Class so far...

Dear Dr. Jones,
     Class so far is going great! I signed up for this class because it was the only elective that I had left to take and to be honest I wasn't too excited to take it. I have never been a big fan of writing, it just has never came easy to me. So at the start of this class I didn't really know what to expect because of my past feelings about writing. However, being over a month into this class, I couldn't be more pleased with what this class has to offer. I have never had so much freedom to write about whatever and however we wanted to. It allows me to enjoy the writing more, which I feel helps to improve my writing overall.

Over the past few weeks that we have been in class I have learned so much already and have enjoyed every minute of it! Although I have heard about blogs I have never used them before so everything was new to me. I have learned how to set up blogs as well as post and respond to others. Now that I have learned how to do them it is something that I can see myself using in the future-not only for myself, but with my students in the future as well. However, the one major thing that I found most interesting so far is the challenge that Hicks makes against the definition of writing. He tells us that we should think of writers not merely as writers, but as composers as well. He talk about photo-essays as being a form of writing, which I disagree with. I feel that writing should be visual letters written on paper instead of a bunch of picture put together to tell a story. However, I feel that if we add some writing to our pictures or if we add pictures or even podcasts into our writing, writers can be thought of composers and writers all in one.

When I write, I tend to do a lot of thinking to make sure I get everything that is needed or that I want to say down on paper. I think that I sometimes over think, which I feel could be the reason why I have always had trouble when it comes to writing. I tend to edit and revise as much as possible while I write, when I should be focusing on the flow of the writing and the content. One thing that I feel that I need to work on more is my prewriting. I need to plan better about the topics that I plan to write about since 70 percent of writing is spent on the prewriting part. That is one thing that I have never spent much time on, which has probably been my biggest weakness when it comes to my writing.

Blogging and wikis are two strategies that we have been taught that I feel will be very beneficial to use as a teacher of literacy. I want my students to have the change to learn from other people's writings and responses to their writings. They could share their thoughts and ideas with others and make changes to their writings if they feel the need to based on the feedback they receive from their peers as well as their teacher. Wikis will also provide my students the opportunity to work collaboratively with one another on writing tasks, which I feel is an important thing to be able to do.

Overall, I really wouldn't say that I am struggling in any certain area. I definitely think that I need to continue working on everything that we have learned about this semester so far, considering it is pretty much all new to me. The more practice I am able to get, the better I will become at everything that is new to me.

                                                                                Sincerely,
                                                                                  Krista Urbanczyk

Learning and Incorporating Blogs and Wikis into the Classroom

Before last semester, I had never used, let alone heard of a wiki before. We had to use them in an online class that I was taking. I enjoyed being able to see everyone's thoughts and writings about each of the topics that we were given. Wikis allowed us to put our writings together and allowed us to give our peers different ideas for their writing. Since I have only used wikis once, I'm sure that I don't know everything there is to know about them just after one semester, which makes me want to work with them more in order to learn more about them. The more that I learn about wikis now, the better I will be able to help students in my future classrooms learn how to use them as well so that they can collaborate with their peers on different writing pieces. I want my students to have the chance to read others writings and be able to give them  their ideas about their writing. And since every update you make to your writing is saved, it makes it easy for students to go back to anything they need to so that they can see what they previously wrote.  

Another digital tool that I have had little to no practice with are blogs. Yes, I have heard of blogs before, but before this semester I have never used blogging before. In the beginning of this class, I had a few glitches with blogger since it was the first time that I had ever used it. However, I am finally starting to figure it all out and I am actually starting to see all the benefits that blogging can have for both students and teachers when it comes to writing workshop. I enjoy being able to continue my writing at home and then posting it so that others can read it and comment on it with their own thoughts and ideas. It also allows the teacher extra time to read every students writing on their own time and give the student feedback just like they would in a face-to-face conference. As Hicks says on p. 37, by having writings and responses captured digitally it "provides a permanence that talk during a face-to-face conference does not".  It also allows us to pause and reflect on what others have to say. From the time I have spent so far blogging, I could really see myself using this in my future classrooms. I think that it is a great idea to have everything electronically saved so that it is easy to access it whenever needed. The best thing that I found that I like about blogs so far is that as soon as you post it, it is date stamped so that it is easy to find in the future if necessary.

