Digital Community Participation Project!

The first thing that I did for this project was create a Pinterest board focused exclusively on literacy. While I was familiar with Pinterest before beginning this project, I had not taken advantage of the website as a way to find teaching resources. Now, I've created boards for Science, Social Studies, and Math as well to keep my resources organized. I definitely see myself using Pinterest as a resource for teaching in the future. It's an awesome way to keep everything organized and in one place. The beautiful thing about Pinterest is that you are adding more than just activities to your "boards." You're adding whole websites. This means that EVERY online teaching resource that you find can be added to your Pinterest board, including blogs, Twitter groups, and Goodreads groups. The only downfall of Pinterest is that it can be difficult to find a particular pin once you have pinned a good bit. I have made sure to add a good description for each pin to help me keep track of them better. In the future, I may break down content areas even more so that there are less pins on each board.

The next community that I experimented with was Goodreads, which I LOVED. (I can not emphasize that enough.) Since discovering the community, I have used it almost daily, both to find new children's books and also to find books for myself. After rating a few books and marking a few books as "to-read," I started getting recommendations for children's books I had never even heard of that I would love to check out. I created a "future classroom" bookshelf where I've created a (rapidly growing) list of books that I want to purchase. As I scrolled through the endless list of children's books, I couldn't help but think of lesson after lesson that could use each book in the classroom. I also joined several groups for educators and lovers of children's and young adult's books, as well as a few book clubs just for myself. This website is extremely valuable for getting ideas and reviews on children's books from other educators, and I already know that I will be using it on a regular basis in the future. I never would have found this community without taking this class. (Thank you, Beth!)

Digital Is...

The major benefit of having students publish their writing online, in my opinion, is that it gives them an authentic audience. Of course, the teacher is always an audience for student work, but students appreciate the ability to share their pieces with a wider audience. Unfortunately, there is barely enough time in the school day to incorporate a daily writer's workshop, much less to incorporate time for each student to share their pieces. This is an area where teachers can fully take advantage of the digital tools available to them today. Having students publish their pieces in an online blog allows their peers to read them whenever they have time and give feedback where they can. Beyond their peers, students can receive feedback from their families and people around the world as well.

When students publish their work online, they are constantly reminded that they are writing for an audience. When writing is published online, people WILL read it. If writing is published on a class blog, each student's classmates will have the opportunity to read ALL of their work. They can then help each other find their strengths and weaknesses and improve. Teachers in each grade and across grade levels at the school can collaborate so that their students can read work from students in other classes, increasing the opportunity for students to receive valuable feedback about their work. Teachers can make their blogs available to principals and other administration at the school, allowing them to give feedback to students as well as keeping them up to date with what is going on in the classroom. Parents, grandparents, and other members of the community can read the students' work, bringing them in to the classroom. Then, using resources like #comments4kids on Twitter, teachers can open up the blog to classrooms across the country and around the world.

Amazingly, with so many resources available, I have not seen many teachers incorporate technology like this in the classroom. My field placement is in a first grade classroom, where it would be extremely difficult to incorporate technology in this way (students have trouble typing ANYTHING, let alone publishing full pieces.) I have spent time in classrooms in higher grade levels, however, and I have not seen teachers taking advantage of the technological resources available to them. Meanwhile, students are struggling to find purpose for their writing. I am thankful that digital resources have been emphasized so much in this class. While I definitely understand the advantages of having students publish online, I was unaware of the amount of safe resources available for kids to use. I will undoubtably search for ways to incorporate these resources in to my classroom regardless of the age of the children that I am working with.

Technology in the Classroom

Before last week, I had not thought very much about using technology in the classroom at all. I was in elementary school at a time before Facebook and Twitter, and I have always envisioned my future classroom being similar to the ones that I grew up in. Times have changed though (as cliche as that is,) and our classrooms have to change with them. Children are constantly exposed to technology outside of the classroom, and our classrooms have to compete with that. By using technology in our classrooms, we have the opportunity to help our students connect with the rest of the world while teaching them how to use technology PRODUCTIVELY. Instead of only using social networking sites for fun, we can show our students the many ways that these sites can help them learn.

