Last year, the high school of which I am the librarian introduced a new end-of-year curriculum called June Academy. This two week period after exams offers students courses from bike repair, to foreign travel, to advanced math topics. Students are required to be enrolled full time in courses during those two weeks and need to complete a specific number of June Academy sessions to graduate. The goal of this workshop is to give students and teachers the chance to teach and learn something new and explore project based learning.
I was assigned what we have come to call a “bucket class” about blogging. A “bucket class” is a large class with up to 40 students in a mix of grades 9, 10 and 11. Some of the students choose the class, and other students are assigned because they didn’t sign up for anything.
The large class size, timing and “bucket” nature of the group are challenging. However, we are a fairly small school (under 700) and I know all of the students. I get a teaching assistant. And, we leverage choice and personal interest in platforms and topics to engage students in the work. Last year I was surprised that exit surveys showed that students enjoyed the course so much. I was impressed by the quality of the blogs they created when I reviewed the work from last year.
The Build a Blog Workshop project is a revision of the first June Academy blogging course I taught last June. I want students experience what I learned in EDC 534 about digital identity, project based learning, building upon the work of others, collaborating, creating effective media, sharing and ethics. The course is designed to make tacit understandings of digital authorship explicit. My revision of the course was a similar journey: I moved from tacit to explicit understanding of many of the choices I made last year, and revisions were a result of explicit understanding.
Project based learning
All of the June Academy courses are supposed to be project based learning. However, we were not given training or guidelines in creating this kind of a classroom. I took this opportunity to do reading and deliberately situate the course in successful project based learning practice.
Methods include:
- Including examples of student work from last year .(Mergendoller)
- Creating smaller communities of practice by organizing student teams that meet twice daily for goal setting and debriefing. (Hungerford-Kresser)
- Using collaboration as method to foster creativity. (Hobbs)
- Encouraging students to set achievable goals and debrief to improve the quality of “work time.” (Miller)
- Create procedures to collect formative assessment info from students. The formal info I will be using is daily notes from students on their goal setting and debriefing and their blog. Informal information is observation, one on one discussion, and check ins. (Mergendoller)
- Create a formal class schedule that repeats every day.
Learning materials
A major component of this final project is my development of a variety of learning materials in different digital formats to help students process complex ideas at their own pace.
- “The Power of You” video is my attempt to make explicit some of Buckingham’s ideas about digital identity, whip up enthusiasm, and encourage students to “flex” their strengths, beliefs, passions, and knowledge into a cohesive and powerful blogging voice.
- “Build a blog” graphic organizer uses ideas from Palmgren-Neuvonen and Sevic Bortree about adolescent blogging and publishing practices to help students identify their blogging voice and purpose.
- “Make a great blog” infographic uses ideas from Sevic Bortree and Hobbs to give students some scaffolding in creating their blogs. I was fascinated by Sevic Bortree’s identification of the social components of adolescent blogging, and I want to recognize and honor it in this workshop.
- “What make a great vlog” infographic gives vlogging scaffolding. The identification of “Big 5 Traits” (Isaac-Biel) and parasocial relationships (Hobbs) may help students recognize their feelings of nervousness about blogging and encourage them to examine their own parasocial relationships with media figures.
- “Building upon the work of others” video attempts to explain the work of Aufderheide, Hobbs, Stimm through the example of Lil Hank Williams, the current internet meme sensation, and encourage students to build upon the works of others.
- “Final reflection blog” is designed to help students with their final debriefing by reflecting on their work and looking at everyone else’s work. This is a celebration of project based learning.
- The entire course is constructed on the library website: Build a Blog Workshop.
Works cited
Aufderheide, P. (2012). Creativity, Copyright and Authorship. In D. Gerstner & C. Chirs (Eds). Media authorship. New York: Routledge.
Buckingham. David (2007) D. Introducing Identity. In D. Buckingham (Ed.). Youth, Identity, and Digital Media (pp. 1 -24). The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Media and Learning. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Hobbs, R. (2010). Copyright clarity: How fair use supports digital learning. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Corwin.
Hobbs, R. (2017). Create to learn: Introduction to digital literacy. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell.
Hungerford-Kresser, H., Wiggins, J., & Amaro-Jiminez, C. (2011). Learning from our mistakes: What matters when incorporating blogging in the content area literacy classroom. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 55(4).
Isaac-Biel, J., Aran, O., & Gatica-Perez, D. (2011). You are known by how you vlog: Personality impressions and nonverbal behavior in YouTube. Fifth International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media, pp. 446-449.
Mergendoller, J. R., & Thomas, J. W. (2001). Managing project based learning: Principles from the field. Buck Institute of Education.
Miller, A. (2011, September 14). Twenty tips for managing project-based learning. Retrieved from Edutopia website: https://www.edutopia.org/blog/20-tips-pbl-project-based-learning-educators-andrew-miller
Palmgren-Neuvonen, L., Jaakkola, M., & Korkeamaki, R.-L. (2015). School-context videos in Janus-faced online publicity: Learner-generated digital video production going online. Scandinavian Journal of Education Research, 59(3), 255-276. Retrieved from http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/csje20
Sevic Bortree, D. (2005). Presentation of self on the web: an ethnographic study of teenage girls’ weblogs. Education, Communication & Information, 5(1), 25-39.
Stim, R. (2015). Measuring fair use: The four factors. Retrieved May 5, 2018, from Stanford University Libraries website: https://fairuse.stanford.edu/overview/fair-use/four-factors/
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