I Have It All Wrong...But I Have An Idea To Fix It

Graphic from SHSU

A few days ago, I posted a research idea  to investigate better ways of giving feedback to my student writers using digital tools.  The problem? I was going about it with my research end already in mind. I know from my work with students and from research already done by so many others what I would find: the students who are not as confident in their writing skills do not feel confident giving feedback on their peer's writing.  And the fix that I had in mind was that I would use the features of Google Docs to comment and give more feedback. But this is no different that what I am already doing!  Simply writing more on a student's writing piece is not going to necessarily ensure that they do something with that feedback.  It just makes more work for me as the teacher. I need a better idea for how to help students engage with meaningful revision of their written work.

Aaron Sams at PAECT event, Oct. 2013

Something I heard Aaron Sams talk about when I ate lunch with him at a PAECT event in October has been kicking around in the back of my mind.  A small group of us were discussing how we tackled grading issues when much of our planning time was used to created the resource materials that students use to learn our materials at home.  In the flipped learning approach, students learn from our instructional materials as homework while classtime is used to practice, collaborate, and workshop.  What this looks like in my high school English classroom can be a bit chaotic at times.  The big switch for me came when I asked students to complete their written work in class rather than in isolation at home.  This made a significant difference.  Students work on their writing with me in the classroom acting as their coach, they can ask questions of their peers, and they see models for how writing happens all around them.  But when do you grade all this work?  Aaron Sams' response: "I never take grading home."  WHHHAAAT??!!  Instead, he grades every assignment with the student in the classroom through a one-on-one conference.  Sounds awesome, right?  My first thought was, "Wow, I wish I could do that, but I don't have time enough in class."  After all, I'm and English teacher and Sams is a science teacher.  I just don't have time to conference every essay.

Wait!  Yes I do! So what I hoped to encourage was student engagement with the feedback they received on their written assignments.  Conferencing does this.  How many times on this blog have I mentioned the work of Lucy Calkins and Kelly Gallagher and Troy Hicks and the fantastic work done by all the National Writing Project educators, all of whom have shown again and again how conferencing with student writers not only helps the writer better understand her process and writing choices but also encourages a deeper level of reflection on where revision (not just editing) needs to happen.  And not only that, but conferencing with students while other students are in the room serves as a model for everyone on how we talk and think and support writing.  What would be a better use of our classtime? So I need to make time to conference/grade every essay in class.  And, I have an idea for how to do it.

Photo by Laurie Sullivan

My students are already using Google Docs and shared folders to turn in their essays.  The shared folder makes it easy for us to give feedback on each other's work throughout the drafting process since we can access each other's writing at any time either in school or outside of it. We use the comment feature in Google Docs to give written feedback. And as I handout the grading rubric the day a writing piece is assigned, we use the rubric to guide how we give peer feedback. But when it comes time to grade the essays, traditionally I have written all my feedback out on a printed grading rubric, not on the student's actual document.  Well, I'm going to change that up a bit, and here's how:

Audio recoding app in Google Drive

On the day that students are to turn in a completed writing piece, I'll call them up to the teacher's computer where I can already have the student's essay pulled up on my screen.  I'll have the grading rubric on my desk, and the student and I will use it to go over the writing piece together with the student making notes on the rubric as we discuss her piece.  There's a handy little tool in Chrome called Kaizena (formerly 121Writing).  When you are in Drive, click on "Create" and at the bottom of the options you will see "Connect More Apps."  Use the search box to find and install Kaizena.  What does it do?  It allows a user to record audio while looking at a specific Google document.  So, while the student and I are conferencing and collaborating over the grading rubric, I can record our conversation so that when the student goes back to her seat or goes home, she can access a recording of our conversation about her writing piece any time she wants!