Now, I am determined to incorporate technology in to my classroom, especially for writing. As we have discussed countless times, it is important for students to have a real audience for their writing. Through blogging and using resources such as #comments4kids, teachers can help their students reach a wider audience than ever before. Students have the opportunity to receive feedback from people who they would never have the opportunity to hear from otherwise, and they can use this feedback to grow in their writing.

Links:

50 Education Technology Tools Every Teacher Should Know About:

http://edudemic.com/2012/08/50-education-technology-tools-every-teacher-should-know-about/

A collection of technology resources for teachers. The links are categorized and there is a short link describing what each tool does and what teachers can use them for in the classroom.

How Are You Connecting Your Students with the World? Skype in the Classroom:

http://www.edutopia.org/blog/mock-elections-via-skype-suzie-boss

This article describes the ways that a teacher used Skype to connect her students with the world outside of her classroom.

7 Reasons to Leverage Social Networking Tools in the Classroom:

http://www.emergingedtech.com/2011/06/7-reasons-to-leverage-social-networking-tools-in-the-classroom/

This article advocates for the use of social networking in the classroom and gives specific reasons why it is beneficial for students.

Miss Night's Marbles:

http://missnightmutters.com/

A kindergarden teacher's blog. Miss Night blogs about day to day kindergarden events, but she ALSO blogged about her experience using Twitter in her classroom.

Allen & Swistak and Friese & Nixon

The Allen & Swistak article focuses on allowing students to choose a topic that is meaningful and important to them and having them write a multi-genre research paper on the topic. The students are required to defend their topic choice before making a final decision. This pushes them to think critically about their topic and why it is important. The students then complete a research paper and question their findings to push them to find out deeper information about their topic. After the paper has been completed, the students write in other genres of their choice about their topic. Once this huge project is complete, the students share their work with an audience that includes their parents and friends. This project is beneficial for several reasons. It allows students to pursue learning about a topic that is important to them, and it teaches them about writing in multiple genres at the same time. Because of how huge the project is, students are allowed to explore their topic deeply, and they are allowed to take things that have been left out of state standards in to account. Students are also given an important audience to share their work with at the end of the project. This motivates students to produce their best work while allowing them to share their work and be proud of it.

The Friese & Nixon article focuses on helping students explore World War II through poetry. The students, who were unfamiliar with poetry when beginning the unit, learned about both topics simultaneously. Writing poetry about the war helped students to engage with the material more effectively while giving their poetry more purpose. The common theme in these two pieces is that these teachers were able to help their students engage with material by integrating content areas. The students not only connected more with the pieces that they wrote, but they experimented with different forms and genres and learned much more deeply about the content areas than they would have through a traditional curriculum.In the end, students created pieces that they were proud of and excited to share with others, allowing them to receive feedback and continue to grow as writers.

Response to WW Ch. 18 & Spelling and Other Writing "Skills"

As with every other topic in the classroom, it is important to help students see the meaning in spelling (and punctuation) in order to help them develop better grammar skills. If students see that learning to spell and punctuate their writing will help them better achieve their purposes as writers, they will develop a desire to learn to do these skills well. In order for this to work, of course, students have to understand that their writing has a purpose and they have to see that writing is an important part of their day to day life. The most interesting think about the reading on spelling instruction was that it discouraged the use of spelling tests and also discouraged teachers correcting their students' spelling in their writing. Both of these things are very common practices in schools, and I can see in my field placement that they are ineffective for the majority of students. The work that they do during centers, or "workstations," seems to be a lot more beneficial. During workstations, the students focus on word families and rhyming words as well as on letter blends and the sounds that they make. The discoveries that they make for themselves during workstations carry over in to all of their work in the classroom. They give the students in the class who are struggling with spelling the tools to invent their own spellings of unknown words. Another important activity to help students develop grammar skills is reading. Since I have begun my field placement, I have felt like the majority of the day is spent focusing on literacy (specifically, reading.) Until recently, I felt like this was a waste of time. Reading has so many purposes in the classroom other than just teaching students how to read, and this chapter definitely reinforced that fact.

