Everybody's Doing It - Using Books to Create Communities

There is no doubt that people get interested in things when “everybody’s doing it” – that is the basis for going viral…everyone is watching OR those hard to come by toys that become a craze at the holidays (I am hearing that the rainbow loom bracelets are going to be hot this holiday…I feel driven to purchase them even though I have no one to give them too!).  Harry Potter is a great example of “viral” reading –all ages got in on the reading because we wanted to know what the hubbub was about.  That’s the idea of community book reads – get people talking, making connections, and reading! 

I have joined an adult book club, that is, a book club made up of adults, not reading adult books, well, we are, but not that kind, but, well, I digress.  Anyway, we are a diverse group (except that many of us have been in education in one form or another), different interests and experiences which makes our discussions very rich.  I can attest to the fact that having just one book in common, we have indeed become a community, we have a built-in connection, camaraderie, relationships, because we have something to talk about, something in common, something to connect with.  And we are forced to think outside the box (that is the TV box). 

Going beyond the Language Arts Classroom

Extending a common book choice beyond the classroom walls, to the entire school community and beyond can help students, teachers and other adults connect.  Whether they like the book or not is immaterial (some of our best book club discussions are the books that we do not all love!). Building a community is easy when you all start out with similar interests, ideals or experiences, and building a community is essential in the classrooms!

Going beyond the School Building

Extending a community book choice beyond the school to parents and community has great relationship-building potential.  The Black Rive Middle School in Chester, NJ has selected Wednesday Wars by Gary Schmidt as a community read.  They will be using it as one of the foundations for advisory discussions – a great way to connect kids to kids and kids to adults.  Parents, too can benefit from having read the same book as their child – gives them a topic beyond “what did you do in school today?”. 

So how do you get started?

Looking for a good book?  The Library of Congress has resources for the “One Book” program.  It lists books that have been used by state or community over the last years.  The lists go by state – apparently it is no longer active, but there are some great ideas and reads listed there.

Want to start a formal discussion?

Just type in the title of your book and “book club discussions” and you will get a set of standard questions to get you started.  I use little sticky note tabs to make places in the books that I am reading that catch my attention to share with the group.  In my book club, some question-types make you glaze over (more appropriate for that language arts classroom), however, everyone seems to like the questions that ask you to connect the book to your own life – making the book relevant works with all ages.  Litlovers.com is an excellent resource for questions, etc.

Need something to get kids interested?  

Get kids hooked by looking at the Banned books list. Here is a list of activities that you can get kids reading and thinking about around banned books:  Banned Books:  The Forbidden Fruit

Want to start a virtual discussion? Try these tools:

Collaborizeclassroom.com is another great platform for discussions, check out this great facilitators guide to get you started.  

Google hangouts can be used for real time book discussions AND you can often get authors to “hang out” with you there!  Mary Beth Hertz suggests this and other ideas for Google hangouts in her blog on Edutopia.

Google groups can also be used to form a group for discussion outside the classroom. 

Connected Educators

Why not try out getting connected to other educators by joining a nationwide book discussion.  Sign up at njamle.wikispaces.com to join us.  We will start a discussion on Dave Burgess’s book “Teach Like a Pirate” on October 15^th.  We’ll even get Dave to join us!

What books would you recommend for community reads?  What tools would you use to facilitate them?

Lurk before you Leap

Lurking has taken on a whole new meaning.  Once meaning, according to Merriam-Webster, “to lie in wait in a place of concealment especially for an evil purpose or b: to move furtively or inconspicuously.” 

It has now come to mean, according to the Urban Dictionary: 

“To read without commenting or contributing, therefore effectively invisible to the rest of the group or community. Generally recommended for joining any forum so that you can observe rules, attitudes and prominent personalities without jumping in and breaking a rule, making an ass of yourself, or asking a question about something obvious that you would have learned for yourself if you’d paid attention in the first place.
Online equivalent of attentive listening before speaking; potentially the solution to all Internet faux pas.” 

While a little unorthodox and a bit gruff, it certainly makes a point. While lurking sounds like it has a negative connotation, it is in fact a good way to gauge what is going on before you jump in to any online discussion group, twitter feed, etc.    I picture a child that is going to “jump in” to jump rope, watching the rope hit the ground a few times before entering.  There were a few times that I wished I had lurked a little longer, but sooner or later, you have to jump in – sink or swim.