Graphic from SHSU

Of course, there is no way that I will be able to conference with a class of 20-30 students in one 90-minute class period.  It will likely take three class periods.  However, as I'm conferencing, students can be using feedback to revise or make further edits or work on another piece.  Trust me, it took me a lot long than three days to get graded essays back to students using the model that I was working with. And the part that I am most excited about - not only will individual students have the ability to go back and listen to the audio record of our conference, but because their work is shared in a class Google folder, other students in the class could access the conference and learn from it as well.  I leave it up to the individual student on whether or not to leave the privacy setting open so others in the class can see and comment on their work, and surprisingly most leave their documents open for others to comment on. Using this conferencing model, I could end up with four or five essays from each student with audio conferences for each, and at the least that's 80 recorded conferences for students to use as models to improve their own writing.

There is some research being done on the effectiveness of using audio to record feedback for student writers.  Dr. Jeff Sommers at West Chester University has been publishing on this idea for the past couple years. His article in the Journal of College Literacy and Learning titled "Response 2.0: Commentary on Student Writing for the New Millenium" addresses how audio recordings can be a more effective feedback tool for student writers than the traditional written feedback.  So I am encouraged by this new model for grading student writing.

I am interested in how other teachers are using both conferences and digital tools to give student writers feedback.  Have you used audio tools to give your student writers revision suggestion?

Can "I" Fit In?

"This ‘rhetorical identity’ - the presence invested in the text, developed by the writer to accomplish particular persuasive effects in the minds of readers, not only contributes to the writer’s authority/credibility but also helps build a mutual relationship to readers as fellow scholars. Effective rhetorical identity defines a textual voice that is at once distinctive and strongly resonant with readers,” writes Juanita Rodgers Comfort in her essay "Becoming a Writerly Self: College Writers Engaging Black Feminist Essays" (532-3).

I teach 15 and 16-year-old students non-Western literature. Throughout our semester we read a variety of African short stories and essays, poems from India, and novels set in Afghanistan. And as a white, female, middle-class teacher who grew up in the Midwest, I struggle to help students see beyond the “otherness” of the texts we read, to stop holding these texts at a distance, to stop reading them as exotic. The strategy of using model texts that employ the personal as a tool for teaching emerging writers to identify and also write with their own clear “rhetorical identity” (532) is intriguing, especially given that as essayist Juanita Rodgers Comfort points out, many teachers at the secondary level and beyond view the disclosure of the personal as “incompatible with the critical detachment valued in much disciplinary discourse” (527). We teach our secondary-level writers to leave the first-person out of the essay, give them easy rules to remember: spell out contractions and numbers under 10 and never use I, me, my, mine. We religate the role of student writer to outsider, making them “others” as well. We hinder not only our students’ critical engagement with content but also their greater understanding of their own developing identities as thinkers and writers when we forbid the personal stance in their writing. Comfort writes, “If imagining, through composing, is something more significant to students than exercises in critical detachment, and if we do not expect them to remain essentially unchanged by the encounters with the ideas they write about, then composing text must be for the purposes of these students’ education, becoming insurgent intellectuals (to use a term coined by West and bell hooks) who are personally invested in the world of ideas” (521). I want to teach insurgent intellectuals.

Photo by Steven DePolo

Bringing the personal into essay writing, when done with the help of carefully selected model texts, can help our students better understand their voice as thinkers and writers. “Rhetorically,” Comfort writes, “self-disclosures foreground the embodied nature of the self, which, through selective, insightful sharing, can build connections between writers and readers that authorize the writer to make claims to ensure the acceptability of those claims” (522). And so in using these rhetorically sophisticated texts that incorporate personal disclosures, we can also teach emerging writers to understand the personal voice as a persuasive writing technique, a rhetorical strategy and position that writers use for a variety of reasons (523). In doing so, students become a part of the conversation about composing rather than left outside of it. “I am convinced that significant problems arise with student writing precisely when they have not defined and located themselves as effectively self-authorized knowers for their evaluative audiences,” Comfort writes (529). No where is this more true than in the high school writing classroom where students are working not only on defining who they are as readers, writers, and thinkers, but where they are also really beginning the work of understanding their own unique cultures, positions, and identities. And it is in our classrooms, where students have already been told multiple times and multiple ways that their understanding of the world is incomplete, students crave opportunities to make sense of their learning and demonstrate it in personally meaningful ways. Teaching students to recognize and utilize their “rhetorical identity” will serve them well as they write to “assess, define, and assert who they are becoming as knowing beings” (534).

