by Pernille Ripp

Three years ago I started blogging with my 4th grade students on a whim. I knew three things at the start: I wanted to get them connected with each other; I wanted to give them a voice, and I knew I had to change the way they wrote. So I started blogging with them – fumbling my way through the how to and the when to.

What I had no way of knowing was how blogging would change the way I taught, how blogging would give my students a way to speak to the world, and how blogs would make it possible for them to create lasting global connections with other children.

Blogging has since become an integral part of my classroom. It’s a way for me to check the emotional temperature of my kids and a way for them to add their voice to the continuing education debate and reach out to other communities.  We no longer just wonder how things are done in other countries. We blog and ask questions and get our answers.

So when I meet with any teacher who wonders how to lower the walls of their classroom and create more authentic learning opportunities, my first advice is to get students blogging.

If they’re interested, I share these steps. They grow out of my own experience working with upper elementary-aged kids, and I believe they can help any middle grades teacher successfully launch a blogging program and integrate it into the daily learning experience.

10 + 1 Steps to Meaningful Student Blogging

Here’s the checklist I follow myself at the beginning of each year, before I unleash my (now) 5th grade students’ voices to the world:

1. Figure out your why

You have to reflect on why it is you want to have students blog. Is it to make connections, for technology integration, to give your students a voice, or for some other reason? If you know the why it is much easier to get students excited about the blogging experience. I don’t feel that blogging should be just to show off student work; it can be something much bigger than that.  So figure out your reasons why before you move on to the how.

2. Pick your platform

I use Kidblog because of its ease, its wonderful safety features, and the ease with which I can adapt it to fit our purpose. While some feel (as a result of recent changes) that Kidblog is geared more toward early elementary students, I disagree. But it’s not the only safe and easy-to-use option: Edublogs is another popular student blogging platform that also comes highly recommended.

3. Get your permissions

Check with your principal, your tech coordinator, and finally get parent permission. You need to be prepared to explain and justify what you are doing — and be transparent throughout the conversation — to receive ultimate support for this endeavor. Student online safety is a predictable concern, and it’s much easier to be proactive, seek out these conversations, and present evidence that safety is easily assured and the learning rewards are significant.

I’ve created my own permission slip to ensure that parents feel well informed as they make their decision about whether to let their child blog. And I have yet to have a parent say no.

4. Blogging versus writing

I always introduce blogging by discussing how it is similar and different to writing. Students often get what blogs are but not necessarily how they can use one themselves. So I showcase my own professional blog and other students’ blogs to get them excited about the adventure they are about go on. We discuss what we can blog about, how long a post should be (as a minimum), and what to do about spelling and grammar. These discussions lead to heightened awareness of what is appropriate for a blog post and what isn’t and will also lead to the next step.

5. Discuss safety!

Before students ever log into their blog accounts for the first time, you have to discuss safety. I use the analogy of “Why the Internet is Like the Mall” to get students to really think about their online behavior and what they post. This is an in-depth discussion that covers many aspects of internet behavior, not just those that are specific to blogging. This is also not just a beginning-of-the-year conversation, but an all-the-time conversation.

6. Do a paper blog

Starting out on paper is a great way to introduce students to blogging and how they can add their own personal voice and flair. (It’s an idea I got from Karen McMillan.) By creating and personalizing a paper copy of their dream blog, my students have a tangible piece to work with while we learn the ins and outs of style, substance and safety. Once all of the paper blogs are done, students spend a class period leaving post-it comments on each other’s blogs as well as responding to the comments they themselves receive. This is a natural progression toward our next step . . .

7. Discuss commenting

For blogging to be effective, students need to know how to make good comments. Commenting on other blogs is one important way to grow an audience for your own blog. And when people comment on what you have written, you need to be prepared to respond with follow-up comments of your own. So we discuss how to create a dialogue in comments, how to thank people, and also how to give constructive feedback. We set up parameters for our posts and our comments in order to uphold a high standard of writing and we discover how commenting can (and should) become a conversation. We even act out comments from our post-its to see if they work well as conversation starters or act as dead ends.  Students quickly realize the power of a comment.

