Teacher in Development

Blogging. Web 2.0. Social Software. Digital Natives bogged down in outdated classrooms with an outmoded paradigm. Teachers, schools, and curriculums playing catch up: maybe. The future is now, and how do you catch up if your head is in the sand, or just plain turned in another direction?

“Buzzzzzzzzzz.”

How? I think that’s the million dollar question here. The change is now. It’s happening and will continue to happen. The whole conversation around group and personal blogging that has been going on has really gotten me thinking a great deal about our team of teachers, blogging, and just plain helping them into a 2.0 mindset.

The more I’ve thought about it, read about it around the blogsphere, and the more I’ve read the comments to my last post, the more I’ve begun to realize that no matter how digitized our world becomes, no matter how fast knowledge explodes, no matter how much we need to be in touch with, and involved in 2.0 - or however this all evolves next, in the end it’s all about people.

People. Individuals. Personalities. That means, in many cases, that change and adaptation is a time thing. That means, from my end, an ongoing, and personal open invitation to “come and see.”

I’ve realized that I’ve been coming at this all wrong. The teachers and students you and I work with are not “clickable.”

I think at some levels I was wrongly expecting our staff to immediatly take blogging and run with it. To instantly understand that blogs are not just journals, but conversations, where you can read and listen in on what other teachers are saying, think about it, research it, and produce your own twist on your own blog. I wrongly expected that after one or two tentative presentations around blogging, that our teachers would see blogs as an absolute haven for “free-range learning“(Ganley, par. eight) where their professional exploration and learning would take off as they begin connecting to a broader and expanding world of other reflective teachers.

It’s a case of me “seeing it” but not effectively passing on what I see.

I’m not ready to throw in the towel around our team blog, especially after this realization around the tool vs. people. It’s so easy to get sucked into the tool and all it helps you do, to the point where you forget how to effectively relate all that to another living, breathing person.

My mac “learns” new things and can do new things whenever I download and install a new program or file. I just drag and drop the new program into the application folder on my hard drive, run the installation, and presto….my comp just got smarter and more useful. This is perhaps an obvious idea, a “duh” post perhaps, but people are not mac hard drives. You don’t just “drag drop” and presto.

Digital Immigrants, the vast majority of the people I am working with, learn things “slowly, step-by-step, one thing at a time, individually, and above all, seriously.” (Marc Prensky: Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants. Par. 12)

I think that’s a little of what I’ve, perhaps we’ve, been bumping up against here. We’re going to fast. I’ve been going to fast.

My bloglines account daily buzzes with new and exciting ideas that grab my mind and leave me breathless as I try to wrap my head around them. It’s happening fast, but people (read digital immigrants) in many cases, adapt slow. My job is to realize that and stop smacking my head up against it in frustration. Instead I need to slow down. Come along side. Get personal, and above all, use the right language when I try to show, tell and invite.

A year old post over at Alan Levine’s cogdogblog nails this all home.

“Just building an online community, and announcing it will not make it happen. Sure, in a class, you make it required for students, but that carrot is not present.

It takes time, whole lot more than you would ever think is reasonable. Same for patience, and perseverance.
Our faculty co-chairs however are mystified, and wondering why their own colleagues could not spend say 5 minutes to read and post a comment to a discussion board. This underscored my belief that even in this electronic age, we need to go out there and talk to people face to face, or sit down with them at their computers, and spend a lot more time in real conversations to get them “in”. Our initiatives are all brand new, still forming, and people do not yet have a clear picture or set of expectations.

It takes much more than technology to build online communities.”(Levine)

Isn’t that the truth? We’re in a digital age, but real conversations and face to face time is still, and will always be, a part of our reality. Ignore this at your peril. I have, and will do my best to grind to a flintstone stop.

Just fell through a post, and followed a comment or two that really got me thinking. The first one comes from James Farmer at incorporated subversion.

The point: Blogging is the exercise and development of personal presence, and this simply doesn’t happen on group or team blogs.

I then followed the link that sparked Farmer’s post off, Alan Levine’s “Does Not Blog Well With Others” post. Aside from the great title and intro, this post really is a thinker, and raises some great points that I know I want to consider more.

If I were a student in Blog School, the parental note they send home from my blog teachers might bear the comment, “Alan writes a lot, but he does not blog well with others”.