But this will not be easy work. Toward the end of the essay, Comfort suggests that utilizing the work of black feminist essayists is a way of helping increase student sensitivity to the writer’s ethos and better understand why and when writers invoke the personal (533). I wonder if this can be done effectively with high school writers, many of whom have been told time and again to disavow the personal stance, and who when given opportunities to write using first-person strongly lean toward confessional writing. Although I love Comfort’s call for writing instruction that enables “students to recognize the writerly self as a persuasive instrument that can be strategically deployed and to learn to make effective use of their own multiple locations to take personal stands on public issues that transcend the confessional” (531), I wonder if this can be done well with emerging writers who do not have a clear idea of their own locations.

How can we best help our emerging writers understand and develop their "rhetorical identities"?

Essay taken from Teaching Composition: Background Readings, third edition, edited by T.R. Johnson.

Gimmie Feedback

Photo by Avolore

So with a bit of a stutter start due to a freak number of snow days this month, I've gone back to school. Full-time. My sabbatical this semester has me in three graduate courses, one being my required research methods course. Now, I just need to decide what I want to research. In the past, I've done action-research on mastery grading and written some about my interest in engaging student writers with authentic audiences. This time around, I want to spend time thinking about ways to grow stronger writers through feedback.

I’m hoping to conduct my research on student writing and ways in which I can help students better understand their own process of production and engage more deeply in their reflection and revision process. This is a topic that has been written about extensively by many others, and the works of Ralph Fletcher, Kelly Gallagher, Troy Hicks, Penny Kittle, and Nancie Atwell have certainly shaped how I interact with my student writers. However, I want to take some time to focus specifically on what is happening in my classroom, what I’m actually doing to teach and support my emerging writers, and reflect on my teaching strategies and assumptions of how my students learn their writing skills.

Photo by Mortsan

For the last seven or so years, I have almost exclusively taught tenth grade English at a suburban high school just outside of Philadelphia. With about 450 students per grade level at our high school, I usually end up teaching somewhere between 140-170 tenth graders each year, about a third of the grade level. I am generally teaching either honors level or academic level students, though those distinctions are often blurred as our district does not have true levelling system in that students with their parents self-select the level of the course they will take. My classes are diverse in that our district brings together students from a wide socio-economic range, and it is not unusual to have students who come from homes where both parents have advanced degrees and students whose parents did not attend college in the same class. That said, although our cultural diversity is increasing in the district, the majority of students identify as Caucasian, and I would guess that about 80% of my students started in the district as kindergarten students. As such, most of my students have come through a system that focuses on teaching the basic expository paragraph which culminates in writing essays formatted on the five-paragraph style of writing. However, as students get into their sophomore year, that formula for writing breaks down. Content teachers across our high school complain that student writing lacks analysis and critical thinking. So I have spent a great deal of time reflecting on how to teach writing that both encourages students to engage deeply with their content materials as well as reflect on how they are organizing their message.

In my classroom, I have moved away from writing on paper, finding that using online spaces to write, namely blogs and shared Google Docs, allow for greater feedback and for me to act more as a coach during the writing process rather than simply responding to student writing after the final copy has been turned in. I can give feedback as they write. When it is working well, students are not simply writing their own work, but engaged with their peers in a collaborative feedback process. This, however, has been difficult to manage. Generally speaking, the students that enjoy writing, who already write well coming into my classroom, are the same ones that spend the most time engaging with their writing and with the writing of their classmates. The students that need the most support are also those that rarely take time give to feedback to other students. This makes sense. The students comfortable and confident with their writing also feel comfortable helping others. However, the students that need more support, who would benefit from both giving and getting feedback, are those less likely to get it. And as a teacher of about 70 students each semester, I find it difficult to give feedback at multiple points to each student during their drafting process. So even though I know from research that students benefit from feedback during their writing process rather than after they complete it, I struggle to make that happen consistently for all students. This is where I would like to focus my research: How can I use digital tools to provide feedback on student writing that encourages revision and reflection on the writing process? And, how can I get all students involved in that process of feedback as well?