Expect More out of Educators
That being said, in the classroom, there are some students who would prefer to lurk for the entire school year.  A good teacher will help them feel comfortable enough to contribute to the conversation.  In the same way, good digital citizens will also make lurkers feel safe enough to contribute, without fear of being chastised.   Good digital citizens will gently guide newbies to understand any nuances of the tool or group without humiliation, just as a good teacher will do in the classroom. 

While you cannot count on regular Joe’s who use newspaper blogs (or even the Urban Dictionary) to anonymously rip each other apart, you can expect that any decent educational twitter chat, blog, or discussion group will welcome your input, respond with encouragement and overlook any faux pas!

Getting Connected: A Few of My Favorite Nings

If you are reading this, you are probably already somewhat connected. You may also have heard that August is Connected Educator’s month. So where do you go to connect? Who are you connecting with?

There are literally hundreds of ways for educators to connect with each other. Many educators have ventured onto the big networks – Facebook, Twitter, and Google+. In addition to these, I love the networks that are more specialized. I am a regular contributing member on a number of Nings. These networks may focus on a subject area or level of education and then drill down deeper into special interest groups. You can even start your own group! Check out the blogs, post questions, share your experiences. Nings are a great way to become a more connected educator!

These are a few of my favorite nings (and yes, I have that Sound of Music song in my head)http://Englishcompanion.ning.com

"A place to ask questions and get help. A community dedicated to helping you enjoy your work. A cafe without walls or coffee: just friends."

Groups such as "Teach with Technology," Teaching Reading," "Teaching Writing," "Teaching Shakespeare," etc.

http://sschat.ning.com/

“This network is dedicated to connecting social studies educators everywhere.”

Groups: US History Educators, World History Educators, Middle School Social Studies, Social Studies Tools

ttp://mathematics24x7.ning.com/

“A network of Mathematics Enthusiasts... Just talking about Mathematics... What do you say?”

Groups: Problem Based Curriculum, Introducing Math Concepts, Developemental math

www.technologyintegrationineducation.com

“Facilitating the use of technology in the classroom.” This is for people interested in helping integrate technology into education in a seemless manner so that technology is a tool that enhances education and does not drive it.

Favorite groups: free for educators, collaborative projects, TIE

http://www.iste-community.org/
"A year round social network for ISTE members and affillitates and groups and Ed leaders"

http://flatclassrooms.ning.com/

“Fostering new ways of learning using Web 2.0 and global collaborative practices and providing a resource for educators to connect globally”

http://Teachvine.ning.com

A new kid-kid-on-the-block- described as “joint professional development better than a course.”

http://tregoed.ning.com

A network for educational leaders! Share your challenges, questions, and solutions with your colleagues.

Start your own group within your staff to increase collaboration!

Looking for more?

Cybraryman, Jerry Blumengarten has a list of other Nings as well as hundreds of other ways to connect!

Where are your favorite places to connect?

3 Rules to Practice for Good Digital Citizenship

With lowering the legal age on Facebook in the news, it is even more important that our students now learn how to practice good digital citizenship.  Although there does not seem to be “rules” out there in cyberspace, students need to be aware that there are.  We should have the same expectations of tolerance, manners, and civil discourse that we have in face to face conversations.  Bringing these tools into the classroom is an excellent opportunity to gets our students engaged in content and teach them civil discourse and proper communication skills in a digital world.

Good digital citizenship is no accident

How do you get to Carnegie Hall?  Practice, practice, practice!  The same thing goes for teaching students good digital citizenship skills.  I have found that teaching three fundamental rules and allowing students to practice digital citizenship, got my students off on the right foot.  Mary Beth Hertz’s blog entry at Edutopia.org points out that we as teachers need to pay as much attention to teaching digital citizenship as we do teaching them to become good classroom citizens. 

Three Fundamental Rules

When practicing good digital citizenship, I taught my students three fundamental rules:

1. Show Respect:   Many people, adults and children alike, feel a certain freedom when they are “hiding behind” a screen name or computer screen.  Some use this freedom to express their opinions more freely and some use it to lash out.   Students using screen names and avatars in online discussions should be taught that the rules of class discussion – respect, staying on topic, and clear communication- carry into the online world.  Before you enter into an online discussion tool like SCAN from TregoED , Collaborize Classroom, or Edmodo you should make your expectations clear.  You can find a great set of rules to teach students to “Interact with Tact” or practice the 10 Core Rules of Netiquette.  These lists of rules point out seemingly obvious things like  “politeness counts” and “avatars are people too” and explain how they apply  to digital discussions.
2.  Practice Civil Discourse:   Before they go online, give your students the “Dos and Don’ts of Online Student Conversation”, a set of guidelines focused on teaching students how to practice civil discourse.   This set of guidelines from Collaborize Classroom gives students some great pointers like “critique the content and not the person” and comment starters to use when they are engaged in debate online such as:

·         I respectfully disagree with Lawrence’s assertion….

