This post originally appeared on the NCTE Inbox blog. I happened upon it today and found myself reminiscing on the paths that I’ve traveled to get to who I am. I thought I’d copy it over to my site to make sure I didn’t lose it. I edited it to remove dated references
Chances are high that you wouldn’t be reading this if it weren’t for online professional development. I don’t mean that in the clichéd “If you can read this thank a teacher” way. What I mean is that I would never, ever have had the connections that led to writing these blog entries if it hadn’t been for the online professional development opportunities that came my way.
People who know me may not believe it, but I kept to myself as a teacher before I found opportunities to connect with other educators online. I read a lot about teaching, but I rarely discussed teaching strategies with others. I had some connections in the department where I taught, and I was a fellow of Writing Project site that no longer exists.
And then I got an email address and found that other college composition teachers were out there discussing what they do in the classroom online. I signed up Megabyte University, an email discussion list that was active from 1990 to 1997. There, I connected with other teachers who were interested in using computers in writing instruction, and I eventually found my voice and began participating—asking questions, sharing strategies, and planning projects. I found that the people who were names on the articles I read in College English and College Composition and Communication were kind, friendly folks who were willing to chat with a relatively inexperienced person like me.
To my conversations on email discussion lists, I added real-time chats on MOOs and IRC. I attended online conferences related to the face-to-face Computers and Writing Conference. Before I knew it, I had connections with colleagues in all corners of the country, and I had actually chatted with CCCC presidents and NCTE Committee Chairs. I even got up the gumption to send a personal email message to Peter Elbow to tell him how much I loved Writing with Power.
Without any reservation, I can say that I ended up writing this blog because of those first connections that I made online in the early 1990s. Online discussion led to new jobs, new teaching opportunities, and new ways to support other teachers using online tools.
None of the resources I tapped when I got started still exist in the same form today. Computer resources have evolved, and we teachers have developed new ways to connect and keep in touch today. Today we have new ways of keeping in touch, like discussion lists, Twitter Chats, and Facebook Groups. You’ll find wonderful teachers who will share their ideas, listen to your strategies, and, if you’re just lucky, bring you opportunities that will invigorate your teaching every day.
Bedford/St. Martin’s Bits bloggers posted on topics ranging from working with new TAs to how we teach research projects. Be sure that you check out all the great ideas for talking about pop culture (like reality TV shows) and how to teach with comics—and don’t miss Holly Pappas’s reflection on the end of one term and the beginning of the next in the Classroom Strategies and Resources section:
Interactive whiteboard redefine hands-on activity in the classroom, as students manipulate information on a giant digital display. They also bring teachers a new challenge: what activities can you use to make the most of this new technology?
If you want your work to be read, you need a strong headline, title, or subject line for the text you’re writing. Readers expect a title to give them a short description of the contents in a way that piques their interest in the topic. When a title doesn’t, it’s possible that you won’t people won’t read any further. They’ll just skip on to something that is interesting.
It’s important, then, to teach students how to write strong headlines, titles, and subject lines—and I have a great technique you can use, based on an observation Guy Kawasaki shared on Google+.
Kawasaki posted a screenshot from his blog indexing site, Alltop.com, and observed, “You can see who the good headline creators are when you see them side by side.” Indeed, you can.
Try the technique yourself by clicking on the screenshot above. It shows headlines from four blogs on the Writing page on Alltop. Even with the limited number of titles in the screenshot, you can see that some headlines are better at catching your attention than others. I want to go read The Other N-Words, for instance.
The blogs at the top of an Alltop page tend to be stronger, so there’s not an obvious dud in the image. If you visit the Writing page on Alltop though, you’re likely to find some headlines that don’t work. On the current page, for example, I’m uninterested in Exercise 9, 10, 11, or 12 from Aldys Fiction. Aldys Fiction may be a great site, but based on those headlines alone, there’s nothing to convince me to go read anything.
To show students how to write strong headlines, titles and subject lines, just customize this activity a bit. Here’s a basic outline of what to do:
Choose a page on Alltop that focuses on a topic that students are familiar with. Alltop has pages for hundreds of topics, ranging from American Idol to Zombies, and from Anthropology to Zoology. Nearly any topic students are exploring can be found on Alltop. (That makes the site great for research too, but I’ll save that for a later post.) Be sure to review the page you choose to ensure the blog titles are all appropriate for the classroom.
Print the Alltop page. You can work on the live website, but when you mouse over a blog title, more information from the post will pop up. Since you want students to focus on the titles alone, the live site isn’t the best option. Further, Alltop is updated hourly, so an inappropriate blog title may appear. Printing the pages avoids both of these problems. If you want a paper-free option, print to PDFs and work from the files rather than the live site.
Pass out the Alltop page, and ask students to mark 10–15 blog posts that they want to read. Encourage students to move quickly through the options. The point is to make fast decisions. Give them two or three minutes.
