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Web Journalism: Lesson Plans for an Online Module

For any Writer's Craft teachers out there who like to do some journalism units, here's something you might want to check out. I've drawn up some lesson plans for a one-week online module on how writing online hard news stories differs from writing print hard news stories.

The unit assumes that the students have already written pyramid-style hard news stories, and that they have already done some serious work on sentence structure and style and tone for journalism.

By the end of the unit, the students have learned about lateral reporting, headlines, summaries, photos and captions, all from an online perspective.

There's no doubt that our future journalists will need to be online-saavy. I think that this unit will work well as a bridge from the print world into the online world.

Here's a text copy of just the student directions so that you can customize them to your heart's content for whatever platform you might want to run the module on. Enjoy!

A Community Connection for Writer's Craft Students

Here's an idea for any of you Writer's Craft teachers out there who are interested in doing a memoir-writing unit that includes a connection to your community.

A few years ago I and my writer's craft students were lucky enough to get a chance to participate in one of Nora Zylstra-Savage's Storylines programs for Alzheimer's patients. Over a course of 15 to 20 classes, the students went to a nearby nursing home and wrote a book of memoirs for a senior with whom they were partnered. It was a fabulous, inspiring experience for everyone who was involved. I can't recommend it enough. Here's a video of a group of students experiencing the program.

Unfortunately, it takes a great deal of time and some financial resources that are not always available. So, what I've done is adapted Nora's program in a very small way for Writer's Craft students and non-Alzheimer's seniors. Click here for a five-day memoir-writing exchange that might work for you and your Writer's Craft students.

This sort of community connection is an real opportunity to step outside of our comfort zone as teachers and offer our students and ourselves a life-changing experience.

Literacy and the ENG 4C class

We do a unit at the end of our ENG 4C class that looks at really interesting podcasts, documentaries, essays, and opinion editorials. It's a tough unit but the 4Cs seem to really appreciate it. We make sure we pick materials that show that we realize that these are adults we're talking to--most of whom own cars, some of whom voted in the last election, some of whom have babies and husbands already. The topics are mature, current, and sometimes controversial.

This is all great, except that some of these adults are still very weak readers. So, what I've done is I've come up with a week's worth of lessons that still use these challenging materials as texts, but that emphasize literacy skills some of these students might benefit from. I'm going to experiment with it in the fall, and I'll get back to you on how it goes.

Here's an overview, and five 75-minutes lesson plans.

Overview
Day One
Day Two
Day Three
Day Four
Day Five

So, we'll see. The unit will continue after these five classes, moving into writing and into looking at documentaries and more essays. I'm hoping that this week of skills will help give the weaker readers a boost so that they won't hesitate to pick up a paper, or click on a podcast, or watch the documentary channel.

The Digital Tribe

The Digital Tribe: Using Social Media in the English Classroom

When the 2007 revisions to the Ontario English curriculum came out, one of the areas of growth was in the media strand. As with all the other strands, meta-cognition was added in as an overall expectation. And, among other changes, there was more emphasis added to students producing their own media and in particular, analyzing their own media. By that point, my own department had already integrated media into all of our courses that met the 2007 expectations—in most cases as extensions of other units, but occasionally as discrete units.

So, the question became what direction should we go with our new media units? We had a nice selection of the usual nineties fare: advertising, manufacturing consent, truthiness, stereotyping, along with movie-making, editing and the like, but not much Internet emphasis. So, in order to accommodate the new expanded expectations, as well as update our media education to include the Web 2.0 world, we’ve begun to include web literacy. Up until now, though, none of us has really wandered into the village of social media literacy. You know, social networking like Facebook, Twitter, Basecamp, Forums, as well as texting, and blogging. But I think it’s time.

It’s been easy to ignore, of course, since so much of social media is banned as soon as we walk in the school door. No texting, no Facebook, no YouTube. But it’s the perfect solution to the missing link in our media units. And I mean the link between us and our students. First of all, our students are living and breathing social media—anyone with a teenager in the house knows that. They are growing up in the age of the digital decentralizing of power and so we need them to be literate about it. We need them to know which medium to choose to do what, and how to exercise their corner of democracy safely, gracefully and respectfully when they’re there. We need to use the social media to teach the social media.

