6 Reasons Blogrolls Are Dying

August 22, 2010 by

Cinnamon Roll by stevendepoloI posted a message to TechRhet this weekend that I thought would yield a fast result. I needed to gather a list of comp/rhet blogs for a project, and I want to make sure I didn’t leave anyone out.

I asked readers to pass along links if they had a great blogroll or knew of some wonderful blogs I should include.

The response? One message. That’s it. One message that pointed to one blog.

So I began searching for the links on my own, visiting friend’s blogs and scooping up links as I went along. I quickly observed that blogrolls are a dying breed.

  1. Fewer people have blogrolls. There was a time when everyone listed every blogger possible in the sidebar. Not the case any more. More than 1/2 of the blogs I visited had no blogroll at all.
     
  2. Blogrolls tend to be an unordered list, which makes their usefulness questionable. Presented with a giant list of blogs, you have nothing to go by but the blog name or the writer’s name. Sorted into categories or with tags, the list would be easier for visitors to use. As they stand on most blogs, they seem to be a simple list of friends and colleagues in most cases.
     
  3. The blogrolls I did find were not well-maintained. The lists were littered with broken links, dead blogs (i.e., the link works but there hasn’t been a new post on the blog in months), and links to old blogs, with pointers to a new home.
     
  4. Gathering a blogroll (and checking its links) is a time-consuming project. There’s a reason these things aren’t maintained. The only way to make use the blog links all work properly is to sit and click on each and every one.
     
  5. Blogrolls are suffering because blogs have more competition these days. Many colleagues are foregoing blogs for shorter status updates. On more than one blog, I found a note that indicated the person was going to update via Facebook or Twitter instead of maintaining the blog.
     
  6. Follower and Friend lists are replacing blogrolls. When you click follow or okay a friend, you create a list of colleagues that is quite similar to a blogroll—and which is infinitely easier to maintain. They take care of themselves. You never have to chase down the URLs or check for deleted accounts.

Ultimately, I collected a list of nearly 70 blogs. Feel free to copy it for your own site or send links to anything I left out. I just won’t promise you that I’ll maintain it for the long term.

 

[Creative Commons licensed Flickr photo by stevendepolo]

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What Are Kidwatching, Microblogging, and Podcasts?

August 19, 2010 by

Writing a Podcast by Irish TypepadSoon NCTE will be launching an online site for members that will include many cool features, including an online glossary for English teachers.

My assignment this afternoon was to come up with 3 definitions to add to the collection as examples—and to make sure they were backed up in case they get accidentally erased. So here are my three rough drafts. What do you think? I’d love to hear suggestions to make them stronger!

Kidwatching Definition

Kidwatching, a term popularized by Yetta Goodman, is a way to record your students’ development by observing their behavior, strategies, and ways of making meaning. In the simplest explanation, kidwatching is exactly what it sounds like: watching kids—as they read, write, collaborate, and participate in your class—and taking notes on your observations of students’ effective use of skills, concepts, and strategies.

Observations alone can be useful; but what makes kidwatching a particular strong tool in the classroom is the step that teachers take to move beyond observations and note-taking to analysis and curriculum building based on on those observations and notes.

For more information, see O’Keefe, T. (1997). The Habit of Kidwatching. School Talk, 3(2). 4–5. [Available online at http://www.ncte.org/journals/st/issues/v3-2]

Microblogging Definition

Microblogging is an online publication method that allows writers to publish very short updates, typically in 140 characters or less. Tools used to post microblog updates include Twitter (the most popular tool), Jaiku, and Plurk. Status updates posted in Facebook can also be microblogs.

Microblog updates can touch many kinds of writing, from exposition to fiction and more. Twitter originally asked writers to post a response to the question “What are you doing?” The question has evolved to “What’s happening?” today. Microblog posts can include any of the following:

  • a status update on where you are and what you’re doing
  • comments and reviews on a book, movie, concert you’ve attended
  • links to pictures with short comments on their significance
  • pointers to websites, news articles, and other resources you’ve found valuable
  • questions and calls for suggestions (as well as related answers)
  • haiku (or Twaiku, as they are sometimes called) and other ultra-short poems
  • one-sentence stories

As far as the content is concerned, anything goes. What primarily defines microblogging are the length and its publication in an online forum.

