1. Before class meeting, read Kajder Chapter 8. Sign up for accounts at blogger.com and pbwiki.com.
Reflective journal prompt.
2. Agenda for class/lab meeting.
a. Demonstration of wikis--Guest: Louise Penner, English dept., UMB
b. Creating individual wikis. See tips discussion on Web CT.
An elaborate wiki example
A guide to wiki style.
c. Collaborative document editing on WebCT--adding your comments and edits to the summary of Week 1's discussion that I posted to the en697 wiki at http://en697.pbwiki.com. Discussion leaders should add pages for their summaries of weekly discussions, where they can collaboratively post and edit.
d. Demonstration of blogs created in Christian Pulver's Freshman Writing and Ellie's Lifewriting courses.
e. Creating individual blogs. Add links to our course blog at http://engltech.blogspot.com/ Use your google email and password to sign in. Use your blog for this week's reflective journal. Use our Technology and Teaching English blog for this week's discussion of readings.
A guide to starting a blog.
Ellie's blog assignment for En276-Life Writing
f. Google docs, Google Groups, Yahoo listserv. We didn't get to these but they offer additional free communication tools.
- Google docs allows collaborative document sharing and editing and the creation of pages with images, etc. in the ways that wiki's do. I haven't created a google doc for us yet, but once you have a Google account, you can create and edit documents.
- Google groups has discussion boards and I've started one for us.: Our Teaching English with Technology google group. You should have received an invitation. You can answer, become a member, and post. We'll use this discussion site for our week 4 discussion.
- The Yahoo listserve allows email communication through a group list. (
A listserv is a type of asynchronous communication tool that allows users to send correspondence to everyone on a particular list with a single e-mail message.
) You should also have received an invitation to our list and be getting some messages as others use this (as well as the WebCT site) to send questions,, etc. You can also join other lists, by searching a database of lists. See Catalists, the Official Catalog of Listserv lists . You can create a list or enter ours at http://groups.yahoo.com/. signing on with your Yahoo username and password.
Our engl697 list.
3. For online work: readings and discussion
Readings:
Will Richardson, "New Jersey High School Learns the ABC's of Blogging." In Technical Horizons in Education Journal, June 2005, v32,p. 40f. Access through Healey Library, Expanded Academic Index database. This article offers a quick overview of how Richardson's high school set up blogging. He suggests another good resource for setting up blogs, searching for blogs, and adding an rss feed (a constantly updated feed from other online source--here's the Wikipedia entry). The resource is bloglines.
Michele Knobel and Colin Lankshear, "Weblog Worlds and Constructions of Effective and Powerful Writing." In Kate Pahl and Jennifer Rowsell, Travel Notes from the New Literacy Studies. Clivedon: Multilingual Matters, 2005.
Stephen Krause, "When Blogging Goes Bad: A Cautionary Tale about Blogs, Email Lists, Discussion, and Interaction." Kairos, Fall 2004, v9.1. Kairos is a great online journal (refereed) about technology and composition.
Naomi Augar, Ruth Raitman and Wanlei Zhou, "Teaching and Learning Online with Wikis." ASCILITE conference proceedings, Perth, 2004.
Emma Tonking, "Making the Case for a Wiki." Ariadne, Issue 42, January 2005.
Additional Resources:
Weblogg-ed--the blog of Will Richardson. Full of great commentary and resources.
Weblog on The Secret Life of Bees from one of Richardson's classes.
TWT--Teaching Writing with Technology--Critical Perspectives on Using Technology to Teach Writing in the Middle School and High School The link page takes you to a section of this blog, about blogging. It has particularly good information about legal issues.
Brian's Ramblings. An example of a student blog from the University of Hawaii
Bahdad Burning. A young woman from Iraq, who goes by the penname Riverbend, has been maintaining this incrdible blog since before the US invasion. It has won prizes for literary journalism, and has been published in book form. I've assigned it in classes, and it's been very powerful.
For Discussion: Read an article on blogs and one on Wikis, plus an additional article on the online genre you're most interested in. Explore the some of these other resources. Then post a response on http://engltech.blogspot.com/ and respond to others' posts.
Week 4--Student Research and the Web
1. Before our class meeting:
Read Kajder Chapter 7 and use the WebQuest Resources on the Resources page of this site to look at some WebQuests.
2. Class/lab.
Ellie's WebQuest on Webquests