What I hope to get at by the end of this ramble is how, to me, in my opinion, this is not a universal rule… the power and enticement of blogging is the sense of ownership of a place of your own making. You own it, it is a relfection, sometimes fun house mirror distorted, of yourself. It is what the storytellers refer to as “finding your voice” (and using it). You are an editorial board of one, and the review process is instantaneous.

But as your own place, you have a lot of investment in what is there or a lot of reason to focus your energy there. It is yours and yours alone.” (Levine)

I find myself totally agreeing here. To me, one of the best parts of blogging is that it’s my turf. Noone else can tell me what to think, how to think, where to go with my thinking etc.

It is also, as Levine mentions, is where I’ve started to find my own voice, and where I’m free to polish, redefine, and develop it.

I also enjoyed his ideas around investment. When its yours, you invest with great freedom and generosity because it “feels like home.” (Levine par. 5)

From here I scrolled down to the comments where I really found myself identifying with Graham Wegner’s comments around his own efforts to team blog with a group of teachers.

I would like to repost his comment here, as it really speaks to the whole issue that I would like to address:

Alan, I post at two blogs - my own Teaching Generation Z
and one set up for my colleagues here at my school as we work through an IWB program. I am tending to agree with you because the team blog ActivBoarding which I post to regularly as a way of “trying” to encourage my fellow staff members is dominated by my content but is fairly shallow compared to what I explore on my own piece of webspace. It has been mistaken by other bloggers as being one of “my” blogs but actually I wanted ActivBoarding to be everyone putting in their own bits and pieces on a regular basis so you only had to look in one spot to see what was going on in our school. But the fact that they are not means they don’t have the ownership you’re talking about to be committed or even bothered to do so. And I will always “save” my most pressing / important posts for my own blog so you could argue, my commitment to the team thing is a bit superficial as well. Yet a part of me still wants to keep it going! Very though provoking.

The part that really got to me was

“I am tending to agree with you because the team blog ActivBoarding which I post to regularly as a way of “trying” to encourage my fellow staff members is dominated by my content but is fairly shallow compared to what I explore on my own piece of webspace.”

Ouch. I’m in the same boat. Where I work, we’ve set up a “team blog” as a space for our teaching staff to reflect on sessions in our professional development program.

Our teachers have been contributing, but only after much “encouragement” and “whip cracking.”

To their credit, the ones who do participate often create well thought out posts…but they are totally lacking in personality…ownership…authenticity, VOICE!

Their posts answer our PD questions, but in most cases the conversation is lost. This group blog space seems to have downgraded into “take in and vomit out.”

There is a great lack of deepness, of exploration and connecting to rest of the blogsphere. They simply answer their “homework” question and that’s it. Next post is when there is more homework to do.

That realization makes me feel…uncomfortable. I have a sneaky feeling that there may be no rescue for my team blog. Afterall, is blogging when you get a bunch of people to use blogging software? Don’t think so.

Is professional reflection working if you have to chase down and cajole the participants?

My whole point behind the group blog was to have a way to connect our teachers. We are usually scattered about the city teaching English classes. Connecting really happens on paydays when everyone comes in for money. But that’s payday! Our brains aren’t in professional development mode, they’re in “show me the money” mode. So PD talking and reflecting is not an option on these days.

So I thought….team blog. A great way for everyone to stay in touch with everyone else, and jointly explore and talk about what we’ve been covering in our PD sessions.

Sounds great on paper, but I’ve been struggling with getting past the “take off” phase since July of this year.

Just doesn’t seem to be working. It’s not really deep. There isn’t room for voice, at least not yet, and our so called “conversation” has turned into tacking comments onto “question” posts.

This is a weird post, and I do apologize. But more and more I’m starting to agree with Farmer, Levine, and Wegner. Group blogs likely don’t work too well.

I guess I’ve just invited myself to haul out the old drawing board and rethink all this.

I eagerly give you the floor…

What happens when you base your educational career around something that is no longer true?

I’ve been following the TOEIC around now for half a year. Up till now, the message has been uniform: Not a native English speaker? Want a good job? Get a great TOEIC score.

Take a peek at this article from the Korea Times. It was posted on October 26 of this year:
Universities Become ‘Cram Schools’ for Jobs
By Chung Ah-young
Staff Reporter

Students study in a library at Yonsei University in Seoul. College students struggle to find jobs amid the soaring jobless rate due to the prolonged economic slowdown, transforming the campus landscape from an ivory tower into a gateway for employment.
A 23-year-old law student at a prestigious university in Seoul goes to the library every morning to study English for the TOEIC instead of studying law for his major.