Chapter 18 of The Writing Workshop focuses on worksheets. Honestly, this was a chapter that I was not expecting to see in the book. As a pre-service teacher, I have already developed the idea that worksheets are bad. I plan to use them in my future classroom as sparingly as possible, because I feel that students rarely take any meaning away from them. Because this book focuses on making sure that students see the meaning and purpose in writing, I didn't expect to encounter a whole chapter devoted to worksheets. The chapter, however, focuses on providing students with meaningful and purposeful worksheets to help them plan and organize their writing and to help them reflect on their work. The word "worksheet" has a negative connotation in the education world because worksheets are seen as busy-work. The worksheets proposed in this chapter, however, are not simply work to be completed. They are tools to help students progress in their writing. If students do not have a need for them, they do not have to use them. If students are stuck, however, the worksheets can give them the push that they need to get writing.

Response to WW Ch. 10 & 16 and Critical Literacy

While I understand the power of sharing your writing and receiving feedback from peers, I have had terrible experiences with sharing my work with classmates in the past. When I decided that I wanted to be a teacher, I also decided that I would never force my students to share their work with the class. I know that as a teacher of 30 or so students, I will never understand everything that is going on in my classroom. I know that there will be name-calling and teasing that I am not aware of, and this was a point that was reinforced in the chapter from Critical Literacy and Writer's Workshop. I know that sometimes knowing that you will be sharing your work changes the content of your writing. Instead of writing about something that is truly meaningful to them, students may choose to write about a more comfortable topic, rather than be criticized. While I agree that sharing is good in the writing workshop, I don't think that it should be forced by any means. If students choose not to share their work with the class, teachers need to trust that they have a reason not to want to share.

Chapter 10 in The Writing Workshop focuses on the actual content to be taught in the workshop. Writing workshop time should focus on grammar and conventions as well as teaching students to think and behave like writers. Teachers should encourage their students to find techniques and strategies that work well for them. Students should also learn to question themselves and their writing so that they are constantly growing. Chapter 16 focuses on planning for the writing workshop. For me, this is definitely scary. Coming up with a formal lesson plan for a time of the day that is full of so many unknowns is intimidating to say the least. Planning for a writing workshop has to be very extensive, and it includes setting out goals for your students, planning a space for them to accomplish those goals, and choosing units of study that will bring them closer to their goals before beginning daily lesson planning. The focus lesson plan is really the only part of the planning process that follows a traditional lesson plan format, because this is the only time during the writing workshop in which you are doing formal, stand-at-the-front-of-the-class-and-teach teaching. The rest of the time is dedicated to working with individual students on what they need that day and allowing students to share their work with the class. While I definitely think that planning for the writing workshop will be difficult my first year of teaching, I know that it is something that I will get more comfortable with over time.

Response to WW Ch. 11 & 12 and "Writing for Justice"

The first chapter focused on the most important component of the writing workshop, in my opinion: allowing each student to write about what is important to them. It is true that students can write a piece on a topic given by the teacher, but they are unlikely to find much, if any, meaning in it. Allowing students to write about something that they are interested in gives the assignment much more meaningful and allows them to take more away from the lesson. The teaching part of the writing workshop is not in assigning students a topic, it is in giving students techniques and strategies to use in their writing. This material may find its way in to students' work for that day, but if it does not, that has to be okay. The students will add the material in to their writing if and when they want to. The students in the writing workshop are their own guides in their writing, the teacher's job is just to provide them with a better set of tools.

As a person who appreciates structure and control, I really liked the chapter that focused on units of study. When we first started reading The Writing Workshop, I was stressed out by how small and disconnected the focus lessons seemed. After reading this chapter, I've been able to think of them as pieces of a larger lesson, which makes them much less intimidating to create. Instead of thinking that you have to effectively teach a large concept in less than 10 minutes, you can make that large concept your unit of study. Then, you can use your focus lessons to dive in to individual components of that concept. Units of study do give a seemingly unstructured writing workshop some structure in the long-term, and that makes it much more likely that I will include it in my classroom in the future.

In "Writing for Justice- Persuasion from the Inside Out" by Mark Hansen, the idea that students need to write about a topic that is important to them is highlighted. As Hansen pointed out, when students write about a topic that they perceived as meaningless, they begin to view writing as meaningless. When students write persuasive letters that do not produce any change, they begin to believe that writing can not lead to change, and this is absolutely NOT what we need to be teaching our students. Allowing students to write about important topics that they are passionate about allows them to see purpose in their persuasive writing. Instead of just writing to complete an assignment, they write because they want to persuade someone to share their views on the subject. This makes their writing powerful.