Here's where my research starts - with questions:

• How do I get all students involved in the process of giving feedback to their peers?
• Is it helping or hindering the giving of peer feedback that I do not grade peer feedback?
• What types of feedback do students find most helpful during their writing process?
• At what point in the writing process do students find feedback most helpful?
• What inhibits students from giving feedback to their peer’s writing?
• If my goal with feedback is to get students to go back into their writing to make content revisions and reflect on their writing process, should I grade student interaction with the feedback that I give?
• How much is access is reliable wireless devices an issue?
• How might the use of digital tools help the feedback/revision process become more transparent for both the student writer and the teacher?

As a National Writing Project (NWP) fellow, I am invested in students exploring their process of writing. In fact, on the very first day of each semester, the students and I begin by writing a short piece describing a metaphor for our writing process. How do we come up with and then refine our ideas through composition? I clearly approach the teaching of writing from a post-process approach, which means that I share with students, both explicitly and subtly, my understanding of writing as a non-linear process that is public, interpretive, and situated. My understanding of teaching writing influence by this post-process approach as well as by critical theories and is steeped in the writing of Alfie Kohn, Paulo Freire, Grant Wiggins, Allen Webb, and most recently by Troy Hicks, another NWP teacher who has focused his recent work on crafting digital writing with student writers.

And my own writing experiences have shaped how I teach writing. Many of my secondary school teachers and some of my undergraduate professors would share feedback in the form of one or two sentences and a grade at the end of my essays, which did little to encourage reflection on my own writing process. Yet, I was always writing, both for school and for pleasure. It really wasn't until I attend a small liberal arts college for my Masters in Liberal Arts that I began to reflect on how writing happens. My graduate professors gave extensive feedback not on my grammar or sentence construction, but on the content of my writing, talking back with me about how I constructed my ideas and rationales. And, our writing assignments were many times for larger audiences. We were sharing our essays with the other students in class, and many times we were submitting out for publication as well. It was in this program that I learned HTML code, not because I took a course but because I needed to create a website to share a few of my essays for a course on American women writers. And it was this experience of writing for a real audience that changed how I thought about my own writing and about teaching writing. When I started receiving emails from people who were reading my work online, I went back and made deliberate revisions (I even noticed this past week that one of my pieces was referenced in a book). And, I also sought out more opportunities to publish. I've been fortunate to have a couple of my poems published, my essay for This I Believe published, and of course I blog. So in teaching writing, I have sought many opportunities for students to write for larger audiences, not just for me as their teacher.

Photo from Flickr Creative Commons

Technology has made this increasingly easy to do. My students blog, submit for publication through websites and emails, and create their own web pages. And this has had an impact on what they select to write about and share. However, many students still seem to view the writing that they do for school as school writing, meaning it is only important insofar as the grade they receive. I don’t know if this is because students are used to using digital tools (Google Docs, blogs, etc.) to share their work and so the unique sense of an audience has disappeared for them or if perhaps they are so disempowered by the types of circumscribed writing that they have been asked to do that by the time I get them as tenth graders they don’t see the relevance of the writing we are doing. Maybe a combination of the two. But whatever the reason, my students do not seem to engage in reflection and revision as deeply as I would like to see them do.

So this is where my research into using digital tools to provide feedback to student writers begins. I hope to share with other teachers how using digital tools to give feedback makes the writing process more transparent for the students and the teacher and can grow student investment in building their writing skills. To this, my goal is not just interview my students, but students from a variety of schools and settings about how they engage with feedback on their writing. If you are interested in helping (or know someone who might be), reach out! I'd love to make new connections!

Google Glass Goes To Class

Just the other day I received my email invitation to join Google Glass Explorers. I have so many ideas about how to bring Glass into my classroom, and I would love your help in bringing this wearable technology to my 10th grade English class. So I have set up a crowdfunding site on IndieGogo to help me raise the necessary funds. I would love your help!