Some teachers use microblogging assignments as part of their class activities, to share quick updates on class business and as a writing activity. See Profhacker’s Framework for Teaching with Twitter for additional tips if you decide to try microblogging with students.

Podcast Definition

Podcasts are serial audio or video recordings, posted regularly online. Some people call video podcasts vlogcasts. You might think of a podcast as a kind of blog that posts recordings (rather than webpages) on a regular basis. Some call any audio or video recording a podcast, but in the strictest technical sense, the word refers to episodic publications.

To listen to a podcast, you can either play it directly (streaming) on your computer or download the file and listen to it later (on your computer or on an MP3 player or smartphone).

Podcasts can be used for any purpose a text might serve—they can tell fictional stories, share and comment on recent events, inform listeners about a topic, and persuade listeners to take an action or adopt a stance. As a result, podcasts are valuable tools for teaching students to use spoken language to communicate effectively with a variety of audiences and for different purposes.

For more information on podcasts, see the ReadWriteThink strategy guide Teaching with Podcasts.

 

[Creative Commons licensed Flickr photo by Irish Typepad]

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My Top 3 Tips for Teaching with Twitter

July 18, 2010 by

Blue Cartoon Bird by Lisa YarostSo you’re ready to dive in and try Twitter in the classroom. Let me share these tips that can make sure your classroom experience is a smooth and effective.

  1. Create separate logins. Audience and purpose shift from message to message. Set up different Twitter accounts to keep classroom updates separate from updates for family, friends, and others. There are tips to make managing multiple accounts easier. Encourage students to create a separate account for official class work as well. I actually post on four accounts:
  2. Use hashtags. Choose a specific and unique hashtag (# plus a keyword) to group updates from your different classes (e.g., #VTEngl10). See “How To Create Successful Chats on Twitter with Hashtags” for more suggestions. Lists can work too, but you have to set up a list. You can just search for hashtags.
     
  3. Use search creatively. Obviously you can search for those hashtags you’re using, but there are some more sophisticated search tools you can use to narrow down exactly what you’re looking for. Pair a search for your hashtag with filter:links to get just the Tweets that have URLS. That’s an easy way to find those links to an assignment students posted. The until: and since: operators can narrow down Tweets by date.

And one extra tip: you can always Make your own Twitter bird if you need to relieve some stress.

 

[Creative Commons licensed Flickr photo by Lisa Yarost]

 

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Classroom Activities Using Twitter

July 13, 2010 by

Sending Twitter Message by Cell Phone Image by rockinfreeSince Twitter is a communications tool, there are infinite ways to use the site in the English classroom.

These two excellent videos provide introductions to using Twitter with students that are polished enough to share at staff meetings and professional development sessions:

  • The Twitter Experiment – UT Dallas is one of the first stories of a teacher using Twitter in the classroom to hit wide distribution . The YouTube video includes discussion and feedback from Dr. Monica Rankin and students in her history class. Rankin’s focus is on increasing discussion and class participation.
  • Twitter in the Classroom? shares details on a partnership between University of Minnesota and Roosevelt High School to use Twitter to communicate and engage students.

In addition to giving students some basic tutorials and guides, it’s useful to go over the information from College Student’s Guide: Twitter 101. The page shares advice on how to make choices wisely so that students are taken seriously when they use Twitter as part of their classes.

For some more concrete classroom activities, look at Twitter Resources for the Classroom and Ten Ways to Use Twitter with Colleagues, both from Bedford Bits.

