Room With A View

Google has a section for Educators. Recently they’ve teamed up with Writing For Teens magazine and created a a series of articles about the writing process and specifically using Google Docs to help promote collaborative writing and editing skills. Though the articles are geared to using Google Docs they’re worthwhile reading/using even if you’re not yet familiar with Google’s on-line word processor. The article titles are:

• With a Little Help From My Friends: The Gifts of a Writing Buddy
• Writing’s Top 10 Tips for Revision
• Collaborative Revision Checklist
• Individual Revision Checklist

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Quickmuse is a beatnik like poetry site. Poets are given a prompt and fifteen minutes to create a poem. Through the miracle of modern technology, the process is recorded in real time. Poems are archived. They can be viewed as finished pieces or in “playback” mode. Playback gives one a glimpse into the process the poet went through keystroke by keystroke. I’m not certain of the ties to K-12 education but Secondary English and Theory of Knowledge come to mind.

Zotero is a free Firefox extension for keeping track of references when conducting research. According to their website:

Zotero [zoh-TAIR-oh] is a free, easy-to-use Firefox extension to help you collect, manage, and cite your research sources. It lives right where you do your work — in the web browser itself.

I’ve just played with it a little but it looks great. It appears to have the functionality of End Note but with a much better price–free! Users can keep track of citations, notes, and even attach files. When it’s time to create a reference list, there are several styles it can use including MLA and APA.

I’m not sure how well it will configure on school computers which are shared. Will students references–known as Libraries in Zotero–and their files be saved on individual hard drives or can they be saved to a student’s documents folder? I know the files can be exported at the end of a work session but it would be great if it could all be done automatically.

Thanks to at Jeff Utrecht for his recent post entitled Top 5 Firefox2 Extensions For Educators.

I know I’m a little behind the times but I just downloaded Firefox 2.0 for OS X. I love the fact that it’s got a spell checker built into it. I’ve always disliked writing in a browser, preferring to write posts in Word and then copy them to my blog. With a built in spell checker, writing directly in Firefox just got a whole lot better.

Google recently released an on-line software package called Google Docs and Spreadsheets. It is, as the name suggests an on-line word processor and spreadsheet program. I’m not sure where the Spreadsheet part came from but the Docs part—the word processor–was formerly called Writely. Google bought Writely, to much fanfare, several months ago.

I’ve had a Writely account for some time but when I first tried it, I didn’t really get it. The interface was easy enough but I didn’t see the point in an on-line word processor. Microsoft Word is available on all the machines on which I work. When I tried Writely I didn’t like writing in a web browser. It felt a bit clunky. I had tried other on-line word processors and felt the same way about them. Regardless of my early experiences, when Google announced its Docs and Spreadsheets program (a revised Writely) I decided I’d give it a try. That’s when I saw it’s potential.

To me the potential is not in the word processor per se but rather, in it’s collaboration feature. It has the collaboration benefits of a wiki with the editing/layout features of a word processor. Docs gives several people access to the same document. People can edit the document simultaneously or at different times. Here’s one teaching situation where Docs and Spreadsheets may help.

As a teacher my class often does group work. Problems come at the end of a class when students are not finished an assignment. If it was an individual assignment, I’d just assign the task to be finished for homework but how do I fairly assign a group writing assignment for homework? I can’t—until now. With Google Docs and Spreadsheets one student can post the work to Google Docs, invite the other group members to collaborate and they can easily finish the task later–working individually or simultaneously. Because of the features built into the program they can even see who in the group is pulling his/her weight and who is not. If teachers are given access to the document, they can see a complete history of the work—a handy assessment feature.

Docs has a lot of potential for group writing tasks among teachers too. Curriculum documents or common assessments can be collaboratively revised using Docs and Spreadsheets much more easily than using track changes in Word.

I don’t see myself switching to Google Docs and Spreadsheets as my main word processor but for tasks when I need to collaborate with others, it will come in handy.

The folks on the Seedlings Podcast were talking about Google Notebook so I installed it yesterday and have been playing around with it. It’s an extension for Firefox and Internet Explore that let’s a person copy and paste text from a webpage into their Google Notebook without leaving the page. (No extension for Safari at this point.) It has huge potential for kids doing research. They can be working at home, at school, or a friend’s house and still have access to their notes.

Of course plagiarism and making sure that kids write things in their own words are issues but they have been for a while. (People have been pasting text into word-processors for years.) It looks pretty good.

I understand that Firefox 2.0 will support spell checking. That’s great news for those of us that use it to post to blogs and wikis. Last year I had students working on a wiki and spell checking would have made life much easier.

I mentioned in an earlier post that I usually teach my students that the writing process goes something like this: plan, draft, revise, edit, and publish. I also teach them that it doesn’t really happen exactly in this way but it’s a good guide to help us as we write.
I also, mentioned that since starting the wiki my students are not following the writing process. It’s more write, publish, write some more, publish, revise a little, publish and so on. I’m not sure I like this. I’m concerned about the quality of the writing my students are producing. I think the quality of the conversations going on in my room and the collaboration is fantastic—better than before the wiki—but I’m not sure about the quality of the writing that my students are publishing. They are so keen to publish that they seem to have forgotten the processes I’ve worked hard to establish with them since the beginning of the year. I went in search of some answers to my concerns. Unfortunately, I haven’t found any research on the subject of writing conventions but I did find a summation of several studies about blogs. Miranda Bella wrote the summary. Here are some of the key points.

• Students put more thought and effort into their blog writing because they know they have a wide audience for their work.
• Students can strengthen their reading skills by reading blogs.
• Students that are quiet in class come alive on a blog.
• Some teachers are concerned that the casualness of blogs means that students don’t pay enough attention to writing conventions.
• There are concerns that students’ work can be too public when published on the web.

Bella, M. (2005). Weblogs in education In B. Hoffman (Ed.), Encyclopedia of Educational Technology. Retrieved March 2, 2006, from http://coe.sdsu.edu/eet/articles/blogsined/start.htm

I’ve created a monster! Well not exactly but it feels like it. I’ve created a monster of marking. My class and I have started a wiki. I’m not ready to post the wiki’s url. We’re not ready to go public yet. We’ve only been working on it for a few weeks yet I’m having trouble keeping up with everything that’s happening on the site. In the past 24 hours there have been over 80 posts. Most of the post have just been minor changes but still I’m trying to keep track of them all.

I’ve noticed a couple of interesting things so far.

First, several of my students stay up too late. The wiki lets me see the time students post their work. Last week a student posted at 10:29 p. m. They’re fourth graders!

Second, one of my students was absent today. He wasn’t feeling well yesterday so I wasn’t surprised. When I checked the wiki tonight I see that he posted at 8:45, 11:25, 12:30, and 15:15.

Lastly, the writing process of planning, drafting, revising, editing, and publishing has gone out the window. The kids are writing, publishing, revising, publishing, and writing some more all at the same time. I’m not sure if this is a good thing. More later.