Second, using social media in the classroom will help unify the class--not gut it as some critics fear—with the added bonus that it can help make the teacher a better leader. Seth Godin, in Tribes, his best-selling book on leadership and change, says, “Great leaders create movements by empowering the tribe to communicate. They establish the foundation for people to make connections, as opposed to commanding people to follow them” (23). Our classes are tribes, and using a social networking tool in class is one more way to encourage our students to connect with each other.

Of course, we’re talking about occasional tools in the high school classroom, not constant companions. Consider, for example, using forums and blogs as an extension of a novel unit. Why both forums and blogs? Well, one of our jobs is to lead our students to discover the right medium for the right purpose. Particpating in a forum lets them practise being a public member of community; writing their own blog lets them publish their own personal voice.

Here’s a perfect place to incorporate forums and blogs: In ENG 2D at our school, the students read To Kill a Mockingbird on their own, and once they’re done reading it, we discuss it, we write a formal essay, and we use the topic of discrimination to segue into an informal essay unit. While the students are reading the novel, we can set up evocative personal response questions in a forum for them to bat about with each other. If we have a class webpage like pbwiki, we can use the discussion section there for a simple forum, or our Board’s forum or online software, or if we don’t mind adverts (or if we purposely want them there so we can use them to talk about advertising on social networks) we can set up a more involved forum with freeforums (phpbb). This will take next-to-no class time, but it will help the students connect with each other and with the novel.

Then, once the novel is read, and we’re discussing it in class, we can leave the forum and switch to blogs. We can have students use their personal blogs (which they can link to our class webpage) to start to build a bridge to the non-fiction (informal essays and speeches) unit on discrimination and social identify that follows.

To fulfill our meta-cognition expectations, we can ask students to reflect on their attitudes and thinking processes as they used the forums and as they are writing on their blogs—how they differ with each medium, how writing publicly may change their responses, and how discussing the book in all these different media (including live!) affects their thinking and writing.

Now, having produced their own media in two different media, they are also in a position to analyze their own media and discuss language conventions and codes in their own media creations as our expanded media expectations expect. And now we’re also set up to talk about social media literacy issues such as cyber-bullying and netiquette—that is, generally being a good cyber-citizen—and, more globally, how social networking is changing the world.

This may be the first time that students themselves are changing education. They are different than the generations of students who have gone before them. It’s not the technology that’s changing what we need to teach, it’s how our students are using the technology that’s changing what we need to teach.

Comparing Nova Scotia and Ontario with an eye to Accountability

Like many of us, I can get pretty focussed on my own classroom in my own board in my own province. I thought it was time I had a look at another province's English curriculum. This report gives some information, comparisons, and opinions about how the English curriculum in Ontario and in Nova Scotia is designed, and how it is affected by streaming policies and large-scale testing policies. It was eye-opening for me to be reminded that there is another world outside my own province. In the end I found that I prefer our own curriculum document. But after talking to people in both the Nova Scotia Department of Education and in the Nova Scotia teachers' union, I think, as a teacher who taught through the Harris years in Ontario and is still teaching under the shadow left by those years, I prefer Nova Scotia politics.

Accounting for Accountability

Well, it's time for me get a little better educated about some of the history that I actually taught through in the last twenty years.When it comes to background on accountability, Diane Ravitch's article A Brief History of Testing and Accountability in the Hoover Digest (2002, No.4) is a good place to start. If you're in rush, here's a summary of the article. A historian of education at the Hoover Institute, Ravitch really delineates clearly the history of the two camps involved in the educational issue of accountability: policy makers versus professional educators. I found it really helped to put into persective our current political situation, as our boards in Ontario start to emphasize more and more the results from the OSSLT, and data profiles start to show up across our desks with principal's requests for median-boosting.