·         I really appreciate Deborah’s insight into….

·         Thank you, Manuel, for sharing….

·         Great point, Angela! Have you considered…?

Great models for practicing civil discourse.

3.  Stay on Topic:  It is perhaps a reluctant teacher’s number one fear that students will say something inappropriate online.  When students have the opportunity to talk in class, you run the same risk.   Why would you expect anything different in online discussions?  Although students may be more tempted to speak out of line in an online discussion, you will also have a clear record of it.  No more, “he said, she said.”  I find pointing this out, monitoring the conversation and addressing students that stray, can help teach them this very important lesson.

There are lots of opportunities, platforms and guidelines to have students practice good digital citizenship in any content area, that are free, flexible and private- perfect practice rooms to get students started on a path of good digital citizenship.  How do you incorporate lessons in digital citizenship in your classroom?

Do You Walk the Walk?

What do you get when you mix ISTE and NASA resources, a select group of educators from across the globe, and a challenge to create educational artifacts for teachers and students to learn about the Magnetospheric MultiScale Mission (MMS)?

You get educators walking the walk- incorporating web 2.0 tools and networking skills to build an international learning community – starting with a base camp at the Iste-Nasa Cyber Café Wiki and branching out to use Edistorm , Skype, google docs, Voice Thread and other tools  just to begin.  What a great learning experience to explore and utilize the capacity of some of these tools.  It increased my skills, exposed me to some great new tools and ways to use some old ones.  It also taught me the power of online collaboration with like and unlike minded educators.

 The results?  A series of showcases waiting to be unveiled on March 27^th at a synchronous celebration. 

Sneak Peak

I can share a little of ours now.  I had the pleasure of working with Jennifer Miller and her students in Dublin Texas and Tom Chambers a teacher of technology applications from Houston, Texas.   We put together the “Take the MMS Challenge” which features student research, application of the scientific method and culminating in students working as engineers, physicists, artists, or journalists to help others understand why the MMS mission is relevant in our everyday lives.

Our project can be found in this livebinder  with teacher guides, student activities, resources, web 2.0 tools and enrichment activities.  Feel free to get in there and “test pilot” the project or individual activities.  We would love your feedback!

Interested in introducing your kids to the mission, the Collaborize Classroom library has custom made questions in their library ready to go with links to some great videos and current events.  Great way to get kids reading informational text and writing for an audience!  Want to go further?  Try out the new SCAN lesson designed to get students to explore the relevance of the mission from different points of view.   “Space Exploration and You: SCAN The NASA MMS Mission” is a new free SCAN scenario designed to get kids thinking from different perspectives about the relevance of the mission. 

Now what?

Needless to say, it was a wonderful experience to walk the walk and integrate all of these tools to successfully make a professional learning community that spanned across the globe.  I am wondering how educators create these wonderful communities of learning for their students but do not create the same for their colleagues? 

Give Me 5 - Critical thinking at its best!

This was their challenge:  Give me 5!

This is what it is all about!  The most impressive workshop I attended at TCEA was presented by students from Dublin ISD, TX.   It was inspiring to see the real tangible benefits of putting technology tools in the hands of students and focusing on 21^st century skills.  It was like watching 21^st century skills in 3D!
The challenge was based on these five skills:  Challenge, Collaborate, Research, Create and Assessment.   The students selected and effectively leveraged simple web tools in unique ways to achieve their goals.  The challenge they chose was to connect the schools and community to increase pride and school spirit.  They focused on the rich history of the town (home of the original Dublin Dr. Pepper) by connecting the schools with local museums.

