The Making Learning Connected Massive Open Online Collaboration (CLMOOC) summer professional learning is comprised not of units or weekly topics. Instead, the collaborative professional learning is organized into “make cycles” which invite participants to make artifacts or content in an effort to explore Connected Learning principles by embodying them. Make cycles are lead by intrepid teams from National Writing Project sites or Educator Innovator partners.
This resource supports make cycle leaders in preparing to lead these cycles, detailing the explicit tasks they’ll need to complete, and describing the help they’ll receive. The graphic below lists the tasks which correspond with the content of this resource.
You will want a team of two or three people to lead a make cycle.
Before the week of your make cycle, a thinking partner or two will come in handy to support your planning. As you begin to prepare some of the communications you’ll send to participants, you will want an extra sets of eyes on them before you push “send.”
During your make cycle, your small team will divide up the facilitation tasks, share the work of responding to participants, and support each other during your synchronous “Make With Me” hangout, a webinar you’ll lead to model the type of making you hope to inspire. Also, you will curate participant contributions to highlight the range of creations participants share during your make cycle.
After your make cycle is complete, participants will come to your topic late or simply opt to spend more time than just a week. Your team may choose to follow and respond to that traffic and content.
When you first sit down to plan your make cycle, you want to be in search of a big, rough idea. The support you’ll receive in a coaching meeting will help you sharpen this idea and plan strategically to engage a large community online.
To begin, you might think through the following prompts:
“What if everyone (made) ______?”
Or, “What might we make if we were all thinking about _____?”
In past years, make cycles grew out of this type of questioning.
What if everyone made maps?
What if everyone made toys (out of toys)?
What might we make if we were all thinking about Connected Learning credos? What might we make if we were all thinking about introducing ourselves?
Etc…
You’re ready when your idea is broad enough that participants have both easy, quick ways to creatively interact, as well as deeper, in-depth opportunities to make and learn. If you begin with a specific idea, it might be helpful to think about a more thematic make.
For example, one make cycle team wanted to lead a make to spotlight the use of paper circuitry. In order to create a make cycle accessible to all participants, the team framed this more broadly as “Hack your writing.” They presented a range of ways folks could think and tinker through hacking their writing, the most supported and structured of which might be paper circuitry.
In another example, the “Make a map” make cycle in the first year of CLMOOC offered participants the options of mapping their neighborhood, mapping their learning, or even taking a learning walk with a camera in hand.
When you’ve got an idea that has entry points for a new arrival to the MOOC and for the most hard-core maker-learner, you will be ready to share your idea with a supportive coaching team.
Your make cycle team (2-3 people) will participate in one coaching session, during which facilitators and participants from last year’s MOOC will serve as thinking partners and “users,” lending a hand in an instructional design activity during a Google Hangout. To help your make cycle team feel prepared going into their week, the coaching session will take place 1.5 weeks prior to the week we’re prepping for.
After the coaching session, your team will have supportive feedback and also will have a number of ideas that build on the idea you generated.
Below is a list of the specific duties that come along with facilitating a make cycle. This should support you in dividing the work and knowing what to expect during your week.
Draft a second newsletter communication prompting reflection on the week in the MOOC (here’s a helpful guide to content and formatting). This will name strong or exciting work and will also prompt participants to reflect on CL principles.
After
Resume your normally scheduled MOOC participation
Watch for posts that address your make cycle even after your week is over. Respond if you like or leave it to the community.
This year we begin our spring testing with civics and economics – the course I teach. Since we test first, we have several weeks of classes left after testing. In hope of sparking each student’s drive, I’ve invited them to undertake capstone projects in government, politics, economics, or career readiness. I’ve offered up some suggestions for planning and iterating projects, and I’ve put forth the idea of working until the project works as our criterion for success. I’ve also told students that learning and making things they love trumps my request that students’ projects focus on civics and economics.
I believe that when a student pursues an ambitious, inquiry-driven project, he or she performs a more civic service than doing a project I assign. I believe that my students will be more civic minded in the future if they feel like they can identify problems and set and meet goals than if they feel like they have to wait to be told what to do.
Democracy is about individual political expression contributing to the greater good; political expression should be personal and idiosyncratic, but also reasoned, generative, and shaped to consensus. Political expression should be much more like inquiry-driven, project-based work – sometimes collaborative – than like test-driven memorization of content.
In looking at how my students have responded to the capstone project prompt so far, I’m struck – as I was on #DLDay – by the variety of the work they’ve chosen and by how intuitively they’ve set about doing that work. I am, frankly, astounded by how much project-specific work is coming from what are, essentially, bare bones plans. In fact, I am reconsidering they way I ask students to approach planning – right now I’m not sure a “good” plan helps a student achieve more than actual work does.
For example, one student spent the entire first day of capstone work messing around on Minecraft, which – in our classroom – is akin to reading a book instead of doing the work at hand. However, today, after we finished testing, I showed the student some HTML5 code I’ve been learning and asked if she had any interest in moving towards making things like on-line games. She said yes. We grabbed a couple of laptops and each built a tiny web page with 3 or 4 CSS definitions a piece and some pixel art we learned to insert and format so that it displayed inline with our text. She came back for our “official” class after lunch, helped me launch an HTML camp for 3 students (through which we built another set of quick proof-of-concept websites with CSS and pixel art), and then took off without the rest of us. I handed the girls notecards with the CodecademyWeb fundamentals URL at the end of class and told them I fully expected to be spending my class time learning from them very shortly. Today, serendipitously, I heard those comments we all want to hear – the ones that alternate between how difficult and awesome learning is.
How could I have asked or expected that first coder to plan for all of that? How could I have asked her, the Minecraft player, to tell me how she was going to iterate her second webpage after building her first, before she built either? Maybe her experience with Minecraft helped her more than a plan ever could. Without wondering about the guts of Minecraft, would she have moved from consumption of a game to production of a website?
What is the role of a plan – or a lesson plan – in inquiry? How many questions does it take to get to the center of learning? What more do we need than, “Where am I? Where do I want to go? How can I figure that out?”
Maybe what I’m beginning to doubt isn’t planning, but the idea of neutral or discipline-agnostic planning. I’m sure that seems like a naive statement to most professionals, but I’m not sure it would be recognized as such inside our system of public education.
Regardless, those are kind of scary questions, and my questions about those questions aren’t new or otherwise original. I have students who aren’t ready to answer those questions yet; we all have students whose anxieties are triggered by uncertainty. How do you scaffold independence for students who need some external dependability? Is it always right to do so?
Probably not, but we need to keep finding ways to help kids who struggle against destructive forces in their lives to be agents and advocates for themselves. Perhaps one way we could this is to ask them to plan and prepare less, and to do and make more.
Perhaps there is a “digiship” – a digitally-mediated citizenship – that isn’t as unreachable for all kids as we – the system – believe it is.
Digiship is an immediate citizenship, one that takes advantage of everyday technologies and materials to let kids rapidly prototype, share, and reiterate solutions to the problems and opportunities they see around them and in their own lives. Being a digital citizen who practices digiship means recognizing opportunities for change and working on a solution until the solution works. Code, test, debug, repeat until I am a better person and/or the world is a better place. Digiship is digital, but also of-the-digits – hands-on work with tangible results that can be assessed and improved on the fly in response to feedback and needs.
This digiship relies on two kinds of democratization of composition. First, we have to accept making and iterating as the equals of writing and drafting. We have to acknowledge, value, and make pedagogical use of a wide cultural variety of knowing and doing so that all students have access to our best teaching and learning about critical thought and design thinking. We can’t limit access to that kind of education because of handwriting or non-academic use of English. By all means, we should help kids communicate clearly about the work they value, but should put a sudden and utter stop to withholding such work from kids who don’t communicate clearly through work they don’t value. Philosophically and practically, we (especially we English teachers) have to let kids connect to the world through a variety of composition that none of us – no student or teacher – could ever be expected to master in its entirety. We have to let go of language as a carrot-and-stick of control and look at all kinds of making – coding, cooking, drawing, dancing, embroidering, et al. – as signal rather than noise, even – and especially – in academic settings. Why? For my part, I suspect there is a causal relationship between kids not showing up prepared to do what we want and us not preparing kids to do what they want to do. We ought to escape that cycle by making stuff that matters to all of us together.
