Final+Paper


 * The Idea:**

Our middle school, located in a rural county with high unemployment and a low number of college graduates, has more than its share of low-scoring readers and writers, or any other content area for that matter. The district is constantly looking for ways to improve our curriculum and performance, and the latest idea for the ’09-’10 school year included me. The other 7th-grade ELA teacher and I would both be teaching an “exploratory” class of mediocre-scoring language arts students with the intention of boosting their performance. We had searched and planned out a curriculum involving a simulation, a meticulously designed program with group work, lessons, activities, and even teacher prompts completely outlined. Worksheets, “game” cards, and playing pieces were already gathered and organized in each of our rooms. It felt a little like cheating, but it was research-based and looked like it would interest and help our students.

When it came time to decide what to research, the study seemed obvious. I would spice up or completely dump our pre-ordered boxed curriculum and replace it with some ideas I would research. I would compare the two classes to see if what I did helped. Would the boxed curriculum with its game atmosphere, group work, and activities help students improve in reading and writing or in motivation, or would my creative, innovative, and possibly technological lessons do even more good?

After spending some time designing a plan and some ideas for a few lessons and projects for my students, I was given a shock only a week before classes began. With no warning, I was informed that I would be given the absolute lowest-scoring readers in the entire grade and that our class would be called Reading 7. My writing curriculum, with all its bells and whistles, was suddenly going to be a lot more difficult to implement. However, reading and writing are intertwined after all, and bettering one without working on the other seemed negligent, so without any given curriculum from the district, I kept my plan quietly in place and simply added a little extra emphasis on reading to fill any gaps.

= Plan A; Trial One =

After some discussion and thought, the most logical choice to combine reading and writing using motivational technology seemed to be “SSR with RSS” as outlined in “The Digital Writing Workshop.” Although our classroom did not own a set of laptops, we were fortunate to be the storage room for a complete set that was rarely used by anyone else, so we could count on being able to use them most days.

I set up a Ning network for my students to help them feel more comfortable on the Internet. I knew from talking to them that many of them had experience either on Facebook or Myspace, or else had a close relationship with someone that did, and knew many of the functions and features of such a site. When I told them we’d be creating our own social networking site for class, most of them were enthusiastic and couldn’t wait to get started, even after I reminded them that everything we did would be heavily monitored and academic in nature.

To get students used to the idea of social networking, we started by answering a prompt online through a forum discussion, so we could see and respond to each other’s work. In retrospect, I was too excited and far too wordy for my struggling students, and my long question yielded some of the shortest answers of the semester. Instead of my questions provoking a lot of thought and lengthy answers, I got some of the shortest answers of the whole semester. I think I overwhelmed them with my lengthy request, and they probably read just enough to know what I wanted in general, and answered just the simplest question.

We next moved into blogs on the Ning network. Paring items down this time, I asked students three short, specific questions about the class when we had been there for five weeks: My goals for this assignment were mostly formative: I wanted to see who could navigate the computers and Internet easily, and I also really wanted to know how students felt about the class so far, and see what they expected to happen in the future. I also used the opportunity to teach students how to navigate the site, and to improve their writing skills.
 * 1) How is it going?
 * 2) What have you learned?
 * 3) What do you expect to learn?

Answers for this question varied, but most students followed directions again with a minimum of effort. I asked for three complete sentences (one for each question) and usually got it, although they weren’t always complete sentences, and often they were nearly exact replicas of the other sentences with just a word or two changed to fit the new question. Despite my encouragement, the only comments on the blogs were by the same students who had written the original, and usually to correct a misspelling or comment with no meaning (“That’s cool!”)

Subsequent short-answer assignments through forums and blogs yielded slightly better yet still disappointing results. Some questions were written explicitly about technical aspects like capitalization and grammar, in hopes to keep some of the conventions in the forefront of student minds: “Please let us know the title and author of your book, and do it with correct capitalization. For example, ‘The Princess Bride’ by William Goldman.” Other questions were meant to spark discussion between students and teacher: “How is your reading going in the book you chose today? Talk about what, specifically, you like about it or don't like about it. Why did you choose this book?” Although the questions were much more to the point and far less wordy than the first attempt, the answers were still far too short, there was little if any punctuation, and the responses were perfunctory at best.

Assuming that moving into our “real” project would boost motivation, I told the students they would be creating their own personalized online magazine through RSS. One student, who was already well-known in our class to be quite knowledgeable in all things computer-related, said that he had been using an RSS feed for years. None of the other students had even heard of RSS or a feeder. This student was eager to try it in a classroom setting, so he had the other students on board with the idea immediately.