The Writing Workshop: Response to Ch. 14 & 15

The first thing that stood out to me while reading these chapters is that Katie Wood Ray mentioned that teachers often burn out quickly because they know what to expect going in to each school day and that the unknown of the writing workshop can help to prevent this burn-out. While I agree that conferences and sharing during the writing workshop allow teachers to learn important important and surprising things about their students, I don't really like that she implied that an elementary school teacher could ever know everything that was going to happen during a school day. No matter what your activities are, a school day will never go exactly as you have planned. I'm definitely not saying that I think having one-on-one conferences with students won't help teachers have good unplanned experiences with students, I'm just making the point that this isn't the only way that this can happen.

In my experiences so far with the writing workshop in my field placement, individual conferences and sharing have stood out as amazing ways to help students progress as writers. Conferences give teachers the unique opportunity to understand their students' thought processes about the writing they are working on. Sharing gives students the opportunity to show off what they have done to their classmates, and this motivates them to continue working hard to improve their writing. One particular experience in the writing workshop time in my field placement earlier this week stands out in my mind. One student who is an English language learner struggles with forming sentences to express his thoughts. During writing workshop, he had already drawn a picture of a penguin to illustrate his writing, but all he had written down were words describing penguins. My mentor teacher pulled him aside, and worked with him to build sentences around his words. At the end of the writing workshop, she got the attention of the class and explained that she was very proud of the hard work that he had done and that she wanted him to share his story with the class. He read the story out loud while he grinned from ear to ear. When he was finished reading, everyone applauded while he ran around the room with his "wings" stretched out, obviously extremely proud of himself. This experience embodied the power of the writing workshop to me, because I could see how excited he was about the improvements that he made and the informational piece that he had put together. The sharing time at the end also created a sense of family in the classroom, and I could tell that all of his classmates were just as proud of him as he was of himself.

The Writing Workshop: Response to Ch. 9 & 13

The first thing that caught my attention is that all of the classes we're taking are syncing up. I LOVE it when that happens. It just makes it easier to think deeply about a topic when you've had the opportunity to look at it from plenty of different angles. When you get to take time in multiple classes to look at one important topic, such as curriculum in the classroom, you get the amount of time that you need to really explore it. We've been discussing curriculum's place in the classroom for the past few weeks, and we always seem to come to the same answer: While curriculum undoubtably belongs in the classroom, it makes up only part of what teachers should teach and what learners should learn. Chapter 9 begins to explore the other ways that teachers teach during writing workshops.

The first part of a teacher's job in a writing workshop classroom that lies outside the curriculum is creating a space where good writing work can occur. Students need the time to allow their writing to develop as well as the materials to allow them to explore their writing. I definitely see this component in place in my practicum classroom. While the students are in their "work stations," which are essentially unsupervised centers, they spend one station working on writing of their choice. These students do this without any instruction or guidance from their teacher. She simply provides them with the time and materials that they need to do their work. Also falling under maintaining a good classroom environment, in my opinion, teachers need to make sure that their classroom is a safe space where students can learn from one another.

While the entire writing workshop time is filled with direct instruction of some kind, the only traditional type of direct instruction is during the focus lesson, which takes up a minimal amount of the workshop time. Focus lessons are short to maximize the amount of time that students can spend writing, but they need to use every second of the short amount of time that they are given to draw students in and give them a point to work on in their writing. From what I have read and seen, it is important that the focus lesson is designed to inspire students, and a teacher will need to know his or her students well to achieve this. That being said, even though there will not be much room for student input in the focus lesson, the lessons need to be created with the students in mind. Although the teacher is expected to do most of the talking, focus lessons are still very student-centered.

The Writing Workshop: Response to Chapters 5-8

As preservice teachers with limited classroom experience so far, we are sometimes delusional when we think about our future classroom. We envision our ideal classroom that works quietly and diligently from the beginning of the day until the dismissal bell. Above all else, we imagine that we will always be fully in control of everything that is going on in our classroom at all times. For this reason, reading a book like The Writing Workshop can sometimes be intimidating because it causes us to question our own definition of a functioning classroom.