Why does it fall to us educators? Because we – in public schools – live with our kids in a digital world; we are all digital natives; we share an ecosystem, as cybernetic as it has become, with our children, and in that ecosystem we have responsibilities to them that are morally independent from those we think they have to us.
What digiship offers students who are traditionally excluded from such work is immediate access to making work that matters and that is repeatedly assessed and revised until it works. (I can’t count the As or Bs I got that didn’t “do” anything.) What digiship offers us is the opportunity to teach and learn with kids as equals in the present, rather than from a privileged and resisted position of authority grounded in the past.
I looked around my room today and saw kids teaching kids circuity and mechanics inside a game; I saw kids writing voluntarily the entire time; I saw kids mashing-up pixel art backgrounds and hand-drawn character sketches for a comic about an alien, cyborg Abe Lincoln looking for enough scattered Lincoln logs to rebuild his crashed spaceship so he can escape Earth; I saw kids mashing up pixel art and multi-layer stencils.
I bet we’re going to read some Egyptian mythology, the non-fiction works of Scott McCloud, and the The Art of Video Games catalog; I bet we’re going to write code and dialogue and maybe even some plans. I hope that by doing so in digiship we contribute to lasting habits, cultures, and communities of learning, understanding, and inclusion in our school and in our lives. If we learn to value doing what we love (as Western as our obsessions generally are), maybe we’ll be better at making sure others can do the same. Maybe we’ll make use of our democracy to listen, as well as to speak. Maybe giving our attention to the immediacy of work will re-kindle our appreciation of the people likewise learning and working around us. I want to bet on that.
Jesse Shapiro, History teacher from Oakland High School, gave the following response to the above question, “I found that students really step their game up. Their writing is much better when they know that other people’s eyes, other than me, [are] going to be on it. They become better speakers, when they know that they are going to have to go out in public and be prepared to speak and they are going to be accountable for what they say.” As a member of Educating for Democracy in the Digital Age, Jesse was speaking as part of a teacher panel on a weekly webcast called Teachers Teaching Teachers (watch the full webcast here).
His point addresses the need that our students feel for authenticity. They know when they are being asked to participate in a simple exercise, and they know when something real is on the line – their image, their beliefs, their feelings, for example. While practicing skills has a place, and a very important one, students experience a dramatic shift when they exchange their practice jerseys for game uniforms and have to perform in front of a real audience. This is not just true in the realm of sports, but as Jesse points out, for academic efforts like writing and speaking that we hope students will develop. It is important to bring civic engagement to classrooms, by which I really mean bring our students outside the classroom, because it gives them a reason to care about their writing and speaking. It adds an element of authenticity to what can feel like a never-ending series of exercises. It motivates them to hone their skills and rise to the occasion.
These academic benefits cannot be overstressed, but there is still another compelling reason for schools to care about civic engagement. Civic engagement promotes social and political development. One of the great criticisms of the United States is that we, as a country, prize individualism above the needs of the larger society. The push for students to strive for their own individual success and achievement begs for the countervailing balance of a healthy sense of connection and community. Students must also learn that they are an integral part of a larger society and that they have both rights and responsibilities within that society.
They cannot develop a sense that they belong to a larger society or live within a political system through theory alone; they must experience society and they must experience that political system. For example, learning about the three branches of government must be coupled with opportunities to effect change through action taken at the local, state, and/or national level. In her government class, Maryann Wolfe has asked her students to do just that. During the 2012 election year, her seniors volunteered for local, state and national candidates and worked on propositions that they cared about. Similarly, being told that they should be compassionate takes on new meaning when students experience what it feels like to care for others through a service learning project. Michelle Espino’s students are acting with care and developing their sense of responsibility to the ecosystem through their recycling project. Finally, instead of banning smartphones and other devices that connect students with the world, schools can provide students with guidance on how to use these powerful tools to take actions that benefits others. Jo Paraiso’s students see themselves as part of an online community, engaging in respectful dialogue with students and adults via their social issue research blogs.
Jesse made a powerful case for how civic engagement can inspire students to “step their game up.” It gives students a reason to care about the quality of their written and spoken word. They feel that it matters. At the same time that students are honing these academic skills, their experience with civic engagement helps them see that their active participation is vital to the health of the larger society.
Video credit: TTT#379 Teaching Civic Engagement in Oakland Schools 1.22.14byPaul Allison
The door to my 8th grade classroom opens, and in walks a group of the district’s administrators and central office staff, including the superintendent and three principals from our district’s high school. My students don’t seem to notice, seated silently in rows, deep in their own thoughts, their attention is fixed on the computer screen sitting in front of them.
The group whispers among themselves and start back towards the door. I make eye contact with the superintendent, who whispers to me, “I’m sorry, we don’t want to disrupt. Are you testing?”
“Even better,” I say, “we are writing reflections!”
There was a pause as they stopped to consider this, perhaps trying to make sense of the scene before them. 25 14-year-olds, oblivious to the visitors in the room, absorbed with the document open on the screen before them, typing like they could not get the words out fast enough.
I continued, “Students are writing reflections on what they have learned through the process of creating pop-up books. You should definitely stay and see what this group of rising 9th graders can do.” I directed them to a counter, lined with carefully crafted books, each telling a story that mattered to students, and invited them to experience the students’ work. They browsed through the books, in awe of the craftsmanship and maturity of the content that spoke to subjects including addiction, bullying, urban crime, sex trafficking, and genocide, all subjects that students chose inquire into. I also added that the students made videos of their books for publication on social media, arranged to have them put on display in the teen section of the public library, and planned on hosting a maker-faire in Discovery Place where they showed others how to create them.
Facebook post by Cabarrus County Library featuring pop-up books.
Screenshot of Facebook post with pop-up paper workshop.
Rightly so, they were impressed with what they had seen. But what they hadn’t seen, what was most important about what these students learned and composed, was the innovative space created in our public school over the last four weeks: the chaotic, organic, and connected experiences that students were writing so intently about. This was the story that needed to be heard.
Speaking quietly to this interested audience over the sound of clicking keys, I began to tell them the story of a classroom that looked very different over the last four weeks….
Over the last two years, I have been working with the science teacher on my interdisciplinary team, Tiffany Green, to incorporate experiences for students to make. Open-ended experiences that encouraged students to produce, rather than consume, where students took the reigns to decide what to make, how to make it, and what content was important enough in their lives to make something about. Though our curricular “content” was interwoven throughout each make, Tiffany and I also both knew that empowering students to make, regardless of where, or if, the content fit, worked at the heart of what each of our subjects was about.
As a Language Arts teacher, I saw make fitting in perfectly with how we use literacy to reconstruct our world. It was an act of composition, with words and images. An authentic experience in negotiation and revision. And for Tiffany, make represented the process of doing real science, the sort where you explore and tinker with the world to figure it out. We both wanted our students to be makers. We wanted them to develop these skills and habits of mind fundamental to working and learning in our respective fields, yes, but more importantly we wanted them to have a school experience that developed their sense of agency and empowered them to engage with their worlds. With the support of the other like-minded UNC Charlotte Writing Project Teacher Consultants and their students, that’s exactly what we did.
The idea we had with making pop-up books represented an approach we hadn’t before tried, around a medium that neither of us knew much about. But pop-up books interested us, and felt like a nice fit into what we wanted students to explore through make. They’re a genre typically found in children’s hands, but the construction of them is more than childsplay. It’s math, it’s science, it’s writing, it’s art. It’s paper engineering a story and a great medium to convey a message just to be read, but experienced.
The Make, part 1—The Set-up
The project grew out of novels students were reading in my 8th grade ELA class. The novels, 20 AYA titles that in some way fell under the broad theme of injustice, were read by students in small book club groups, or literature circles. Towards the conclusion of their novels students brainstormed themes and subject matter related to the text that they felt was important to their lives and/or community, and used this area of interest as a starting place for both research and creative writing. Writing that students would riff off for the storyline that would guide the books they would soon be engineering.
