Teaching Literature Unbound

Teachers' Lounge Series, part 2 of 4

Mike and I have been close English Department and personal friends for over thirty years. I also teach social studies, and recently was sharing one of my new tech adventures in American Government class. Mike remarked that tech suited social studies as a discipline better than English. I automatically agreed. After all, one of the reasons that I chose to redesign gov' as a bookless course was because information was so readily available on the Web. Not that I have kept my English classes tech-free. In January, I presented an in-service to the department on the wonders of using hyperlinks in study guides and suggested uses for Google Docs/Sites with English classes. Since then Fran has launched a very cool collaborative project for her Women in Lit class.

But a recent experience has caused me to reconsider my agreement with Mike. While I was sitting in an airport over spring break, I noticed that I had a new Twitter "follower." When I checked the profile I discovered Jim Burke's treasure trove of Web 2.0 resources, not the least being his English Companion Ning (Join!). Days later, I read a simple tweet by Jim: "Is this the future of book?" By clicking the link he provided, I came upon a vision that could provide succor to our department, chronically troubled by book availability, and now vexed by curriculum corseting. Jim's Weekly Reader-- A Digital Anthology points the way for English lit teachers to more freely choose literature and free themselves from a dying medium (see Book End). What if our freshmen or sophomore team teachers collaborated on digital anthologies? The collections would grow, stay fresh, and become wonderfully diverse. Too much "work?" Not for the voracious readers in my department!

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Diigo is a little more futuristic as a classroom application, but it signals the end of research as most of us learned it. It will knock your socks off. In addition to allowing collaboration on bookmarks in a wild variety of ways, Diigo allows its users to share highlighting and annotations. This has tremendous possibilities for student research.

As Phil Butler points out,

Diigo allows users to add, gather or extract from pages of information and then share or work with others to further refine knowledge. . . . At Diigo . . . the atmosphere is a “thinking” one rather than a reactive one. Diigo takes all the standard Web 2.0 user tools and focuses them on connecting people with knowledge and then community.

I have already started highlighting and annotating electronic documents with Diigo. I wonder how long it will be before our students will begin building and sharing their own research databases of documents and annotations for their "papers." A video overview is posted at Diigo's site, but I prefer the one created by Liz B Davis. Checking out the demonstration of Diigo which she created with Jing will provide the bonus of allowing you to see the instructional potential of screencasting.

I know that my resourceful colleague, Lynn, hopes to explore Jing soon. The idea that one of my colleagues might soon create a Jing tutorial for students on how to to use Diigo with digital Readers puts me in Web 2.0 nirvana.


Part 3 of this series will be posted Wednesday-- Transcending Words (and copyright!)

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"The Teacher's Desk" Flick Creative Commons Photo courtesy of bitzcelt

Three Sweet Shortcuts

Need a Quick Rubric? Talented ed tech consultant Andy Mann showed me Rubistar, which is quite useful for whipping up a quick evaluation rubric for student work. It is preloaded with dozens of templates and categories. It is also fully customizable. In an hour I created three very different and detailed rubrics for my wiki project. While using Rubistar is not exactly intuitive, I have found my way around without the tutorials. (Here is an example: Peer wiki eval). Get your rubric right the first time if you can. Later edits are somewhat convoluted and very slow.

Labels for Gmail Like so many other things in life, I am slow to move toward a trend, but when I jump in I go head over heels. Such has been the case with Gmail. Despite the fact that my daughter and wife have been swearing by it for months, I only recently made it my main account. But when I commited to it, I decided to go through the entire Atomic Learning tutorial so that I would become aware of all of its nuances. I then discovered that many users don't realize how easy it is to "tag" one's mail with a label. I find that these labels are particularly useful for short term purposes. For example, when I was developing my staff development proposal I contacted several academics about their research. Five of them replied at various times and we began different levels of correspondence. By tagging each response with a label, I could bring up all the mail with a click whenever I worked on my proposal. This was much more efficient than the typical folder system.

Cross Platform To Do List. This tip is the most idiosyncratic, but it has been a major change in how I go about my daily business. For years, I faithfully carried a Franklin Planner through the work day. I'm a compulsive list maker and my planner kept me quite happy making daily list after daily list. But now Google Docs serves that purpose. I have created a Google Doc titled "To Do". This document is published to a url and I have tagged it with my most commonly used Delicious bookmarks. The bookmark then appears on my Firefox toolbar at home and at work, on my Macs and my HP. It updates through the day. It makes me oddly happy.

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"Shortcut" Flickr Creative Commons photo by Wagman 30