The value of the image search

The last several classes, I have had my students spend quite a bit of time searching the web and learning. Informal web research to find out just what is out there about a topic they may know little about.  In the case of my classes recently, the subjects of our googling have in some way connected to the context of Night, by Elie Wiesel  a novel that we'll soon start reading together.  Last week we inquired into the Holocaust and World War II.  Today our lesson focused on trying to learn a little more about how some concepts of Jewish Mysticism mentioned in the first three pages of Night connected to each other, so that we could better understand Wiesel's childhood and background. 

Though our research could hardly be considered formal, I have used this time to teach students a little about how to search the web and also a little about website evaluation. Actually, I imagined that I would be writing this post today as a way of reflecting on the process of how these mini-lessons on digital skills have gone. I'll have to hang on to that idea for another time, though, because I noticed something today that I'm feeling needs more thought.  I noticed how many of my students, while searching for information on the internet, do an image search.  It's a habit that I'm seeing become more common among my students, and I'm wanting to think more about value of it. 

My first reaction as a teacher is to say, "hey, were doing research (even as light-weight as my assignments have been), those pictures aren't going to give you the information that you need," but I don't feel like that's right.  Partially because I do the same thing sometimes....actually a lot of times.  I am reading or watching television and something sparks my interest.  I go to the web, and depending on the topic, I usually end up at some point doing an image search. Having those pages and pages of images from the web help me "see" the concept I'm trying to know in a way that searching blogs or news articles don't.  Of course, there are other times when I specifically search for blogs, journal articles, news articles, or even tweets.  Usually I'll end up meandering through several of different genres of web text, and at some point stumble across something that gets me thinking about something that makes me feel like I need to do an image search to better understand what I want to know. 

By the last class of my day today, after I had the first three classes to observe and wonder about students internet searching habits and the value of image searching, I was a little more conciseness of my students' internet search habits.  I noticed that most of my students didn't begin with searching for images.  I noticed that at some point most students at some term that they searched in images. They were basically doing the same thing that I did when I sat on the couch at home and wanted to learn about something. 

Both my students and I understand that there is value in having a visual reference to a concept that we want to know more about, especially one about which we are unfamiliar. Image searches are worthwhile, I don't doubt that, but I'm wondering about the place the practice has in the context of literacy instruction in my classroom.  Should I incorporate lessons that guide students in doing image searches, and what would such lessons focus on? I'm not sure exactly what the guidelines are for being an effective image searcher.  Maybe we could create some. It could also be interesting to "read" pages of images, examining the story they collectively tell, and looking at this story critically. Maybe even looking at the results as augmentative texts.  Maybe even students findings of image searches could work their way into the more formal research papers that we'll write later in the year. 

A summer of writing

I have worked harder this summer than I ever had in years past.  I could even to so far to say that there were   some stretches this summer that were even more intense than teaching during the school  year.  

I'm sure that there are some teachers who would call me crazy.  Wondering why I would willingly put myself in a postion of having to always be "on" during the time that is so desperately needed to recover from burnout that we all face at the end of the school year. I see why someone, especially a teacher, would wonder about me. 

But the truth be told, I'm feeling pretty excited to be getting back to the classroom, thanks for the type of work that I have had the fortune to be engaged in.  I spent the entire summer working with the UNC Charlotte Writing Project, planning professional development, facilitating professional development, and participating in the learning all along the way.  I've filled up to daybooks, connected with all sorts of new teachers from across grades and contents, read about new ideas, and pondered (and wrote) about just how all of what I am learning will mean for my classroom this year. I've collected quite a few new ideas, and more importantly, I have discovered new questions, new paths of inquiry that I am starting into. 

My batteries have never felt so recharged. 