Collaborate, Connect and Research
 How wonderful to see the students select and use the tools to do the job rather than have the 2.0 tools retrofitted to the project.  They started the challenge by brainstorming solutions to problems in both their school and local community.  Inspired by Steve Jobs, they sought to think globally and act locally.
They began their collaboration using TodaysMeet , a simple online meeting room to brainstorm solutions to community challenges from their school community to their local community.  This allowed them to post ideas, comment on posts and contribute 24-7 to the conversation.  They also used project share  as their workspace to “virtually” meet and share ideas, resources, etc.
Understanding the power of social media in their world, they chose to use Twitter (developing hashtags) and  Facebook to get the word out and increase school spirit, connect to local museums and increase community pride.  They also used Twitterfall  to research attitudes towards the Dublin Dr. Pepper plant shutting down production of the original Dublin Dr. Pepper recipe.  They continue to use these communication tools to improve school spirit and student participation by announcing school events, news, etc.

Create
One of their solutions was to strengthen the connection between local museums and the schools.  Working closely with local museums, they created content, and contributed to off-site curriculum centers.  They made QR codes to link artifacts and information using Beetagg and Kaywa.    The created videos and posted them on schooltube to promote school spirit.

Assessment
Are they making a difference?  In order to find this out, they used polleverywhere, a place to get responses to questions via text messages, to gather data about the success of their campaigns.  I have no doubt that this project will go further.
Bottom line, under the guidance of Jennifer Miller, these students were given the opportunity to problem solve, choosing tools to create an impact beyond their classroom doors.  This teacher has provided a true training ground for the 21^st century.  No doubt, these kids will go far!

Dr. King's Dream

Remembering Dr. King’s legacy is a relevant activity in any classroom whether covering bullying, the economy, world peace, social justice or looking for relevant nonfictional reading and writing across several disciplines. Plan ahead using some of these great resources to get your students thinking.

For Students:

Read Dr. King’s "I Have a Dream..." Speech: 

Students get a small taste of what segregation feels just entering the site.  They can listen to Dr. King’s speeches or read some of his other writings at Remember Segregation.  Simply powerful.

Watch a video on Dr. King, fill out a KWL graphic organizer, take a quiz, or study relevant vocabulary at BrainPop

Read the Story of Martin Luther King and find related facts, figures and folklore. (some ads)

Play the “It’s Not Fair Game” to learn about and experience prejudice first hand!  Fun- teaches students MLK related vocabulary while skewing the score to discover how it feels when "it's not fair!"

For Teachers:

Teachersfirst (a great FREE teacher resource page) has links to many different MLK resources including video links, lesson ideas, materials, and interactive sites.

See what other teachers are doing for MLK day at Scholastic’s site.   

Watch great historical videos of the Civil Rights Movement and Rev. King

Try out this free SCAN lesson “Dr. King’s Dream.”  Register from the dashboard, set up the lesson and send kids to your private URL to discuss whether Dr. King’s dream has been reached in their school, state, country or globally. They will look at issues from each perspective and name some action steps that you might take to solve them.  New to SCAN?  Start here.

Students can make a difference:  Read the 6 Steps to Nonviolent Social Change and remind students of the small everyday things they can do such as not judging others by their appearance or actions, sticking up for others, or learning more about different religions and cultures. Have them make a list of actions that they can do to reach MLK's dream.

How will you honor his legacy and work towards his dream?

Discussing Discussions

As an old dog, always looking for a new trick, technology has taken on a large role in my professional development.  Beyond the faculty room and my colleagues, workshops, blogs, classroom, and webinars, this year I have discovered the discussion group to be one of the most valuable tools in my professional development tool box.  While I shied away from being involved in the original discussion groups on listservs, email groups that focused on one subject area, I have discovered that there are many online discussion groups full of great educators with all kinds of expertise, just waiting to give you advice and support at the click of the mouse.   Most recently, educators in the Teaching Writing Forum on the English Companion Ning had a great discussion centered on Problem Based Research.  All it took was a simple question – Have you done this?  How does it work? - to let the learning begin.  The input on this conversation ranged from great idea starters, mechanics, critical thinking strategies, to assessment.  Beyond the discussion forum, groups form around common interests and you can sort them by most active, etc.  What a great way to share ideas and resources!  In this community alone, there are 46 groups ranging from “Free to Educators” to “Collaborative Projects.”   Some of the other communities where I have found supportive, creative, active, and practical groups are the ISTE Community Ning, edweb.net, and LinkedIn.   Check them out!  Find a group and get in on the action.  You will find the feedback and creativity of these collaborative groups to be invaluable in professional growth as you do not have to reinvent the wheel.  Why not take advantage of the free advice of your colleagues and share some of your own?  Hmmmm...maybe I should start a discussion group on discussion groups!  What's your favorite?