8. Start small

When students are finally ready to blog, have them introduce themselves.  That way, as your class starts to reach out to others (because ultimately blogging is about connections), students can showcase themselves and thus spark a conversation.

9. Connect with others.

Use quadblogging or a project like The Global Read Aloud to get students connected – or simply reach out to one or two other classes (preferably far away from you) to establish a blogging relationship. Once you get started, teachers can go on Twitter and use the hashtag #comments4kids to get comments for your students. Kidblog also has a wonderful feature called “Blogroll” where you can build a list of links to other blogs you like to follow in the margin of your own blog. My students use this all year as they check in with classes from around the world.

This is what gets the kids excited about blogging — it’s not just that they get to read other posts, they are able to establish a personal connection with other kids in faraway places, maintain that relationship throughout the year, and learn a lot about life in other parts of the globe.

10. Make it their own

Students need to feel genuine ownership of their blogs. I ask them for ideas of what to blog about; I give them free artistic rein over their posts, and I give them time to explore the blog’s tools and capabilities. This is what gives students ownership and has them take pride in their blogging. If it is truly their voice being heard in whatever fashion they want to present it, then they are eager to show it off.

Blogging has to be authentic for it to work. I don’t correct their grammar and spelling. I don’t require editorial changes unless something is likely to lead to hurt feelings or misunderstandings. I will ask them to add more or to explain further, but I give them the time to do so. I also challenge them with a weekly blogging challenge and then find time to do it in school. (Ideas for the challenge come from students or things I wonder about myself.)

11. Give it time

Great blogging and great connections don’t happen overnight, so give it time. Let the students develop as bloggers, celebrate their successes, and map their connections. Truly celebrate the blogging they do and spend time on it class. Encourage blogging but don’t make it an assignment to just get done. Treat it as an integral part of your classroom and watch it become one. Blogging is not just about writing, it is about bringing the world in and making it a little bit smaller.

In the end, blogging should not be a burden in your already full day. Students should love blogging, not see it as a chore (which is also why I never grade my students’ blogs) and they should be eager to express themselves and expand their worlds.

If you are ever in need of someone to connect to or ask questions, please reach out to me @pernilleripp on Twitter. I will gladly help. After all, blogging is about expanding our own comfort zones and creating authentic, global collaboration.

More about Pernille Ripp: I am a passionate 5th grade teacher (I’ve taught 4th grade too) in Middleton, Wisconsin, a proud techy geek, and honest to a fault. I’m also the creator of the Global Read Aloud Project, Co-founder of EdCamp MadWI, and believer in all children. Nominated for Elementary Teacher of the Year by the Bammy Awards 2013. My first book will be published later this year by Powerful Learning Press. Meanwhile I muse on education at my blog “Blogging Through the Fourth Dimension”  and you can follow me on Twitter @PernilleRipp.

by Michael Fisher

In the past, I’ve had the very good fortune to work with both Destination Imagination and Odyssey of the Mind. Both of these programs allow kids to explore creativity to the nth degree and offer engaging and learning-filled explorations beyond what is typically offered in school. The guiding philosophies of both programs are:

• In what ways can we be creative?
• How creative can we be?

We often ask our students to be creative, but how often do we ask them to extend that creativity into previously unexplored territory? How often do we invite them to up the WOW Factor?

I often muse about that when I think about Web 2.0 tools that I share in workshops. I’m always trying to brainstorm divergent ways to use these versatile tools at multiple cognitive levels as well as creative extensions beyond what the tool was designed for.

A clipping tool just for us

A free Web 2.0 tool has emerged that has me actively exploring these two essential questions about creativity. It’s called eduClipper. Those of you who love Pinterest will love eduClipper because of its familiar functionality. Those of you who love Pinterest but are blocked from using it at school will love eduClipper because it’s most likely not blocked — it’s an educational website. (Here’s a simple overview.)

