Category Archives: Homepage

Design, Usability, Size of Online Writing Spaces

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The other day, I saw a notice that mentioned that the English Companion Ning space, started by Jim Burke, now had more than 20,000 members. My first thought is: that’s a whole lot of English teachers in one place. It reminds me of the first Ning I ever was part of — Classroom 2.0, created by Steve Hargadon — and the growth that took place there over fairly a short period of time. That site now has more than 53,000 members. Those are like small cities of teachers.

In both cases, the size of the community has come to dwarf my interest in the sites, and I mostly have dropped out of both of them. The very elements that I initially liked about the two communities — the ability to connect with other teachers, to follow threads and learn from examples, to share and gather resources — has become less and less like discovery there, and more like a navigational chore. I become overwhelmed by sheer numbers and feel like a little pebble dropping into the ocean when I go there, so I don’t anymore. Which is not to say that neither site has value — I still tell folks to head to both for their first forays into networking. They just don’t have value for me.

Here’s what I like: a smaller-scale community that experiences slow, but steady, growth. A Ning site that I facilitate with my friend Bonnie Kaplan for teachers in the National Writing Project still feels like a home for me as a writer and teacher. We have a little over 400 teachers, but we all have connections to the National Writing Project. We get a few new members each month, with more at the end of each summer, and many folks join us in weekly writing activities. I still know and write with many of the original members of the network.

It reminds me of a side conversation that I took part in at the National Writing Project Annual Meeting, where we were talking about the “ideal size” of a networking space, where it is small enough to have connections with others and large enough to have enough diverse thoughts to make it interesting. We settled on something around 500 people for a network. I still stand by that number.

Ning has gotten a lot of grief in the past year as it moved from a free model to a paid one, but they do keep adding more and more features that allow a manager of site to make it their own. You can do as much or as little as you want to make the Ning site welcoming and reflective of your community, which in turn supports the work of the members of the community. That’s how design works hand-in-hand with nurturing a networking site.

Which brings me to another online forum that I am now taking part in with the Massachusetts New Literacies Teacher Leadership Initiative. We’re moving some discussions into the online portal (MassOne) of the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education. I know all the reasons for using the MassOne site: it keeps discussions under the banner of the state, which has graciously funded the year-long initiative; it archives our discussion; it is  a place where every teachers in our state has an account.

But I personally find the site unfriendly, from a design and usability standpoint, and I truly wish we could have launched our own stand-alone space that is easier to use and more design-friendly.Here are some of the things that bother me:

  • First, if I make a thread or a discussion, I can’t edit or delete it once it is posted.  I made this mistake the other day, as one of the leaders of a forum, and had to email another teacher leader, who had to email a forum manager at the state education offices. That seems awfully inefficient to me. And I was so frustrated that I could not make any changes to my post. It was as if I had tossed a badly written letter into a bottle and tossed it into the ocean, only to remember I forgot to put my name on it. Too late. Your words are lost.
  • Second, the interface feels like it was designed in the mid-1990s and was never revamped to keep up with the times. There’s something to be said for a clean look with little flash but this is extreme. It’s like writing in a virtual version of the dentist’s office. At our Ning space, we try to keep things simple. A good, thoughtful design invites people to write. A friendly look extends a friendly invitation to folks to be part of the community, and giving them some tools to make the space their own provides a path towards ownership, which leads to more interaction within the community. This MassOne has none of that. Zip.
  • Third, there does not seem to be any way to change your email for notification updates. As one of the forum leaders, I want to know when folks in my teacher group are posting, so I can respond and nurture the discussion in a timely manner (another element of a good site — quick, thoughtful responses). For me, this means that I have to keep checking my school email as opposed to my personal email. (I suppose this is done to verify that we are all teachers in the Massachusetts system but still, I find it annoying). There is an RSS button in the forum space, and I thought: Perfect! But it didn’t work. Darn it. (And if it did work, the RSS seems to cover the entire MassOne system, not just my forums. How is that helpful? It’s just a stream of information that I would still have to wade through).
  • Fourth, there is no real way to personalize myself in the space. I can choose an avavatar icon, but only from the preset ones.  I can’t upload anything — no images or screenshots or anything — and the threads only show my author-name as a shortened version of my email. Talk about impersonal. A good, nurturing space gives users the options for staking out some ground. I don’t want to be one of the masses.
  • Finally, the fact that we are writing under the Department of Educational umbrella means that folks may be guarded, and might fear honesty. When you know high-level state folks might be wondering what we are up to and can quickly check in over your shoulder, you pull some punches (if you have them).