Building a pop-up book required students to be able to do more than write a compelling narrative; they would also need some familiarity with the mechanisms commonly employed while creating them. Robby Stanley, the Make Ambassador from Discovery Place, and self-taught (over the two weeks prior to this project) paper engineer, collaborated with Mrs. Green to transform her classroom for a few days into a paper engineering workshop. With plenty of scrap paper, scissors, and markers on hand, the two teachers guided students as they worked through iterations of each of the four mechanisms commonly used in pop-up books: pull tabs/sliders, flaps, layers, fold-outs, and wheels.
There was a spirit of play that pervaded the classroom as students tinkered with the craft of paper engineering. Each day, Robby demonstrated the approach to making a different mechanism, but that didn’t necessarily mean that a student was bound to master it that day. Some would use their time to continue to refine a mechanism introduced the previous day, gaining assistance from Robby, Tiffany, or a classmate if they needed it. Other students used this time to explore, perhaps decorating the mechanism they created and figuring out what moving paper could enable in their art, or reading through the pop-up book mentor texts we had on hand. Others used this time to invent, to modify an mechanism for a new purpose or play with combining mechanisms to make them work together.
And when a mechanism didn’t function as it was supposed to, which in most cases it did not the first time through, students were encouraged to figure out why. Robby encouraged this on the first day, telling students that they were engineers, and the job of engineers could be summed up in two words: “solving problems.” Students folded and cut, refolded and recut. Early iterations were piled on a table in the back, and students frequently went back to this table to pull out scraps to try out something they weren’t sure of, or repurpose what another had discarded.
Learning about Learning
Through this low-stakes, playful paper engineering workshop, students learned the basics of the craft, and just as importantly, they learned about learning. They began to re-see the importance of just diving in, even if the first try doesn’t work out. The developed a playful attitude towards discovery and learned what it means to tinker, to play with materials without knowing what they will become. and to persevere and solve problems. In itself, Robby and Tiffany’s paper engineering workshop was an experience that mattered, but what made it more than a successful experience, what made it powerful was what came next: the opportunity for students to put all of these skills and awakened habits of mind to use to compose and speak into their world through building a pop-up book.
Make Part 2—Composing Workshop
On the days while students tinkered with paper in Science class with Robby and Tiffany, in my class they were finishing and sharing their creative writing pieces, negotiating collaborative groups and the stories that their books would feature, and beginning to storyboard the individual pages. And at this point, I stepped out of the way and gave over the control, and for the first time, making this book felt less like a project and more like a make.
While all students were creating a similar form, how they crafted that pop-up book–from the story it told, the pop-up mechanisms it employed, the ways illustrations supported and interacted with both, was up to them. What was also up to them, and perhaps the greatest challenge, was how they figured out how to make this all happen as a group. It was a process of constant negotiation and iteration. It wasn’t neat or easy, and fraught with unexpected challenges and frustration. In other words, it was a space that was rich with learning.
While it wasn’t uncommon for students to add a page they started to the scrap table because it didn’t work out the way they had envisioned, as the week went on, it also became more common for students to go back to this scrap table and build prototypes models of the before working on the actual page of the book. And it seemed that the more students iterated, the more they also innovated.
They also began branching out from the models Robby had shown them. Students combined mechanisms, for example, integrating a slide into a wheel. They searched YouTube and discovered more complex ways to engineer paper. And they even played around with introducing new materials into their book, like string, duct tape, and electronic circuits made from led lights, copper tape, and coin-cell batteries.
The cycle continued and grew, and with it students’ excitement and investment. The week I had set aside for students to make was nowhere near enough, nor was the extension I gave. By the time we came to the new deadline we agreed upon, students books resembled something far different, and greater, than what they initially conceived.
It was the most rigorous experience with composition that has ever taken place in my classroom.
Writing and Making our World
This group of administrators seemed content as they left my room on what was a much longer stay then I’m sure they envisioned. They seemed excited about the work that was happening, One commented on the way out that it was great to see students who took writing so seriously. I understand why she said this. The level of involvement of my students in their writing was uncommon. I hope, though, that something that she and the rest of my visitors took away was the importance of our informal makerspace for student writers.
Writing is, of course, making, and making, minus the printed words, is no different than writing. Some of this I saw to be true as students made their books, but confirmed it when they put words on the page about the process afterwards. My students didn’t have to take time to collect and formulate their thoughts into words, the heart and most challenging part of writing, because they had already done so while making. They could write deeply, because they had deep experiences to write from. And, what facilitated the process further, something that I have believed for some time to be true, is that since students were so accustomed to the just dive in there and figure-it-out-as-you-go, risk-taking, tinkerers’ spirit of Make, there was no hesitation on their part to do this with their writing.
My students wrote like makers, and while this scene provided a powerful image for a group of administrators to see, I hope that it’s not the only one they are leaving with. I hope that they are also leaving with an image of just why make matters so much in school. Too often in teaching we are pressured to focus heavily on teaching content rather than teaching students; on students consuming, rather than producing; and having standards and assessment data drive instruction, rather than students’ own interests and purposes. Make represents an approach and underlying belief system that is much different, one that empowers the student and would not be possible if the teacher was not empowered and trusted as well. I want these district administrators, as well as the principles in my school who have also supported us, to pat themselves on the back for entrusting Tiffany and I to do this work. Like our students, we are left the experience excited and empowered, with a sense of being closer to the community and feeling the agency that comes from being able to make our world.
As I was preparing to give a presentation for CyberCamp, a summer professional development experience I created in the summer of 2008, I tried to put together everything that I had learned about blogging, or, as I sometimes call it, connective writing. The document below is that summary. I find that I return to it again and again when I need to explain blogging—either some of the practical, writerly considerations, or my rationale for it as a classroom practice. I thought it might be useful in this space.
Each section is a link to a blog post combined with a summary of that post as well as a quotation of the relevant material from the blog.
Bud & Blogs 2.0—February 2005—A post I wrote three years ago that I keep coming back to. This post pretty much sums up the big picture of what I want to teach about blogging, as well as models the fact that blogging is, for me a very powerful way of learning. I write, I link, I think, I re-write, I re-think, I link anew, etc. Again—this post is three years old. And I keep coming back to it. How many school assignments do students return to three years later?
There is a “blog,” a noun, which is what this space is called. It’s composed of my links, my posts, the silly picture of me playing the guitar in the corner, etc. The blog is the management tool that I’m thinking about and have previously discussed. There’s also “blogging” the verb, which is where I think Will’s mind is, and mine’s still catching up. Blogging is that set of skills that he talks about. It’s the reason why I want the students that I work with to use blogs—in the end. But I don’t think that many of them will start with that skill.
I want the students to use the blog to record their reflections on their work over time. I want them to use links to begin to point out how their different assignments and projects speak to one another. I want them to discover what others have written or thought about the ideas they are working with and to include that information in their reflections. I think that’s the blogging that Will is talking about, and it’s where I’m hoping to get to. I just need the blogs to manage it all.
Types of Posts—May 2006—A post I wrote for my speech students to help them think about the types of writing that they might choose to do on their blogs. I thought then that blogs as research logs made lots of sense, particularly with the blog/blogging difference in my head. I listed these:
1. Research-related posts. These are posts that share information that you’re learning or questions that you’re having as you research. These might be questions for the class, or for me, or thoughts about the sources that you’re discovering. Remember to link to the sources that you talk about in these posts. If you’re writing about an offline source, make sure to include enough information about that source so that we can find it to follow up.
2. Speech-class content posts. These are posts concerning the ideas and tips and content we’re discussing in class. You might want to write about how you think you’ll begin a speech, or the type of visual aid that you want to use (you’ll be required to have at least one visual aid in your third and fourth speeches). You might write to express your frustration about what we’re talking about, or questions that you have about how to present the information that you’re learning.
3. Classmate-related posts. Sometimes, the writing on your classmates’ blogs will get you thinking. Other times, you’ll have questions about what they’re up to. Feel free to write about their work on your own blog. Make sure to link to what you’re writing about, and to quote any relevant passages for your readers. Also, you might want to drop a comment at your classmate’s blog to let them know that you’re continuing the “conversation” that they started.
