921-Lebrun,+Kim

Plan for the Edublog
For Deliverable #1, I made a blog for my high school Volleyball team as a way of maintaining and improving communication with my volleyball players in the off-season. This will be a great tool for me to use with them, but for this deliverable I will be thinking about an Edublog that I will create for my classroom. I would create an additional blogging site, most likely through blogger, for my ELA class to use.

As an English/ESL teacher my focus is to develop and improve linguistic skills, academic vocabulary, communicative functioning, and skills and strategies in the areas of reading, writing, listening, and speaking. In order to do so, I create many opportunities for students to practice and meet these language objectives.

An example of how I would embed an Edublog into an already existing practice or lesson is through an electronic dialogue journal. For instance, when I teach the book __Among the Hidden__, by Margaret Peterson Haddix, I ask students to write diary entries for every few chapters. I would change this assignment next time to have students completing dialogue journals with a partner on an edublog. Dialogue journals is an activity that has students writing letters to each other to discuss the chapter(s) that they just read. Instead of using a pen and paper, Edublogging would give me the opportunity to have my students working with partners from another class, school, state, or even country. Since I have worked at a few different schools over the last few years, I could easily call on a former contact to set up such an assignment. This will give my ELLs a chance to practice their writing skills, but also to engage with other students and to learn from potential models of good writing. The greatest thing about this practice is that it could be used for virtually any book and would open the doors of possibility; No longer would we be forced to only have partners within our classroom or school, but now we can become part of a bigger community and not have to wait for the mail to come in.

Potential trials, tests, missteps, and successes of this integration
As with any new edition to a classroom routine, there will be trials and tribulations which will occur. Knowing the middle school students that I work with, I am sure that one of them will test the electronic waters to see exactly how close I am monitoring the blog. I am hoping that if this happens that I find it quickly, deal with it swiftly, and it nevers happens again. Also, privacy remains a huge issue and some parents just may not be onboard with this type of activity. If this should happen, I am prepared to offer similar assignments that do not require the use of these tools, but I am hoping that I can educate them to see the potentials instead of the risks. I am thinking of using pseudonyms or only first names as a measure to protect my students and their identities, and would work to teach students the necessary skills to use this program: comment etiquette, online safety, code of conducts online, etc.

Another key issue is just getting comfortable enough with the program that I can teach my student the quickest and most effective way to navigate it. I am hoping that my trial with my volleyball blog will allow me the time and the space for that growth to happen, so that when I start this with my students I am totally a pro.

Future goals
I am really hoping to include many different web 2.0 tools in my classroom as a way of changing the way we practice different skills. I hope for these to include wikis, podcasts, blogs, video streaming, and many other things that I am sure I have yet to learn about or that have even been created.

**Deliverable #3: Proposal for Implementation**
Since our school has bee awarded the One-to-One technology grant, which brings one computer to every student in two classes, I would like to propose the use of wikis to help support the learning and to serve as a virtual organizational tool for these classes. This wiki space will provide teachers and students the ability to springboard from one location and to embed all classroom resources such as texts, links, videos, podcasts, etc. right into that one place. The service that I would like to create with this wiki is a placeholder for all of the curriculum, notices, resources, and links to live so that students can access these materials in class and at home. This resource will mostly be designed to assist students and parents.

This plan will fill a need at our school because we are entering into un-chartered waters with this new grant. It is clear that this school has identified the benefits for increasing the use and knowledge of technology, evident from the application and implementation of the one-to-one grant, however, will fill the organizational need on this team. To see successful examples of wikis, like I am proposing click on the links at the end of this proposal. In summary, education is changing, largely to help to meet the needs of our growing society and the idea that the world is flat and accessible to everyone. To be a part of this movement and to produce students that have the skills to become productive professional and citizens, we need to adopt the tools available to us through the revolution called Web 2.0. In the article Minds on Fire: Open Education, the Long Tail and Learning 2.0, John Seely Brown and Richard P. Adler write, “In a traditional Cartesian educational system, students may spend years learning about a subject; only after amassing sufficient (explicit) knowledge are they expected to start acquiring the (tacit) knowledge or practice of how to be an active practitioner or professional in a field. But viewing learning as the process of joining a community of practice reverses this pattern and allows new students to engage in “learning to be” even as they are mastering the content of a field. This encourages the practice of what John Dewey called “productive inquiry”—that is, the process of seeking the knowledge when it is needed in order to carry out a particular situated task.” For more information on this topic or to view the whole article, click on [].

Although there are many benefits to implementing this technology in our school, there may also be a few roadblocks. Since the staff already has by-in because of the grant that they chose to participate in, an issue that remains is knowledge of wikis and the amount of time and quality of professional development. In order to get this project off of the ground, I would hold a professional development for the team teachers and help them to learn how to use and manage the technology. I would also be able to assist throughout the year, as well as the technology support staff in our building, if a problem, questions, or concerns should arise. Another concern that parents and district personnel may have is privacy. For this pilot, we would just utilize the wiki as a placeholder and no personal information about any of the students will be on there. Eventually if the team decides to include a blog or the editing function of a wiki, we will be sure to take all of the necessary precautions and create a Code of Conduct that would iron out the rules and also hold classes with students about internet safety, not releasing information that is identifying, proper comment conduct, and etc. Obviously before moving forward in that direction, we would seek the proper permissions from parents and school administration at that time.

For this proposal I would suggest using a wiki service offered through wikispaces. I would suggest using wikispaces for these classes because the service is free for educators, advertisements can be removed from the page, ease of use, and it has a recovery function that some other programs do not have. Another reason why I have chosen wikispaces is because it will require every student to have their own log in. This will give the teachers a chance to monitor specific student interactions and to police problems should they arise.

Although I am only proposing that we start out small with this idea, in just two classrooms, I am hoping that eventually this will be used a model for best practice around the building and throughout the district. My goal is to prove to you that the integration of Web 2.0 technology will positively affect students in a variety of ways. As Will Richardson writes in his book, Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms, “In using wikis, students are not only learning how to publish content; they are also learning how to develop and use all sorts of collaborative skills, negotiating with others to agree on correctness, meaning, relevance, and more. In essence, students begin to teach each other” (65). ** Examples of Current Classroom Wikis **

http://kkps-r25.wikispaces.com/ This wiki is from a grade 5 and 6 class at Katikati Primary School in New Zealand. This site operate much like I would like ours to operate. If you look in the left margin you will see the links to the various things the students would use in this class.

http://aristotle-experiment.wikispaces.com/ This wiki is a high school English class wiki, but it may help you see some of the benefits of using wikis. I love how all of the projects are embedded on this wiki and there is work space for students to complete them right there.

Final Project
For the final project, I created a wiki for the team at my school that was awarded the one-to-one pilot grant. Since this grant had the teachers returning their classroom texts to the shelf and using the computers as the ever evolving text, I created this wiki to serve as a springboard for everything in the classroom. Due to the nature of a wiki, a an ever evolving body of work, it is not complete, nor will it ever be. However, there is a good representation of the direction that I am going in. Right now the wiki is speaking to the team teachers and school administrators, but that is because the students don't know that it exists yet. The Home Page will change as the school year approaches. Here is the link to view Bain's Champion Team Wiki.