You’ll also find useful examples in these articles:

[Creative Commons licensed Flickr photo by rockinfree]

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Resources You Need to Teach Effectively with Twitter

June 30, 2010 by

Twitter Button from MilkAddictTuesday, I argued that Twitter is a great classroom tool. Students can publish their ideas immediately to a ready audience of readers. This authentic audience and purpose makes Twitter one of the many ways that teachers can engage writers in meaningful communication.

So how do you teach effectively with Twitter? Today I’m sharing classroom resources you can use to get started and tomorrow I’ll have details on specific classroom activities you can complete with Twitter.

Basic Twitter Guides

Regardless of the project or activities, you’ll need some basic tutorial or guide to share with students and colleagues.

The classic explanation of Twitter is Twitter in Plain English from The Commoncraft Show. Originally produced in March 2008, the video is dated in places, but it’s still a good overview for someone who has never heard of Twitter. Chances are your students already know all about the tool, but if you’re trying to explain the resource to colleague or students’ family members, the video can be useful.

Ten Handy How-To Resources for Twitter from Bedford Bits includes guides and tutorials you can use yourself and share with colleagues or students. Twitter features have changed over the months, so some information will no longer match the site exactly.

Twitter’s Help Resources and Twitip’s Beginner’s Guide Posts are the best place to find the most current information. The 5 Naming Tips can get you going if you still need to set up your own Twitter account.

Specific Twitter Features

For classroom use, be sure that you talk about these features:

Twitip’s 5 Commonly Misunderstood Things on Twitter addresses several specific features quickly. Some may not be very relevant for class activities (e.g., tracking retweets), but others are crucial—like effective use of the @ sign in Twitter updates.

Be sure to come back later for information on how these features can be part of great classroom activities.

 

[Twitter Button Image by MilkAddict]

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Is Twitter Classroom Worthy?

June 29, 2010 by

Sending Twitter Message by Cell Phone Image by rockinfreeI have a confession to make. I spend more time sending out Twitter updates (commonly called tweets) than I do on email these days.

Why is it a confession? Twitter has gotten a bad reputation in some circles. The College Humor video Twitter in Real Life demonstrates the way many people perceive the world of Twitter—it’s all a bunch of random, mediocre comments about whatever the writer happens to be doing at the moment in time.

Just because you can use Twitter for random reports on your day, however, doesn’t meant that you have to use it that way. In fact, I’d argue that a lot of the updates on Twitter are anything but random and mediocre when they are read by the intended audience in the appropriate context.

Yep, it’s all about the rhetorical situation. There are lots of people using Twitter to publish status updates about projects, news, and their lives in ways that are anything but random. Take @BreakingNews for instance. All day long, every day, the editors post the latest news stories in 140 characters or less, often with a link to a page with more information.

Looking for a more local example? The town where I live posts regular updates about road construction, town planning, town council meetings, and special events as @Blacksburg_Gov. Virginia Tech, my local university, posts similar updates as @vt_edu and @vtnews.

But is Twitter classroom worthy? Obviously, you can send similar class information and news to students using Twitter, but is the social networking tool capable of more than simply class announcements? Absolutely.

If you’re unsure, think about Twitter as another of the many ways that students can publish their writing. Make it one of the tools in your arsenal, placing it alongside blog posts, Wikipedia updates, email messages, and web forum posts.

Now any one of those tools for publishing writing can be used in mediocre ways that are not worthy of classroom exploration. That’s where the teacher comes in. The teacher has to talk about the audience and purpose for the messages and help students find the most effective ways to communicate—whether students are using blogs, email messages or Twitter.

Now just how do you go about it? Come back later this week for tips on how to introduce Twitter and ways to use Twitter in the classroom.

 

[Creative Commons licensed Flickr photo by rockinfree]

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Text + Image = Tagxedo: The Next Generation of Word Cloud Fun

June 19, 2010 by

I’ve been a Wordle addict for a while. The online tool takes any text and creates a cloud of the words based on their frequency. It makes for some fun analysis activities that goes beyond the norm in the classroom.