TOEIC _ Test of English for International Communication _ is the standard for workplace English language proficiency worldwide.

“It is a part of my daily routine to study English for about five hours. TOEIC scores are becoming more important to getting a good job,’’ she said.

F-I-V-E hours!
As an ESL teacher this article disturbs me greatly. What’s the point of school anyway? To learn how to learn? Or to pass an exam? There sure seems to be something off balance here…

But that’s another post.

The starting question, if you recall, was what happens when the market shifts?

This article, again from the Korea Times paints a very different picture. It was posted on November 13 of this year.
The Korea Times : TOEIC Minor Factor in Hiring
TOEIC Minor Factor in Hiring
By Choi Kyong-ae
Staff Reporter

High TOEIC scores will no longer give advantages for jobseekers as an increasing number of companies recruit new workers through intensive interviews and internship programs, according to personnel managers.

TOEIC, which stands for Test of English for International Communication, has been a bible for undergraduate students to study to get a better-paying job in Korea.

“In document screening, unlike in the past, we focus on self-introduction letters, not on TOEIC scores or credits. We want rookies who have participated in various extracurricular activities and have a clear vision to pursue in this company,’’ a Hyundai Motor’s personnel manager said.

Quite a radical shift. A shift that we need to be paying careful attention to. While a very small focus on standarized testing could be useful, what really counts is a well rounded person.

The New Market wants:
A person who knows how to relate to and with others.
A thinker.
A person with clear vision.
Openness to learning.

Core knowledge (what you supposedly go to university for) is important, but it seems like more weight is shifting over to what is contained in the list above.

High TOEIC scores are fading as a prerequisite.

Something to ponder:

An applicant with good credits and high TOEIC score does not always make a successful worker. So we have lowered the required TOEIC score to 500 and now concentrate on applicants’ attitude toward the job,’’ a Doosan Group personnel manager said.

What does that mean for your TOEIC prep classes?

More and more I see a tendency towards personal learning. Students are tired of course books. Teachers are tired of them too. I know I am. I also know my students are.

Sure, sometimes the text can be interesting and relevant, but the more I think about Alger’s post around curriculum and how it creates a certain aloofness, the more I’m seeing esl textbooks in the same light.

Curriculum forces you into a scheduled environment. It’s 7:30 a.m. - English time. Your English time lasts until 9:00 a.m. where you’ll leave the “English environment” and enter your real world. English, more often than not, slides away until it’s time for the next block of English time.

A fantastic quote from David Warlick’s 2 Cents Worth:

“It isn’t about the technology. It isn’t about the machine! It’s about the information. So, with this in mind, what if we instead said…

…kids should only be allowed to learn from textbooks they have written themselves.

The sentiment is the same. Kids are learning by teaching themselves, within their own information environment. They are accessing information, doing something with it, and expressing it in a way that will be valuable to themselves and/or to others in the future.” (Warlick)

and

“The point is that students are learning, not merely by consuming content, but by interacting within an evolving information environment and producing valuable content. In addition, they are learning by building a personal network of content, and ultimately, a network of trusted people as sources of knowledge. It’s the best way I can think of for students to learn contemporary literacy as a learning skill.”

Learning is not only consuming information, but it is also reflecting on it, producing value added content - where value added is the information of origin with the student’s own informed addition to it - and connecting with others who are also speaking into the same body of information.

I especially like Warlick’s comment that the content should be drawn from within the student’s own information environment. How true, and how far off we are sometimes.

Most course books attempt to be relevant, but they just cannot. Atleast not for long. Market Leader used to be a course book on the cutting edge of business English. But that was several years ago, back when faxes and memos were the rage. E-mail was just arriving on the Mexican business scene. Market Leader targets business people, it attempts relevancy - and for a time it was successful. But in the end, it was just a course book that took a snap shot of it’s environment, was adopted into curriculum by many language schools - I know I brought it into ours - but now has and is phasing out of relevance.

I like Warlick ask, why can’t we have the student bring in content? Why do we have to latch onto course books, when we should be basing our content on the student’s world. Their “information environment.”

I’ve started doing this in my classes, tired of the frustration of a course book that is no longer meaning much to my students.