Framing Blogging – February 2007. Same line of thinking. First attempt to articulate some of the details. This post became the seed for this article in English Journal, an attempt for me to bridge my traditional writing with my online writing. Some of my articulation:
I see several different types of linking that I should be explicitly teaching:
1. Connecting to locations. The simplest of links. When we write, we might write about specific places, people or events. Often, those events or places have websites. A very basic form of connective writing, then, would include creating links to those places. (Ex. I like the Denver Broncos; Bob Ross was a great artist.)
2. Connecting to ideas. This is a basic citation. Alan Levine calls it a linktribution. One of my pet peeves about teaching blogging and hyperlinking is that so often, people will link to the parent page of a website rather than the page where they got their specific information. The best part about linking to specific information is that it’s very transparent. I can trust you as a writer right away if I can see that your links are accurate and that the quotes that you use are reproduced accurately.
3. Connecting to self. Sometimes the best ideas that we can find are ones that we had in the past. The advantage to keeping and archiving a blog is that you can almost literally travel back in time to visit with the old you. One way to connect with the old you is to quote yourself and respond.
4. Connecting for attention. When students are writing for specific audiences, they sometimes need to get the attention of the folks that they are writing for. One way to do so in an online environment is to include a link to a site or blog or wiki or something that their intended audience might be keeping an eye on. When the audience searches for references to the link the writer uses, then that writer will discover the piece of writing. Most bloggers that I know are aware of this, and they maintain an RSS feed (or several) of searches for specific links or terms that relate to them. For example, I use Technorati to provide me with an RSS feed of any reference to the URL of this blog. When someone writes about, and links back to, something that’s been posted on my blog, I find out about it and can go check it out.
Thinking ’bout Linking – A post from March of this year, my latest attempt at thinking through what a course on “connective writing,” or blogging the verb, would look like. Lots of interesting conversation here. Some of the essential bits of my thinking:
But most folks that I see beginning to use digital writing spaces aren’t treating them any differently. And I can’t quite figure out why. I also can’t quite figure out how to articulate the differences, even though I think I get some, if not several, of them. And if I can’t articulate them, perhaps I can’t teach them. (Not sure about that, actually—but work with me.)
Digital texts have the potential to make a big, juicy mess of a linear experience. Or to turn a so-so piece of writing into a masterful collection of references, linktributions, and pointers to other good stuff. My hunch, a rough one, but one I’ve held for a while, is that reading and writing that way makes you (ultimately) a better reader and writer. I just don’t really think I know how to teach that way yet, or at least, I don’t know how to teach other people to think about teaching that way.
What would such a course look like? What would it cover? How would it differ from a “regular” (I know – bogus term.) 9th or 10th grade high school writing course? How would it be the same? (Why wait until high school? I’ve been thinking through blogs as science or inquiry notebooks at the elementary school level.) What happens when we add video(s)? Pictures? Embedded widgets? I’ve got to believe that some analysis of what links do and how they do it would be a necessary piece of any such course. So, too, would be copious quoting and linking to others, building a network of classroom texts that would be added to the greater networks of the world.
Our Routines – Blogging – A post I wrote yesterday for CyberCamp – a way to help folks think about purposes for blogging. I identified five possiblilities:
1. Blogging as remembering. You might want to write a post documenting something that you learned, observed, or found during your work. Blog posts that are remembering in nature might be a few sentences about what you’ve learned, or they might be a link to a great resource along with some information about why you found the resource to be of value. Once you post it, whatever you post will be here later when you need it.
2. Blogging as reflecting. As you move forward with your project, you might want to write a little bit as a way of thinking differently or reflecting on your work up to this point. Why is your project important? Why do you think you need to use a specific tool to get a job done? How might you use something that you’ve read or talked about in your classroom in the fall.
3. Blogging as questioning. You may find that you have lots of questions. This blog is a shared space – consider asking a question here for your fellow CyberCampers to address. How did you do X? Why did you do it that way? How might you incorporate wikis into your classroom? Want some feedback on any element of your project? Write a blog post with some useful context and a good question or two – we’ll answer you. We promise.
4. Blogging as sharing. See something cool? Tell us about it. Embed a video. Post a picture. Link. Sometimes, the best part of camp is show and tell.
5. Blogging as experimenting. Want us to try out a tool or a lesson or an activity? Post it here along with some instructions and, perhaps, a question or two to guide our exploration/experimentation.
Junko Ikeya vividly remembers the moment the FBI came for her father, Kaiji Ikeya, in Portland, Oregon.
At 6:00 pm on December 7, 1941, there was a knock on the door of our family apartment in Portland, Oregon. Two men stood there and told my father, Kaiji Ikeya that he was to go with them. He then put on his coat and hat and left with the two men without telling my mom. We did not hear from him or know where he was for about a month. When we finally learned about my dad’s whereabouts, I went to visit him in the Multnomah County jail. I was still in high school. The memory of my dad behind bars in jail and his last words are seared in my mind. He told me to take good care of myself and that we might never see each other again. I never did.
This is an excerpt from a social studies curriculum, ”Untold Stories of the Department of Justice Incarceration” written by Bay Area Writing Project (BAWP) teacher consultants Stan Pesick and Grace Morizawa in partnership with the National Japanese Historical Society (NJAHS) and the Golden Gate National Recreation Area (GGNRA) National Park Service (NPS).
This inquiry lesson explored the little known story of the Department of Justice imprisonment of the Japanese community leaders arrested throughout the U. S. It is different from the West Coast mass incarceration set in motion by President Franklin D. Roosevelt signing Executive Order 9066 on February 19, 1942. The curriculum is a story of a decade of a program of government surveillance of the Japanese American community, and U.S. decisions based on rumor and informants that resulted to the imprisonment of the Japanese community leaders—priests, businessmen, Japanese language school teachers, and martial arts teachers. It is a story of the denial of citizenship based on race and prejudice to immigrants who had lived in the US for over thirty years. It led to displacement and family separation. It paved the road for the mass incarceration of 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry from the West Coast.
Lindsey Little from the Kitsap Tribal School explaining a graphic organizer at the Seattle workshop.
The Department of Justice history of World War II arrests is a hidden history. This significant and relevant historical event is not in high school textbooks. The Bay Area Writing Project through the National Writing Project/National Park Service grant funded teachers who attended workshops across the country to participate in a six-month study group to share how they fit the curriculum in their social studies classroom. Six teachers from different schools and districts in New Mexico, Washington, and California participated.
It didn’t seem possible that teachers who didn’t know each other would be able to share their work, their challenges, and thinking without ever seeing each other face-to-face. Honestly, I didn’t know how the study group would turn out, but it turned out well. It could be that teachers self selected themselves for the study group. It could be that their participation in the workshops established a level of trust with one of the facilitators of the group. It could be that one of the teachers, Lindsey Little from Kitsap Tribal School in Washington, volunteered to co-facilitate. With her pulse on what was happening with her students, teachers were able to support each and made a safe place for teacher talk. The online platform Zoom made it all possible. One teacher Marti Gutierrez from Albuquerque zoomed in from her car while waiting for daughter at cheerleading practice.
Seattle Workshop. Richard Kaz, second from the right 1st row and Craig Townsend, 1st on the right third row reading case studies.
Using Zoom the teachers were able to share how they implemented the curriculum, asked questions, shared student work, and how the curriculum and strategies they learned transferred to studying similar historical events especially those regarding the struggle for justice and human rights. Richard Kaz found the curriculum to be an easy fit into his already developed unit on the Japanese incarceration. Craig Townsend tried to fit it in a unit on World War II which had focused on the war abroad and found that it didn’t work in that unit. Danielle Guernea used the poetry lesson as a theater piece embellishing it with information from the case studies. Lindsey used the curriculum in a unit about resistance following a case study about Gordon Hirabayashi. Marti Gutierrez found it was perfect for her Humanities classroom. Marti wrote:
It was some of the best professional development I have ever received. I learned great strategies that could be applied across content but also emphasized ways to teach the story of Japanese Americans during and after WWII. The online study group also spent a great deal of time discussing teaching social justice, tolerance, and reaching out to our most marginalized students.