The main idea that I took away from the reading in The Writing Workshop for this week is that the writing workshop should be structured while simultaneously being free-flowing. Students in the writing workshop should feel comfortable taking the time set aside for writing in whatever direction they want to go, and it is the teachers job to make this possible. The teacher is responsible for giving his or her students all of the materials,space, and time they may need during the writing process, from brainstorming to publication. It is the teachers job to give several suggestions for what students could spend their writing time doing. The teacher should also provide various types of spaces in which students can work, whether they may like to work sitting with friends, sitting by themselves, sitting at a desk, or stretched out on the floor. It is not, however, the teacher's job to tell the students what to write about or what steps they should follow on a given day.

The main obstacle that I will have to overcome as a teacher in a classroom with a writing workshop is letting go of some of that control. As a teacher, it will be my job to help students that are stuck in the writing process, but not to take over their project. It will be my job to create a safe space where my students feel comfortable exploring new topics and genres and taking risks to improve as a writer. As was explained in Chapter 8, it would be impossible to directly oversee the writing projects of every student in the class. Instead, I will have to act as a guide for my students when they need me.

The Writing Workshop: Response to Chapters 1-4

Since the first time that I wrote a short story of my very own, I have thought of myself as a writer. I continuously write for various purposes at school, but I also consistently write for my own purposes and on my own time. As I have grown up, writing has become a very important part of my life. I know that as a teacher, I hope to encourage my students to include writing as an important part in their daily lives as well. Something that I have struggled with, however, is how I can achieve this. Writing comes fairly easily to me, and I rarely struggle to get my thoughts down on paper. I have written for fun since I was very young, and no one had to encourage me to do so. I just did it because I wanted to. Obviously, only a small percentage of students are going to feel this way about writing, and it will be a challenge to keep an entire class engaged in daily writing activities, especially if those activities follow a traditional format.

Simply giving students a prompt to write about week after week and expecting them to go through the writing process for each piece is monotonous, and the teacher will surely lose students in the process. If students come to view writing as boring, they will have no desire to attempt to become better writers on their own. If they are constantly writing about prompts that they do not care about, they are not being given the opportunity to see the value of writing. Students need to be given the opportunity to write about something that is important to them so that they can begin to view writing as a way to send a message to the world. Writing of this kind also gives students the opportunity to share things about themselves in the classroom that they may not have a chance to share otherwise. This gives the teacher and students the chance to get to know each other better during writing workshop activities.

After reading through these chapters in the book, I took some time to think back to my experiences as a writer in elementary school. Specifically, I thought back to a very broad and open-ended writing assignment that I was given in 3rd grade. The only instruction that we were given was that our piece was to be non-fiction and informative and that the subject should have something to do with water. This assignment stands out in my memory, because I do not remember another time that I was given such freedom in choosing my topic to write about. I settled on writing about tiger sharks, and other students wrote about everything from the Titanic to the Loch Ness Monster. This assignment was so valuable, because it gave me the opportunity to research something that I wanted to explore and then present the information that I learned to the class. This allowed me as a student to see value both in the assignment and in writing in general.

I hope to include open-ended writing assignments in my classroom so that I can learn things about my students that can only be revealed through writing. A writer's hopes, dreams, fears, pain, happiness, and imagination come to the surface in their work. I hope to write alongside my students in the classroom so that they can learn these things about me as well. It is important for students to see that their teacher is making a journey as a writer just as they are. This idea was heavily emphasized in the reading for this week. Not only is it important for a teacher to think of each of his or her students as a writer with valuable things to say, but it is important for students to see their teacher as a writer as well. The best way to do this, in my opinion, would be to include myself in the writing workshop in the classroom by creating my own piece that fits each assignment and sharing it with the class. I believe that this will motivate my students to become better writers and also to view others' writing critically, no matter what position that person holds. I want my students to know that I understand that I have room to grow and that I am open to criticism, so that they can understand that constructive criticism can help them grow as a writer as well.

As a teacher, I hope to model constructive writing workshop behavior in the classroom to help it become a seamless part of my daily routine. I hope to encourage my students to work together as a writing community to help each other produce the best writing possible. By creating a safe environment where students have room to grow, I hope to help them develop a love for writing like the one that I have myself.