Game Time

At this point last weekend, I was sitting in Philip Vinogradov's session on Gamification and Flipped Instruction at the DCIU Google Symposium.  But to say that I was just sitting there would be inaccurate.  Instead, shortly after Philip's opening remarks, we split into small groups and my teammates and I, who did not know one another prior to the presentation, read through the first directions which happened to refer to rolling some dice using Dungeons and Dragons lingo.  It took only a few seconds for us to realize that all of us understood the directions; we all had played D and D. We were united, we were nerdy, and we quickly set to work completing the first task. It took a little while longer to realize that we had completed the first task of Philip's presentation prior to him explaining it to the rest of the educators in the room.  And it was that moment that got me thinking more seriously about gamification. We were engaged from the introduction to the close of his presentation.

Photo by peddhapati

I am new to the idea of gamification.  As a high school English teacher, I used to think that gamification referred to the use of online avatars and badges to reward student progress, which sounded a bit too much like the stickers given to elementary students, too much like an extrinstic reward.  Although I have seen a number of gamification sessions listed on recent conference programs, I must confess that I dismissed it as just an educational fad inspired by teachers who had grown up playing a few too many role playing games (which I should also confess that I would be included in that group as not only did I play D and D with an actual group but also played all...yes, all...the D and D inspired video games).  But when I saw that Philip's presentation also included elements of flipped learning, I was intrigued.  And now I must admit that I am a bit ashamed that I had so quickly dismissed gamification as a fad. As Philip's presentation demonstrated, the principles of gamification are not simply to have fun or hand out rewards.  Instead, the principles of gamification include engaging students in higher order problem-solving skills, both collaborative and competitive learning, placing learning opportunities in the students' hands.   So if this skeptical teacher was engaged in the first few minutes, imagine the possibility that gamification holds for classroom planning and instruction.

Philip's presentation had our group of teachers reflecting and discussing the possibilities of implementing gamification in a variety of classrooms, from elementary math classes to high school English courses.  And something that I have found myself returning to over the course of this week is Philip's helpful heuristic - Q.U.E.S.T.T.  I would highly encourage teachers to review his presentation materials below for a better introduction to the principles of gamification than I could give. I also found that participating in the #levelupEd Twitter chat this past week was another good introduction to teachers in various stages of using these principles in their lesson design.  The interest in incorporating the principles of game-play into lesson design is growing, and it is easier for me now to see why.  The ideas of gamification and game-design thinking are not simply about rewarding players, or in this case students.  Instead, the same principles that underpin problem-based learning, flipped learning, and mastery learning are also at the heart of the gamification movement.  It is about inspiring and empowering learning at all levels.

Changes in Teaching Writing from EduCon

This past weekend, I attended EduCon at Philadelphia’s Science Leadership Academy in which teachers, librarians, education professors, think tank members, app developers, even representatives from the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Technology came together to discuss innovations happening in education. While attending a number of sessions on innovations in the reading/writing classroom, which at EduCon are called conversations, I was fortunate enough to connect with two very dynamic SLA teachers -Larissa Pahomov and Meenoo Rami.  The session that Larissa lead on Sunday focused on the reading/writing workshop model, and conversations that started in that section have stuck with me all week as I reflect on changes that I would like to make in my own classroom.

Photo by vanhookc

As a National Writing Project fellow, Larissa's approach to teaching writing is similar to what I try to foster in my classroom, a way that is being questioned more and more in light of the increase in state-based high-stakes testing, especially given that student performance on these state tests will now be included in teacher evaluations, at least in Pennsylvania. Over the course of my teaching career, I have applied he ideas of the writing workshop model while teaching emerging writers. What this looks like is a classroom that engages students in writing for authentic audiences, writing in response to texts and to events, encouraging student choice, encouraging publication outside the classroom, all those higher-order thinking activities that research has shown encourages and engages students in a more thoughtful level of interaction with texts. I am especially interested in the doors that technology opens up when it comes to reading and writing with students. This has been my passion.