Dear UNCCWP: Parting, Starting, and Wobbling

Dear UNCCWP,

Two years ago, I was sitting in SI, knowing that this experience was something powerful.  That I would leave here with the path of my career and life forever being changed.  I had a renewed excitement for teaching, an invigorated love for learning, and made connections to people who I gave me a new sense of what it meant to be part of a professional community. I remember how bummed I was that this life changing endeavor was coming to an end, how I couldn’t wait for the reunion in the fall and any other opportunities to reconnect later on down the line.

Strange how I’m feeling that same way again, two years later.  But not exactly the same.... Quite frequently these last two weeks I have felt struck by the difference in the lens through which I am viewing our time together, the ideas circulating in my mind, and the words I hear myself saying. I’m not the same Steve/teacher/writer I was two yers ago. I think that Cindy said it best when she told me that Summer Institute is where it starts.

Her words couldn’t be more true.

And they’ve got me thinking more about what new starts this final day in SI will bring.  I know that I don’t have the ability to foretell events that are yet to happen (not that I would want to....more on that later),  but I’m thinking about the new places I’m starting from as I head from SI back out into my professional world.  I'm not sure why I'm calling them "new places."  I probably should say familiar places that are now strange.  "Starting" may not even be the right word to use either, as I think many of the areas I'm rethinking had been floating around my mind for some time until a TC demo or conversations had teased them out.  I'm also pretty sure that these starting points are not the only ones SI will prompt, as I know that others are present that I just have not learned to see yet.    So, here are just a few newly-strange ideas that were once familiar, that my week in SI has go got me re-seeing:

Thinking on learning.  This has been an ongoing thing, of course, but I’ve been thinking a lot about the journey and process.  The quote Tony read from Alfie Kohn about how the more fixated you are on getting to enlightenment, the longer it will take you to get there is what has got me headed in this direction. There is powerful truth to these words, as I’ve found in my own learning, and it’s this truth that provoked my statement above, that I wouldn’t want to see into the future if I could.  It’s the unexpected that brings on the wobble, and it’s in the inquiring into and seeking understanding in these situations were the greatest learning happens.  I’m wondering how I can better work this into my classroom, especially with what seems a focus that puts standards at the end of the process, rather than the beginning.

Thinking on Value and Assessment. Like with learning, my thinking on this subject has been ongoing, particularly in the last two years.  I feel like I’ve made some pretty awesome strides towards shifting what my students value from the end product to the learning process by having self assessment be a regular part of my classroom. With the new thinking that I’m doing on learning, though, I find myself trying to dig deeper into this idea as well as my own practice. I’ve felt that my shift in what I assess has promoted more the kinds of learning I want to happen, but I’m hung up on the idea that my assessment practices are what is promoting learning.  I feel like the notion assessment drives learning is still the wrong paradigm.  But I’m not sure how to disconnect assessment from the learning process if I am operating in a grades based system.  Hmm.

Thinking on Leadership.  While standing in front of a room full of 8th graders feels like second nature, leading teachers can be pretty scary.  After a few experiences facilitating sessions with other teachers over the last couple years, this feeling of anxiety has faded.  SI has been like this, too. Low stress.  But at the beginning of the week I began wondering if my change in feelings was a result of feeling more "used to" the audience.   Maybe, but this didn't feel right.   About half-way into the week, in our leadership conversation, I began to realize that something else was at work.  It wasn’t just that I was more comfortable leading teachers’ learning, it was that I had grown better at learning with them.  I think that’s what caused my anxiety at first, feeling like I had to be an authority...an impossible task in a room full of individuals who are certainly more knowledgeable, skilled, and experienced at parts of the craft than I am.  I’m re-conceptualizing teacher leadership, and I’m feeling particularly excited about where this start may lead.

So, UNCCWP, that’s where I am right now.   Over the last two years, you've taken this familiar path of teaching I was on and made it strange.  You've made me feel lost in my own world, guided me in the struggle needed to find my way out, and made sure I was never in the familiar for too long.

Now that I’ve seen how much I have grown as a teacher and writer through the thinking, wondering, sharing, and wobbling, I feel even stronger about the need for the process not to end.  Just so you know, I plan to stay connected to you so it doesn’t have to.

