will highly recommend they don�t subscribe to too many feeds.

They will then be responsible for reading their feeds each week, thinking about them, and then reflecting on them in their personal blogs. They will get some class time to do this, but will also be expected to do this outside of class. They will also be responsible for presenting interesting articles/themes to the rest of the class, probably twice each semester. After each student presents, the class will then react to that presentation by commenting on that student�s personal blog.

Anne�s written a first draft (Word, PDF) of what she�s going to distribute to students in a week or two (including the seed feeds that we have so far for students to choose from). Please take a look and we�d love to hear your constructive comments.

Our goals are two-fold. First, these are students in a Language Arts class, and they will be reading, thinking, writing and presenting on information that they find personally interesting and relevant. Critical thinking skills, information literacy skills, reading, writing, presenting skills � all fit well in our Language Arts curriculum.

Second, we hope to help them to begin to build their own personal learning network. To help them find trusted sources (and how to evaluate them in the first place to figure out if they trust them). To help them find multiple sources on the same topic, to help them compare and contrast and try to get multiple viewpoints on issues. To help them construct their own knowledge, to learn not just because it�s an assignment for school, but because it�s just too darn interesting, meaningful, and fun not to.

And this is a two-way street. They should not only be constructing their own personal learning network, but they should be learning how to be part of someone else�s learning network. How to provide relevant and meaningful information and analysis to others. We have a sign in our cafeteria that says, �Add to the sum total of the world�s knowledge.� While I don�t particularly like the way it�s phrased (the idea that knowledge is this huge collection of stuff that can be counted and summed), I do agree with the intent: they should be contributors and producers, not just consumers and users. Or, as Kurt Hahn said, �We are crew, not passengers.�

I�ve really struggled writing this post for two reasons. One, I�m insanely overwhelmed at the moment and haven�t had any time to read or think myself, and I can�t seem to get the ideas in my head onto the screen in any way that resembles the original brilliant thoughts.

And two, I�ve been struck with �tool paralysis.� I kept hoping that I would have the time to really evaluate Bloglines and Google Reader, Pageflakes and Netvibes and iGoogle, all from the perspective of a student, not for myself. But I can�t find the time to do it. And while I know the tool is not the important thing, I did want to pick the �best� tool available to help them be successful at this. But since I don�t have the time I�m thinking we may just go with Google Reader and ultimately iGoogle. I think Pageflakes and Netvibes may actually be better, but iGoogle has the G.A. (Google Advantage � trademark pending). Our students use Blogger, so they already have a Google Account. Google Reader is a nice aggregator. We are beginning to use Google Docs a lot more. If I ever find time to play with it, I think we�ll use Google Notebook. If they don�t have web-based email, Gmail is a great choice. And on and on. This can all come together with one login and in one place on iGoogle and maybe, just maybe, might be simple enough that the technology doesn�t get in the way of the learning (which is a big fear of mine right now). Finally, I think I may pick it for the same reason we picked Blogger a couple of years ago � I don�t think Google is going away anytime soon. I hope Netvibes and Pageflakes don�t either, but I think Google is the safest bet. Now, I know there are a lot of Netvibes and Pageflakes fans out there (and probably fans of other tools as well), so feel free to chime in on the comments. But I�m betting we�ll stick with Google Reader/iGoogle for the G.A.

So, I feel like this post is somewhat half-baked, as I can�t completely get my head around this idea or get my ideas out, so that�s why it�s titled Part 1. I�m really, really, really hoping my personal learning network will chime in with some wonderful comments that I�ll then feel compelled to pull out into a separate � and much better � post in a week or two. Also, I would love it if folks would submit suggested feeds that are of general interest to high school students that we could include in our seed list that they�ll be choosing from.

So, help me out here. Submit your comments and help me write an amazing Creating Personal Learning Networks: Part 2 post in a few weeks.

Rhyme Time Podcasts

To update this earlier post, each student has now chosen the favorite poem that they've written and podcasted it. Please head over to this post on Learning and Laptops, listen to a few, and then give them some constructive criticism in the comments.

Rhyme Time

Over on Learning and Laptops, Maria � who is a ninth grader � wrote this:

Imagine: A place where students are adults and teachers are students. Imagine: A place where information is pulled, not fed. Imagine: A place where poetry can be real, deep, and fun at the same time.

Welcome to Ms. Smith's 9th Grade Honors English Class!!! Beware: This is NOT education as usual, please come prepared to learn in a way never experienced before. Please come excited to try new things, and to do your best, no matter the outcome.

. . . So boom! Out came student-taught poetry explications, publishing of our poems, and a opportunity that, instead of ogling Shakespeare's brilliance, we could to create our own! And our poems wouldn't simply be pieces of paper with a red grade, they would be published on the world-wide internet for others to enjoy and reply with their feedback.

The limits of blogging were pushed past the max as, each night from my computer at home, I would post the rough draft of one of my poems. Then I could scroll through all my classmates' poems, and discover new ideas and ways to improve. The next time I checked back, it was thrilling to read others' comments and feedback. It felt like a giant fishbowl, where instead of agonizing over a poem by myself, I could throw it out to a ton of different minds and we could build it up together, achieving an end result that I knew was truly my very best work.

If you go to the post, there are links to multiple examples on their blog. I particularly like this one.

Then, over on Anne Smith's ninth grade blog, the students in that class responded to this:

Students were asked to compose poems following the "I am" poem format revealing in one line who they truly are. This line is then repeated throughout the poem as they speak of their wishes, dreams, hopes and fears.

Students not only posted their poems as comments, but also commented on each other�s poems.

If you have a few moments, please check out the posts, read through some of the poems, and offer your constructive criticism in the comments.


Image Citation: Poetry and dreams, originally uploaded by Cher Amio.