The National Literary Trust, a charitable organization dedicated to improving literacy rates in the UK, recently released the findings from their study titled Young People’s Writing: Attitudes, behaviour and the role of technology. In May, 2009 3001 pupils aged 9-16 from England and Scotland completed an online survey 3001 pupils aged 9-16 from England and Scotland completed an online survey that asked about their writing activities. The goal of the survey was threefold:

• To explore how much young people enjoy writing
• To determine what type of writing they engage in
• To find out how good at writing they think they are and what they think about writing

According to the study, instead of “dumbing down” young people’s writing, technology offers a wider variety of ways students can express themselves through the written word, leading to greater enjoyment of writing and higher (self-reported) writing ability.

While blogging and texting is not replacing pen to paper (77% of students surveyed hand write notes in class or do their homework offline) this research indicates that the proliferation of opportunities for writing presented by new technologies may be benefiting the next generation of Shakespeares, Brontës, and Dickenses.

Do you use new technology to get students excited about writing? Are writing skills on the decline, or could status updates and texts lead to future literary achievement? Share your ideas to use new technology in writing instruction.

We’ve had some excellent contributors to the ISTEconnects blog, and we want to keep it open – making it a community driven place for you to connect with other educational technology enthusiasts.  We’ve created a simple guest blogger functionality, and all you have to do to get published here is to sign up to be a “contributor” and you’ll be able submit your own blog posts.

You can write as few, or as many posts as you like – just keep in mind that we’ll have to moderate these before they go live to make sure there’s nothing ‘touchy’ in there. We will then tweet your post to the rest of the Connex community! To be considered for publishing, a post must cover a relevant ed tech topic and be at least 200 words in length. Happy Blogging!

If you have any question you can find me on twitter @isteconnects or email me here.

Signup to Guest Blog Today!

Just as I was yesterday, I’m embedded among the teachers and technologists at ISTE Central, reporting from the front lines of the ed tech festivities here in Washington, DC.  I promise to be a tireless correspondent, so be sure to check in frequently for new posts.  And, as always, if you’d like to reach me with questions or comments, I’m @zbgoodwin on Twitter.

(For those who are tuning in for the first time, the briefest of bios: I’m a writer, designer and technologist based in Washington, DC, and a member of the iStrategyLabs family.)

With introductions and formalities out of the way, let’s get down to business: This morning has been busy!  The @ISTEConnects team and I arrived at 7:30 to set up our scores of MacBooks, and our workhorse of a videocamera (a Sony PD170 for any A/V nerds out there) in preparation for today’s live-streaming.  At 9 am, Joe Corbett — who oversees the ISTEConnects universe — began interviewing a long list of NECC attendees.  Check it out:

After a few hours of interviews with the ISTE faithful, I headed off to the Conference Room 146B, to hear one teacher’s reflections on teaching to the “digital generation.”  (My plan was to live-blog the presentation, but an over-burdened wi-fi connection made that impossible!)  The session documented the experience of Camilla Gagliolo, a Jamestown Elementary School teacher, who has been experimenting with employing the Nintendo DS in her daily instructions.  She began by purchasing 12 Nintendo DSs, using a BestBuy grant for teachers, and creating a ‘classroom kit’ which could circulate around the school as needed.  She found, from the very beginning, that kids were extremely enthusiastic with the notion of playing “games” in class.  From the looks of the video Camilla played during her presentation, the kids couldn’t believe their good fortune.

The programs Camilla used were right off the shelf: BrainAge, BrainBoost, MyWord and a few others.  She seemed to suggest that the math games were most sucessful — though the language-arts oriented games were used as well.

The networking function of the Nintendo DS is likely its most important feature.  The DS allows for teachers to create chat rooms, which can hold up to 12 student on their own DSs.  For larger classes, each teacher can create four chat rooms of 12 students.  The chatrooms allow one teacher to get real-time information about how each student is grasping new concepts.  What’s 12 * 56?  The DS will allow one to teacher to figure out which of his or her 30 students knows — and, more importantly, which are struggling.