Your friend through it all,

Steve

Research and Inquiry

Today's demo with Christin has got me revisiting some thinking that has been ongoing over the past couple years, thinking about cultivating student inquiry within my classroom, and doing so in the context of the wealth of content students can access on the web and tools they can use to organize and create.

But before I go there, let me back up to today's inquiry with Christin.

She began by having us map our inquiry over the process of SI.  This inquiry, for most of us,  has taken the form of reflective blog posts we have written daily about what that day had us thinking and wondering about.

Honestly, I haven't been feeling too good about my inquiry blog.  Lots of random pieces that I feel really didn't dig too deeply into anything.  It just sort of skated across the surface of a bunch of disconnected, but important pieces of my thinking throughout SI.

But, in the interest of being a good sport, when Christin directed us to map out our inquiry, I opened my blog in one window and a new Prezi in another.  I read through my posts, and typed what I though to be topics or key ideas into my Prezi.  The experience of revisiting the path of my thinking over the course of SI had value in itself.  It made me realize how much thinking I did these last few weeks, as well as the value of documenting it on my blog.  Though, like I first thought, my ideas were pretty scattered.


  *an aside: Prior to SI, in thinking about the blogging I would be doing and this article that I had read on blogging, I made the conscious decision NOT to try to keep my posts focused around a particular focus or within a certain niche.  So, even though I'm sounding a little critical of the scattered-ness of my posts, the criticism is related to how I was thinking that I'd be able to find connections between ideas, not the fact that I was writing without these connections in mind. 


For the next piece of her demo, Christin had us turn and share our maps with a partner.  Without a clear focus for my "story" I turned Laura sitting next to me, explained a little about the process for creating my map, then started at the beginning for the key ideas that I found.  When I finished, I zoomed out to see the whole thing, and just before I was going to comment on the messy disconnected thing that I had going, I stopped.  Starred off into the distance, and let a low "whoaaaaaaa" escape my lips. In telling my fragmented story to Laura, I saw the pieces come together.   Categories formed, fragments overlapped, and I dragged them into piles and labeled them: 

• Concepts Underlying my Practice, 
• Adaptations and Thinking on Current Classroom Practices, 
• Writing Project and Me
•  Unfinished Starts.  

Still hanging on this "ah ha" moment, Christin moved us to the next piece: taking the mapping we just did, and making it into a plan for a MLA style research paper.  

I moved to my daybook, with these big inquiry categories in mind, and started planning.  I didn't get too far because of the limited time we had to work, but in that time, I managed to write a thesis statement of my inquiry-research paper: Through my inquiry I developed both my understanding of the values which underscored my practice, specific aspects of my practice, and the role that the UNCCWP had in it all. 

And it's here, at this place, where my wheels really started spinning.  

I thought back to this digital inquiry project that I started last year with my students, which involved students going to the web to learn, make annotations of their thinking, and keep on learning with the direction that their inquiry took them.  They then took this learning and used it to inform pieces of writing.  It was cool, no doubt, but I abandoned it this year because I found that when the writing students were doing in writing workshop the were doing online, the going to the web to learn about stuff just happened naturally.  And it did, it's been awesome.  

But now I'm rethinking about revising this process again based on what was happening in my mind during the demo today and my learning over the course of SI.  

I'm thinking about how to engage my students in real inquiry that they document reflectively.  I'm thinking about how to let this sort of learning in pieces happen while also putting the structure in place to guide students and encourage them to both make meaning and embrace the mess. 

And I'm thinking about what a research paper would look like that drew upon all of this.  

And I'm thinking about the last question that I need to keep in mind as I think through the shape this will take in my classroom: How can inquiry be sustained, when we move towards the research process?

I'm excited, but out of time for the day.  That's fine, though.  I'm feeling that this piece is best left unfinished. 

