Day Two: Tech Talk

Day Two: Write about one piece of technology that you would like to try this year and why.

True confession: there is nothing on my current technology try-list. With all my talk yesterday about being bold, I still want to be careful that I am using technology to truly enhance student experience and not just "engage" them in activities that don't actually lead to deeper learning. However, here is a list of my current interests/explorations regarding technology.

I am interested in how writing collaboratively can help students grow as individual writers. My students have spent the last two days co-writing literary analysis paragraphs after sharing individual goals based on my feedback on their first paragraphs. I'm curious if collective ownership will take some of the pressure off--and help them learn some new tricks. We used Google docs for this collaborative writing, but the students were sitting side by side and talking as they did so.

I am interested in how Goodreads can help my students stay fired up about their independent reading and make tracking their progress fun rather than tedious.

I am interested in my own use of Twitter and the English Companion Ning. I'd like to participate in more #engchat and #titletalk for my own growth. I'm curious about students following writers on Twitter, trying to grow their muscles of positive use of social media, but I'm not sure I can get most of my 9th graders to truly buy in. I'm not sure--perhaps I was too inconsistent last year with my use of Twitter--but I wonder if young adolescents aren't too interested in combining their social space with their school spaces.

I am interested in inviting more work with visual literacy and movie-making into my room, but not at the expense of student work with words, with crafting their perspective with raw tools. Modifying language is hard enough, and I don't want to replace precious minutes with things that aren't real writing. But in the name of being bold, I think I might need to do some experimenting here.