In my legal class, my students have started bringing in actual legal briefs - in English - that they are working through, and struggling over. Their information world is starting to become our content.

The results have been….amazing. We’re still in touch with grammar and vocabulary - but now it’s grammar and vocabulary and sentence structures that are useful. Relevant. Why? The student said so.

Learning is no longer passive, but is very much a prosumer activity. I see the classroom content of the future as being something that is live - highlighted by the student as being important to them (hello rss , blog content, day to day papwerwork etc.)

Curriculum will likely always play a role, but it will have to be personalized - and the teacher will need to be an expert on the horizon (the big direction that students have to be moving in) but also incredibly flexible around the steps involved in the journey that will get them there. I think the effective trajectory coach is unafraid of developing fluency in what their students are involved in.

I’m no tax lawyer, but my students are. Relevant content for them is tax law. Is tax treaties. Slowly but surely I’m starting to tap into this pipeline. My bloglines account is now a buzz with spirited activity of several tax blogs (holy cow, lawyers blog too!).

While I don’t plan or pretend to know everything about tax law, I have made it my mission to become a student of it, so I can be relevant to my students.

I’m still moving towards curriculum set goals and proficiencies, but I’m doing it from within my student’s information environment.

the conversation is open…what do you think?

If you’ve been working in ESL for any length of time, or if you’re working to learn a language yourself, you likely have faced the flatline, where language learning and useage seems to stand still, with little noteworthy progress to spur you on.

Basic students usually enjoy sharp, or at least a steadily rising learning/application curve - where they are constantly taking in new vocabulary, using it, and making themselves understood in English. It’s exciting. It’s motivating. It’s fun. You can really note the difference from when you first began, to where you are now.

Then the slump hits. You break into intermediate level fluency, and everything seems to grind to a halt.

I’ve been noticing this with my students, all of whom are at a high intermediate level of English. I’ve been working with some of them for over a year and a half, and with the exception of one, all continue to make very similar mistakes, and still seem to be stuck in a lower geared level of fluency.

There have been improvements, but they’ve been about as measureable as watching a tree grow. You just don’t see immediate, noteable growth overnight. Instead we’ve entered slow grow. It’s about years vs. weeks or months.

I’ve noted considerable increases in confidence, the ability to express thoughts - and have everyone else understand them - has also gone up. However, they are walking the flatline.

Seth Godin has an interesting post around this that I thought was quite interesting. It’s about understanding the local max, and developing the staying power to break through to the BIG MAX.

The local max, borrowing from Godin, is when you or your students are flatlining. When they’re wondering if they’ll ever be able to speak English well, if they’re checking in on how many years they’ve been at this whole English thing, if they’re about ready to try something else, or just plain throw in the towel.

But Godin pushes for something more, something you’re not seeing yet, but should be.

“You’re not succeeding because you haven’t started yet.” (Godin)

While my post is geared towards esl, I think principle applies to many areas, inside and outside of education in general.

If you feel you’ve maxed out, that doesn’t mean you’ve stopped moving forward. More than likely you’re heading towards a minor dip before the next big climb.
Seth’s Blog: Understanding Local Max

More thinking around Brian Alger’s post - Curriculum:The Design of the Prerequisite.

If you’re involved in course/curriculum design, of if you live and work inside of one, you should grab a cup of coffee (make it extra strong!) and try to wade through his post.

All I can say is that my head is still mostly spinning after a third read of this amazing piece. Lots of things to think about and ponder that’s for sure.

“Education and Curriculum are interdependent.” (Alger par.4)

We’ve been discussing the use of blogs in the classroom and the difficulties and walls we seem to be bumping up against from the system we work within. I would like to venture a guess that what we’re running into is the curriculum.

Agler points out that “curriculum is the most basic technology for control and authority in education.” To me, this means that if you are involved in educating - or “training by formal instruction and supervised practice especially in a skill, trade, or profession”(qtd. from Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary) then you are by default, also heavily involved in a curriculum.

Tonight’s thought:
Perhaps curriculum is neither a bad thing nor a good thing. It simply exists. It’s a part of our educational institutions, and is likely to remain so for a very long time. A curriculum can become a bad or good thing depending on the one who wields it.

In the hands of the wrong person, a curriculum becomes a one sided speech that students are forced to listen to and obey. It becomes ” a one-way technology - a push technology - a system of mass communication.”(Agler par. 5) One way. Push. Tune into this program or you fail the year or you fail the big exam at the end. One message to many, and many dialing in on one message.