All that being said, I’m interested to see how this experiment goes. We held an online conference the other day and our teachers are now being reminded of their responsibilities of moving discussions online into the forum space. As of this morning, though, not one of the 20 or so teachers in the group I am facilitating had posted a single thing (of course, it is the start of vacation week).

Peace (in the networks),
Kevin

Why Widgets?

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This is another activity in the Edublog Teacher Challenge taking place the last month or so, and the focus is on Widgets, those boxes of stuff that we attach to the sides of our blogs. I’m going to sound a bit cranky here, but I often find widgets too distracting and wonder why people go overboard with them.

I know, I use them, too. I’m guilty.

A look at my blog shows a Twitter widget, an informational widget for my Teaching the New Writing book collection, a link to my Boolean Squared webcomic site, an internal search engine and links to posts on my blog.  Arrrr. I remember the first time I found out about widgets in my blog dashboard. I went a little widget crazy. I had a whole line of things running down the spine of my blog – maps, counters, videos, etc. Later, I removed most of them. But even now, every time I see that side bar of my blog, I think: that’s just too much stuff floating around.

And I often think the same thing when I go to other blogs for a visit or a comment. Widgets can produce information overload, and when we start thinking of design elements of blogs — of what makes an online site work from the visual and information angle, and what detracts from the site — I can’t help but sometimes think that widgets are nothing but clutter that can get in the way of understanding.

And yet … having a space for static information is good, right? I guess. And it gives a blog a certain identity, too. What we choose to include leaves our own mark on our blog sites, which most of us (me) don’t code or create ourselves. We (me) use templates. Widgets can give our sites a little personality.

I do have my widgets here for a reason, and that reason is that I want to provide easy-to-access information and links to my readers.  But this morning, as I was trolling through my RSS reader, it occurred to me (and not for the first time) that I almost never actually see a blog itself. I see the feed. For the most part, I don’t even know what the blogs I subscribe to look like (for example, I went to a friend’s blog last night for the first time in who knows how long and saw that he had completely redesigned the thing. I didn’t know. Did it matter?), and so, I don’t really see the widgets either.

Maybe you never see mine, either.

Peace (in the crankiness),
Kevin

Laughter and Chatter: Remembering Kindergarten

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Kindergarten files
We had one of the funnest, most laugh-infested Circle of Power (Morning Meeting) sessions in my class the other day, as one of my sixth graders brought in a book that she and a bunch of others published when they were in Kindergarten with my colleague, Gail Poulin. (See her wonderful class blog and her own reflective blog).

My students shared, with permission of the others, drawings and stories they had either written or had transcribed. As is often the case with Gail, the stories were nicely published together. The theme for book was about “I Have  Dream” (inspired by Martin Luther King Jr.) and another packet was when one student is “star of the day,” the others write nice things about them and draw cute pictures.

Even students who did not have Gail for their kindergarter teacher had a great time with looking at the drawings, and listening to the stories, and remembering a bit about their own kindergarten experiences. It was an unexpected surprise, and we all had a good time.

Thank, Gail, for making memories that can impact us up here a the other end of the building. And thanks to the rest of our wonderful kindergarten team, too, who do such a fantastic job with the youngsters in our building. The things they do in those younger grades sets the stage for the learning we try to do in the upper grades. I know I appreciate their hard work.

Peace (down the memory land),
Kevin

Eavesdropping on Norris Tech Team

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The other day, I wrote a post about a meeting of the Western Massachusetts Writing Project — a sort of eavesdropping into the topics of the gathering. A few days later, I was in a meeting of our Norris Elementary School Technology Team and took some notes. Here are some of the topics we talked about. The Tech Team is comprised of our principal, our district’s technology coordinator, and teachers of various levels and disciplines in our building.