This is where our teachers' associations can really play an important role. They are our voice of reason, one of our vehicles for change. In 2005, the Alberta Teachers' Association put out a background paper, Accountability in Education, to voice its concerns about Alberta Education's accountability framework. The paper gives an historical context of accountability in Alberta which provides a striking comparison with Ravitch's history of the US. Ontario would do well to take heed. Another section of the paper suggests nine ways that Alberta Education could improve its accountability system. You're welcome to have a look at my comments about their suggestions. These are certainly worthwhile considerations for our own system here in Ontario.

Although it's important to stay abreast at the political level, I think it's also important for us all to remember the essence of accountablility. Lorna Earl , associate professor at OISE,wrote an article for Orbit magazine in 2001 that still resonates with me today. It was a turbulent and ugly time to be a teacher in the Harris years. I'll never forget the unsettling mix of feelings I felt standing out on the picket line day after day. But everyday I tried to remember that what was most important was the kids in my classroom. It's still what's most important to me today, and Earl's article, Accountability: Where Do Teachers Fit ( Earl, L. [2001] In Leithwood,K. and Earl, L. [Eds.] Is Accountability in Schools A Good Thing for Kids? Orbit. OISE/UT) really puts the focus where it ultimately belongs. Here's a summary of the article. She passionately reminds us that we and the kids and their parents are our most important accountability relationship.

What's a Department Head to Do?

Sometimes department heads can get caught in uncomfortable situations between their administration team and the teachers in their department. Say, for example, a teacher is having serious enough problems controlling her classes that the VPs have taken notice. What can a department head do? Here's a Case Study that looks at what leadership styles might work best and outlines a plan to help solve the situation.

Proving Plagiarism--A moving target

It's 12 o'clock and you get to the last essay of the bunch. As soon as you begin to read it, your heart sinks. Suddenly the nearly failing student who didn't do any rough work all week has written a B essay. It would be so easy to just mark it and let it go. But we just can't. On goes Google. . .

We always hope that our lessons about identifying plagiarism, and our lessons about how to cite sources will avoid this sticky issue, but that's wishful thinking, I'm afraid. At one point or another during marking, we all come across a phrase or a sentence or a paragraph or even a whole paper that we suspect is not the student's own ideas or words. Click here to see some of the ways teachers in my department use to prove plagiarism.

Here are the links to the two plagiarism detection software programs that our department recommends:
Doc Cop and Turnitin.

We always try to err on the side of student. But once we've proved that a student has plagiarized, we deal with each student individually. She may not have intended to plagiarize or to have helped another student plagiarize. But in the cases where she has knowingly plagiarized, most often we assign a zero for the assignment and a vice-principal is notified.

No matter how thorougly we teach about the types of plagiarism, no matter how carefully we plan our assignments to lessen plagiarize, or no matter how diligently we handle suspected cases of plagiarism, it's hard to keep one step ahead of the technology. We certainly will not catch every instance of plagiarism, but at least we are making a fuss about it. After that, it's a student's own conscience that directs her.

Welcome, fellow Honours Specialists

Well, it's taken me twenty summers to be ready to take this course. And every summer has taught me different things. One summer I set my watch (back when people still wore watches) to 00:00:00 so that every time I glanced at my wrist I'd remember to live in the moment--that was my New Age era. Another summer I rested in a hospital bed in my living room after a split-second of bad luck on Highway 7. Over a number of summers, chasing whatever my latest passion, I've taken courses in philosophy, neuropsychology, novel-writing, medicinal herbs, how to train your German Shepherd. One summer I helped my mom as she died. Most summers I help myself live.


So this is this summer. Just creating this blog has already made me think about how I can do my Writer's Craft class better. And I've already emailed my colleagues (we are all middle-aged to old, and serious sharers) about how we could use a Course Blog to share material with our new incoming young teachers instead of our Course Shelf (yes, I mean a shelf in the English office).

Here's to whatever this summer's course of learning brings us all!