Looking beyond the Pinterest comparison, eduClipper is built for both students and teachers. Teachers can have students sign up through the teacher account and everyone can curate information. Not sure what curation is? I wrote about it last year here. In essence, it’s collecting plus critical thinking.

For instance, Pinterest is, by and large, a visual collection of websites around a particular topic. In order for it to be “curated,” a user would have to reveal why a particular site is relevant to the topic and has been identified as an essential and included resource. This is possible in Pinterest, and also possible in eduClipper, though eduClipper has the advantage of organizing and annotating content for each of your classes and/or via collections for in-the-moment learning.

Imagine students collecting resources in eduClipper, sharing and amplifying their self-selected resources, and also articulating why those resources are important to be included. This is the intention of the eduClipper site: collaborative collecting and curating.

The creativity comes from the multiple ways in which students and teachers can collect, access, group, visualize, and explore content. That’s pretty cool and aligns very well with College and Career Ready practices as well as specific Common Core Standards in writing, particularly the research standards 7, 8, and 9.

The innovation zone

But what of innovation? What of moving to the “how creative can we be” zone? There is a definite zone of innovation here.

eduClipper can clip/display both visual and textual information, and it allows users to include uploads (e.g., student-made content) as well as what is found online. So we can move from what is consumed and considered to what is created and evaluated. Let me paint an example of how eduClipper and other tools can upgrade a learning project or task:

Imagine a research project on butterflies. A teacher and his/her students could collect web resources around butterflies: pictures, videos, text, websites, etc. Students could collect, collect, collect and then study their collections for what they want to cut and what they want to keep. If they keep something, they must say why they are choosing this particular item for curation, using the comment box provided with each eduClipper clip.

Moving into the innovation zone, students could create something online such as a wiki, a LiveBinder, an iPad video, a Prezi, an xTraNormal animated video, etc. and save it to an eduClipboard designated for assessment. Here, all of the students could converse (with quality comments!) about each other’s work. This could happen by leveraging online tools or even creating something more traditional, like a hand-drawn picture of a butterfly life cycle or a writing task, each of which could be uploaded as an image or PDF into the system.

Students could also invite global perspectives on learning by connecting and sharing their work on butterflies with audiences beyond the classroom — perhaps in parts of the world with very different butterfly populations.

Looking beyond the tool for a moment, the task I’ve described is also upgradeable:

What does a traditional butterfly project look like? A paragraph about life cycles? A picture/visualization of butterflies? Think about the objective– the big ideas, and how you might assess it. What’s the point? Is it to get a bunch of pretty pictures for the classroom wall? Or is it to learn how life cycles perpetuate niches in habitats to maintain the flow and stability of the ecosystem? What would the visualization of that look like? How can we extend the butterfly’s life cycle to include multiple organisms, looking for similarities and differences? How can we extend the research questions to something more authentic and perhaps self-selected by the student?

When we consider these upgrades to the task, then we can plan for how the tool, eduClipper, is an appropriate tool for the collection, curation, reflection, articulation, and presentation of deeper learning.

This use of eduClipper puts the teacher squarely into the role of coach, asking questions to help students determine what to cut, keep, comment on, etc. This effort puts student tasks and efforts at the forefront and allows opportunities for more peer-directed learning versus teacher-directed work.

Upgrade to more student-driven learning

In our new ASCD book Upgrade Your Curriculum, Janet Hale and I advocate for more student-centered opportunities that have both high levels of engagement and high levels of learning. You can see an excerpt of our book here and explore our Transformation Matrix.

In Chapter 12 of the book, we write specifically about Pinterest and how one teacher used it as a tool for an upgrade to a previous version of her project. Her students created digital artwork, shared it to a Pinterest board, and interacted with each other around art principles. They were guided by a  rubric that focused on the artwork itself, the critique of the artwork, and the quality of the comments about the artwork and the critique. The tool (Pinterest, in this case) enhanced the task but did not override it. The planning of the art critique lesson was done with the task in mind rather than the tool. The critiquing and subsequent discussion allowed students to improve their abilities to objectively critique others, an upgrade from the past when students felt that comments were more subjective and not useful.