As a beginning teacher I was heavily steeped in holistic models of teaching which encouraged authentic assessment, formative assessment, differentiation, and student choice. Technology has allowed educators to help students understand that reading and writing are not activities done only in the classroom. I am interested in how teachers are leveraging technology to connect students with authentic audiences for their writing endeavors. But also I wonder how digital writing is changing how students understand texts.

Amanda Lyons' Visuals for Change from EduCon

The Pew Research Foundation just released a study that found just under a quarter of Americans didn’t even open a book last year. Yet, the content that is both being produced and consumed online rises exponentially. People are reading, though they may not be reading traditional texts. Students are reading and writing online. But have our models for teaching writing changed. What does this mean for how we teach young writers? I think it would be interesting to interview and perhaps survey secondary students from a couple of different locals school about their reading and writing habits outside of school and connect that with how students feel they have learned about writing. My guess is that many teachers use traditional printed texts as models for their student writing, asking students to practice the more traditional five-paragraph format of writing as this is how students are assessed on state and academic achievement tests. Yet since more and more of the text that is produced is digital, hyperlinked, and dynamic, shouldn’t the writing that we do in the classroom reflect the type of writing that is actually happening in our world? Which students feel more confident about their writing experiences and abilities - those that learn writing using traditional text models or those that write using digital mentor texts? I sense a research project for myself.

But don't misunderstand me; I am not advocating the death of paperback books in schools.  An e-reader cannot replace the feeling of a well-worn, well-loved book, whose pages are annotated with connections, definitions, and reminders of readings past.  Helping students understand how to navigate and enjoy a good printed book is a skill.  However, what I am advocating is that we need to bring the digital texts that students are also reading into the classroom, hold them up for inspection and help students become critical readers of these texts in thes same way we do traditional texts. But this is not a new suggestion.  Troy Hicks has been talking and writing about this for years!  And like Hicks, I agree that students should be using these digital texts as mentor texts for their own writing.

Oh, there's an idea for an e-book - The Digital Mentor Text: Teaching Writing 2.0.  So who wants to help write it with me?

Reflections on Connected Learning from EduCon

Often times we hear the term "Connected Learning" thrown around educational workshops and blogs in conjunction with building our students' digital literacies, and often it is used to refer to those connected online interactions that we attempt to foster with our learners. However, participating in today's EduCon conversation hosted by Christina Cantrill, Danielle Filipiak, Larissa Pahomov, Meenoo Rami, Robert Rivera-Amezola, and virtually by Antero Garcia has me reconsidering the term. My notion of connected learning is changing. Although connected learning does have much to do with fostering collaborative connections, it is not simply an online process. Connected learning is something that we do with our hands, with every part of us. We take the time to connect with what is happening in our world, learn from it, and connect with interested others. Connected learning is hands on learning. It is the type of participatory learning that humanizes what happens in the classroom. But how does it do this?

Today's presenters shared with us a graphic from the Connected Learning group outlining how connected learning empowers students. "Connected learning is a model of learning that holds out the possibility of reimagining the experience of education in the information age. It draws on the power of today's technology to fuse young people's interests, friendships, and academic achievement through experiences laced with hands-on production, shared purpose, and open networks." I know what you may be thinking, sounds a bit lofty, right? Here's what struck me during some of the smaller group discussions that we had during this session: this is why I became a teacher. I've been interested in connected learning, or some variation of it, my entire teaching career.

I started my teacher education program in 1994 when the talk of the time was holistic portfolio assessment which gave students opportunities to revise and select their best work for assessment. Portfolios provided students an opportunity to view their work over time, reflect on their growth as writers, and have choice over how and on what they were assessed. This is the start of connected learning, the foundation. When ownership over the ideas, in this case writing, remains in the hands of students, learners are empowered.

As I neared the end of my undergraduate program and student teaching loomed on the horizon, the professor of my Strategies for Teaching Writing course connected each of us would-be teachers with one of his high school English students. In a sort of pen pal relationship, we helped our students revise pieces they were working on and sent them creative pieces of our own for feedback. We weren't just writing mentors for this group of high school students. We were writing partners. And it is here where I really started to develop my interest in what was then called Authentic Assessment, giving students opportunities to have their work viewed by real audiences. This too is a component of connected learning; giving students real purpose for their work and a specific audience to tailor that work to not only engages students more deeply in their task but also helps students feel empowered.

