Beyond School

Sorry for this, but I've decided to migrate this blog to a new website before it gets any bigger. 

All posts on this blog, and any future posts, will be at http://burell.blogspot.com/.  It's still called "Beyond School."  Please go there now, and bookmark, del.icio.us, diigo, and/or subscribe to the rss feed there!

Thanks for the memories, Livejournal~

[Update:  Imagine it.  Express it.  Then...find it in the edtech blogging community.  Ten minutes after writing this post, I read Karl Fisch's excellent Fischbowl post on global education and collaboration, and discovered there this link to ePals.  From its webpage:

Connecting over 120,129 registered classrooms, 6.5 million students and educators in 191 countries for classroom-to-classroom penpal exchanges and cross-cultural learning projects in the world's largest online classroom community.]

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I've noticed something about educational technology blogs:  they're mostly written and maintained by technology specialists, and not classroom teachers in the content areas.  (And please comment with links to classroom teachers' edtech blogs if I'm wrong!)

It's no wonder: most classroom teachers are too busy with the demands of classroom teaching to find the time or energy to learn and integrate new tools from the read-write web into their instruction. 

This will surely change when the next generation of "digital native" teachers replace this generation. 

In the meantime, I picture hordes of edtech specialists pulling their hair out because they have a million great ideas--but those ideas are not being implemented in the mainstream classrooms.  Teachers are too busy.

SO:  an offer to any frustrated (or simply expansive and collaborative) edtech specialists on the web....

I am a content area teacher: high school history and language arts.  If you're dying to see your ideas for history or language arts using the read-write web in action, contact me.  I'll be glad to talk about it.

And if you already have teachers in your school who are using 21st century tools, and want to globally collaborate with my students in Korea, again--contact me.

And please spread the word about this offer.  I'm still a novice at blog-promotion.

I was just thinking how cool it would be if my Arabian Nights wiki project was done with other classrooms in other countries.  Imagine:  My students tell "Korean Nights" stories to partners in other countries/cultures, who then have to write those stories--and vice versa.  A "Flat Earth," globalized learning experience. 

It's probably too late this year (unless you can think of a way it's not), but I want to try this next year.

Ha!  I took a UCLA distance AP English Language and Composition workshop last summer that was excellent despite being on Blackboard.  My fantastic  professor, Carol Elsen, must have tired of my five weeks of bulleting board variations on this question:  "Why isn't UCLA using Moodle?  It's free, and so much better than the $50,000 Blackboard."

Lo and behold, UCLA saw the light--"more expensive" does not mean "better" in the Open Source age: they're adopting Moodle school-wide.  Thanks to Mark Wagner at Educational Technology and Life for the news.

This blog has been alive for only a week or so (blessed holidays!), and I've already learned one remarkable thing:

Professional development and collaboration are without walls (and free) when you blog.  Through this blog, in one short week, I've engaged in teaching-and-learning discussions with

• an English teacher/tekky in Shanghai
• a English professor/tekky  in Virginia
• a Vancouver history teacher
• a California English professor

Though these people don't work with me, or for my school, they enjoy exploring 21st century teaching ideas so much that they're helping me think about unit plans--for use only in my school!  (Unless, of course--and here's the beauty--they want to borrow these ideas and units they're helping to create.) 

That's real collaboration and professional development--voluntary, unscheduled, passionate, creative, democratic.  Nobody playing the Expert (though sure, we've all got stuff to share), and everybody being the Explorer.

Best of all, it's FUN: A global dialog via the "Brave New Web."

Still thinking about educational computer gaming....and this idea is forming.  It's not about making a video game, but about how to use wikis to create a "creative writing game" unit.  Like so:

My students in 9 English are reading The Arabian Nights--100 pages from it, anyway--over winter break right now.  When they come back, I want the summative assessment to be a creative writing/storytelling project connected to Scheherezade and company.

The selection they're reading, "The Hunchback's Tale," is a typically dizzying example of the narrative frame-within-a-frame wizardry of the Nights.  But it has an element of "gaming" in it that I want to transfer to the final project.  Let me explain.