  • We spent a chunk of time talking about Facebook and pondering our school’s presence there. One of our team members created a Norris School FB site in the summer and he maintains it, but the principal wonders about the line between “official school news” and someone posting items to the Norris School FB wall, seemingly as official news (but not). I imagine a lot of schools are struggling with this. While I am not FB fan, I do see the value is connecting with the community that does use FB. We didn’t resolve much here, except to research if a post to the wall can be held in moderation before going public.
  • The last few meetings, we’ve aired some difficulties and frustrations we are having with staff members using and taking care of equipment that we do have available. Computer carts don’t get signed out; individual computer get taken off the carts; wires and cables disappear; digital cameras are scattered about. So, we are moving towards a Google Calendar system so that the sign-out process for the three computer carts (two PC and one Mac) will be all online. Ideally, this will allow everyone to know where the carts should be and when they are available. We’ll see how it works when the concept gets rolled out in a week or so. Our tech coordinator is working to provide a Google account to all staff members in the building, and then constructing shared calendars.
  • The flow of Promethean and other interactive boards into classroom is continuing but the training has not yet followed. What this means is that some teachers with boards don’t know how to use them, even in basic terms, and some have not yet even opened up the software on their new Macs (and some have not even used the Macs at all). A training session is taking place next month, led by a teacher here at our school and another teacher at another school in our district. I think we’ll be needing much more than that — I think a Mentor System is the way to go. We’re not there yet.
  • A series of workshops around using our new set of iTouch mobile devices, and the Thinkfinity site (which paid for the devices), is coming up in late March. Teachers will learn how to use the devices for at least some podcasting and publishing in the science area, as a focus. The grant also provides a stipend for participants, and they get to take use the iTouch during the time periods. We’re hoping this gets folks interested and engaged. But, we worry about use and care of the devices (see previous points).
  • The principal noted his commitment to sending our entire Tech Team to an upcoming technology conference in nearby Holyoke (with keynote speaker, Alan November). He supports the idea of going together as a group, then reflecting afterward on how we can use ideas we gathered here at our school. (This is the conference that I am sending in a proposal to for a workshop on Technology Across the Content Areas.)
  • Our tech team misses our Ning site, which we used a lot last year to connect but then abandoned because of Ning’s cost shift. I may look around for an alternative or try to get our principal to pony up the $20 for the basic Ning setup. It really made a big difference in our communication as a team.
  • Our principal left us with a little “fun homework,” as he called it. We are to come up with one interesting idea of technology that might inspire us, our school, to make a step forward. He suggested it be something neat, or fun, or engaging. I have more ideas than I can think of, but one that came up the other day is how some school districts create “virtual snow days” for students to connect with the school even when the school day is called off for weather. This appeals to me because of the lack of consistency these past few weeks, although I wonder about hurdles of implementing ways for students to work (and teachers to monitor) from home during snow days. (See article about this at The Answer Sheet.)

Peace (in the sharing),
Kevin

Images and Multimedia: The Teacher Challenge

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I seem to have fallen behind a bit with the Edublog Teacher Challenge, but that’s the beauty of online work — there’s always another day. I’ve missed two of the activities: thinking about how we use images on our spaces and thinking about how we embed media into our sites.

First, I use images as a partner to text, mostly, but this is something I have been rethinking or at least, wondering about. Am I using images with blog posts for the way it looks or for the way it means? I’d have to admit: it’s all about the visual. I guess that’s not that unusual or all that bad, but given this age of multimedia, am I doing enough thinking and reflecting around why I use a specific image and what message does it convey?

This had me thinking a bit about Bud the Teacher’s annual month of poetry picture prompts, in which he posts an image and asks folks to be inspired to write a poem. Each morning, I found something unusual and would let the image spark some words and thoughts, and then I would write. I love how that visual element really got to the heart of creative inspiration.