We spent considerable time in the classroom focusing on appropriate topics before getting to any computers. With the students working along at their desks, we spent several class periods brainstorming and creating thinking maps with ideas for topics and, once those got narrowed down, categories or specific types within a topic that could be searched for online. We even created a forum where we put in our ideas. Although I had spent days modeling, brainstorming, and walking around helping individuals, the topics my students came up with were just not very innovative or practical. I had a student suggest go-karts because he liked them, one said he would try “the legendary QB” (no name), another couple of students wanted to learn about the only two genres we had so far covered in regular ELA class because they couldn’t think of anything else, and many other far too vague or far too specific topics.

When the brainstorming and choosing a topic portion of the activity took longer than I intended, I thought that maybe moving along with the project and letting students search for appropriate sites would at least get some of us headed in the right direction. My thinking was that if we could get online and start searching for sites, the students would realize that their topics were either too specific or too vague, and we could adjust appropriately. Also, it was possible that some students could help others if they finished early.

The first step to getting them working with RSS was to have the students attach a special RSS application to their name on the Ning website. Since this was a purely technical aspect of the project, we didn’t have too much trouble. I was able to model using our overhead projector and my own computer, and students were able to follow along in real time at their desks using their assigned laptops. All of the students were able to get this installed the first day we tried. This feeder allowed students to create up to five RSS sites to feed into it. I required at least three. Some of the students had five before that first day was up. Other students, even though we spent more than a week on just this step, never even made it to three. There were various reasons for this: the lack of a good topic as mentioned earlier, the inability to do anything without the teacher’s explicit consent and confirmation, and the general apathy about completing anything in school, which likely contributed to the student’s being placed in that classroom in the first place.

In frustration, I gave up on this project before a full week was up. The amount of time it was taking to get all of the students to commit to a topic and find at least three feeds that were appropriate was astonishing, and I realized that we would never get to a point where everyone was on the same track. In addition, I was still having difficulty getting anyone who had accomplished that first step to actually //read// any of the feeds being sent to them. Instead, I kept finding my students looking at just the pictures on the blogs or sites and sharing those with others. While I find sharing and discussion to be essential pieces of the learning process, I needed to see some reading and writing involved, too, and was not able to produce anything from even one student. In a class where reading and/or writing are the last things to do on anyone’s list, they are particularly difficult to get a student to do when they are the only ones on that step in a project. I believe the students who were enjoying the content of their feeds felt that they were just waiting for others to catch up to them so that the real work could begin.

Plan A; Trial 2
Maybe it’s the topic! The cohesiveness of our group? My lack of instruction??

After some consideration, I thought that the freedom of choosing one’s own topic and the resulting individual frustrations was holding many students back. Struggles with signing in, not understanding the program, being unable to locating appropriate topics and feeds, and many more situations were keeping the students from Instead, creating a topic together (with my mediation) might produce a solid debate around which we could choose sides (evenly, of course) and have heated, thoughtful discussions. Let the brainstorming session begin! (again.)

As a class we listed on the whiteboard a variety of topics possibly suited for classroom debate and discussion backed up with research from RSS feeds. In my head I compared this simple brainstorming activity to my reading a script for the first time, imagining how the scenes will play out, what the actors will vaguely look like in costume and makeup, how they will speak in eloquent tones that convey exactly what the author (or I) originally intended, and how the show will ultimately look to an audience.

Just as I always am in the theater metaphor, I was profoundly mistaken.

We spent an entire class period brainstorming and discussing possible topics that we could divide and conquer together. What I learned during this time was that my students took things literally. There was no “for instance,” or “well, if we were to pretend...” with them. If I said it, it wasn’t merely something to discuss, it was what the board of education was voting on TOMORROW and we’d better quash that idea right now. Absolutely no way would we discuss separating boys from girls in the classrooms, or (Heaven help us!) gaming in the classroom! I could not get the students to commit to a side opposite their personal views, even for “fun,” and subsequently could not come up with an organic topic wherein we fell evenly split on either side. This idea was abandoned quicker than the first.


 * Plan B; something totally different.**

Since I had created my own and taught them before, both times with wild success, I thought that creating digital stories might be the way to go with the remedial students after all. I had plenty of experience and had researched for a while, so I assumed that this might be the key to getting reluctant students to //write// without realizing that that’s what they were doing. They’d be so involved in the process and the audience that they wouldn’t give a second thought to their typical unwillingness to write anything, and things in the classroom would run smoothly along...

