Why social media for educators?

Cross-posted (and better looking) at NCAIS Innovate. Not sure why I'm struggling with Blogger and succeeding with Wordpress, but I definitely am.

Once upon a very hot August almost-back-to-school day, I came upon a tweet. A tweet that traveled across the country, from North Carolina to Oregon (and maybe beyond) in a flash.



I was not the only one. . .




Within a few days, at least 10 (and I suspect far more) teachers asked the same two questions of the fresh faces gathering in front of them: When do you feel most engaged/interested/curious in school? and When do you feel most checked out/bored/uninterested in school?

The result? You can see my class's responses here:







They resemble, but are not identical to the responses Ms Stewart's students gave.

Sharing ideas among teachers is nothing new. Back when I began teaching, it sometimes (often?) took a semester or more for an idea to make it down the hallway. This shared question went from North Carolina to Iowa to Utah in moments. Next, the questions, along with their accompanying images, sparked a spirited conversation on the English Companion Ning, as well as a less feisty but just as heart-felt series of responses on Ms Stewart's blog, In For Good. So what's the value of this rapid spread of an idea?

First, every teacher who asked the questions spent a some time thinking about knowing the students they encounter a little better as learners. Which means that a few hundred students learned that their teachers care how they learn.

Second, a few teachers engaged in a lively conversation that involved debating the value of pedagogical methods, sharing professional resources, and critiquing said resources with intellectual vigor. Teachers are busy this time of year with activities that can seem decidedly unintellectual. To have teachers engage in visible intellectual discourse can only be described as heartening! And this happened without a course, a scholarly journal article, or a professional development session!

The American Lit students in my course and I had an interesting conversation about their thoughts as they looked at the Wordles. I'm sure that the other classes that answered the same questions did too. Is the next step connecting the students together to see what they have in common with students across the country (and maybe across the world?) That would be yet another value add.

Time for some little ideas!

By little, I mean narrowly focused, not unimportant!

I've been frustrated lately by reading assignments that are way too difficult for students. I bet they have been even more frustrated than I have! This is particularly difficult when content area teachers are doing their best to bring in authentic reading material such as current news in the field. The problem is that such material is written at a level that precludes independent reading. Instead, students end up needing a great deal of support.

When teachers assign reading material, sometimes it is difficult to know until after students have done the reading whether the material is too easy or too advanced. Here are two tools that can make evaluating the reading level of text a little easier.

For a rough estimate, Microsoft Word has the option to evaluate readability statistics as part of the grammar and spelling check. You turn this feature on by clicking on the MS Office button in the upper left hand corner, clicking on Word Options, choosing "proofing", and checking the box that says "show readability statistics."



Copy and paste or type about 100 words of the text into MS Word and save. Then, when you are in a document, go to the reviewing toolbar and run the spelling and grammar check. At the very end of the check, you get a window with a Flesch-Kinkaid reading level. It's not perfect, and I personally think it skews a little low, particularly if the text has a lot of dialogue. However, it is a great quick and easy check that a reading selection isn't way off base.

The second tool is a program that you can download called Reading Rater that is free. It's nice to sometimes do a cross check between the two, but I have found them to be consistent.

Hope these are useful for you!

Wordle Meme

I've never been "tagged" by one of these, but this one looks too fun not to try. I'm a big fan of Wordle already and I've used it with students and their writing and with journal articles, but never with my own writing. So, here's the Wordle for my blog's RSS feed



The first thing I noticed is that I really need to stop saying "really" so often! The other is that students is my most used word, which makes me really happy (ha!). Since today was my last day at school until next year, that seems like a happy note to go out on!

Cheers!

Wordle

I tried something interesting today. Our diversity director sent out two different articles written about the the U.S. House of Representatives issuing an apology for slavery and for Jim Crow. His point was that the two articles were quite different. I had heard about Wordle, which makes the images based on the frequency with which words appear in the article. So, I made images of the two articles. The first article was written by Darryl Fears and appeared in the Washington Post. Here's the Wordle for that article.



The second article was written by Jim Abrams for the Associated Press and distributed widely. Here's the Wordle for it.


I left out the headlines for both because those are seldom written by the journalists who write the articles.
Discussion fodder in conjunction with reading the articles? I think so.

Wouldn't it be interesting to have students create something similar with two pieces, either historical, literary, or current?