I’m featuring eduClipper specifically in this post because it’s a safe, school-friendly tool and less likely to be blocked in school districts. It also has teacher-friendly functionality, making it easy to establish class and student logins so that all students can potentially use it. Additionally, it was created by one of us, an educator and thought leader named Adam Bellow, who some of you know as EduTecher. Adam has been sharing unbelievable resources to help teachers help students for years. EduClipper is his newest free tool for educators and students.

As you read this, I hope you’re thinking of your own creative ways to engage web tools. Upgrading your curriculum and professional practice is about being creative, but also innovating into a zone that expands your creativity into previously unrealized opportunities.

Think of some of the tools you’re probably already using: YouTube, Wordle, Slideshare, Prezi, anything! How can you be more creative with those tools? How can you stay task-focused and tool-enhanced? How can we move curriculum practice into more student-centered opportunities for learning and engagement? How can we up the WOW Factor through clever uses of apps and web services?

This is the beginning of a conversation. As you think of new ways to approach tools you already use, please consider sharing your ideas in the comments below.

Michael Fisher, former middle grades teacher, is now a full-time author, educational consultant, and instructional coach. He works with schools and districts around the country, helping to sustain curriculum upgrades and be immersive with technology. He specializes in 21st Century Fluencies, Common Core integration, and all that modern learning entails. His latest book, Upgrade Your Curriculum: Practical Ways to Transform Units and Engage Students (ASCD, 2013), is co-authored with Janet Hale. Find Mike on Twitter @fisher1000 and visit his website, The Digigogy Collaborative.

by Michael Fisher

In the next few weeks, Janet Hale and I will have our newest book published by ASCD, Upgrade Your Curriculum: Practical Ways to Transform Units and Engage Students. We will very soon be launching a new ASCD Edge Group and Discussion Board around the book to discuss improvements in instructional practice and design. We also want to hear the awesome ideas of all the educators who would like to engage in a dynamic multi-media conversation!

In the book, we discuss different lenses and considerations through which you can view your current curriculum for a particular upgrade. This blog post is honing in on two upgrades: technology integration and Common Core alignment.

The Common Core alignment relates to a pair of anchor standards for reading: #1 that asks students to read closely, and #10, that asks that students read and comprehend complex literary and informational texts. For the technology lens, I’ve been playing with a few new web tools and wanted to share some ideas for task-focused instruction.

Additionally, when I refer to “upgrades,” I’m speaking of a two-pronged approach, looking both for learning AND engagement. Effective instruction comes from a balance of these two considerations and while I know they can be somewhat subjective, I am, in general, looking for more student-centered opportunities than teacher-led “to-do” lists.

It’s always worth reminding ourselves that it’s the task that matters, not the tool. However, I think it’s important to build a repertoire of tools so that you and your students can choose the right one for the task.

So, in the context of adding tools to your toolboxes and doing so with specific Common Core ideas, I’d like to share three new tools that I’ve come across recently that can help with curriculum upgrades.

Smore

Smore allows a user to create flyers with embedded color schemes, fonts, and templates. I used it initially to create handouts for a workshop I was doing and quickly figured out that I needed to prioritize my information so that the message I was sending would fit on one printed page. I created a Smore flyer for this blog post around Text Complexity, specifically considering Reader and Task, from the Common Core document. Here’s the example:

I liked Smore for several reasons and see several opportunities for specific tasks/upgrades using this tool. For one, if students are visualizing their learning using something like this, it promotes eye-catching design. Brain based instructional strategies work because they are different, creating “mental glue” to help the brain retain information. Visuals stick better than text and using a tool like Smore will help students own their learning.