All in all, it was a fascinating presentation — and one that prompted a lot of great questions from the audience.  And with that, I’m off to my next session!  See you in a few,

Zach

These prospects for shared, online learning surrounding a face-to-face conference reminded me this week of a situation in the fall of 2005, when I attempted (unsuccessfully) to catalyze live blogging and sharing from the upcoming TCEA 2006 conference. Citizen journalism is a disruptive prospect for many organizational leaders. Empowering anyone with access to a computer and the Internet to share their voice on the “global stage” can seem risky as well as dangerous to leaders most comfortable with tightly controlled, top-down styles of management as well as information dissemination.* As I noted in 2005, we’re living in an era where traditional publishing has been disintermediated. This landscape is fraught with risks and dangers, but it is also filled with opportunities. For more on the pros and cons of blogging for teachers, see the point/counterpoint article in the May 2009 issue of ISTE’s Learning and Leading with Technology, “Is Blogging Worth the Risk?” by James Maxlow and Lisa Nielson. It’s available as a free PDF download for both ISTE members and non-members.

It is impossible for me to think about social media and its potentially transformative potential to permit transparency and more open communication without reflecting on recent events in Iran following their election last week as well as many EduBlogger responses to the election.

On Monday in his post “An Amazing Day”, Jim Gates wrote:

Today was an historic day in the world. The elections in Iran sparked demonstrations by the people there insisting on their freedom. They objected to what they call a fixed election and have, in spite of everything, taken their anger to the streets in incredible numbers. And, they used the social medium of the web to help spread their message…This was a GREAT day to be working with teachers and trying to show them the power of social media, Twitter, specifically. In Tweetdeck I created a Search column for the word Tehran and that’s how I followed the events. There was a hashtag of #iranelections too that I could have chosen to follow. But, the bottom line is that I was following up to the minute reports from the people who were living the event.

Yesterday as well, Shelly Blake-Plock wrote in his post, “This is the Moment: Legitimize Social Media in Education:”

This weekend will go down in history in two ways. First, it will mark — for better or worse depending on the outcome — a fundamental shift in the way the people of Iran are able to express dissent with their government. Second, at least here in the United States, this weekend will mark the moment at which the mainstream media — particularly cable news — was overwhelmed by social media.

It can not be denied. We are all now living in a world of social media. You can’t claim ignorance. You can’t call it a ‘trend’. Whether or not Twitter exists in five years is beside the point. What happened this weekend is that social media became — in the most legitimate way — the voice of the people.

Shelly goes on in his post to exhort educators to take action, along the lines of her guest post here on ISTEconnects, “What Does Internet Blocking Suggest to Students?” He wrote yesterday:

The blocking debate ended this weekend.

Goodbye to the last vestiges of 20th century top-down media. Goodbye to the fear of what humans might produce given the opportunity to work collectively in thought and goodwill. Good morning, humankind.

So teachers, don’t try to teach kids to live in a world that doesn’t exist anymore. Rather, reach out and take hold of the possibilities social media offers. Anyone countering you doesn’t deserve the authority their office holds.

This is the moment. Legitimize social media in education.

When it comes to content filtering and other administrative policies relating to technology and social media, in many contexts we definitely have a strong need to “unmask the digital truth.” What ARE the reasons all blogs and wikis are blocked in many school districts? Why do some organizational leaders resist attempts to embrace social media and blog coverage of conference events as well as organizational meetings?

At NECC 2009 this year, it’s going to be exciting to not only EXPERIENCE the conference, but also SHARE the conference. We are probably only beginning to glimpse the power of social media tools to communicate and amplify ideas as well as conversations. Social media’s potential to provide transparency for a national election or a local school board meeting is largely untouched in many communities, but that reality is changing. Quickly.

We’re living in a “publish at will” digital landscape. What will you share today?!

* I first heard Marco Torres use the phrase “the global stage” at an educational technology conference, when referencing students publishing work online for a worldwide audience.

CoverItLive is a free tool available for live blogging, providing opportunities for multiple folks to participate in the live blog discussions whether they are attending an event in-person or virtually. CoverItLive allows live-bloggers to insert Ustream or Mogulus webcast streams as well. I have recently used CoverItLive to live blog our state dropout summit, a TechLearning webinar on Web 2.0 in schools, and our most recent school board meeting in my community. Sarah Perez provided a good overview of the functionalities available in with CoverItLive in her January 2008 post, “Live Blogging 2.0.”

