21st Cent. Literacy classroom-3-Authentic Writing

K12 Online Conference 2007 final project part 3

In this post, I will describe the 3rd cornerstone I see for my 21st Century Literacy Classroom: Authentic Writing…as in writing for an authentic audience.

During my college class on teaching writing years ago, the professor always talked about giving students an authentic audience.  The best writing always came when the audience of the writing was real.  Then we would write our assignments and hand them into the professor to be graded.  It pervades our education system…write for the teacher, not for the audience.

Writing in the real world is not like that.  Just like now, I am writing this for you and me. (ok, it’s also for graduate credit, but does that matter?)  Not only am I transmitting my thoughts to you through these words, but you can also comment back to to me in an asynchronous conversation.

This is the power of the Read/Write Web.  I created this blog as a place for me to reflect upon my teaching practices and think through the role of technology in education.  However, when I started my first post, I realized I was not just writing for myself.  I was also writing for you, dear reader.

I was so excited when I got my first subscriber.  I remember being amazed that someone actually liked my writing enough that they wanted more.  I am so happy you are here, reading this.  I am humbled by my Clustermap and Feedjit maps pointing out all the places all over the world from which people have viewed my ramblings.

Noticed the feeling words included in the above sentences.  If you are a blogger, then you probably know what I am talking about, because you have experienced them, too.  Are those feeling students usually associate with writing?  Can they get the same experience from writing only for the teacher?  You know the answer, right?

I want to give my students the same experience I have had with writing.  My writing professor had also said that teachers need to write in order to teach writing.  It really helps the teacher teach writing from the inside out (the passion of writing about ideas and opinions), instead of the outside in (the lack of passion of writing focused on grammar and outlines).  Now that I have been blogging for a little over a year, I want to pass along to my students my passion about writing for an audience.

There are several web 2.0 tools that I would like to use to teach writing for an authentic audience.  The foundation will be a blog for each student.  We will start by reading other student blogs to get a feeling for what blogging looks like.  Then, we’ll start using feedreaders.  Next, we’ll learn how make good comments on some else’s blog.  Commenting will be a natural lead-in to using their own blogs to respond to other blogs.  Then we’ll branch out into reflective posts, learning post, story posts, pictures, and linking.  I got a lot of these ideas from this K12 Online Conference.

We’ll also try Voicethreads, Bubbleshare, Animoto, Vokis, and Make Belief Comics.  I hope to do some Digital Storytelling with some of these interactive tools.  Unfortunately, most of them use Flash animation, and Flash will not run on our thin clients, so we’ll have to plan ahead and use them in the computer lab.

We’ll also do a class podcast.  We did some last year, but post-production (by me) really slowed down the turn-around time for producing podcasts.  Maybe the students will be able to help this year.  I also plan this year to make more use of the voice recorder function on the students’ mp3 players and cell phones for making the podcasts.

I hope to use our digital camera to record some short student movies.  Movies are a lot more complicated, and we run into online safety issues of matching names with faces in the class. However, you can’t beat video for immersing students in their learning.

I have used a wiki a little with our class.  We’ll probably use it some more this year.  The big project we did was creating a Wikijunior book.  We studied famous inventors and then started a Famous Inventors wikibook.  I explained more about it here on our class blog last year.  We’ll add more to it this year.

We could do all of this within the classroom and keep it there.  It would be safe.  If would be easier.  It would be boring.  With 21st century learning, we can post it for our parents to see, for our family to see, for our friends to see, and for the world to see.  It gives people like you a window into the learning in our classroom.  If gives us an audience.  Suddenly, our learning extends beyond the four walls in the classroom.  Not only are we creating content to share with you, you can give us feedback.  We are not longer just producing, we are interacting with the world.  Our class blog is called the Global Frig Door, because we are proudly displaying our best work for the world to see.  Just like families proudly display their children’s best work on their frig door at home.

Web 1.0 was Read Only.  However, Web 2.0 is Read/Write.  We need to have our students writing for the global stage.  We’ll be putting the content we create up on our Global Frig Door.

NETS for Students Standards by ISTE

Correlation with the NETS

1. Creativity and Innovation

b. Students create original works as a means of personal or group expression

2. Communication and Collaboration

a. Students interact, collaborate, and publish with peers, experts, or others employing a variety of digital environments and media.
b.  Students communicate information and ideas effectively to multiple audiences using a variety of media and formats.

21st Century Skills Framework

Correlation with the 21st Century Skills

Creativity and Innovation

• Demonstrating originality and inventiveness in work
• Developing, implementing and communicating new ideas to others
• Being open and responsive to new and diverse perspectives
• Acting on creative ideas to make a tangible and useful contribution to the domain in which the innovation occurs

Communication and Collaboration

• Articulating thoughts and ideas clearly and effectively through speaking and writing

ICT Literacy

• Using digital technology, communication tools and/or networks appropriately to access, manage, integrate, evaluate, and create information in order to function in a knowledge economy

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