Also, if students are writing about text, specifically after “close reading,” this might be a good tool to use for emphasizing important comprehension points or prioritizing the information they may potentially share. In fact, how awesome would it be for students, perhaps in pairs, to prioritize different pieces of the puzzle, with some focusing on text structure, some on vocabulary, some on connections to other texts, some on text based conclusions, etc. This could help establish new audiences, purposes, and tasks as students make their own choices and ultimately help teach each other! (With sideline coaching from the teacher, rather than direct instruction.)

Piktochart

Like Smore, Piktochart is a visualization tool. However, its specific purpose is to help the user create an infographic. Infographics are visualizations of information or data — you’ve probably seen some…they’ve gone viral in the last several years. There’s a really cool Flickr Group that collects educational infographics that you should check out! Piktochart lets your students create these awesome visualizations without first acquiring high-end graphic design skills.

I think infographics are where it’s at right now in education. It’s vital for students to be able to think critically about data and draw conclusions. Infographics also offer an opportunity for us to explore integrating subjects such as math into other content areas. The Piktochart I created is about Close Reading and Text Dependent Questions, both of which are represented in the instructional shifts related to the Common Core in ELA. The one I’ve created here is text heavy, as I was just trying out the tool, but it excites me to think what kids could do with this. I found the interface and dashboard easy to use and navigate, and I went from complete novice to finished product in about 45 minutes. Next time, it won’t take half so long. Ease of use is high up on my list when it comes to web tools, and this one is as easy as they come! Here’s the example I created:

Yapp

The last tool I want to add to your toolboxes today is Yapp. I’ve been using Yapp for several months now, and it became the basis for one of the technology upgrades that Janet and I advocate in our new book. Yapp is a tool that lets you easily create your own App for a digital device. Here’s a short video tour:

I’ve used it to create Apps for events such as conferences, to collect information for a local library, and most recently, to create an App that lets me share all of my resources for Text Complexity based on a LiveBinder I created back in November. You can access the App by navigating, through your internet browser, to the following address on your digital device:

http://my.yapp.us/KML9N2

Note that you may need to install YappBox onto your device if you have any trouble with the link itself.

In the book, Janet and I talk about Learning and Engagement around students creating apps. There are certainly a number of ways to go about this, but Yapp is a good starting point. Right now in classrooms, teachers are clamoring to find apps for the various digital devices they use. This translates, a lot of times, into teacher-selected, tool-based learning scenarios rather than student-centered, task-based scenarios. Now that teachers have had some “play time” in the first decade of the 21st Century, we’re ready to shift the focus to thinking, and the ownership of the learning back to the students. If students are CREATING, and making authentic choices about what to include in an app and how to share and amplify it, then they are working at the highest levels of Bloom’s and absolutely owning the learning.

Put your toolbox to work

So, to recap, adding tools to your toolbox is valuable and necessary, even though the goal is to work toward task-based opportunities. Learning and engagement are important and must be considered together for effective learning. Also, there are several lenses through which we can explore potential upgrades to the work we are currently doing.

I’ll be exploring more of these lenses with posts at my ASCD Edge blog as we lead up to the launch of the book in early March. If any readers would like to join Janet and me in Chicago at the ASCD conference, we’ll be exploring what it means to Upgrade Your Curriculum in person. You can also use the Twitter Hashtag #UpgradeYC to interact online right now!

Michael Fisher is a former middle grades teacher who is now a full-time author, educational consultant, and instructional coach. He works with schools and districts around the country, helping to sustain curriculum upgrades and integrate instructional technology. He specializes in the integration of research-based instructional strategies to facilitate transformations of curriculum design, instructional practice, and professional collaboration, currently around 21st Century Fluencies, Common Core integration, and all that modern learning entails. Michael is a member of the Curriculum 21 Faculty and is an active blogger who writes often for the Curriculum 21 Ning (curriculum21.ning.com) and ASCD’s Edge Social Network (http://edge.ascd.org). His web site is The Digigogy Collaborative (digigogy.com) and he can be found on Twitter (@fisher1000).