Curriculum can cooly kill off passion and joy in the classroom as teachers are forced to follow the track and not deviate, and students are downgraded into passive receivers of information.

J.M., a fellow teacher who is also my brother, has written a fantastic post which explores the tension between following the curriculum and blogging.

“Part of my angst is over the seeming contradiction between the inherent open-endedness of the blog platform versus the mandated, closed nature of the literature 12 curriculum. From the research I have done, blogs and social software have been created for a multiple of personal topics. My own blog categories is indicative of this, as it ranges from education to faith and social justice. The blog reflects the blogger.”

“The lit. 12 platform seems to be on the opposite end of this spectrum. It is reflected in the proscribed reading list, and lack of flexibility in teaching (I will give the curriculum this, they do openly state that these are the ‘minimum’ readings and that students should be encouraged to read beyond the course requirements, but as an educator who is trying to equip his students for success in this course–read success on the provincial exam as well as in the course– I have a lot of cognitive dissonance over introducing any ‘extra’ texts into the course package and adding to the workload of all. So, in short, it seems that although ‘going beyond the course’ is encouraged, there is no intrinsic ‘reward’ for classes who do so. In this sense, I find the curriculum, ie the mandated reading list, to be constrictive and confining.” (Palimpsest redux)

It’s personal, social connectedness, and exploration vs. perscribed, lack of flexibility, constriction and confinement.

If we’re at all interested in our students, and being student centered teachers - and boy we had better be because it’s all about them in the first place, then we need to be thinking hard about the curriculum we are working with and under.

Curriculums BY NATURE, according to Agler, are “fundamentally a technology designed to control and impose authority.” (Agler par. 3)

While we do need to follow through with the “must knows,” we need to also make space inside the curriculum for the student and ourselves. If not, we run the terrible risk of falling into a deep joyless void where the curriculum

“exclude(s) the thoughts, ideas and experiences of the students in the educational process, or at least (…) denigrate(s) the role of student to receiver. The effect is much the same for teachers since they do not have any meaningful input into the fundamental structure of curriculum. Often, the best as teacher can do is to try an integrate creative approaches to instructional design. The problem here, of course, is that the nature of this creativity is completely subsumed, framed and shaped by the curriculum - a force that is external to them as well.” (Agler par.5)

Stephen Covey, in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, gives a great explanation around the word responsible. We are the only ones on the planet who can be exposed to a stimulus, and choose our response. We can think about what we will do as a result of something that happens OUTSIDE OF OUR CONTROL, and then act. There is a space between the stimulus and our action where we can learn how to think first, and act more responsively. We are a response - able people.

Curriculum is something that is largely out of our control. We can either get run over by it, or learn how to respond in a way that is congruous to our “must knows” but also that is friendly to student and teacher.

To be continued, but until then the floor is yours…

I’m listening to a skypecast over at weblogg-ed that I’m totally enjoying. Right now Barbara Ganley (a vetren classroom blogging teacher) is talking about modeling, portfolios, assessment - wow! If you’re working with blogs in the classroom, or thinking about it…you need to check this skypecast out.

Weblogg-ed Barbara Ganley Skypecast.

The more I explore, the less I recognize where I am. The more I learn, the less I feel I know. The highway I thought I was flying down, has suddenly become an overgrown, hard to follow, dirt pathway.

I’m loving every minute of this journey. The following, I warn you, is an exploration. It’s unfinished, and way open to conversation…

So begins the headshift…

The last few days we’ve been kicking around the “blogging in the classroom” meme.Today,
after following a link from elearnspace to an article that I think I will describe as staggering, I found myself in an exciting, but completly strange new world. A world that I think we’ve been sort of bumping up against as we attempt to think about how blogs, and technology fit into the classroom.

I say bumping up against, because I think there is something in the way.

I have to laugh about this. On Friday I was beginning yet another post around blogging in the classroom. This one, as a result of a post by James Farmer over at Blogsavvy.

I was about to come out in favor of “purpose driven” blogging in the classroom. Was going to suggest that maybe true (See par. 10 onward.) blogging, read: independent, free flowing, subversive, and individualized, where the purpose of that blog is intrinsic, could really not survive in the curriculum driven classroom.

