Digital Youth Network

When Tracy Edwards posted on Facebook last October that she was searching for a part-time writing instructor for a middle school program, Kip Glazer jumped immediately at the chance.

But Glazer wasn’t applying for herself. Instead, she envisioned her 100 senior high school English students, who were about to become virtual writing mentors to 200 6th-graders halfway across the nation.

“I require them to do peer-to-peer editing, but I wasn’t quite getting the results that I wanted” when seniors helped other seniors, said Glazer, who found Edwards through a Facebook group created for online graduate students of educational technology at Pepperdine University. Both women are students in the program.

“When [Edwards] said ‘6th grade,’ I felt like this could really work,” Glazer said.

So far, her students at Independence High School in Bakersfield, Calif., have appeared invested. Since late November, each student has mentored five 6th-graders enrolled in the Digital Youth Network’s social network-based writing curriculum digital at three separate Chicago charter middle schools. That ratio allows every 6th grader to receive advice from multiple mentors.

Glazer’s two sections of AP English Literature and Composition and two sections of California’s college-prep-focused Expository Reading and Writing Course spend one class period weekly in a

computer lab responding to a range of assignments the 6th graders post on the cloud-based iRemix platform. The platform allows for varying levels of privacy, including blog posts and forum discussions that can be viewed by every teacher and student, and more private notebooks that are only accessible to the 6th grade writer, his or her 12th grade mentors, and teachers.

Glazer’s students then switch from mentor to student in a separate Edmodo online classroom community and discuss their successes and failures as mentors. A sample of their thoughts:

• Breanna S.: It’s tough for me to explain their error. I know how to fix their sentences, but I actually had to google why it should be changed. It adds more of a challenge and it helps me remember grammar rules. To be honest, I am worried that I will give them wrong information, but I always try to double check.
  
• Mavee P.: I found this particularly difficult to provide constructive feedback[,] instead of strict criticism[,] while remaining encouraging. In addition, the balance between too formal and laid back was a constant problem in my comments.
• Lisa H.: I am used to just blatantly pointing out errors because I know my peers won’t be offended and can handle constructive criticism. Now I have to put more thought and creativity into the feedback so I won’t hurt the kids’ feelings. Some of these kids talk about personal things like the death of their family members or worrying about gangs and getting shot, and I wish I knew how to address these topics while still pointing out their errors.

That mutual feeling of concern is ultimately a good thing, said Glazer, who added that it has translated into a heightened awareness of their own writing strengths and weaknesses.

Edwards, meanwhile, said that despite their mentors’ concerns about upsetting the 6th graders, their advice has been received better than it might have been from more traditional sources.

“It’s actually a lot more powerful than we tend to think it is, because kids tend to value other kids’ feedback a bit more than their parents’, teachers’, etcetera,” Edwards said.

As the students shift into the role of mentor, teachers’ roles also change.

The 6th-grade teachers involved, Edwards said, are still ultimately responsible grading students’ finished product, and also respond to student work on the iRemix platform. But the quality of the feedback from 12th graders, in general, has been good enough that Edwards said teachers’ most important role might be to help their own students push past their initial shyness or hesitance to work with a stranger on the other side of the country.

“Their role initially was to build that community,” she said.

Glazer said she focuses on regularly modeling and discussing the meaning and practice of responsible mentoring.

“Students will say, ‘What do I do when I see five sentences and every sentence has some kind of error?’” she said. “Now I step back and say, ‘What do you think I should do? If you were me and I was your student, what would you like me to tell you?’”