In "The Hunchback's Tale," a hunchback is invited home by a drunken Muslim tailor and his wife for entertainment.  Once home, the wife accidentally kills the hunchback by choking him while shoving too much food into his mouth for fun.  The couple panic and decide to get rid of the body by leaving it at a Jewish doctor's house and running away.  They prop the hunchback's body at the top of the staircase in the Jewish doctor's house, and the Jewish doctor accidentally knocks the body down the stairs--and panics because he thinks that he killed the hunchback.  So the Jewish doctor lowers the hunchback's body over a wall into the yard of his neighbor, a Muslim steward and chef for the sultan.  When the steward sees the hunchback against the wall, he mistakes him for a food-thief and gives him a solid hammer-blow to the chest--and then panics when he discovers that he "killed" the hunchback.  So the Steward, under cover of night, takes the body to the nearest bazaar and props it against the wall.  There, a drunk Christian broker mistakes the hunchback for a thief who'd stolen his scarf earlier in the night, and starts throttling him.  A Muslim policeman breaks up the "fight," discovers the hunchback is dead, and arrests the broker.

The broker is about to be hung for murder when the steward happens by and confesses: "Hang me instead," he says.  But the Jewish doctor happens by and says, "No, hang me."  Then the steward shows up and confesses, and says, "Hang me."  (What a harmonious multicultural world!)

At this point, we learn that the hunchback was the favorite jester of the "King of China," who happens to be in town.  The King arrives, is amazed by the story, and says he will pardon all the "murderers" if they can tell a story more wonderful than that of his hunchback's being "murdered" four times in one night!

So--and here's the gaming part--the four "murderers" take turns telling stories that they claim are more wondrous than the hunchback's.  They are telling stories like their survival depends on it (just like Scheherezade, who is, of course, telling all of these stories in the "master frame").

If their stories please the King of China, they survive.  If not, they die....

Does this sound like any television game shows you can think of?  Survivor, for instance?  Or American Idol? (Or, for the long of tooth, The Gong Show?)

The King of China is the audience/jury.  The contestants live or die by the merits of their performance.

One final detail that's beautiful for teaching/learning the elements of a good short story:  The King listens to the four storytellers, and rejects each one of their stories as being "less wondrous" than the hunchback's!  Why do the stories fail?  The King doesn't explain, but his literary judgment/critical thinking is solid--these stories are unsatisfying. 

So let the students give presentations of their criticisms of the failed stories!  Out of this can come a class-created rubric of what makes a "winning" short story.  "What was missing from the stories that made the King dislike them?"

So here's the unit idea, and the reason a wiki is a better writing tool for it than any traditional classroom method I know of:

1. Whole Class: 

• Create that class short story rubric based on evaluation of the failed tales in Arabian Nights.  (Give a Six Traits organizer to students so they categorize their findings under these headings--incidental learning of the common critical language we'll use for writing in the second semester will come from this.)
  

2. Teacher/Students:

• Assign a partner for each student.

3. Pairs:

• Have each student tell their partner the story of the most amazing thing that ever happened to them (if they don't have one, they interview a parent for the parent's "most amazing story").

4. Individual: 

• Each partner summarizes the story as the "pre-write/first draft" on their own wiki page (wikis save every version and revision of a document as separate documents in the "history" tab of that document).

5a. Individual: 

• Students then revise their summary with successive edits using the Six Traits of Effective Writing. 
  
• Revision 1: Ideas, content, images, details;
  
• Revision 2: Organization (good intro, different chronological order, etc);
  
• Revision 3: Voice;
  
• Revision 4: Word choice;
  
• Revision 5: Sentence Fluency;
  
• Revision 6: Conventions and Mechanics (especially dialog conventions);
  
• Revision 6: Presentation (add images, formatting and font style).

5b. Pairs (Peer editing on wiki):

• As individuals write their partners' stories, the partner will serve as peer editor.  (The idea is that the partner will have an emotional investment in the success of his/her story, which will motivate engaged feedback to the person that's writing it.)  That feedback will take place in the "discussion" tab of that story's wiki page.

6. Groups?:

• Assign groups of four to collaboratively create a narrative frame device similar to Scheherezade or the King of China on a new wiki page.
• Each group of four copies and pastes the stories written by four other students into their frame device--and collaboratively writes the critical reaction of their "frame audience" to each of these stories as part of the frame story, deciding whether each storyteller "survives" by pleasing his/her audience with his/her story.
• Each "survivor" is finished, but any story that does NOT survive is allowed a final revision (open to all?)--one last chance to please his/her audience and survive after all.