I was going to suggest that maybe there is another kind of blogging for the classroom. The kind Farmer spoke of, where the teacher and curriculum, along with the student, has a hand in its direction - but largely the curriculum and teacher would win out in this scenario don’t you think?

This has been my difficulty. Every time I think and post around classroom blogging, and every time I read someone else’s post around this topic, I feel tension. Tension between what real blogging is, and how most courses, classrooms, teachers, and schools function. Blogging vs. Curriculum. Can they really mix?

Then I followed the elearnspace link to Brian Alger’sExperience Designer Network blog. My previous post vaporized.

Opening Key Points as I broke through the highway’s guardrail and fell into the exciting jungle…

“Curriculum is the most basic technology for control and authority in education and is commonly backed by extensive legislation as well as generations of cultural conditioning. In the sense, then need for a curriculum has become an assumption - a presupposition.” (Alger, Nov. 2005. Par. 2)

- Have we been teaching under an assumption? Is curriculum based teaching, the way most everyone does it, really the way we should be doing this? Or is curriculum merely a thing taken for granted. Accepted as true because that’s the way school has been done for as long as we can remember? What if this idea of curriculum is….NOT the way learning should be managed and delivered?

According to Alger, the major assumption of curriculum is “the idea that a group of experts can and should predetermine the knowledge, skills and attitudes that people will acquire over long periods of time.” (Curriculum: The Design of the Prerequisite par.2)

The very thought that we should be sticking our hands into classroom blogging flies directly against Alger’s view on learning. “Further, learning cannot be developed “for” students but is by default always designed “by” them.” (Curriculum: The Design of the Prerequisite par.3) He then goes on to quickly point out a difference between learning and education that I have never really thought about before, having always somehow thought them to be the same.

Alger mentions some important characteristics of curriculum, and I include my humble thoughts on why it may not mix well with true blogging efforts.

“Curriculum is fundamentally a technology designed to control and impose authority.”
- A few bad words in there for true bloggers - control and authority. True blogging, from what I’ve seen so far, is in nature independent. Is free from outside author rule, and bucks imposed authority. It’s subversive in nature because it’s individual, while a curriculum “like television, is a form of mass communication.” (Alger, 2005) In my mind, curriculum is mass communication that broadcasts a message to a wide audience, forcing them to tune into the program to succeed. If you don’t follow the program, you don’t pass the grade, you don’t graduate, you fail.

Blogging, again if it’s real, has unlimited channels. It’s cable, not a local two or three station network. It’s cable because the broadcast varies by its source: the person. You’re not limited to just two or three local channels anymore. In blogging, the content of the “broadcast” is set by the broadcaster. It’s done for intrinsic purposes rather than explicit ones.

And: “Curriculum embraces education, but not necessarily learning.” (Alger, 2005)
Just because we’re following a curriculum doesn’t guarantee our students are learning. It just means we’re following a curriculum.

To be continued… The coversation is wide open.

This is sort of re-examining a line of thought around blogging practices in the classroom.

This morning I was revisiting Aaron Campbell’s post over at Dekita.org around approaches to classroom blogging.

Today’s focus: how involved should a trajectory coach get in the content of a student’s blog post. Is it hands in and on, or largely model and invite?

Taken from EDUCAUSE REVIEW | September/October 2004, Volume 39, Number 5

“What happens when a free-flowing medium such as blogging interacts with the more restrictive domains of the educational system? What happens when the necessary rules and boundaries of the system are imposed on students who are writing blogs, when grades are assigned in order to get students to write at all, and when posts are monitored to ensure that they don’t say the wrong things?”

“After returning from a writing teachers’ conference with sessions on blogging, Richard Long, a professor at St. Louis Community College, explained the issue this way: “I’m not convinced, however, the presenters who claimed to be blogging are actually blogging. They’re using blogging software, their students use blogging software, but I’m not convinced that using the software is the same as blogging. For example, does posting writing prompts for students constitute blogging? Are students blogging when they use blogging software to write to those prompts?”

That’s a thinker isn’t it? There’s a huge difference between using blog software, and really blogging. Between journaling and edu-blogging.

So, based on the above thoughts, can/should trajectory coaches (be they esl, math, lit, writing etc. coaches) be stipulating student content? Can authentic, passionate, blogging be done without a “teacher-set” direction? Is it poor edu-blogging practice to set some sort of direction or standard to work to?

And that brings me back to my cluelessness around objectives. Should they be implicit or explicit?

The jury is still out.