Glazer also admits there are some necessary conditions to implement a successful virtual mentor-student relationship:

• Distance: Glazer said the vast geographical divide between the two sets of students is a benefit and perhaps a necessity. For one thing, it’s easier to enforce a strict ban of any extraneous social contact between mentors and students outside of academic work. And it spurs students’ curiosity to learn more about each other during academic activities.
• School culture: Service and community are familiar themes at Independence High School, helping to make Glazer’s project more attractive to students, she said. “They naturally understand helping and the benefit of it, and I don’t have to sell it too much,” Glazer said. “But I can see how that would be difficult” in schools without that culture, she added.
• Time: Glazer said the project is a better fit with seniors because of their freedom from state standardized testing. And she says students in her two sections that are studying California’s state-constructed Expository Reading and Writing Curriculum have been more invested than her two sections of Advanced Placement students. “They have more emotional allowance right now,” Glazer said. “They have decided that either they are going to go to state schools or community colleges, so they have a little more time and they’re much more invested in picking up that skill.”
• Technology access: Because Independence High School was built within the last decade, Glazer said technology is accessible enough that securing the computer lab weekly hasn’t been an obstacle. And the school’s allowance for the use of mobile devices has helped the mentors’ ability to respond to the Chicago students’ posts in a timely manner. That said, Glazer also enjoys the focus a computer lab provides, as opposed to working on the virtual mentoring project in their normal classroom using a laptop cart.

Erin Scott

When it comes to language arts, the jury’s still out on the quality and effectiveness of the available software. Some schools are investing and experimenting with different products, with mixed results, while others are working with free available web 2.0 tools. Here are two case studies examining each approach.

THE SOFTWARE APPROACH

Firstline Schools, a public charter school company in New Orleans operating five schools, has aggressively pursued blended learning with hopes to help students who have fallen behind — especially after the devastating effects on schooling after Hurricane Katrina.

“We can’t imagine going back to a traditional model,” said Chris Liang-Vergara, director of instructional technology for personalized learning at Firstline. “It seems crazy with the amount of differentiation we need.”

Firstline uses Achieve3000 in some schools, a program that allows students to read a nonfiction

article everyday and answer questions related to it. But the program is dry, according to Liang-Vergara, and it can seem random and disconnected to the rest of what students are doing in class. He says he’s seen it used well, but usually by experienced teachers who are empowered to use it for the best kind of differentiation. If the teacher takes the time to search the Achieve300 database for nonfiction articles that are relevant to other class work, discusses them, and wraps them into the curriculum that works best. And the software does provide differentiation, increasing the difficulty of vocabulary and sentence structure as a reader progresses.

“When you show it to any experienced teacher, they get very excited because they think about how much time they’ll save and how much information can be at their fingertips,” said Liang-Vergara. It’s easier for the teacher to see what the student has learned and whether their reading comprehension skills are improving, while saving her grading time.

Overall, Liang-Vergara hasn’t seen the success in language arts blended learning that he’d hoped for and Firstline schools have scaled back the amount of time they use digital tools in English class. Liang-Vergara admitted that some schools have stopped using Achieve3000 partly because kids were quickly bored by it.

[RELATED: To Make Blended Learning Work, Teacher Try Different Tactics]

“The biggest issue I still see is that people are still trying to break it down when
it needs to be combined,” Liang-Vergara said. Learning to read and write requires many complimentary skills working in unison and offering a program that addresses just one skill doesn’t work as well to promote literacy as whole. Vocabulary in a text contributes to understanding meaning, literary structures give it depth, and non-fiction works about the subject matter help deepen understanding. These things can’t be parsed and require frequent back and forth with the teacher.

Still, Liang-Vergara says some software has proven more successful – like Vocab Journey, which puts words in context and uses pictures and gamification to make learning new words fun. Even putting a small portion of assessment online saves teachers time, a big factor in English classes where teachers have to grade writing. “English teachers spend so much time on assessment that it causes them not to assign much work because they know they’ll have to correct all of it,” said Liang-Vergara. Removing some of that burden with programs like Achieve3000 or Vocab Journey allows them more time for one-on-one instruction.

Liang-Vergara says software developers he’s spoken to at conferences aren’t as interested in working on innovations in language arts software as they are in math. He believes the whole market has a lot of growing to do.

THE WEB 2.0 APPROACH

For Catlin Tucker, a high school teacher in Winsor, Calif., her school has not focused on blended learning the way Firstline has, partly because the cost of software and infrastructure has been a barrier. Even if she had the choice, though, she would not use what she refers to as “canned content.” Instead, she started integrating technology naturally into her classroom on an experimental basis using free web tools.