Online I found a treasure trove of great ideas and samples of digital stories to show my students. The first great site from a teacher’s point of view was Nancy Pratt’s tips on what she learned about teaching digital stories and how she would set it up in the future. I took a lot of advice from this site and I am sure it helped. My students loved having a chart showing their progress up where everyone could see, and they looked forward to being able to cross off steps as they were completed. I was thankful to know enough to tell them to save the sound track until the last step or else they would spend too much time on it. The piece of advice I thought would help the most and took to heart was having the students write the story out first, before ever getting a computer. I agreed that it was the story that was important, and since I was in this to teach writers, I wanted to focus on the process of writing and revision first.

I started by creating a modified version of the “7 Elements of Digital Storytelling.” I knew the version I found at the Center for Digital Storytelling would be too complicated for 7th graders, so I tried to simplify the language a bit. For the first day of this project I simply showed a few movies to the students and talked about the elements and how those samples had put some of the elements together. The students loved the stories they saw and got excited to begin the projects. Of course, they wanted to get out the laptops right away and start “playing,” but I had a plan.

For the next few days, we started out each class with a short prompt in a writing journal, and I asked the students to write about the prompt for ten minutes. The prompts were designed by me and intended to spark thoughtful narrative answers about a time or place in the student’s life. I thought those kinds of stories would be the easiest for them to write about, and the digital stories would turn out well because the stories would be from the heart. After each day’s prompt, the students watched three videos that could have come out of that same prompt, and as a class we discussed two or three of the seven elements using a worksheet that contained them all, but let us focus on whichever ones we chose. See here for the list of prompts and related videos.

After we had completed five days of prompting and analyzing videos, the students were getting a little tired of the monotony. I was seeing the beginning signs of a mutiny as students were getting antsy to start working on their own stories and playing around with the computers. I announced that they were going to choose among the five prompts to find a story they would like to turn into a video project, and that they would spend a little time writing it up so that it could make a decent digital story.

Now that the students were already familiar with the videos and ready to get started soon, I thought it was time to revisit them with more intention of pulling the pieces out and analyzing the process that created them. We started working on the introduction process. I created a worksheet to help the students, and I let them work in pairs on this activity. They loved getting to choose which videos to watch again, but were a little reluctant to fill in a worksheet. Overall, though, the activity worked, and I could see the answers on the worksheets starting to reflect the kinds of thought I was aiming for. Some of the students were ready to begin.

Every student was required to create a storyboard before getting their assigned laptop. Most of them groaned about this, and I understood. I wouldn’t have used one, either, and to this day never have. However, from a teacher’s standpoint, I wanted some planning done ahead of time, especially by these students who had proven themselves to be champion time-wasters and sneaky with the online gaming. A big concern was for the students who did not have their own pictures for their stories. These students had to come up with the ideas for which pictures they would search for before I would allow them to get online, because all too often I had seen students waste days simply browsing when they didn’t know what they were looking for. They grumbled about this rule, too, but overall it really helped save time.

Although I had stated from the beginning that the soundtrack would be the very last step, and that students were required to use their own voices, every day I had at least one student ask me if he could download this one song he just knew he was going to use for sure, or could I please let so-and-so record the story instead? I stood my ground and insisted on my requirements for the story, and the last step stayed as it was. It was a good thing, too. As it was, for the students who did work hard and long on these stories, some of them still didn’t have time for the soundtrack at the end of our semester together.

Approximately half of the students took to the project without any trouble. They were fairly motivated students, and they wanted to create what they saw on the screen, so they got started. They knew that a little bit of writing would get them where they wanted to be, so they did it. Other students had a good story idea but refused to work on the writing portion, insisting that they could adlib during the recording. A few students could not come up with any ideas for stories, even after several more attempts by me to spark any idea at all. After a few tries, I got the sense that they were just going to tell me there was no story at all about anything, no matter what I asked. With three days left to go in the marking period, I had one stubborn student finally give in and take up finishing one of the story ideas I had suggested for him in the beginning. At that point it was too late to get anything really done as a digital story, but he did try to race through the process. At the end of the last three days he had searched for a few pictures on the Internet, but that was as far as he got.

At the end of the semester I had three projects (out of a possible 17) completed and turned in. Several others had unfinished projects that I had them turn in anyway. Four students had never even gotten out a computer. I graded all of the students on their attempt at the project far more than I did the results. Of the three completed stories, two of them were little more than talking picture slideshows, but one of them had the true makings of a digital story, with a nice voiceover and background music to enhance the experience. That student was at my desk four times each day for the next week, asking if I had yet created a DVD for her to take home. She was proud of what she had accomplished, and had every intention of sharing with her audience.