I first participated remotely in an educational conference keynote covered via CoverItLive in the most recent Computer Using Educators (CUE) conference in California. I think it would be great if multiple attendees at NECC 2009 would use CoverItLive to provide live-blog coverage of as many sessions at the conference as possible. I’m not suggesting that this type of volunteer, organic live-blogging efforts should be centrally managed or controlled, but I am wondering how live blogging can be best supported and facilitated? It would be great to provide links to live-bogged sessions on a site like NECC Unplugged, as well as posting tweets with the NECC09 hashtag, #necc09. Do you think a common account on CoverItLive should be created and made available to attendees to use when live-blogging NECC sessions, or would it be better for everyone to use their own CoverItLive accounts? Have you participated in or seen a coordinated live-blogging effort at any conferences in the past year, which involved multiple people providing blog coverage via CoverItLive? I’d love to hear and read about others’ experiences with live-blogging at conferences, to get ideas about how live-blogging could be best supported and facilitated at NECC this year.

(Flickr CC Image)

Blogs are naturally “publish at will” platforms. While blogs certainly CAN be configured to have new posts “moderated” by someone serving in the role of a gatekeeper, by default most blogs allow users to publish INSTANTLY. If you’re interested in setting up a blog for moderated posting by students, I’d recommend using Class Blogmeister for this purpose. Wordpress blogs can be configured for contributor posts to be moderated as well, but this requires a bit of configuration. (This is the setup we’re using here on ISTEconnects, btw.) On the Wordpress dashboard, under SETTINGS – GENERAL SETTINGS, we’ve checked the MEMBERSHIP box ANYONE CAN REGISTER and set the “New User Default Role” to be CONTRIBUTOR. With these configuration settings, new posts must be reviewed by a user designated as an “editor” or “administrator” before they become “live” on the site. For more on this, see the Wordpress.org CODEX article “Roles and Capabilities.” To setup a free classroom or personal Wordpress blog you don’t have to host yourself, I recommend using EduBlogs or Wordpress.com. Blogs setup with Blogger can similarly be setup as “team” blogs with moderated contributions from members which can include students and/or teachers. See the Blogger help article “How do I create a team blog?” for more details. My post from July 2008, “How can our school set up a team blog for teachers?” also gives more information about this for Wordpress users.

While publishing text “at will” is an increasingly common experience in our information landscape, publishing audio has been less common. A couple of years ago, elementary educator and podcaster-extrordinaire Bob Sprankle (via Cheryl Oakes) taught me about the free webservice Springdoo. Sadly, like more than a few web 2.0 sites and technologies, Springdoo closed up shop and is no longer functioning. Springdoo allowed users to, without logging in or creating a user account, immediately record audio which was published on the web for others to hear it. It was billed as a “voice to email” service. I loved it.

Ever since I used Springdoo and it closed up shop, I’ve been looking for similar websites that support “publishing audio at will.” In the past week, I’ve been delighted to discover two free services which have this functionality.

Vocaroo is an audio web tool I learned about thanks to Missouri educator Elizabeth Helfant and thanks to Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan educator Kathy Cassidy. (Kathy has a classroom blog on ClassBlogmeister too.) Similar to Springdoo, Vocaroo permits users to record audio IMMEDIATELY to the web using a computer with a microphone. Vocaroo accounts are optional. They are beneficial, since they permit you to see all your past Vocaroo recordings together in a single place, but they are not required. This can be a plus particularly when working with students in a computer lab setting. This is an example Vocaroo recording, which I created using the built-in microphone on my MacBook laptop:

If you have trouble recording with Vocaroo, take a look at the site’s FAQ list. I also found Adobe’s Flash Player help instructions beneficial for troubleshooting microphone issues. Users can right click / control click the Flash player area in a webpage and choose SETTINGS to change the microphone Flash settings which were previously selected.

AudioBoo is another “publish audio at will” option available for iPhone owners. This is an example of an AudioBoo recording I created, comparing the features of AudioBoo to Qik.com. Like Qik, Audioboo lets users share their location on planet earth with others. Locations can also be hidden / kept private.

The Audioboo page for a recording shows (if users choose) the location where the Audioboo was made. Vocaroo does not support geo-location, but it can be used on any Internet-connected computer with a microphone. Audioboo requires an iPhone.

Some websites are now supporting interactive, asychronous audio chat conversations. Yackpack and Voxopop are two examples I know about. I’ve used Yackpack a bit with my kids and in professional development workshops with teachers, but not Voxopop.

What do you think of “publish audio at will” websites and technologies like Vocaroo and Audioboo?