Tucker started off by trying to improve her students’ communication skills both online and in-person by using the free online platform Collaborize Classroom, which offers more tools than an average discussion board. The online discussion, debate, and collaboration replaced homework, with assignments like posting a response to the discussion topic and responding to three peers. “It was interesting to see students who don’t engage verbally with their peers be super engaged in the online space,” Tucker said. Once those students found an online voice, she said they participated more in class discussions too.

She also realized that just because students have been exposed to technology at young ages and use it often doesn’t mean they know how to have an appropriate online discussion, a skill Tucker knows they need.

With the success of Collaborize Classroom, Tucker began to slowly integrate her classroom time with online spaces, making the transitions fluid with a clear focus on the learning goal, not the technology. She might start a discussion in class, extend it online, require collaboration through Google docs, deepen an understanding of the topic through a TED-Ed video, then pull it back into the classroom with extension activities.

For example, her vocabulary lessons — one of the few areas where she still found herself lecturing, and a necessary part of any English class — have been transformed. She now starts out by having students look at words in context and predict what they mean. Then they go home and watch Tucker’s video lecture. When they come back to class, they use mobile devices to find synonyms and antonyms, then go home and incorporate them into poems or stories. They share their work online, the class votes and the winner gets to read aloud in class. Suddenly vocabulary, a traditionally dull aspect of English class has some spice and students find a personal connection to the words they’re using.

[RELATED: How Teachers Mix Online Math With Classroom Instruction]

Tucker doesn’t teach in a wealthy school district where every student has access to a smartphone and a home computer. But if there’s one phone for every three to four students, the activity can still work. And, she doesn’t allow home computer access to become an excuse not to participate – instead she connects her students to free online resources in town.

This blended teaching style has completely changed Tucker’s classroom. “So much of my creative energy was being drained by managing the paper load,” Tucker said. “Now I read their online discussions, I see how they’re engaging in that space, but I’m not the only one giving feedback; they’re getting it from their peers too.” And while teaching this way doesn’t make her job easier, she’s more engaged too. “This is so much more creative, inventive and exciting,” she said. “As a teacher I am so much more energized.”

And she’s assigning more work than ever before. “Everything that happens online requires that they’re reading and writing as well as thinking critically, so all these different skills are being developed,” said Tucker. For her, blended learning is a good way to get away from collecting and disseminating information, instead helping students discover it on their own.

For educators looking for new ways to introduce ideas to students, videos can be a great way to spark interest.

By Sara Bernard

Storytelling is taking on all kinds of new forms in the Web 2.0 era. Now, thanks to a range of new software, students can not only flex their writing wings, but do it together,  by creating group-led e-books, fictional stories, blogs, op-eds, and petitions, and, in some cases, see their edits and additions. Collaboratively producing a finished product that’s full of the trappings of its process can be pretty exciting.

To that end, here are a handful of examples of collaborative writing tools with classroom applications. Of course, these can be used outside the classroom, too.

MixedInk: MixedInk, a free online interface that allows users to work collaboratively on anything from fiction to mission statements, recently launched a slew of education-related features. At MixedInk.com/educator, the software is beefed up with classroom-specific tools, such as authorship tracking, realtime suggestions (students can comment on one another’s work as it appears), and peer evaluation.

Protagonize: Users can write an entire book collaboratively on this site — either by starting their own or adding to an existing story’s draft. Signing up is free, and comments are easy, so students can offer constructive feedback to their classmates’ work as well as “rate” the site’s existing content. There are also plenty of opportunities to network with other writers and gather resources, tips, and constructive criticism.

Glypho: This is a landing site for group writing of fictional stories with a very simple structure: One user uploads his or her story idea, another writes the first chapter or installment, others write different versions of that chapter or installment, and then users review and vote on their favorites. From there, the story moves on. It’s a great way for students to collaborate not only with their classmates, but with peers across the globe.

Novlet:  This one focuses on what it calls “non-linear” story writing, and is similar in structure to Glypho: different users submit different versions or installments of a piece of writing and then vote on the most compelling. Novlet’s installments are called “passages,” usually just a few paragraphs long, and can be written in any language, which makes it a fun resource for a foreign language class.