When Obama was sworn in, Wordle addicts like me used the tool to analyze the inaugural address and to look back at the speeches of previous presidents. I even used Wordle to explore Elizabeth Alexander’s inaugural poem.

Shakespeare's Sonnet 18Now this word cloud-driven analysis is ready to move to the next level with Tagxedo. Highlighted Friday as Jane‘s Pick of the Day, Tagxedo shapes your cloud of words into an image. To demonstrate, I used the text of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18 and had Tagxedo arrange the words into a heart. Cute, no?

Tagxedo allows you to choose one of 42 included image shapes or upload your own image. Settings allow you to customize the colors, contrast, and other features of the resulting word cloud.

You an also exclude words, and customize the way that the text is handled (e.g., include or exclude numbers or punctuation). Like Wordle, Tagxedo allows you to save the resulting word clouds. You can place the image in the Tagxedo Gallery, create an embedded version you can use elsewhere, or simply save the image as a JPG or PNG.

The possible downside: The tool uses Microsoft’s Silverlight. I didn’t have Silverlight installed, and it managed to crash my machine once the installation completed and I tried to refresh the Tagxedo page. If you allow for that possible bump and can get Silverlight installed, however, you’ll have another option for playing with word clouds in the classroom.

The Black Cat by Edgar Allan PoeThe benefit of Tagxedo in the classroom is its stronger connection to visual rhetoric. Word clouds emphasize the words that are used most frequently in a text. Taken out of their context, key words stand out and readers can think about how they may work as symbols, establish a mood, or build an image.

Tagxedo word clouds allow students to pair that kind of textual analysis with an image that extends the emphasis the words communicate. Consider the image on the left. I took the text of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Black Cat.” Click on the cat image to see a larger version. If you have Silverlight installed, you can go to the Tagxedo site to see the Silverlight version, which enlarges the words in the image when you mouse over them.

To make the image, I had Tagxedo focus on the top 150 words. I chose the cat shape, which is one of Tagxedo’s included images, and then I changed the colors to get the strong contrast I wanted. I love the way this cat image includes the words cat, wall, myself, and animal in the center of the image, and the stark black and white contrast makes the cat image really stand out.

Now imagine students applying this same tool to texts you explore in class. The process is fairly simple:

  1. Choose a text. You might have students analyze a full chapter of a work, a short story, several poems by a single poet, or an essay. The text might come from an author in their textbooks or it could be their own work. Project Gutenberg can make the process for many out of copyright text as simple as copy and paste.
    The Tagxedo developers also have the ability to point to an HTML page and are working on the capability to use a Twitter feed or search results.
  2. Choose an image. There are 42 images included in Tagxedo. Students can also use their own images. Designs with a clear two-color appearance will work best. Simpler designs probably work best. A detailed image of a colorful garden is not going to work as well picture of a single flower.
  3. Enter the information in Tagxedo. Use the various tools in the left panel to customize the results. Make sure students know how to save the image so that they can share it with the class or turn it in.

Simple and fun, Tagxedo takes word clouds beyond simple rectangles and asks students to do a bit more critical thinking than Wordle word clouds do. There’s still a place for Wordle in the classroom, but Tagxedo adds another level to the designs that deepen students’ critical thinking–and can create some nice posters for the class bulletin boards and websites!

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Piecing Together the Copyright Puzzle

June 15, 2010 by

Copyright Symbol by Horia VarlanFiguring out copyright can be like piecing together a puzzle. You have a good idea how it’s supposed to work in the end, but all the little pieces can be confusing to piece together.

I’ve posted links to 15 sites on copyright and fair use that will help you move from scattered pieces to a full picture in this week’s NCTE Inbox Blog.

[Creative Commons licensed Flickr photo of copyright symbol by Horia Varlan]

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What’s the Trick to Building Community in the Classroom?

June 4, 2010 by

Barn raising photo by Mangrove MikeOnline or off, getting students to talk to each other is a tricky task. I’ve had my happy share of classes where discussion took off, but I’ve also had my quota of classes where not even bribery with cookies and candy could get students chatting.

