BCTELA

 Andrea Matza

Andrea, who usually teaches English 10-12 at Carihi Senior Secondary in Campbell  River, is looking forward to her overseas teaching adventure this school year. She has a Masters in Educational Leadership. 

When I started teaching twelve years ago, we were saving our data on blue square disks, starting the Apple computers in the SFU library's basement with "boot disks" and purchasing photocopy cards with twenty dollar bills in order to copy the academic articles we needed for our research papers. Entering into the teaching profession, there was never even a thought that I might be able to easily plug a projector and speakers into my laptop computer, throw a DVD into the drive and show Roman Polanski's version of Macbeth to my students in movie theatre fashion. We thought colouring in ‘A' and ‘T' boxes on special cards was a high tech method of keeping attendance. How much has changed,just in one decade!

Although I had always felt quite comfortable in the world of technology, that is where I remained in terms of using it in the classroom:comfortable. As long as it was easy, required little in the wayof set-up and required little or no research, I was willing to “use” technology.

This changed significantly at the urging of my professor in my Master of Education program. Again, I was at ease in my use of technology; I used it for my own means but did not have a committed interest in providing technology to my students. After a three-day technology intensive during our summer session, our professor requested a reflectionon technology in education and where westood. At the same time, we were preparing professional platforms with our goals for the coming school year.

It was then that I realized that I would have to make a committed effort to embrace technology beyond the use of it on “my terms”—for my use when it was convenient to me—for the benefit of my students.

My research then began in earnest. I explored many things: blogs, wikis, podcasts, building websites, combining video with still images, and uploading photos. I watched YouTube, TED talks, and how-to videos that other teachers had uploaded to their sites. Clearly, the opportunities were endless.

As I learned and discovered new sites, I began to bookmark my sites to my newly created "delicious" site. Delicious, a bookmarking site that allows the user to bookmark sites and then access those bookmarks anywhere in the world, can have multiple contributors, making it a powerful tool for educators in particular-no more having to write URL addresses on the white board in the computer lab or in the classroom. Once you bookmark a site to a delicious account, you can have your students go to the class delicious site and get to it from there. And it is easy to use, easy to register and easy to create more than one delicious site. To check delicious out, point your web browser to http://del.icio.us/.

After discovering the value of delicious, and bookmarking scores of websites, I focused my research on two key areas: blogging and other useful sites that would assist my students in representing their learning in new ways.

I knew I wanted to start a blog for my class, but knew little about it. What would its purpose be? How would the blog play a role in my classroom? And the most important question, could I make the blog more interactive than just a place to post homework?

I found many of my answers with Darren Kuroptawa, an educator in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Through his site, “A Difference”, (http://adifference.blogspot.com/) I was able to learn much about not only pushing the boundaries of technology in the classroom, but also pushing myself to be a better educator in general! He became, and continues to be, an excellent resourceand mentor for me.

One of the first things I learned from Darren that I have implemented is his idea of creating an “interactive learning ecology” through blogging. Using this concept, students also become the bloggers, and use the blog as a means of continuing dis- cussion outside of class; parents can also then keep abreast of the activities in the classroom. Most importantly, however, is the emphasis on students being given author privileges, being given the role of “scribe posts.”

Every day, a new student, chosen by the previous poster, takes on the responsibility of being the scribe post for the day. This means it is the poster’s job to chronicle, online, the events of the day’s class. Not only does this provide a valuable service to the other members of the class, particularly those that might be absent, it also makes the scribe post have to think about what they actually learned on a given day, making them think about their thinking.

Having scribe posts also creates an opportunity for me, the teacher, to teach another form of published writing, thereby creating another learning opportunity for my students. We talk about design, how it relates to writing and what online publishing looks like in contrast to the written form. For instance, although we know the process of reading is a visual experience, reading on-screen re-emphasizes the need to consider the visual. Shorter paragraphs are the norm. Following design ideas around series of three, I teach students how that would look on a web post. We discuss use of colour and different fonts and the importance of not overwhelming the reader with too much colour or different fonts. One of my students, Levi, wrote a quick blog post describing some of the criteria: http://english12blocka.blogspot.com/2007/11/what-wecovered-in-class-todaynov.html

Using blogs in this manner also means that I am not “on the hook” to write what is going on in the class. I hand that responsibility over to my students, and then I am free to post when I need or want to. My most recent class that shows a full semester’s worth of classroom blogging can be found here: http://english12blocka.blogspot.com/. Looking back on that blog brings back warm memories for me. It has become a neat way to remember the class!

Having experimented with this form of blogging for the past three years now, of course I have learned a lot – and have had varying degrees of success. Because I started with “Blogger”, I continue to use it. However, there are other blog sites available, like TypePad or EduBlogs. What I like about Blogger is that I can easily invite students, once they send me an email, to be authors on our class blog. They do not receive administrative privileges—I alone maintain overall control of the blog—and in all the blogs I have done with my classes, I am happy to say that I have only had to delete two posts for inappropriate content, which occurred on days I was sick. My students sign an acceptable use form that also outlines what is acceptable/unacceptable, and consequences for inappropriate content. I have been really impressed with how positive and supportive the students are of each other; many of my preconceived notions of adolescent “online” behaviour were shattered by my experiences with classroom blogging.