Jenny Luca is a middle grades teacher and librarian currently working as Director of Information Services at Toorak College, a secondary school in Mt.Eliza (outskirts of Melbourne) Australia. She’s an internationally respected education blogger at Lucacept: Intercepting the Web. This post originally appeared at the Powerful Learning Practice group blog Voices from the Learning Revolution. She presented on this work at the ISTE 2012 conference in San Diego.

by Jenny Luca

I work in an Independent School in Melbourne, Australia, and this past year we made a commitment to help our students (grades 7-12) create ePortfolios, using an Edublogs campus as the platform. Here are 5 reasons why we are making student blogging and portfolio development a high priority.

1. Positive digital footprints

These kids need to establish a positive digital footprint. Without question, it will be the norm for these students to be Googled when they begin to seek employment. Even employment of the part time variety! They need to cultivate their personal brand, and we can help them by encouraging them to post about the great things they are involved in at school. This can reflect what they are learning in their classrooms, or it can be a discussion of the co-curricular activities they enjoy. We want our students to understand that they can control the message about them that exists on the Web, and they can point prospective employers, colleagues or university admissions officers towards a digital footprint that they themselves have created when the time is right.

2. Communicating with digital tools

We want our students to have a handle on how you use digital tools for communication purposes, and not just through networks like Facebook. Plenty of our students are Facebook users, but there is a higher order skill set required to maintain consistent posts in a blog. We’ve taught our students how to set up categories, add widgets, use the HTML editor to embed code, and even how to tell the difference between a legitimate comment and someone who is spamming you. As our world moves ever more closely towards the Internet as the main vehicle for communication, we feel that we are helping our students understand the language they will need to navigate this new territory.

3. Transparency for parents and family

Our curriculum is becoming more transparent for our parent population. As our students write more and more about their learning, we now have a means for our parents to feel more connected to what happens at school. Where once a child would write for an audience of one – their teacher – now they are writing for a potentially much larger audience that includes their immediate and extended family. When you see a grandparent leave a comment on a child’s blog, it brings a bit of a tear to your  eye!

Just think, these students will have a digital archive of their learning, but not only that, they will have comments from friends and family members that they can revisit in years to come. Their access won’t be limited to the box of cherished school records and momentos at the top of the bedroom cupboard. For these kids, an internet connection will enable them to pull up their account from anywhere and revisit their childhood and adolescent school years.

4. New ways of thinking about Web tools

We need a digital space to demonstrate new methods of learning using Web tools. Already this year, our student ePortfolios have been used to embed Slideshare and Google Docs presentations, Glogsters, podcasts created with Garageband, Google MyMaps, Prezi’s and links to Wiki pages they have edited for differing subject areas. Just having our students understand how to hyperlink to other people’s content, and the potential this opens for two-way conversation, has been eye opening for them. These spaces have helped provide even more reasons for our teaching staff to utilize Web based tools and teach themselves new skills in the process.

5. Effective digital citizenship

The ePortfolios support our commitment to assist our students with the skills they need for effective digital citizenship. We are having the conversations we need to have about how you conduct yourself in digital spaces in the context of our curriculum, and not in isolated lecture style presentations that may hit a chord with some students, but miss the mark with others. When I talk to my 7th grade students, they can clearly articulate why it is we are using these ePortfolios. It makes sense to them, and they know it is important for their future lives. Believe you me, when a student tells you they need a really good digital footprint, it makes you feel like you’ve earned your keep that week!

Amazing or what?

I know I said I’d give you 5 reasons, but I can’t resist adding a very important 6th. For many of our students, their world view is changing as a result of posting in public spaces. Many of them have embedded clustr maps into their sidebars, and they can see where people are visiting from. Recently, one of our year seven students posted about the effect this global audience has had on her.

“Okay- so this is amazing.

I’ve used this blog since March 30th and so far it’s been a great resource and an amazing display of some of my work this year. It hasn’t just been my teachers, my classmates, my family and I that have looked at it- as of August 6 my blog has had 533 visits worldwide.

Amazing or what? WOW.”

Wow indeed.

photo: pixelsrzen, CC