7. Groups: Publish Group Wiki:

• Each group publishes its own 4-story-with-frame-narrative wiki.

8. Whole Class: Publish Class Wiki:

• Combine all group wikis (from BOTH classes) into a single wiki page and give it a title (The Korean Nights?).

9.  Individual:

• Orally perform your own story and record it as a podcast, using Audacity, and embed it  on the wiki.

That's the idea....so far.  Comments, Jonathan?  Prof. Groom?  Anybody? 

From Epistemic Games, a review of David Shaffer's book, How Computer Games Help Children Learn:

‘Like Dewey, Piaget, and Papert before him, Shaffer challenges us to rethink learning in a new age. He uses vivid examples - backed by solid research - to show what education should look like in the 21st century.‘ [emphasis added]

It only makes sense, if you think about it.  A good educational computer game*  would incorporate the unit's declarative knowledge (facts) and processes (teamwork, critical thinking, problem-solving, whatever) into the computer game, and the students will incidentally pick those things up while . . . playing.  And if the game is good enough (or the grading incentives high enough), computer games offer this advantage over traditional classroom games and simulations:  students can play the games at home obsessively (which they already do, instead of homework, with commercial games) to raise their scores and reach higher mastery levels.

Here's the link to Epistemic Games' write-up.  Well worth a read.  It makes me want to open a mental unit-planning file for how to incorporate computer-gaming elements. 

And to suggest this idea:  any school that wants to position itself as a high-tech, 21st century school should create a professional learning community focused on staying abreast of the latest breakthroughs in educational technology and research, and periodically reporting its findings and recommendations for short- and long-term technology initiatives and visions for the school.

Because technology and computers no longer mean Powerpoint and Word, or even web design.  On the first day of 2007, it bears stating that we now live with a "Brave New Web"--at least, outside of traditional schools.

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*Note: "Good educational computer games" are being designed by forward-thinking educational researchers at MIT, UWisconsin Madison, and many other places.  Teaching a science class about the moon or other planets?  Play a game that incorporates NASA imagery from Mars Rover and other space-travelers, and literally (in a virtual sense, anyway) "go to Mars" and explore in a game environment.  One among many examples I'm reading about.

Here is an updated version of the Diigo tutorial. Your students will love you (not immediately, but only after they're gone--they're students, after all) for teaching them this great research tool!

And you'll love being able to access your online notes of every website you've researched yourself, too--from any computer in the world.

The post below was disappointing in its fuzziness on Google Video. So I uploaded a slightly edited version to YouTube (after compressing it on iMovie on my Mac). Let's see if it looks and/or sounds any clearer.

"Who cares?" you ask? Well, if you want to get your own, or better still, your students', video work published on the web, it's good to know which host will give them the better publishing option.

So let's see how it looks, and compare it to the post just below this one. Take notes! (Preferably with Diigo! Put that pen and paper away!)

If you click on the Google Video button on the viewer, it will take you to Google Video, where you can resize this to your liking.  Sorry about  the resolution fuzziness.  I need to find a clearer alternative to Google.

[Update: Jonathan, your comments are so helpful.  Thanks and keep them coming.  You know I'll be commenting back ;-) ]

I could scribble notes or work on an asocial Word document, but I figure doing it here might invite some free collaboration and good ideas from those of you reading along.  If you don't know how to use wikis, I hope this "Think-Aloud" will help you learn; and if you do know wikis, I hope you'll help me learn.

Objective: Students will "write to learn" about the French Revolution by role-playing specific characters or members of social classes involved in the events, using the Wiki "Ant Farm" project design.

Okay, so what does that mean?

Unit Scope and Sequence:

They're going to read about the main events and ideas of the French Revolution (online, I might add.  Our textbook is your typical obese, boring, student back-breaking, and biased American specimen--don't get me started--and the web has much better ones here and here.  Note the differentiation in reading level that webtexts offer over textbooks.  How many schools realize how much money could be better spent by investing in other things with textbook money, and using web resources for readings?)

That means they'll have a specific historical start date and end date to limit the project.  Say, from the summoning of the Estates General to the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo.  Good: I've got my bookends.

Now I need to subdivide the events between the first and last event.  (It would be better to do this on a wiki instead of a blog,

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