For questions or interest, please email Grace Morizawa, Bay Area Writing Project, grace@njahs.org
Top image: Los Cruces teacher’s adaptation of case studies for her students—using group graphic organizer rather than individual student response sheets.
Here’s how the students in rural northern Michigan choose to be seen and heard and celebrated–we hope you will join us as we continue to try to “Be The Change.”
One day you will
tell your story
of how you’ve
overcome what
You’re going
through now
and it will become
Part of someone
else’s survival
guide.
These words, from the heart and experience of one of the more than 100 public school students, tell the story of our Be The Change project. Conceived by a group of like-minded teachers in northwest Michigan, the words created for this project, though challenged by the turmoil and the tumult of the Covid-19 pandemic, ring as true today as they did when they were written in chalk on a winter sidewalk in early 2020.
Combining music, poetry, and art, these students, many who did not earlier know one another, came together for a day of sharing. Through songwriting, performance poetry, mask-making, and other activities, the students in grades 4-12 worked to understand each other, as well as the trials of youth.
Jim Gillespie from the nearby Bliss Music Organization, as well as poet Shawntai Brown from Detroit, along with the teachers, coached, coaxed, and cheered as the students identified the many ways we can all change what we see as trouble in the world.
Racism, ageism, environmental degradation, and more were all addressed as students worked together to first identify the challenges, and then create positive responses for confronting these modern dilemmas.
‘Scars are left like stretch marks that grace the thighs of Mother Earth,’ one student wrote about environmental challenges. Still others confronted racism and gender inequality and more.
In her poem ‘Dear Trees (like Aiyanas and Tamirs),’
Shawntai Brown wrote,
You are not disposable
Not melanin and melancholy
Or cracked bark
Not limbs whipped by winds
You are forest and fortress
They thin you out
And you replenish
Grow upwards
Defy sky
Your leaves clapping like a choir
Student Ty Sisler-Richer tackles climate change in the poem “Rain Forest,” writing …
Slash and burn turns day into night
For the fires in the rainforest rage
The world watches in helpless horror
As we enter a new age
… before stating “Be the change. It starts with you,” and then challenging us all by asking “What will you do?”
In “This is For You,” Kaitlyn Hammerle addresses many of the social justice issues students face, explaining …
This is for the picked on, for the bullied, for the discriminated against.
For the boys who are girls and the girls who are boys.
For the dysphoric and the euphoric. Stare them down
… and then concludes by stating, “This is for you.”
Seizing on the importance of confronting such issues, these teachers and students shared heart-felt words and images that demonstrate without question how passion can move to words, and words move to action. In every instance, these writers strive to Be The Change.
This is the script we composed for a video of the all-student day:
“Make the world a better piece of ground.” Poet and farmer Wendell Berry implores us to do more than passively accept the world as it is. He urges us to play a part to improve what we see and who we know. Together, through art and writing, music, and dance, we can lift our neighbors and heal our neighborhoods. Young and old, black and white, with generous grant support from John Legend’s Show Me Campaign, LRNG.org and the National Writing Project, Top of the Mitt Writing Project teachers and students seized the power to make the world a better piece of ground through our Be The Change project.
Our project was generously supported by the following community partners in this effort:
In the summer of 2019, the Leatherstocking Writing Project (LSWP) in association with SUNY Oneonta developed a writing enrichment program for youth focusing on video game design and elements of connected learning (Connected Learning Alliance, 2021). The guiding principles of connected learning center on activating youth interest, supporting and mentoring youth relationships, and providing youth opportunities in becoming life-long agentive knowers. Our goal as a local site of the National Writing Project is to support local youth and educators in engaging and developing authentic writing practices for real-world audiences and purposes. Guided by some of the LSWP leaders’ interests in video games, the LSWP wanted to engage local youth who had interest in playing video games and leverage their interests in playing and consuming video games into designing and producing video games. Moreover, we wanted to give the local youth writing enrichment opportunities that have up until been limited due to living in small, rural communities that are geographically cut off from other summer enrichment programs provided for youth in more suburban and urban locations.
Some vocabulary terms used by game designers.
The youth in the Northern Catskill region of Central New York State lack access to high-quality academic enrichment programs due to both geographic and economic challenges. The LSWP’s Video Game Designer Institute aimed to provide access to STEM/STEAM enrichment programs in video game design and creation for local youth. In two, week-long summer camps for young people in 4th through 8th grade in 2019, institute attendees participated in a writing and game design enrichment program. In this program, local kids would develop understanding in the fundamentals of video game design, communicate and use content-specific vocabulary, discuss different genres and styles of video games, develop expertise in the mechanics of rule-writing and design, apply game creation to expository and narrative writing, and experience in play-testing self-created video games. This past summer, in addition to the original grades 4 to 8 institutes, we expanded the Video Game Designer Institute for kids going into 2nd/3rd grades and for kids in high school.We wanted to provide broader range of age groups than our previous institutes access. The youth were able to enhance their design expertise with more challenging game design engines. We were also able to provide more developmentally appropriate for younger kids entering 2nd and 3rd grades. Over two summers, the LSWP provided writing and game design enrichment for youth going into grade 2 through 12th grade as well as providing professional development for educators interested in merging game design and coding into their classrooms and content areas.
Young Video Game Designers and Leaders, summer 2019.
As a teacher, teacher educator, literacy specialist, and gamer, I am deeply invested in including coding (and elements of game design) as a language art since there is strong potential for educators to better equitably distribute computer science, coding, systems thinking, and multimodal design within a content area where most kids have access, e.g., English Language Arts classrooms. Whereas, most computer science and coding curricula programs for kids are located in more affluent schools and areas. Therefore, we wanted to extend our institutes for educators involved in local schools and after-school programs. In service to this goal, the LSWP held a Video Game Designer Institute for Educators: a three-day professional development seminar in the summer of 2019 and a week-long online in the summer of 2020 for local in-service educators for the purpose of extending video game design and production into their classrooms. For the last two summers and professional development workshops at local schools during the school year, local youth and teachers have gained some expertise in video game design and production through rigorous game design with interactive tools including Scratch Jr., Scratch, Gamestar Mechanic, and Construct 3 through the lens of language arts, multimodal composition, and design.
Our final goal was for the Video Game Designer Institutes was to combine connected learning with a post-process writing approach that established a production-centered approach on composition and production of authentic games for real-world audiences and purposes. Kids and teachers produced, play-tested, and shared each other’s games, giving them all opportunities to learn game design principles and systems thinking embedded in the elements of connected learning.
The Calm Before the Storm
The LSWP Gamestar Mechanic Game Alley of all games created by LSWP video game designers.
The first series of institutes and professional development workshops went smoothly for participants in the summer and fall of 2019. For one week, kids, leaders, and teachers learned about elements of game design using Gamestar Mechanic. The kids workshopped how to write intriguing titles and the expository forms of writing simple, explicit instructions and tips and tricks for their merging games. The game designers mapped out and participated in world building by developing broader expositions for their narratives in their games. These beginning game designers worked on communicating in the language and register of game developers by completing vocabulary and game design challenges on components and assets like health meters and sprites as well as game mechanics jumping, solving, and racing.
Game Designer presents her game at our LSWP Gaming Conference
At the end of each institute, the kids enthusiastically held their game developer conferences in the spirit of professional game developer conferences like the annual Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) celebrated by gamers and game development companies worldwide. In the same manner, these kids presented their games, gave tips and tricks, and invited peers to play test their games. Leaders, teachers, and the young game designers celebrated their games and emerging talents as game designers. We looked forward to expanding these institutes for younger kids and students in high school for the summer and school of 2020.
Pedagogical Triage and Revisioning the Institute in the Midst of the Pandemic
By the end of March of 2020, it was clear to the leadership team that we would not be able to hold in-person video game design institutes. We had two choices: cancel the institutes until summer 21 or go online. Fortunately, one of our design and institute leaders, Cassie Carl, was finishing her graduate program in educational technology and had previous experience in online gaming communities. Because of Cassie’s expertise and confidence, we decided to switch our face-to-face pedagogical frames to online methods that would be a combination of synchronous and asynchronous online institutes.