Here’s an image he posted about refrigerator art:

magnetic poetry

And here was the poem that he inspired for me, looking at some art of my young son on our fridge (Creative Commons License photo credit: surrealmuse):

Oh, Luke, how could you
flash that light saber at your father like that,
there, with your stick arms and fat head,
drawn from some innocence yearning for conflict
and placed right next to the phone numbers
of people whose numbers we should remember anyway.
Luke, you’re not going anywhere anyway,
not with that magnet stuck to your head,
and I hope you don’t mind sharing your space with a report card,
a few coupons,
a reminder or two,
and that flier for a summer camp.
Space has become a cluttered place, Luke, and you’ll have to make do
until the Force of gravity releases you.

The next Teacher Challenge activity was all about embedding media, which I do quite regularly. I am always trying out things and sharing my process as best as I can here at my blog. I figure learning is an adventure, and the more I can reflect, the more I know about what I am doing. Media such as videos and interactive applications are becoming more and more portable, allowing us a chance to engage our readers in different ways. There is also a wide range of skills that go into creating a multimedia piece, and embedding them into our blogs gives us wider publication.

Since we’re on the poetry kick, I figure I would embed a Voicethread that I had created when I did a 30 poems in 30 Days project a few years ago, and asked folks to add thoughts or comments.

Peace (in the kickstart),
Kevin

Teacher Challenge: Avatars and Us

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The most recent Teacher Challenge challenge is to think about Avatars, and how we visually represent ourselves and our identities in the online world. It got me thinking a bit about the various avatars that I have used since I began blogging and networking.

The first avatar I ever used was my old dog, Bella. I figured that since my nickname was dogtrax, having a dog as my avatar made sense. And she was a beautiful dog, so I enjoyed seeing her image on my posts. I think, at the time, I was erecting some protective walls around identity, and my dog didn’t reveal a thing about me, really.

Later, I shifted to an avatar image that I have of me playing guitar with my old band, The Sofa Kings. It’s a picture from when we went into the recording studio. I liked how it captured my love of music and my identity of being in a rock and roll band.

These days, I am more apt to use a drawing I made myself in MS Paint. It’s pretty basic, but it seems comfortable to me. I got tired of seeing myself in an image as my avatar. The self-portrait is not really me (maybe an older version of me, with more hair) but I like that I drew it myself, with my own hands (mouse) and I see it and think, yep, that’s me.

I uploaded a bunch of my various avatars to see how the embedded gallery will work.

In general, I guess folks have to think about hwy they want to use an avatar: is it for flash, for fun, for privacy or for something else. There are certainly tons of avatar makers out there now, and it is always good to take a step back and consider how it is that we represent ourselves to the world. And when we talk to our students, and work with our students with avatars, it’s a good way to get into visual literacy: what does this picture say to the world?

And the ease in which we can make the switch of our visual representation means we can easily shed and recreate our online visual identities with a click of a button and swipe of a mouse.

Peace (in the avatar),
Kevin

PS — Later, it occurred to me that I didn’t mention the use of Voki and other animated avatars. I have tried them and found them … too disjointed and too odd. Maybe it’s that whole robotic human thing. And the eyeballs following my mouse just makes me unsettled. I know plenty of folks like Voki. Not me. I prefer a static avatar that doesn’t talk to me.

Creating a Cross-Grade Writing Rubric

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Writing Rubric
ELA Conventions Rubric
Our school is in the midst of a two year Literacy Initiative, which has led to such things as a Literacy Conference hosted at our school last year and a move into the Fountas & Pinnell Benchmark Assessment and many conversations about reading and writing and literacy (although not so much around New Literacies).

Last year, as we shifted into a Standard-based Reporting System (no more grades), I realized that I needed a reading response rubric that would align with that new system and allow me to have conversations about what we expect from our writers when they are responding to literature. The principal agreed to pay for enlarging the rubric into a huge poster for all of our sixth grade classrooms, and now that is a common tool we all use. Then, our associate superintendent walked through the room earlier this year, commented on the rubric, and asked that our principal provide copies for other schools and also for other classrooms.

Now, that reading response rubric hangs in most of the grades three through six classrooms in our school. I can’t say if it is helping or hindering other teachers, though. I am hopeful that it will lead to more exposure to open response, critical thinking questions. All of our test score data shows an across-the-board weakness in open response from our students, in math as well as ELA.

But what about writing? What about personal narratives, short stories and other forms of longer composition that does not fall under the heading of reading response?