In the past two semesters, I have learned about how to use two new digital tools. I think that they are both very valuable and beneficial to both students and teachers and they are both something that I want to incorporate into my classrooms someday. When it comes to writing workshop, I would for the most part like to give my students the freedom to choose the topics that they want to write about so it will drive them to better writing. I would encourage my students to look at others writings and post their thoughts and any ideas that they may have for their peers. I will want my students to take part in collaborative writing as well and to do this I would post weekly wikis that the students would be responsible for completing. I feel very excited about trying this in my own classroom someday and I can't wait to be able to do so. 

Hicks, T. (2009). The digital writing workshop. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Journals within the Classroom

   Looking back, I never really enjoyed writing in journals when I was in school. To me it was just busy work to give the teachers some extra time to do something that they needed to do. I didn't really see the point of it at the time. However, as a future teacher and with the amount of education that I have received since then, I now have a totally different prospective on journal writing. 

   When I get my own classroom someday, I definitely want to incorporate journal writing in my daily instruction. I plan to use a variety of journal writing methods: personal journals, dialogue journals, and depending on the grade level I am teaching I may introduce digital journals, like wikis or blogs. I feel like each of these types of journals have many advantages that I would like to have in my classroom. 

 

   By using personal journals or dialogue journals, it allows the student the freedom to write about anything that they want, as long as the teacher doesn't give the students a specific topic to write about. The students know that anything they say in their journals stay between the teacher and the student, so they are free to say whatever they want or feel. With dialogue journals, teachers can write back and fourth to the student and they are able to have an ongoing conversation. It is also a way for the teacher to get to know the student better and create a personal trusting relationship with the student. There are a lot of kids out there that don't have many people to talk to or feel safe talking to nowadays, so it is important to me to incorporate these journals into my classroom so that my students will be able to talk to me about things that they are normally would not talk about. 

   If I ever taught in the upper grades, I would want to have them use wikis or blogs as their journals. I would want to be able to assign work that they would have to do on their own at home. I would expect my students to read their peers writing and comment on it and give them ideas on how they could make their writing even better. In the upper grade levels, I find collaboration with peers to be very important and for me wikis and blogs are a way to make that happen in any classroom. It also allows me to revise or interact with my students while at home and it saves time spent meeting with students face-to-face,which can be very time consuming. 

   Written journals and digital journals both have their advantages and disadvantages for everyone, but for me they are most definitely something that I plan and want to incorporate in my classroom someday. Funny how the years and knowledge helped to change the way I felt about journals!

Digital Writing Workshop

   Thinking back on the last classroom that I was in I would have to say that there were a variety of different individuals among the students that I had. I remember that they were separated into two different groups: the green class, which were the lower level students and the gold class, which were the more advanced group of students. Knowing the levels of all the students and what they were capable of, I knew that my green class would struggle with the digital world if I made it available to them. A lot of the students in the green class also came from a lower socio economic status so they had very little access and experience with computers. The gold class, however, knew how to do pod casts. For some of our projects that were required within the grade level, the computers were necessary for all students. They needed to be able to look up information and create a paper, or more, afterwords. The gold class had no problems with this project, however, when supervising the green class during this project, I found a lot of them stuck or playing with other things on the computer. I found it extremely helpful having four adults in the classroom because we were all able to walk around and assist the students with their projects on the computer.

   The one thing that we had in place in order to begin our digital writing workshop was a classroom set of laptops. The computers were shared within the grade level so they weren't for our classroom personally, but it was very useful to rent out the cart and have each student have their own computer to work on within the classroom. There was no need to travel down to the computer lab or the library to work on our writing pieces every time we needed to write. We were able to stay right in the classroom and work with the students individually in a more comforting environment for them. I also seemed to notice that it was a lot less distracting staying in the classroom and working then if we had been working in the computer lab or the library.

   Since I had two very different groups of students who were at two very different levels, it was hard to allow one group to do one thing when my other group couldn't. Even though my gold group was capable of creating a pod casts or a blog page for example, I didn't want my green class to wonder why the other class got to do those things when they couldn't. I just knew that at the level that they were at, that they weren't ready to learn how to create those type of things on the computer. Looking back, in order to make the digital writing workshop more successful, I would need more time with those students so that I could spend the time teaching the digital world to my green class. I would have loved to teach them how to create a blog page so that they could go online and write journals to me about the books that we read. I would have also liked to posts wikis so that I could have posted questions for homework that they would have had to go answer. I feel that if I would have had more time to accomplish this with my green class then I wouldn't have had to hold the gold class back and my digital writing workshop could have been successful.