Next ask students to identify 5 blog posts that they would not read. Again, ask them to work quickly, as if they were scrolling down the list on a computer screen.
In small groups, have students share their selections and note posts chosen by more than one person. Have them create a group list of approximately 15 blogs the group would read.
Ask group members to compare the 15 blog titles and identify what makes the titles compelling. Encourage students to look for similarities. You might work through an example title to demonstrate features that typically make a headline stand out.
Have students use the similarities to create guidelines for strong titles. Students can consider the 5 posts they each said they would not read to see how they violate their guidelines as well.
Compile all the group guidelines into a class list. Groups can share their lists with the class. As a group shares its guidelines, note new ideas on the board. Work to group related ideas as the groups present their lists. Once all groups have shared, review the class list together and make any revisions.
Talk about how to apply the headline guidelines to paper titles and subject lines. Add suggestions on how to adjust the information for different rhetorical situations.
For homework, ask students to strengthen the titles on their texts by using the guidelines that the class has created. If desired, students can submit a before and after version of their titles that you review during the next class session.
So there you have it. It’s fairly simple, but it should influence the headlines, titles, and subject lines that you see after the class completes it. Do you have any tricks for teaching students about headlines, titles, and subject lines? Leave me a comment!
Now setting up a profile for a company had occurred to me before I saw this list of news companies. I confess that as soon as the red invite envelope showed up on my Google+ page, I sent invites to myself for the two clients I do social networking for, ReadWriteThink and Bedford Bits.
Before I set up either profile, however, I found an article that said I shouldn’t proceed. The LA Times reported that Google asks businesses to stay out of Google+ — for now. The article explains that Google+ is for individuals only. Businesses, schools, clubs, non-profits, and everyone will use a business version of Google+ that will connect to Google products like Analytics and AdWords. The original post on the Google+ blog is coming up 404 as I write, but Christian Oestlien, who wrote the post, also recorded a video explaining the request for businesses to stay out of Google+:
So following the instructions, I filled out Google’s online form for beta testers. I was particularly persuaded by the last note in the LA Times article. Oestlien stated, “We just ask for your patience while we build it. In the meantime, we are discouraging businesses from using regular profiles to connect with Google+ users. Our policy team will actively work with profile owners to shut down non-user profiles” (emphasis mine).
I resolved to wait. After all, one interview suggested that the business profiles may be available in just a few weeks, though the video suggests, less optimistically, “later” this year.
This afternoon, however, I found that dozens of companies have ignored Google’s request and set up profiles anyway. Even companies like PC Magazine that reported the request for businesses to stay out of Google+ have set up a profile on Google+ anyway. Is Google likely to delete companies like NPR, Al Jazeera, and PC Magazine? Probably not. If non-user profiles are shut down, I suspect they’ll be small businesses and non-profits that don’t have the clout or ability to fight back.
This all looks like another case where following the rules and doing as you were asked means you’re left out. What’s the best wisdom here for smaller groups and companies that don’t have the firepower of those bigger companies? Do we add ourselves and risk deletion? Will the power of companies adding themselves overcome Google’s policy? I wish I knew the answers.
Just published last week, Troy Hicks’ collection on Reading and Writing Transmedia on the National Writing Project’s Digital Is site explores how digital writing is evolving.
The collection of texts “primarily authored by Laura Fleming represents one educator’s vision of what transmedia is, and what it can be, for teachers and students learning to read and write in a digital age.” You’ll find an explanation and history of transmedia as well as example texts and pedagogical reflections.
Also out last week are these posts from Bedford Bits posts:
Writers tell stories that demonstrate how everyone is a writer in the video “Who is a Writer: What Writers Tell Us” from the National Conversation on Writing and and the WPA Network for Media Action.
Have great assignments or student essays to share? Jay Dolmage is Looking for Essays and Assignments and paying up to $100 for works chosen for publication.
It’s that time when many of us size up the list of texts we’ve been thinking of all year and choose the few that we’ll try to get through during the all-too-short summer months.
If you’re struggling a bit with your choices, take a look at Lifehacker’s How to Create an Awesome Summer Reading List for some tips on where to find books, ways to track your progress, and recommendations from other bookworms.
While you’re looking for great texts to read, be sure you’ve read the great ideas for the classroom or professional development in these Bedford Bits posts from last week:
What basic tech literacy skills do you assume students bring to the classroom? Barclay Barrios questions the assumptions teachers sometimes make in http://ass.u.me.
Is your doctor well-versed in literature? Does she write about her experiences? Listen to NPR on the value of stories in Can Literature Make A Better Doctor?
Have great assignments or student essays to share? Jay Dolmage is Looking for Essays and Assignments and paying up to $100 for works chosen for publication.