Last week, we began the first steps towards creating a similar rubric for writing and composition for grades three through six. We made pretty decent headway, I think, but it is more difficult than it seems to create a document flexible enough to be useful for a third grader as well as a sixth graders, without being so general that it means nothing.

We decided to break off the ELA Conventions as its own rubric and then, with the Writing/Composition Rubric, we focused in on some specific areas:

  • Clarity
  • Explanations
  • Details
  • Development of ideas
  • (to be added) rich vocabulary

One teacher had a great suggestion with this draft that a small group of us presented: create a third column on the rubric for grade-specific skills. This would allow for us all to have some common language around literacy, but still allow that flexibility for what is expected in each grade — building skills as the students move upward through the school.

We’ll also be reformatting these rubrics with more bullet points, as opposed to sentences, so that the rubric makes more sense visually for students. Eventually, each classroom will have three large rubric posters: reading response, writing/composition, and conventions.

Since I was given the charge of creating the draft of the rubric (which I am sharing here), I purposely used the word “composition” instead of writing in the rubric, and I explained to my colleagues that this word better covers all elements of literacy — use of digital tools to create work as well as composing an essay. I noted, too, that the Common Core standards are heavy on use of media for learning and creating and so I hoped that word “composition” would be flexible enough. No one argued that point.

Peace (in the rubric),
Kevin

Considering the ‘Academically Adrift’

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A newspaper headline caught my eye this morning, and had me searching around for information about this book, Academically Adrift, which seems to indicate that for many students, the University is not all that rigorous nor is it enhancing their learning. I don’t confess to know all the ins and outs of the study, and the newspaper article did note that some had called some of the methods of the data collection into question.

But (according to an article in Inside Higher Ed) the study finds that:

  • Students who study by themselves for more hours each week gain more knowledge — while those who spend more time studying in peer groups see diminishing gains.
  • Students whose classes reflect high expectations (more than 40 pages of reading a week and more than 20 pages of writing a semester) gained more than other students.
  • Students majoring in liberal arts fields see “significantly higher gains in critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing skills over time than students in other fields of study.”

The result?

According to their analysis of more than 2,300 undergraduates at twenty-four institutions, 45 percent of these students demonstrate no significant improvement in a range of skills—including critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing—during their first two years of college. — from the book blurb.

So, what are we to make of this?

It seems to me that critical thinking and pushing students to solve problems, as opposed to rote learning, is one way to increase the rigor of our academic environments. I suppose we, in the public school field, have to wonder if we are doing what we need to do to prepare our students for the University. Is too much of the first part of the college experience just bringing students up to a certain standard?

I think the data also indicates that our push for social engagement (online or not) takes away from academic engagement, and is that good or bad? I remember many benefits from the social elements of college (connections that are still strong) but I surely rushed through some assignments or did not go as deep as I should have in order to have time for the non-academics.

Lots of questions emerge from this kind of study, I think, particularly as we think about how we are strengthening our educational system from top to bottom, and everywhere else. I often feel as if there are too few conversations between professors in the University systems and teachers in the high schools, although the National Writing Project has consistently been a place where I HAVE heard those conversations taking place.

Peace (in the successful student),
Kevin

Teacher Challenge: All About Me is really All About You

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This blogging  activity, as part of the Edublog Teacher Challenge, is to consider the use of “Pages” as opposed to “posts” on a blog. Essentially, a page is a static site (sort of like a common webpage) while a post shows up as the homepage, in reverse chronological order. Specifically, we are being asked to examine our All About Me pages and think about the message it sends, and maybe do a little spring cleaning.

I did a similar preview a few years ago, too, and although today I made some quick tweaks to the language there (I used to moderate every single comment and now I have it set differently, so returning users don’t need to be in my moderation bin), it is still a pretty inviting message,  I think. My All About Me page is actually All Ab0ut You (the reader).

You can view my All About Me Page here.

I’ve avoided using too many pages because I feel like it clutters up the blog homepage site. The only other pages that I used to use was for an ongoing short story called Mac’s Music Shack (and is really The Canterbury Tales, retold through music themes), and I was working to embed video introductions to each chapters and podcasting the chapters. (You can tell it’s a bit dated because I was using Google Video).  It was an experiment around using audio and video and writing, and the static quality of the Page made sense to me at the time. The page is still there, if you are curious, but it remains a Page Under Construction and is not currently linked on the homepage.