The first question we had to ask ourselves was which online platforms could we use. Our institutes were also more complicated because we were adding more game design engines like Scratch Jr. for younger kids and Construct 3 for the older, more experienced kids. We also had to contemplate how best to scaffold these programs so the kids and educators could use them asynchronously while still giving them the instructional support needed to complete the tasks workshopped in our synchronous meetings.
The next problem was to locate programs and digital media platforms that were easily accessible to kids, caregivers, and institute leaders. Therefore, we needed to select online media and programs that only required internet access and did not require downloading software. With face-to-face institutes the previous summer, all the kids had access to SUNY Oneonta’s computer lab and campus-wide software. Going online meant challenges in terms of equitable access to the programs and media that we did not face in our face-to-face summer institutes. Therefore, we needed to have a social media place for synchronous discussions and teaching with affordances to easily distribute game design software and host a “homeroom” for the kids and caregivers where we could provide asynchronous models of instruction like walkthroughs and how-to videos.
Redesigning an Revising: A DIY Guide to Shapeshifting to Online Learning
The LSWP Young Video Game Designer Discord Channel
The instructional design team led by Cassandra Carl, an early-career 7th-grade-teacher at a local middle school and experienced gamer, chose a variety of online platforms that best met the needs of the kids. The design team settled on using Discord to be the central hub for all synchronous chats, warm up activities, and game testing. We chose Discord because it is an open access platform where users can create and control their own channels that can have threaded discussions and live video or audio chatting that is secure. Moreover, because Discord functions as a networked public (boyd, 2010) that kids use, there was a good chance most of our game design participants were already familiar with how to navigate the various aspects of the channel. The affordances of Discord also aided our online institutes because it had a place for an asynchronous text chat thread and forum. Kids could use this feature to post questions to leaders and use it as a hangout space with their peers. Moreover, they would be able to share links and give updates on their progress.
The Young Video Game Designer Web Page
With Discord being our hub for live, synchronous meetings with the kids, we needed a platform to deliver online instructional resources and models for the kids to follow. We also needed a platform to help organize each day’s agenda and serve as the landing site to start each day for our participants. With the help of the IT department at SUNY Oneonta, we were able to create a wordpress created web page at gamedesigner.sunycreate.cloud. Our site laid out our curriculum for each day of the institute and served as an anchor page to go over our daily agenda. This site also allowed our team to embed pre-recorded YouTube videos where we provided instructional walkthroughs and how-tos for the different game design engines. We also created a playlist from the LSWP’s YouTube channel and linked that to our web page. These videos became the vehicle where we modeled instruction as well as gave walkthroughs on how to use the various programs. The kids had access to these videos and could watch or rewatch them at their own leisure.
For software, we selected three game design engines for their affordances for end users to only need internet access and a web browser. The Gamestar Mechanic program we used in our previous institutes became crucial because the kids gained access to the website once we assigned each user a license. There was no need to download software, however, the newest update for Gamestar as of this post (now that Flash was no longer going to be updated) requires a user to download an app–which may make access easier since it can be added to smartphones and tablets. For our junior video game designer institute, we needed to provide developmentally appropriate software and hardware. Joe Reilly, the other institute leader and early-career elementary teacher, felt the kids going into second and third grade might benefit with touch screen devices as well as using a game design engine that was better scaffolded for younger game designers. With grant funding, we were able to purchase iPads for all the participants that needed a touch screen tablet. We chose Scratch Jr because it was more developmentally appropriate for the younger kids learning to read and write. Also, because we were able to provide one-to-one tablets for the kids, they had devices that could install the Scratch Jr app. For our advanced game designer institute for high schoolers and returnees, we had a challenge in finding the right game design engine that would work with our requirements for access equity.
In the late fall of 2019, I began testing more advanced game design engines. I settled on two due to pricing and low-entry access to beginners. The two programs that stood out were Construct 3 and Godot. Both engines have the capacity to produce professional quality games while having a low price point for licenses. Godot, like Scratch and Scratch Jr., is an open access game design engine originally produced by MIT labs. Construct 3 is a game design engine that can be used with only a web browser with no required downloads. After playing around with both programs by watching how-to videos on YouTube, I chose Construct 3 as the game design engine for our advanced game design institute. Construct 3 was more flexible in access because it does not require a user to download any software. Moreover, while the Construct 3 user interface resembles professional game design engines like Unity, Unreal, and Godot, Construct 3 does not require the user to learn code like Python or C#. In fact, because Construct 3 utilizes point and click objects in the coding interface, Construct 3 is an excellent scaffold for game designers to see the design logic in designing a game without the burden of needing to know how to code.
Now that we figured out our plan for which game design software we were going to use, it was up to us to create the material, e.g. videos, web page, and the Discord channels needed to to transition online. Our design and leadership team spent two months creating the videos and site to host asynchronous/synchronous online institutes for the kids and teachers.
Being and Designing Online with Others
In July, the LSWP held four online video game design institutes for kids grades 2-12 and local educators. Five kids participated in a week long junior video game designer institute using Scratch Jr. Six kids participated in the young video game designer institute completing self-created video games on Gamestar Mechanic. The following week five educators participated in a video game design institute where they designed video games for different content areas using Gamestar Mechanic. Additionally, five middle and high school kids participated in the master video game designer institute using Construct 3.
Kids in the Junior Video Game Designer Institute spent five days meeting synchronously with some asynchronous work. Joe (the Lead Instructor) spent approximately an hour each day modeling different aspects of Scratch Jr where he showed how to “code” and use sprites and objects. Each day, Joe would give the kids a challenge with an end goal for a one-level game where a sprite moved and interacted with an object, e.g., a dragon moves across a field and opens a box. While the kids enjoyed meeting and sharing with each other, it became clear that this institute would be more successful and lighten the kids’ frustration had this institute been a traditional face-to-face summer institute. While only anecdotal, the interaction between kids was limited to the synchronous video meetings. The asynchronous interaction between leaders and kids was limited because Discord requires more sophisticated literacy practices needed to communicate in the social mediated threads beyond the voice/video channel.
Like the previous year, we held a video game designer institute for educators. As with the youth, the educators met online on our Discord server. Cassie led the cohort of educators in the basics of game design for the week. The educators completed the same Gamestar Mechanic missions as the kids in the Young Video Game Designer Institutes. By the end of the week, the educators were able to share and play test their content-related games with each other. The educators had a more difficult time navigating the Discord channel than the kids. The educators may have been less familiar with Discord’s user interface with different channels for voice/video chat and threaded discussion threads. Video chat programs like Zoom or Google hangout may be more advantageous for educators since educators may have more familiarity with these programs and the user interfaces. The kids, however, did not have much difficulty with the nuances of Discord because most of them had already been using Discord to hang out with their friends for more a couple of years now.
The other Young Video Game Designer and Master Video Game Designer Institutes went as well as could be expected during the next couple of weeks. Each day, we (Cassie or I) would post a daily agenda on our web page. Most days we would include a walkthrough video modeling a specific task, for example–how to create a save object where a character can respawn at that object’s location if the character in the game dies. We (the leaders and young video game designers) met each day on a Discord video channel where we would share our progress, go over challenges, and play test games in progress. Afterwards, the game designers were free to hang out with each other on discord–either in the video chat or the discussion board. Interestingly, the kids in both the young and master video game designer institutes spent most of their free time during the day hanging out on Discord. Throughout each day, the kids would post questions to leaders or other game designers and leaders. Some would post their game files so others could play test the game. The Discord channel transformed into a game design studio where more experienced designers were able to give advice and teach how to design different aspects of the game.
At the time of writing this, more than ten months removed, a couple of game designers still go on our Discord channel to post new games that they have created. Some young video game designers from the original face-to-face institute still post games on the LSWP Gamestar Mechanic page. Because some participants are still participating on these online forums, Discord or other similar media, may help curate a learning community of invested youth beyond the summer interaction. We hope in the future to use the affordances of these online media to complement our face-to-face institutes that allow for connected learning opportunities beyond a one-week enrichment institutes in the summer.
