Teacher Reactions to Connective Writing

In an effort to be as transparent as possible, I would like to post the reactions to the Connective Writing Class that just concluded yesterday. Here they are:

Overall Summary:

I felt the the community of learning theme was hit by skyping with all of the bloggers. It was very worthwhile, we were exposed to so many different applications and began to make our blogs.

This course was very good. I would like to have had more time to actually set up the blog accounts. I felt a little rushed.

Although I do not consider myself tech savvy I am going to implement blogs for my students this year, slowly at first, I feel it will provide a larger outlet for my students to express themselves.

Patrick is very knowledgeable and made the course easy to understand, and easy to relate to. It opened my eyes to the many possibilities that technology can bring to the classroom.

It was a lot of information to take in but was well worth the time. I can use it all in my classroom. Blogging, Wikispaces and their uses as well as ways to incorporate writing through the technology available to us.

I felt that this helped me feel less intimidated about using the technology and better understand ways I can use these tools in my class.

How will you apply what you learned?

I will start a professional blog for myself and a book blog for my students in September.

I will set up a blog for the first novel that we read in September.

I will start with a basic class blog page and grow from there!

I will set up a class blog for my students to communicate with each other in a different way than routine class discussions. I also plan on setting up a professional blog to communicate with teachers all over the world, instead of just the ones down the hall. I'm excited to get started!

I would like to include book chats and classroom discussions with the blogging sites as well as use the Wikispaces to promote more research and discussions.

I will try to blog with my students and encourage them to share their thoughts and reflect in a productive way. I also hope to not only read various blogs, but jump in from time to time.

My question to myself right off the bat is mostly about why I didn't push the issue of personal professional development more? Will's post regarding his intentions and the reactions he gets rings similarly to what I felt as I talked about using blogs as personal learning tools. However, this was a great first step taken by a great group of teachers. It's easy for most of us to simply forget how hard it is for many teachers, especially those that are further removed in age from the students they teach to embrace the changes that these technologies bring.

These teachers worked very hard to assimilate blogging into their own framework, and I am excited to see where it goes.

As they see it...

Previously, I posted about my observations of the teachers in the connective writing workshop that I have been conducting over the last two days. Actually, it was more of an introduction and overview than a workshop, but nonetheless, some great dialog came out of it.

Here are some of the quotes that I was able to pull from our discussion of yesterday's project:

• "We needed to have a plan and sit together and work through the information"
• "Sometimes things would appear on the document that I wouldn't want on there, stuff that I wouldn't put on their if this were my own document."
• "We really had no format to follow, so trying to learn the application, collaborate, and write was hard."
• "Should we have had roles?"
• "You can see where having good communication skills is important when doing this."
• "It is not as easy explaining to people what you want them to do this way."

Some pretty telling soundbites here, and we spoke about these as we looked at various examples of connective writing and online collaboration. Framing this in the context of these teachers as my students, they understood a need for scaffolding with technology, and I tried to model what it would be like when the teacher learns alongside the students; I had no idea how any of this would pan out, so I was making decisions about what information to share and which direction to push in as the need arose.

A spontaneous discussion about teaching digital literacy and ethics arose as we began introducing blogging examples and formats. What was great was that they all were advocates of tearing down the filters and the blocks to Internet sites. Several of them revealed that conversations were more important than limiting access. I have a great staff to work with.