You can view Mac’s Music Shack here.

Peace (in the reflecting),
Kevin

Considering the National Day on Writing

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I’ve agreed to be on a task force with the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) to brainstorm and coordinate more outreach efforts for the third annual National Day on Writing that takes place this coming fall. This week, we will have our first phone conference and our coordinator sent along some interesting data to help guide our thoughts. This data (most of which comes from the 2009 Day on Writing, as the most recent 2010 data is still being sifted) comes from the National Day on Writing Online Gallery.

At the Gallery:

  • There are 29,058 submissions have been published (that’s impressive, isn’t it?);
  • There are 3017 galleries (including 2994 local galleries — such as teachers and schools — and 23 partner galleries — such as larger organizations like the National Writing Project that partner up for the project);
  • The majority of published work is student work, from school-based assignments (In 2009, there were more than 10,000 writers from the age range of 13 to 22 while there were about 2,000 writers from ages 30 to 60);
  • (For 2009’s Day on Writing) most of the writing was done with a word processor (11,000 pieces) while only a few used multimedia (137 used video and 11 used audio). I’d be interested to see if these numbers started to shift in 2010;
  • Most of the writing came under traditional genres (short stories, poetry, etc.);
  • Very few galleries were represented from organizations outside of schools and education (ie, community groups);
  • There are plenty of empty galleries that folks set up but never used.

As I mull over what I can bring to the conversation, I was thinking:

  • I love the concept of capturing writing in all of its glory and power and beauty through a National Day on Writing, particularly the emphasis on daily writing that we do without thinking about it;
  • I wish the online Gallery website were easier to navigate and easier to use. There seem to be too many data point questions to get to the actual submission page (but that data yields information like what I just shared);
  • It drove me crazy that I could not  “embed” media (such as a digital story, or an audio file) right into my submission page. Everything had to be linked to another place outside of the Gallery. I think it is fair to say that most people will not follow those links, but they would watch or listen if they could do it right there on the Gallery page itself. Does the Gallery infrastructure allow for this?
  • The look and feel of the Gallery site is, as one friend put it, like a throwback site from the 90s. I don’t know anything about the resources that are available to NCTE but it seems like the site itself could use a little more oomph.
  • I’m not all that crazy about the homepage design. It is a large library and while I love and adore libraries, it is not quite the message of 21st Century that we want to send. At least, the image should have some technology component along with the stacks of books. Most libraries have made that transition.
  • Given the day of interactions between readers and writers, isn’t there a way to allow for comments on writing? (this may not be within the mission of the effort, though, and the question of moderation would surely come into play).
  • There must be a better way to search through the Gallery — can we create a “Stumble Upon” style of navigation for the site, I wonder. Or a “Surprise Me” feature? I’d like that.
  • If teachers like me are using the Day on Writing to celebrate writing, are students buying in? or is it just another writing assignment? And how can we tell? (We can’t.)
  • I wonder if people even come back to the Gallery to read during the rest of the year? I’ll ask about that kind of data. My guess is that folks submit writing, publish to the site but don’t do all that much reading. The danger is an empty space of writing, right?
  • It would be nice to have a writing showcase are at the Gallery — right on the homepage — for a variety of different kinds of work. That might invite more folks in to look around.
  • How can we best use the tools of social media (Twitter, Facebook, etc.) to encourage, invite and promote the National Day on Writing? This is an area that I will be thinking most deeply upon.
  • How can we promote the idea of the Day on Writing to groups not directly affiliated with schools? I am thinking of YMCA, Boys and Girls Clubs, Scouts, etc., who might find the initiative valuable but either don’t know about it or know how to access it. This might be a “branding issue,” too, if this effort seems to be only school-based.

I’m really looking for ideas from any of you, dear readers, about how to improve the Day on Writing and the Gallery experiences. If you have thoughts, I would love to hear them. Just write me a comment here and I will be sure to add them into the conversations this week.

Peace (in the writing),
Kevin