Write on!

Digital poetry reading and teaching poetry

Melissa's demo from yesterday got me thinking more about the teaching of poetry, specifically how I can adapt pieces of her demo into what I've got going in my classroom.

I've been thinking a lot recently about the idea of "teaching" poetry.  While the "teaching as telling" method of instruction doesn't work for a lot of content, it's definitely true with poetry.  Poetry is best experienced, rather than explained or taught, so the structure of a class where the goal for students is to be readers, writers, and appreciaters of poetry, is one that has a space for students to engage in these practices.

It's always tricky, as a teacher, to create structure and direction (kind of the idea of lessons), without limitation.

This in my class, I feel like I took a step in the right direction this past year by giving students some poetry exploration space.  Like with what Melissa did in her demo, I had a lesson where students had the space to explore poetry.  The site I used was Teen Ink.  Students found some poetry they liked, bookmarked the poems, talked with classmates about what was happening in the poems and why they picked them, then moved to use one or more of these pieces as mentor texts to try out writing their own poetry.

But where Melissa's demo has got me thinking is within the capacities of technology that I already had placed in front of my students for my lesson.  That it could be used to engage students more deeply with poetry.

In her demo, we searched and read, but we also recorded readings of these poems and listen to/view /responded to the reading of others.  I was struck by how just this extra step enabled me to connect to the poem; reading it aloud gave me a feeling of ownership of the words that I wouldn't have had through just looking at the words on the page. And similarly, with being able to "experience" other poems as told through the voices of my colleagues made the poems more human...the presentations of poems better conveyed the human experience that the poetry is meant to capture.

I'm totally stealing this. Thanks Melissa.

Assessment and value: theory, practice, and keepin' it real

Tony's lunch conversation on assessment has got me thinking...

I'm thinking about how the practice of grading involves is us, as teachers, deciding what should be valued and how this value will be determined.

I'm thinking about how when we place value on a particular part of any process, it is then this part of the process that becomes valued.

I'm thinking about how what we, as teachers, place value upon are tangible artifacts of learning.

I'm thinking about how the reason we place value on such artifacts is not because of the inherent value any particular artifact possesses, but rather because we believe that the product we value has value in the learning process.  That the creation of a such a product or engagement in such an activity must reflect a particular degree of thinking and learning.

I'm also thinking about the observation common to us all today in our conversation, that what is being reflected through the grading system is often anything but learning.  It's the knowledge and skills a student possesses before entering our classroom.  It's the student's ability to game the system.  And it's our willingness to play into the system, not assigning too many A's or not making parents or administrators angry, engaging in grading practices that validate the a particular set of beliefs and the structure of the system.

And I'm feeling like the grading practice, along with the increased weight society places on the commodity of grades, has taken us to a place where it's too easy to lose sight of what grades were originally intended to reflect.

This isn't the first time that I've thought about all of this.  I'm sure that it's not the last, either.

Over the past couple of years I've made attempts to address the problems with grading, while also working within a system of grades.  With only a few exceptions, I stopped grading the products and instead began including a reflective component to just about every project, writing piece, and discussion.  I check the products for completion and respond to them, but as for the assignment's grade, it is the reflection where I place value.

My students were a bit baffled by this approach at the start of the year, and their first written reflections were also pretty week. As the year progressed, though, students reflections gained depth, and more importantly I saw a shift begin among students about what they valued.  Students began to take more risks and play with creativity.  Writing was more recursive, students were more engaged, and the products produced (though not what the grade was tied to) was of greater quality than any I had seen in years past.

And what made it even cooler is that because of the reflections, students grew meta-cognitively.  They were aware of and could articulate their own learning.