References
Connected Learning Alliance (2021). What is connected learning? https://clalliance.org/about-connected-learning/
danah boyd. (2010). “Social Network Sites as Networked Publics: Affordances, Dynamics, and Implications.” In Networked Self: Identity, Community, and Culture on Social Network Sites (ed. Zizi Papacharissi), pp. 39-58.
When my principal asked me and a colleague, history teacher Isaac Raya, if we’d like to take over our middle school’s daily live news show, we jumped at the opportunity. We were both pioneering 1:1 laptop classrooms, and we knew the great potential of kids working in a genuine media production program. But within a week of our new adventure, we knew its current model wasn’t sustainable, and we started lobbying our principal for some changes.
Our school’s news show started in 1999 when a couple of teachers and the librarian set up a tiny studio where a handful of students met before school each day to broadcast the daily announcements. It was an exciting early foray into media production before cell phones, laptops, or tablets appeared in our classrooms. But by the time Isaac and I took over the program, our students were filming movies on their cell phones and we were using green screens in our classrooms. We knew that for our students to really benefit from this broadcast media experience, they needed to be creating the content for the daily show and learning how to operate the technology. But since our show was prepped and broadcast in the 10 minutes before school started, we didn’t have a dedicated time or space for the students to do the behind-the-scenes work of the production.
Thanks to our visionary principal, Emily Todd, and a generous $20,000 grant from Educator Innovator (ie. the National Writing Project, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and John Legend’s Show Me Campaign), our before-school club was transformed into two class sections of broadcast media, giving 64 students hands-on experience producing a daily news show.
These resources are here to give you an idea of what our program looks like, how we run the daily class, the kinds of equipment we use, and how we continue to tweak and revise the program as we learn from our mistakes.
Evolution of an Experiment: The Kids are Running the Show!
My teaching colleague Isaac Raya and I spent the summer of 2015 getting ready to welcome students to our new broadcast media classroom. We moved our cameras, lights, and tri-caster from our old studio into our new classroom, and painted a green screen in a corner wall.
As we worked, we brainstormed how this new class would operate. There was a variety of jobs that needed to be completed for each show’s production, and with 32 students in a class, we weren’t sure how we would keep all students on-task for a full 90-minute class period.
Since some students would be writing the show’s script, some would be creating graphics, some would be filming/editing movies, and others would be working the technology during the show, we couldn’t teach them all the jobs at the same time. We decided to create a central hub where students would access the resources and directions needed for each job. This hub took the form of a class website, which we have made available to anyone interested in seeing how we run our class. We also created a job board, where students could check in to see their responsibilities for the day (students keep the same job for three weeks, giving them time to learn each job well enough that they can teach another student).
If you were to walk into our studio during class time, you might sense a bit of chaos. Students are scattered throughout the room: some seated at tables with laptops, some working with studio equipment, some outside filming, some huddled in groups brainstorming. Since the teacher can’t be at every station, answering questions for every job, the students learn to turn to each other for help. They know they can find answers on our website, but they also discover which students are experts in which area, and they learn to collaborate to get the jobs done.
Recently we completed our second year in our new classroom, where we continue to tweak, revise, and fine-tune our program. Our biggest struggle is one we had anticipated: keeping students productive during class. Some jobs require hard work most of the class period (script, graphics, floor manager, producer); while other jobs demand focused attention for the final half hour of class (tricaster, teleprompter, audio, bus, director). But the students responsible for the equipment (cameras, laptops, studio lights/cameras) have very little to do during most of the class period. We have told them they should be working on film production when they have nothing else to do (creating PSAs, for example, about school rules or current issues), but too many students don’t work well in that kind of self-directed environment.
So as our program continues to evolve, we look for more ways to help our students develop those life skills critical not only to their futures, but to their current lives: responsibility, initiative, maturity.
Next year we will divide the jobs into three categories:
Production Team: busy all class period, so they won’t have any other assigned work during that job rotation.
Tech Team: busy only during filming, so they will be assigned short films to help build film-making skills (angles, narration, green screen, etc.).
Equipment Team: busy only at the end of class, so they will be assigned specific PSAs, longer films that should take multiple class periods to film and edit.
When Isaac and I took on the challenge of advising our student news program, we really didn’t know how much we didn’t know! But we both agree that it has been one of the most exciting challenges of our career. And the best part is probably that our students continue to teach us how to look at learning with fresh eyes, to give our students more responsibility, and to let go of the need to be in charge of everything that happens in our classroom.
It’s especially satisfying to see a tiny 7th grade girl call out, “Quiet on the set!”; see the entire class respond appropriately; watch the students produce the entire episode; and hear the joyous, “And that’s KTV!” that signals the end of each show.
To get a sense of how our class is run, check out this student-made video from our first year in our studio classroom:
When Assignments Become Jobs: The Power of Meaningful Work
When Jordan enters her Broadcast Media class at Kenilworth Junior High School, she doesn’t wait for directions from her teacher. She checks the job board, grabs a laptop and heads to her table to confer with her partner, Kyle. They are anchoring today’s news show, so they will spend the first part of class writing their script. They pull up the class website and navigate to a spreadsheet of announcements submitted by school staff members. They work together on a shared Google doc (also from the website) and coordinate with the weather and sports teams so they can incorporate their reports into their script.
In addition to Jordan and Kyle, there are 31 more seventh and eighth grade students in the class, all assigned jobs in the production of KTV, their school’s daily news broadcast.
Studio Managers: set up lights, cameras and teleprompters at the start of class
Script/Anchors: write script and anchor news show
Weather: research and write weather forecast and make graphics; deliver report on air
Sports: research and write sports report and make graphics; deliver report on air
Graphics: make graphics for each news item
On This Day…Team: research, write, film and edit movies to highlight events in history
Film Crew: research, storyboard, film and edit movies (PSAs, school events, etc.)
Floor Manager: collect, deliver, and confirm that graphics and videos are loaded on the tricaster prior to filming
Producer: organize teams to prep for filming; supervise directors
Audio Tech: set up, check and monitor audio for anchors
Bus Tech: switch cameras during filming
Tricaster Tech: manage videos, graphics, audio and recording during filming
Directors: direct anchors during filming
Teleprompter Tech: set up and pace teleprompters during filming
Equipment Managers: confirm all equipment is shut down and stored after filming
From the time the first bell rings until the producer quiets the class for filming, the KTV room is abuzz with activity. Students move with authority around the room (and across campus), each responsible for elements of genuine broadcast media work. The stakes are high, as the scripts they write, the graphics they design or the movies they edit are not merely “turned in” to a teacher, but are published to a wide and meaningful audience.
Our students know that the next day, during their morning class, they will watch this episode of KTV, surrounded by their peers. That audience alone is significant enough to motivate 12 and 13-year-olds to do the best work they can. But the audience for our students’ work extends well beyond the walls of our classroom — parents and community members also stays up-to-date on school news by accessing KTV from the front page of the school website.
Far more meaningful than grades, the daily publication of the KTV students’ efforts provides a steady stream of feedback, affirmation and ownership, while also strengthening their ability to work in a self-directed environment. The work they do on any given day in the KTV studio is informed by their previous work, as the class critiques the published episodes, discusses what worked and what didn’t, and moves on to the next episode with specific plans for improvement. In addition to building academic skills such as writing, proofreading, presenting and speaking, KTV students practice professional broadcast skills, such as media production and behind-the-scenes technology. And woven through all of their work are skills critical to our professional and personal lives: collaboration, communication, creativity, critical thinking, responsibility, flexibility, and the problem-solving prowess that comes from working under pressure to produce a daily news show in a room full of people and unreliable technology.
In the final half hour of class, Jordan and Kyle wear the official KTV News Team shirts, sit at the anchor desk in the studio, and run through their lines while the teleprompter team paces the script. The producer rounds up the tech team and directors, and checks in with the floor manager to make sure the tricaster and bus tech have coordinated the show’s chronology. She quiets the room for filming and the show is now in the hands of the tech team, anchors and directors. When the show is over, the class applauds and then starts putting away the equipment, while the tech team uploads the show to YouTube and Twitter. Another episode is in the can; just another day in the studio for these kids.