Looking Into the Future
Writing is writing, and sometimes you just can’t hide it. Even by dangling the proverbial carrot out in front of my students’ noses, I still couldn’t persuade some of them to write. They wanted the computers, and although some would beg occasionally, I insisted that they have a story for me to look at first, so many of them simply sat and refused. I’m sure some of them thought that if they held out long enough, and the end of the marking period drew close enough, that I would feel sorry and give in just so that they could get the project done and get a grade. Instead, I stood my ground, insisting that I see some form of writing or planning on a storyboard before getting a computer to play around with. It was writing, after all. A few students gave in and began to write or draw at the last minute and then blamed me for not having enough time to finish. A few others managed to sit and do nothing all the way through the final days of class, getting no grade on the assignment at all. Even though I graded on effort and process, they still failed.

Do I plan to try any of these projects again? Of course I do, without a doubt. Our school is piloting a movement to give a laptop to every student from 6th grade through 12th by the winter of next year, and so we will have more opportunities than ever to work with technology. In addition, every classroom is outfitted with a mounted projector that hooks to any computer or gooseneck device. I plan to try all of these projects and more, in various forms, with all of my classes in regular ELA and my exploratory classes. In fact, digital stories have already been fairly successful during both years of my teaching general education ELA classes.

I do have some specific new ideas in mind for composing digital stories next year. The first thing I will do is implement a short, one- or two-day lesson where the class creates digital stories together on a fixed, rigid plan. This can be done individually or in small groups at the teacher’s discretion. Students will be given a very short prompt (Roses are red, violets are blue...) or opening line and have a limited time in which to add a short piece to it. One idea is to let students randomly pick out of a list of moods or themes and continue the entire project with that in mind (think audience). With slow, deliberate steps, and explicit whole-group modeling along the way, students will be led through the process of deciding on appropriate pictures for the short piece, locating and downloading the pictures and background music, recording the voice pieces, and ultimately putting the digital story together. By running through all of the pieces of the project together, students would be able to grasp the concept of what a digital story is made of and how it works, so that when it is time for them to work on their own, a lot of the technical aspects should no longer get in the way. Students can focus on the audience and the outcome of their story, and not as much on how to craft the project.

Sometimes forcing students to work out a story on paper first is simply not going to be successful. The holdouts in my class proved that some students would truly rather sit and do nothing than put a pencil to paper, no matter which carrot we dangle. Then again, there will be times when students will test our patience, and we will discover that for the past day and a half they have not been composing a digital story as we thought, but were instead looking up pictures of the latest high-powered model of snowmobile and the awesome tricks it can do. Instead of anticipating those outcomes from everyone from the start, however, maybe students need to be given a chance to compose electronically. They spend a lot of their time on computers and online, and so their thinking may very well be done in that familiar environment. Honestly, my first digital story, which turned out to be quite well received, was composed almost entirely in my head, and I only turned to “paper” when I got stuck and needed some time to think and organize my thoughts. Even then, I went to my computer and typed my thoughts. Nothing ever went to physical paper.

Always, always, always, have a list of usernames and passwords for every student if they need them for a required project. Students will lose passwords, probably every day, and it is extremely helpful and timesaving to have a convenient list nearby. Also, some students may try to use lost passwords as an excuse to do something other than the assigned work, so this is one way to cut down on that as well.

Although this was a terribly difficult group of students who were reluctant to do anything in my class, I have no doubt that computers did motivation them. Getting them to use them academically was still tough, but I feel we were on the right track. Some of the best days we had in that class were an accidental discovery. One day I decided to get a list of word games around for them to choose from, thinking that it would be both fun and academic at the same time. Without any push from me, within minutes all of the students in the class were playing the same game in the same “room” online, where it was a timed game and scores were posted for everyone. It was an instant hit, and before I knew it they had me playing along, beating them soundly but having fun alongside them. Electronically we could all be building skills together at our individual levels and personal pace and having fun doing it.

Of course these few projects are not the only electronic means to encourage students to write, so I will keep trying. Every day a colleague or a website shows me a new way of using the Internet or a new program in my classroom in a way that completely changes my previous line of thought. Just yesterday I got a link to a video that blew me away with its forethought, planning, creativity, and a genius end product. Although I’ve viewed it several times already, I cannot even wrap my mind around the concept long enough to figure out other possibilities. I showed it to all of my current students in hopes that they can take that seed of an idea and apply it to their future projects, and many of them are already showing signs of brilliance. I will just have to do my best to keep up.