....
Reading back over this post, I'm feeling that it's got a whole happy ending thing going.  Like one of those fairy tales you read about in education where the teacher overcomes all odds to be amazing.    I don't want to come off as sounding like I'm telling that over-used teacher as hero narrative.  So, I'm feeling like I want to come back and keep it real, say all of those things that make the picture look less glamorous.  Things like the process was messy and hard.  That it wasn't a perfect system and some students still tried to game it, and weak writers were at a disadvantage because reflections were written.   That there were still some students who weren't engaged, and some type-A's were driven crazy by the approach.  Yep, all these things are true, just as it also true that that I'm still figuring it out.

But for the sake of keeping it real, I still have to point out...

This approach IS a step in the right direction, and if more teachers took it, more real learning would take place in our classrooms.


Our students won't value learning until it is what we place the value on.

on being an English teacher

It wasn't my plan to be an English teacher.  Science was the plan.  I knew that I wanted to teach, and I felt like I could identify with the science crowd. All the scientists I saw in text books and on TV looked like me. English people, they were, well....different. They spoke about strange ideas, they wore strange clothes.  They weren't me.

My undergraduate teacher program required me to have two areas of concentration.  I was going to teach science, but for my second choice I marked English.  I liked to read, so I figured that those courses wouldn't be too bad. I wouldn't have even called it a back up plan.

But now, 15 years from that point, here I am teaching English.  Here I am, an English person. An English person with certificates, awards, and recognition for teaching English.  That's interesting...not just because I didn't plan on teaching English, but because I can point to so many times where I did so poorly.

And I'm not saying that now, today, after all these years of teaching, I am at some place in my career where the days of screwing up are behind me..I do it just as much now than I ever have.  But I look at error differently. I seek out difficulty, and look to put myself in positions where I know I won't get it right.  And I'm doing it all because of some things that I'm starting to figure out about teaching, about writing, and about learning and growth.

-It's a process
-It's non-linear
-There is no ending place
-It's different for everyone

And it seems that the more I embrace and understands these realities, the better I teach, write, and learn. The better I understand what it is to be an English teacher.  The more I feel like one.

It's unfortunate that this vision, one that has been so hard to come by, is so contrary to the current narrative being shaped for our schools, students, and teachers today.

wondering on wondering

I'm a wonderer.  Always have been. Wondering is something that I do, but I feel like too often lately my wondering is more the practical type and less the creative, open type.  Like, "I wonder if I'll be able to refinance my house," or "I wonder if this presentation will meet the needs of a particular group that I am presenting to."

This type of wondering is important, but I'm not feeling like it's the wondering that Fletcher is speaking about.   So, I'm wondering why these days I'm feeling less of a sense of wondering about the cool, open, unexplainable things that surround me.  I wonder if the reason is because, as Fletcher says, "writing about what you wonder about isn't as easy as it sounds.  It takes honesty and courage."

I wonder if  I my recent tendency to wonder about the practical is the low road, maybe I need to take tougher look at myself and force myself into some deeper, more personal spaces of wondering.  Fletcher is right that, "as a writer, you need to know what you wonder about."  And as a person you need to also.  It makes sense to me that the less real wondering that one does, the less curious and critical one becomes.

My daybook is a perfect place for this.  I wonder why I'm wondering in this space here.

writing and sleep deprivation

Going on what is two nights now on a couple hours of sleep, I had a feeling today wasn't going to be easy on me.  Ideas were going to be hard to come by intelligibly. That indeed was the case, but I continued writing anyway, hoping that something good would come out of it.  I guess that's more Peter Elbow speaking to me.

One form that this writing took was an ongoing commentary and summary of what was taking place in SI today.   It's my job today to post to day in the life, and I was hoping that I'd be able to pull from this.

One of the ideas we talked about today was taking other approaches to day in the life response.  So below is my attempt at doing this.  It's a wordle of the ongoing notes I typed up throughout the day.

Two years! The 2012 SI digital project

Rethinking cultivating critical perspectives on day 4

I'm feeling like today in SI was the quickest thus far.  I don't think that there was a time in where my thinking was off.  Ideas were moving around my mind continuously, and since the last part of today is the most fresh, that's where my writing here today will be.