Darren’s website has several useful links and videos describing the role of the scribe post and blogs in general, which I certainly consulted time and time again as I “learned the ropes.” Having a mobile laptop lab helps, as teaching with the computers in my own classroom is easier than teaching in our school’s open-concept library—lovely for being in the library, but not as easy on the vocal chords! Any lab will do, however and, in fact, is not necessarily needed at all—you can have the students email you outside of class time, and have everything occur outside the confines of the classroom walls and school bells, which of course is the beauty of the internet.

After investigating blogs to the point where I felt comfortable introducing them, I began looking at scores of websites to incorporate into my teaching. I was looking for sites that could allow my students to represent and publish in different ways.

Some of the sites I have used include: voicethread.com, animoto.com, pbs.org, stephenlewisfoundation.org and amazon. ca. I have had students post reviews of their books online at Amazon, showing them what literacy looks like in “the real world”; I have shown Frontline documentaries in the computer lab and in my classroom as a way to do complete a unit on the AIDS pandemic in Africa, which included getting tons of resources from the Stephen Lewis foundation and Give a Day’s Pay to AIDS…and allowed my English 11 class to raise over $400 for the Stephen Lewis foundation!

Using such sites as “voicethread” has created an opportunity for my students to represent in a new way by combining still images and/or video with their own voice-over narration, and has allowed me to create an assessment opportunity with oral language. PBS also has a great site called “Poetry 180”, created with the intention of giving students the opportunity to enjoy a daily taste of poetry for all 180 days of the entire school year.

The possibilities are endless, and one evening poking around the internet will certainly provide you with a range of options. Then, just when you think you have exhausted the possibilities, you can show your students the wildly successful and often evocative collective art blog, “Post Secret”, and have them read Richard Van Camp’s delightful storyabout secrets, The Power of Secrets. Or, have them write their own “6 Word Memoirs” at www.smithmag.net/sixwords.

My most recent foray into blending the virtual world with my classroom world has culminated in my most exciting venture yet, and affirms my overarching belief that, despite all the great opportunities that technology can provide the teacher and student, in the end, what still remains is just that—the relationship between student and teacher. Technology only enhances the learning environment; it does not replace the essential role of the teacher and that powerful relationship that can emerge between teacher and child.

Early in March, I received an email from our district principal of Aboriginal Education, Greg Johnson, describing a unique opportunity to participate in an online literature circle with three published authors: Richard Van Camp, Jennifer Storm and Drew Hayden Taylor. Without giving too much thought about the nittygritty of how we would set this up, my colleague, Joni Puurula and I shot a quick email to organizer, Bruce Hansen, superintendent of Vancouver Island West School District, to register for this program known as “Classroom Connections.” We were in!

The day before Spring Break, we received the best gift an English teacher could wish for: a box full of free books! The titles for our literature circle included The Lesser Blessed (Van Camp), Deadly Loyalties (Storm) and The Night Wanderer (Taylor.) With the help of the district’s technology resource teacher who attended to set-up, we had five weeks of reading, and opportunity galore to ask questions, as well as hear and share stories—all using the internet and Elluminate software.

I cannot overemphasize how much it helped having the technology resource teacher come to my class to set everything up, which points to the necessity of having support teachers in roles such as this to assist classroom teachers. While he set up the projector, speakers, log in, microphone settings and laptop, I was able to continue instructing the students and carry on with the learning environment. Not having a resource teacher means the classroom teacher must do this, which can, quite honestly, be a deterrent from taking on these projects altogether. If you have a resource teacher or tech support in the school, I would highly recommend using them!

With the literature circles, not only did students get to hear the authors discuss their books and pose questions to them, the writers themselves provided my students with writing assignments to complete. These pieces were posted to a “wiki”, an editable online space, where authors provided the students with feedback. This was a rewarding experience in its own right. The students felt pride as a result of the great feedback that was left for them by the authors themselves.The wikispace is still online, at: www.aboriginalliteraturecircle.wikispaces.com

The lit circles were characterized by students as “…a great experience.” Others shared that they were “…sad they were over, it was a lot of fun…It allowed us to be up close and personal with the authors, which was really amazing.”

On their own, the literature circles were a tremendous success. The experience was, however, further enlivened by the subsequent visit of Richard Van Camp to Carihi. Funded through an Arts Starts grant that another colleague, Trevor McMonagle, had set up, Richard arrived at our school the day after our final literature circle, where all three authors converged online in a group discussion.

This visit was the perfect culmination to an already educationally rich experience. It breathed life into our school. As one student said, “Mr. Van Camp’s visit flooded the school with cultural and creative energy that permeated through each and every one of us, inspiring, guiding and pushing us to strive for a similar success.”

Everyone hopes that Richard can return next year. And my English 11 students resoundingly agree that next year’s Grade 11 students would be fortunate, indeed, to have the chance to participate in the online literature circles in the coming year. And following the online experience with a personal visit from someone as skillful as Richard brought further to life what we were able to capture in the online literature circle: that authors are human beings and we can actually talk to them!

Classroom Connections will be repeated again next year. For more information, contact organizer Bruce Jansen, Superintendent of Vancouver Island West School District at bjansen@viw.sd84.bc.ca.

Bringing technology into the classroom is not always the “easy” thing to do – but we all know as educators that our jobs are never easy. Technology has allowed me to widen the walls of my classroom, and attempt to make my classroom a richer learning environment. And, no, it does not always go perfectly. There have been days where I have sweated in front of the class, mystified as to why the projector, speakers or website is not working. What I have learned, however, is that just like those authors, I am human. It is okay for my students to see that their teacher is human too. And, again, there is still a human with them in that classroom, trying to make the learning environment just a little bit more interesting with the world that is at her fingertips!