Three principles of digital citizenship

Hello Teacher Candidates! Our focus this week, here in our virtual classroom anyway, will be on writing for an online audience. I asked you to create a blog last week and then to post to it, and I am seeing that some of you are either dragging your feet, are wondering how to post, or are timid about dipping your foot into the blogging pool (or, who knows, a host of zillions of other reasons that I'm sure are relevant...) So, I've reflected on how I can assist you in making the transition to digital writing, as a way of transitioning you to the inevitability that you will be writing digitally with your students, too.

First: MODELS. It seems important to provide some solid models of teachers as thoughtful bloggers. You are writers, and you are teachers. It is only reasonable that we, then, write about the process of becoming teachers, making our reflective practice transparent and also making the process of learning to teach transparent. This isn't about a 6-week crash course in summer, people! This is a lifelong endeavor: learning to teach. Welcome to the beginning of a long journey. Let's document this beginning by writing about it! (Note: I hope you appreciate as much as I do how the models and teachers below are from a diverse range of places and contexts. Being networked to a global resource is really, really cool.)

1. George Couros, a principal in Canada and an extremely tech savvy educator. I learn from this guy every day! http://georgecouros.ca/blog/

2. One of my longtime favorite educator voices, writers and advocate for public schools, Mike Rose, has a great blog that you may want to subscribe to: http://mikerosebooks.blogspot.com/

3. This is a great blog about teaching writing, written by a writing teacher at UMass Amherst, Peggy Woods: http://blogs.umass.edu/writingp/

4. If you want to roll with the "in-the-know" crowd in education activism, you gotta know this guy, Jose Vilson: http://thejosevilson.com/#sthash.P2oOS4tr.dpbs

5. Gail Desler, National Writing Project teacher, has an excellent ed tech and pedagogy blog: http://blogwalker.edublogs.org/

Please peruse these blogs and pay attention to: the writing (both content and form) and the design aesthetic of the blog itself. What is the digital reading experience like for you when you visit that particular blog?

*Note that the one common feature of all these blog posts are short, engaging pieces that focus on one specific incident, observation, reflection or idea. These are not pieces of writing that ramble but instead are crafted to be succinct, powerful and concentrated.


Second: FOOTPRINTS. It seems prudent to ask you to Google yourself to see what you find about yourself. What's out there? What will a principal see if he Googles your name upon receiving your application for a job at his school? Let's uncover our (past) digital footprints before we make any more footprints in the digital snow. Do you have old blogs that are dormant or a leftover MySpace page from 7th grade that you'd like to delete? Google your name in all its configurations, with your town of residence and/or your place of employment alongside. See what turns up in the first couple screens of hits.

Third: DESIGN. One of the most significant differences between turning in a paper to me every week and writing on your teaching blog every week is that your audience is looking at a space you've designed while also reading your writing. The space, and the design, has an affect on the reader. In some cases, the text on the blog is difficult to read because of the background the author has chosen. For others, your blog is still sparse and empty. What might you fill it with to provide a context for your writing? A profile so we can see the author, maybe? Also, be mindful of margins and toolbars and photos and profiles and hit counters and so on and so forth. In digital writing, DESIGN MATTERS. I want to implore some of you to go back and tinker with the design of your writing spaces. I will have to read your posts on these blogs for a year, so as your primary audience member, I think some of your spaces need some redesigning with the reader/the audience in mind.

Please consider these three features of our digital writing experiment this semester and take time to read the blogs, Google yourself (using specific keywords), and consider the design (vis a vis the reader) of your blog. Then, we will discuss these three things in class this week.