In honor of Memorial Day, I wanted to point back to an entry I wrote last October on writing about photos. The image I used to illustrate it was the one that came to mind when I thought about Memorial Day this year.
Look back to that entry for some ideas for writing or discussion, and for more ideas for the classroom or professional development, look back to these Bedford Bits posts from last week:
Andrea Lunsford describes how she designs a course syllabus as blueprint for action, and a guide from the first meeting through the last class in Tips for New Teachers #4 – Building a Syllabus.
Doug Downs describes how a writing-about-writing course helps nontraditional and returning students by its focus on enabled writers in As If We Took Them Seriously.
Can students connect the work they’re doing in the classroom to the work they will come to do in their disciplines and majors? Barclay Barrios shares an assignment that helps ensure they do in Thinking about Research in the Disciplines.
Have great assignments or student essays to share? Jay Dolmage is Looking for Essays and Assignments and paying up to $100 for works chosen for publication.
Let us know what you want to know about teaching writing or about using digital tools in the composition classroom by leaving a comment. Your response will help shape upcoming posts.
The LearnStreaming blog posted 50 Quotes About Learning last week. The quotations are sometimes familiar or predictable: “You can teach a student a lesson for a day; but if you can teach him to learn by creating curiosity, he will continue the learning process as long as he lives.”~Clay P. Bedford. That’s just an ambling restatement of the “give a man a fish” aphorism.
I disagree with some: “You aren’t learning anything when you’re talking.” ~Lyndon B. Johnson. Fiddlesticks. Learning while talking is sometimes the point, especially in the socially collaborative classroom. I smiled at others: “If you hold a cat by the tail you learn things you cannot learn any other way.” ~ Mark Twain. Yes. Absolutely true. A life lesson is described right there.
As I reviewed the list, I began wondering how I might use the quotations in class. I admit that I didn’t fact-check or authenticate the quotations, so one activity might be doing so and hypothesizing where errors came from. Another activity could be arranging the quotations into categories (e.g., those about experience) and then comparing all the quotations in a specific category. The simplest activity perhaps is asking students to each choose a quotation that fits some experience from their lives, and then tell that story so that the quotation is the conclusion—a sort of moral at the end of the fable.
According to the site list, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. said, “Man’s mind stretched to a new idea never goes back to its original dimensions.” Consider expanding the dimensions of your mind by checking out the ideas in these Bedford Bits posts from last week:
Have great assignments or student essays to share? Jay Dolmage is Looking for Essays and Assignments and paying up to $100 for works chosen for publication.
Let us know what you want to know about teaching writing or about using digital tools in the composition classroom by leaving a comment. Your response will help shape upcoming posts.
A severe thunderstorm brought graduation ceremonies at Virginia Tech to an abrupt and very early conclusion here in Blacksburg on Friday night. The keynote speaker never even made it to the podium. Fortunately, students were able to pick up their diplomas on Saturday morning during college and departmental ceremonies. It may not have been the original plan, but everything worked out.
As you reach the end of the term where you teach, I hope the ceremonies and celebrations go well (even if they aren’t what you originally expect them to be). As move on to the second half of the month, take a few minutes to check out these Bedford Bits posts from last week:
Now that testing is finished for the year, High School Bits blogger Jesse Tangen-Mills shares some classroom activities that work well for Treating Post-Test Syndrome
Andrea Lunsford argues that Texting IS Writing, and that we need to pay very close attention to it and learn from our students how they use this new way to communicate.
Want to create a super-mobile, super-light virtual classroom? Barclay Barrios describes the system he is adopting for his class this summer in Twitter Me This.
Nancy Sommers reflects on her year of teaching and shares some plans for the summer in Looking Back, Looking Forward.
Susan Naomi Bernstein reminds students what is important to them—where they come from, what and whom they love, why they have succeeded in the past—in Writing Beyond Stereotypes.
Submit your suggestions in the Idea Survey for what our illustrator should draw in The Everyday Writer, 5th edition, by Andrea A. Lunsford, and choose a free trade book or professional resource as our thanks.
Have great assignments or student essays to share? Jay Dolmage is Looking for Essays and Assignments and paying up to $100 for works chosen for publication.
Let us know what you want to know about teaching writing or about using digital tools in the composition classroom by leaving a comment. Your response will help shape upcoming posts.
Hi, I’m Traci Gardner, known in most circles as Tengrrl. I’ve been exploring and writing about the best ways to teach composition using digital technology for over 20 years. You may have come here because you’re looking for my Lists of Ten or because you know my work on the ReadWriteThink website. You can also find my daily collection of links to news stories about technology and the teaching of writing, literacy, and literature. You can read more on my About page, or connect with me on one of the networks below. Thanks for visiting the site.
Hi, I’m Traci Gardner, known in most circles as Tengrrl. I’ve been exploring and writing about the best ways to teach composition using digital technology for over 20 years. You may have come here because you’re looking for my 