When finally I found myself in my own classroom after a couple of moves and career detours, one of the big issues my English department discussed was student choice. Where are we fostering student engagement and differentiation through student choice? Not long after beginning my first teaching job, I attended the annual NCTE conference in Pittsburgh where I saw Carlin Borsheim and Robert Petrone speak about how they fostered student choice through a local action research project in which students selected an issue facing their local community, interviewed local experts, and put together research essays and demonstrations based on their findings. Their presentation changed the entire way I thought about teaching. You mean I didn't have to give students a list of topics? I didn't need to outline every step along the way that students needed to complete? When I came back to my tenth grade students following that conference, we ditched our traditional research unit. Instead, I told students that in the real world research was done to affect change, so that's what we needed to do. What did you want to change? Research became action. As I teach a non-Western literature course, the only stipulation that I gave students was that they needed to pick an issue facing a non-western country and do something about it. Along the way they researched, wrote project proposals, and typed up lengthy, citation-heavy essays about their topics, but the culminating piece was that they needed to do something with their topic outside the walls of our classroom. They needed to adapt their research to a specific audience. And over the last six or so years, students have fundraised to build a computer lab for a high school in Kabul, collected school supplies for a secondary school in Haiti, put together a bake sale to support an orphanage in Kolkuta, started a student club to raise awareness about genocide in Darfur, crafted articles for the student paper, put together web pages and Facebook groups, and so much more. And this, too, seems to be at the heart of Connected Learning. In fact, as described by the Connected Learning group, "Interests foster the drive to gain knowledge and expertise. Research has repeatedly shown that when the topic is personally interesting and relevant, learners achieve much higher-order learning outcomes." And this was certainly true when I switched from teaching the more traditional research paper. But, I didn't reach every student. Some students were not interested in issues taking place so far away from home.

@plugusin reflects on EduCon

So this fall, after participating in AJ Juliani's MOOC to learn with other teachers about 20% time projects, I knew I needed to teach research writing differently. Research? What students get excited to write a research paper? So instead of writing the ubiquitous research essay about bullying or problems facing students in Afghanistan, my students and I started 20% time projects in which 20% of our week (one class day each week) was dedicated to researching a topic that students don't ordinarily have time or access to research in the traditional school setting. My 10th graders learned to quilt, how to film a documentary, how to write a screenplay, how to write code, how to decorate a cake, how to start a business, and so much more. And as a part of their research, they needed to interview an expert in the field. We could not have done this without the help of Twitter and Google Docs. We created a spreadsheet with all the student topics and their request for people to interview. I tweeted it out, and within a few days we had a video game script writer at Bethesda Games to interview, a master cake decorator who appeared on Food Network, published authors, television production managers, photographers - all of whom connected with us virtually using Twitter, Google Drive, and email. And this is where it all came together for me - holistic grading, authentic assessments, differentiation, and student choice. Connected learning. It is not often when a teacher has students rushing into class asking if today was a research day, begging for more time to produce pitch videos, conduct interviews, and practice for presentations. And throughout this process, students were writing...a lot! Formal proposals, weekly blog posts, emails requesting and then thanking interviewees, reflection posts on interviews - my students wrote more and more often as part of this research than had previous students. And while I did not require them to write what would be considered a traditional research essay, many of them did in order to prepare themselves for presentations and speeches that they would later deliver. And along the way, we shared all parts of our research through our class blogs and shared Google Drive folder, which meant we could see each other's thinking every step of the way. We were models and mentors for each other. This is connected learning.

But how I got to this point, as you can see, did not happen overnight or even over the course of one year. So we must be patient with those new to this idea of connected learning, offer support along the way, and as Larissa Pahomov pointed out in our session today, remember that this is not an additive model of education. We are not adding one more thing to our curriculums. We are reimagining how we can teach the same skills that we have been teaching in a way that connects and empowers learners.