Rashid's demo at the end really has my mind reeling.  I'm thinking back to my own classroom, my own practices.  I think that fostering the development of this critical lens is something that I've always tried to do.  Sometimes I've been successful.  Sometimes not.  Sometimes I've taken an approach similar to Rashid's.  What's got me thinking is must as much, if not more, about the experience than the method.

What I got the most from was taking on the student role.  I got to feel the wrestling with ideas that I want my students to do.  That experience, shapes me more as a teacher than anything else.

It's the same way with teaching writing.  Having the experience of writing transformed my approach to teaching writing.

So now, I'm thinking back about the experiences that I create for students in my classroom.  Thinking about the moves that I can make as a teacher to make them wrestle with ideas.  Thinking about the importance of my own wrestling out loud, in front of them.

---

getting writing groups right

Seems like the structure of writing group conferences was a common concern among most of the group.  On one hand, we want students to be engaged in learning the objectives of a particular lesson.  On the other, when it comes to the type of response that writers need, there is a wide range of response types that are helpful.  More than that which can be structured.  I've wrestled quite a bit with this, and while I still am contemplating how to make writing groups better/more productive/more helpful for writers, I feel like I am in a better place now with my students than I ever have been.

I'm coming to see that there are multiple pieces that determine whether or not the group will work.  Student personalities are part of it, and while space should be given for the group to develop a relationship, this is the least of the areas that I feel the teacher can control.

Knowing how to respond is pretty important.  Yep...it should be modeled and practiced.

But what I'm finding to be the most important are how much students value their writing and the flexibility students have for their responding.  If their writing isn't important, it doesn't matter how engaged their responders are...the responses will fall on deaf ears.  And when I think of my own writing, I don't always need responses at the same place in my writing for each piece.  My needs as a writer with each piece are different, so the structure that needs to be in place for meeting with writing groups ought to be structured accordingly.

These two pieces seem to be the stickiest for me, and most others, it seems.

Thinking about writing engagement

With Tony's activity got us thinking about writing in our classroom, where it was happening, who was doing it, and how it moved.  I've done an activity sort of like this before, and like the other instances when I repeat a writing related exercise, I tried to find a new angle.

The map I made of my classroom, though, looked pretty much like the last one I made. But then, when writing about this map, focusing on Tony's questions related to student engagement and writing, I started thinking more about what engagement looks like in writing.

To an outside observer watching my class, my students may look engaged if they are sitting quietly focused on the task in front of them.  Maybe engaging in a deep conversation with the class or in a small group.   I've seen these behaviors often during our class writing workshop.  But  I have also seen behaviors that don't fit in this conception of engagement.

engagement = talking
While at our conferencing table, for example, I approached two students who were just talking.  No writing in front of them.  Just talking and laughing.  This wasn't the engagement I envisioned for students in a writing conference.  But when I talked with them about what was happening, one student told me that he was telling the other the story that he planned on writing, to get his ideas worked out.  I hear that.  Been there before.  So, I stepped back, let the two finish, and was pretty impressed to watch, over the course of the next few days, a student engage in a sustained session of writing longer than any he had before.

engagement = staring
It's not uncommon for students to stare into space during writing workshop. I get that.  Actually, I would go so far to say that the occasional space out is a healthy stage in the writing process.  I noticed one student this year who was partaking in this step for an extended time.  Concerned he wasn't engaged, I approached him to find out what's up.  Five minutes later he was still talking about the problems he's trying to work through related to the names of his characters and how his plot was unfolding. He was thinking, no doubt. In his case engagement =staring,   And, not surprisingly, as he also managed to work out many of his problems by just talking to me, the engagement = talking proved helpful for him as a writer as well.