After teaching English for 20 years, taking on the broadcast media class has opened my eyes to the power of giving students jobs with clearly defined responsibilities, meaningful motivation, and wide publication to a significant audience. And it makes me wonder: What if our traditional academic classes looked like this? What if in an English class, my students were given jobs that writers and literary critics tackle in their professional roles? And what if those jobs resulted in frequent publication to a meaningful audience? What about math classes? Can they look more like the workplaces of mathematicians and engineers?
We’ve all heard the favorite student complaint disguised as a question: “When am I ever going to use this in the real world?” Annoying, yes, but a fair question. What if their classes really did operate like the real world? What if students were given jobs instead of assignments and could easily see how the skills they were learning were relevant to real-world work? This teacher is convinced: The real-world question is valid, and we owe our students more than an answer; we owe them authentic, real-world learning opportunities.
Media Equipment is Expensive! Grants Make it Possible
Your school can start a broadcast media program with as little as an iPad. Add a green screen (fabric or paint), and the students can deliver the news from what looks to be a professional studio set. A low-key operation like this is a great way to get students in front of and behind the camera, and to teach them some broadcast media skills.
But the more your news program reflects the equipment found in a professional studio, the better your students’ experiences will be. That equipment is expensive, though!
As we have built our broadcast program, we have written grants and sought donations in order to purchase the best quality equipment (see our equipment list here). While it can be tempting to buy the cheapest, that can end up costing you more. Our lavalier mics are an ongoing issue; we have already replaced some less expensive mics with better ones, and since they are used every day, it’s important that they are sturdy.
It is well worth the time to learn to write grants, as there is a lot of money out there if you can present and argue your case clearly. Here is where we have received funding for our program:
There is a lot to be gained from giving students access to professional quality media equipment, and even if your school can’t afford to buy it, you can start building a program from scratch by taking advantage of grants.
Media Across the Curriculum: Lessons from a TV Studio
Lizzy was working on a short movie about Women’s History Month for her broadcast media class. Using the “labeled for reuse with modifications” Google search option, she had gathered images to represent women’s accomplishments over the years. Now she was inserting text throughout her film, highlighting the names of pioneering women.
“What do you think?” she asked Bella. “Crafty Girls font or Special Elite?” She turned her laptop so her friend could see her work.
“Oh, not Crafty Girls! That’s way too swirly – doesn’t match the tone of your movie. Stick with something more serious. I like Special Elite – it looks like a typewriter – it goes with those older photos.”
Since Lizzy, Bella and their classmates create media for their school’s daily news show, they have begun to recognize (and use) the strategies that artists, graphic designers, and advertisers use to influence viewers. Prior to this class, most students wouldn’t realize how a particular ad might affect their shopping habits, but now that they are on the other side of the screen, designing media themselves, they are becoming quite savvy about the careful construction and potential uses of media.
Our students navigate a world that is saturated with various forms of media: images on their cell phones, movies on their iPads, text on screens and paper; and GIFs, emojis, and tweets dominate their communications. But passively consuming and sharing media does little to improve students’ media literacy skills. It is in the creation of media that we begin to understand how much media can influence us. When we use the strategies that media-makers use, we view media with new eyes. We become critical consumers, less likely to be swayed by the images that surround us every day.
Media production is a natural part of any broadcast class, as you wouldn’t see a news show that doesn’t include images, videos, and text on the screen. But your students shouldn’t have to enroll in a broadcast class before they discover the power of media production. Engaging your students in media production will not only build their digital literacy skills, but it will offer them a variety of ways to demonstrate their learning.
Here are some resources for incorporating media production across the curriculum:
Worried about learning how to use all these tools yourself? Never fear! Your students will love diving into new apps, and they will especially enjoy teaching YOU how to use them.
In the summer of 2014 fifteen teachers participating in a National Writing Project Leadership Institute at Fairfield University were invited by Brett Orzechowski, CEO of the CT Mirror, to write OP-Ed pieces on the state of education in Connecticut. The result was an interactive website called Special Report: Education, Change, and Diversity in Fairfield County, where educators representing rural, urban, and suburban districts collaborated with journalists to capture the challenge of achievement gaps in the state. After participating in the partnership, several of us desired a replicative way for students representing the spectrum of Connecticut schools to collaboratively write across districts so they, too, could experience the diversity of the region beyond zip-code disparities. We Too Are Connecticut – a collaboration uniting over 400 high school writers through the creation of radio plays, blogs, digital maps, and Tedx talks – resulted. With a 2015 LRNG Education Innovators award funded by The National Writing Project, John Legend Show Me Campaign, and John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and the young adult novel, We Were Here by Matt de la Peña, the multi-district writing project began.
Six of us from the summer institute asked the questions “How might a multidistrict, digital writing project motivate student voice and engagement? How might expanding writing communities beyond a single school impact written outcomes of individual writers?” We began thinking about ways to inspire our students to write beyond the walls of the classroom, to write for audiences other than their teachers, and to write about things that mattered to them. A theme that kept coming up in our classrooms, no matter the zip code, socioeconomic status, race, culture, or religion was the difficulty of challenging stereotypes about their communities and the individuals within them. We used Matt de la Pena’s book We Were Here for its themes of adolescence, identity, community, and belonging. The young adult novel initiates dialogue about human differences, as Miguel, Rondel and Mong represented, too, varying backgrounds and lived experiences. In the novel, Miguel is ordered to write in a journal as he comes to terms with a crime he committed – “I know the judge said for me to write in here four times a week, but what’s dude want me to do man, make shit up?” (p. 37) – and his entries grapple with his sense of belonging in a complicated world. de la Peña’s text helped us ask students, “So, why are you here?” and encourage them to write their answers within a variety of digital media.
In each of our classrooms, we asked our students to journal about what it was like to live in their community. Although our entry points were specific to our own classrooms and curricula, the outcomes were very similar. Students across districts, whether they lived in affluent suburbs, middle-class rural towns, or economically challenged urban cities, all wrote about the challenge of finding themselves within the stereotypes of their communities. When they were pushed to publish their thinking, the reasons for their resistance were varied: students in the more affluent districts were afraid to lose their anonymity, fearful that standing out in the crowd or sharing an unpopular perspective about the community might bring unwanted attention. Students in underserved districts were much more vocal about their opinions and perspectives, but didn’t see the point of sharing them with a public audience, asking the question: who was even listening, anyway? As teachers, we saw a unique opportunity to provide a safe space for our students to share their thinking: a student-led conference that would give students the opportunity to learn from one another outside of the confines and expectations (or lack thereof) of their own schools and communities. Drawing from the National Writing Project’s model of teachers teaching teachers, the conference would provide a location for students to share, digitally, who they were together.
With this end goal in mind, we spent six months preparing for the conference by engaging in different digital publishing projects at our individual schools. Though the initial question/purpose was the same, to explore the different ways students could question position and privilege, challenge stereotypes, learn to respect differences, and find connections beyond their communities, our students produced their answers in a variety of multimedia projects. Students wrote personal blogs, contributed to class blogs serving as digital showcases, wrote and presented TedTalks, wrote and performed radio plays, and created ethnographic maps.
The six-school collaboration culminated at a Writing Our Lives – Digital Ubuntu conference at Fairfield University in May, where students showcased their communities with one another, participated in workshops hosted by TEDxTeen coach, Robert Galinsky, and met the author of We Were Here, Matt de la Peña, who provided the keynote at the conference and attended their student-led workshops. Students wrote their lives, developed perspectives and voice, and experienced the power of communicating with audiences beyond the single classroom, all while reimagining Fairfield County, Connecticut in creative, real-world ways.
A shining moment arrived when Matt de la Peña contacted us, post conference, to say he had never experienced anything quite like Writing Our Lives – Digital Ubuntu. “The whole event came alive for me,” he wrote, “when I saw kids from a wide arrange of socio-economic backgrounds exchanging phone numbers. It was then I saw the power of Ubuntu.” Staples High School teacher Kim Herzog similarly reflected, “Students from all walks of life came together to share a piece of themselves. One of my students said, ‘I have never experienced anything like this before, and it was amazing. We were taken out of our bubbles and expanded our understanding of people that live less than ten minutes away from us. I’m so proud to be part of this.’”
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