The FeverBee Primer About Successful Online Communities can help. While meant more for corporate and public community building, the lessons apply to the classroom just as well.

Lesson One: Establish a reason to connect

FeverBee Blogger Richard Millington explains that the key to a successful community is “connecting a group of people online and making them feel a part of something special.” Students aren’t going to launch into discussion just because we throw them together. We have to give them reasons to connect.

Themed classes (e.g., classes focused on a specific topic like “rhetoric of war” or “gender images”) can have a real advantage here. Students are already in the classroom because of their shared interest, so you’re one step closer to community.

In other classes, you have to work a little harder. Try tying current events on your campus or in the news to the pedagogical goals of the course to make connections and give students a reason to start talking.

For instance, almost everyone has an opinion on the Mac vs. Windows vs. Linux debate. Share the Fast Company article, “Analyzing Steve Jobs’ Language at D8: He’s a "People" Person!” to tie discussion of personal opinions to rhetorical analysis.

Lesson Two: Focus on group bonding

With so much we need to accomplish in the classroom, group bonding may seem off-task. Millington’s advice is important here:

The better you get to know and like your fellow members, and the more you care about their opinion of you, the more you participate and thus work towards a successful goal.

Give students time to bond and make connections. Even simple icebreakers can help students get to know each other and ultimately increase participation.

Lesson Three: Do things together

You have gathered your students and they have some common interests, but that still may not be enough to build a thriving community. Millington explains:

Bonding a community means doing things together. Like challenges for your community, milestones to reach or problems to overcome. It also means having a high level of interactions per member and ensuring members are happy to disclose their thoughts, feelings and other information.

Simply put, the class needs to do things together. You don’t have to layer on another set of tasks to make this happen. Look at what students are doing and try strategies like these:

  • Recognize students with the most posts (just simply by the number).
  • Identify students whose questions lead to the most follow-up discussion.
  • Point out posts with great ideas that may have been overlooked.
  • Mark group milestones (like reaching 1000 posts as a class).

As Millington mentions, community challenges can also be effective. As a simple challenge, you might ask students to reach a certain number of posts on a specific topic. If students work in small groups, challenge groups to have each member participate five times, for example.

Consider community participation projects as well. You might challenge students to post photos of language use from the local area (e.g., misspellings, grammar errors, ironic images). Start class collections of great resources, like links to websites that relate to the class focus. If your technology resources allow, you can even add some simple voting for the favorite photos or links.

Lesson Four: Encourage authentic discussion

To ensure things move in the right direction, do all you can to encourage authentic conversation. Allow students to discuss topics freely and without fear of criticism.

Free discussion doesn’t mean anything goes however. Millington suggests that

Allowing self-disclosure also means accepting negative comments. Not personal attacks, they’re nearly always worth removing (as our [sic] racist, bigoted and sexist remarks) . . . .. [Allow] heated debates and open disagreement to take place. It’s tough to let this happen, it feels like you should jump in and break it up. But don’t. Let people get their opinions out into the open.

Be sure the boundaries for safe and appropriate discussion are clear. Talk about the ad hominem fallacy, and explain how it applies to class discussion. Work together to create some class guidelines to help things run smoothly if you like.

Looking for more?

You’ll find some more suggestions in the FeverBee Primer. For some additional ways to highlight class members, check out 10 Excellent Rewards You Can Offer Members That Don’t Cost A Penny.

 

[Creative Commons licensed Flickr photo by Mangrove Mike]

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Why You Should Try Twitter in the Classroom

February 2, 2010 by

If you’re even slightly interested in how you might use Twitter in the classroom, take a look at William M. Ferriter’s essay “Why Teachers Should Try Twitter” from Educational Leadership.

The article explains, “For educators who use this tool to build a network of people whose Twitter messages connect to their work, Twitter becomes a constant source of new ideas to explore.” It includes some tips and how-to’s as well as a personal story on how the experience affected the author’s understanding of differentiated instruction.

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