The last instance that is coming to my mind but there is another instance that comes to my mind from writing workshop this year where I noticed students two students who each had a Google Document up on their computers where they were working on writing pieces.  Both students were typing away furiously, but neither in the document.  They were conversing in the chat window of the document, which students often do in our workshop, but they were having a conversation completely unrelated to what either was writing.  I saw some mention of a boyfriend until the girl I was standing behind noticed me and closed the window.

I asked her why she and the other student were misusing their writing time.  She told me that their chat started as a conference, but wasn't going anywhere and the conversation changed direction.  I told them to redirect themselves, but now, particularly after reading Peter Elbow, I finding myself rethinking this interaction.

They were engaged, and even though they weren't engaged in the writing task at hand, they were engaged in writing.  Writing that was unrestrained and free flowing.  This is the type of writing that I do when I get stuck on a piece, and that is where these students were, right?

...unfinished...

Day 1 of SI: Reflecting on tech use...

What, it's 2:30?  It feels like the day just started.  I shouldn't be surprised, though. Everything Writing Project related seems to move pretty quickly.  

I'm still thinking about the direction of my inquiry, but I have a few things that I'm thinking about.  There has been a lot of talk recently about different ways in which technology can/should be integrated into education.  Sally and I were talking about what companies like Microsoft and Apple were doing to be involved in the process.  I'm sure that there are plenty of other companies out there looking to capitalize on the movement as well.  

So, I'm thinking about the popular trends that I'm seeing alongside what I know to be true of good teaching and the role of technology in the process.  

The three areas that are at the front of my mind are 1to1 iPad integration, the flipped classroom model, any using technology to gather organize data. 

Initially, I'm feeling that these trends represent technology integration that may not necessarily be in the best interest of resources to promote learning.  

Why iPads and not the more functional laptop?  Does the flipped model do anything more than just restructure the traditional model of teaching, moving pieces around?  Are we misusing time and resources when we put kids in front of computers for the sake if collecting data from programs developed by textbook publishers?  

Without question, the move towards technology integration is a good thing.....it needs to happen.  But there needs to be a reason why, a reason that supports that type of learning that needs to happen in schools and within our society.  A reason that draws upon the potential of technology to inform, create, collaborate, and share.  

Wanted: Room to Write

I've started this blog for a number of reasons, I guess, but the central most being that I needed space.  Yes, I have a blog already, and though I've done a poor job of maintaining it, I feel like it's been a success.  It's entered me into a conversation taking place in circles of educators, a conversation about teaching, middle school, and technology integration.  I want to be part of the edtech convo, so having this blog is not a problem.  I'm sure that I'll continue to maintain it.

But the need for a new space can be summed up quite well in John Spencer's recent post that gives advice for new bloggers.  The biggest piece was that one should not start a blog writing into a particular niche. Rather, one should start blog, write about what's important, and the niche will emerge organically.

I'm reading Peter Elbow's Writing without Teachers right now, and reading it has made me realize that Spencer's advice on blog writing mirrors Elbow's ideas about how writing happens.  One doesn't start with a clear understanding of a writing piece then transcribe this conception exactly as it is conceived.  Rather, the act of writing the piece itself is what shapes the writers idea of what the piece should be.

So, I decided that I needed to start this new blog, not just because I wanted a space to write about ideas unrelated to teaching with technology in middle school.  Actually, I think that there is a pretty good chance that much of what I do write about here can in some way fall into that category.  But, it's a category that I am not limited to, and this lack of limitation is what I need.

Here, I envision myself posting process work and thinking.  The writing that needs to happen in order for me to figure out what I want to say.  I'll write here to draft ideas for Teaching with Technology in the Middle (I especially like this idea, as more than two-thirds of my ideas for that blog never made it past draft form.  I'll write here for the daily reflective posts we'll be doing this summer with the UNC Charlotte Summer Institute. And I'll write here whenever I have an important idea to work though that ought to be heard in a public space.

A more refined focus for this blog may emerge, and while I'm cool with that possibility, it's not the end that I have in mind.  Actually, I don't have one in mind at all.  That's the point.