Learning and Teaching Scotland
MFLE Podcast 10 Blogging2-tcm4-321424
NA: PF:
Narrator Peter Ford
Identifier NA:
Text Welcome to the MFLE Podcast. In this second part of Peter Ford’s
Blogging Conference at the ECML Blogs Project in Graz last November, November 2005, he tells us that at the end of the day, despite all of this wonderful technology, it really is the teacher that is making the difference and give some practical tips in what teachers can do, not just for blogging but to encourage more habitual writing and also make some fantastic readings of poetry. Well worth a listen. You can pick up the third and final part of this conference in the MFLE Podcast by going to www.ltscotland.org.uk/mfle or subscribe to MFLE Podcast at iTunes. # music PF: Now listen. I’m going to be very upfront with you. I am a teacher’s teacher okay. ?S: PF: Yes. You see we’ve learnt this interaction thing now aren’t we. I’m going to recite a poem to you. Now I must say two things. I have been very explicit with you. (a) I’m not a very good performance poet; (b) the last three times I attempted this poem, I’ve caught or died in the middle of it. Okay. Now imagine, I’m your pupil. Okay, lets me What are you explicit about how you’re going to interact with me. going to do if it goes wrong? questions we ask regards with the blog. I absolutely believe that it is teachers that make the difference. I’m going to give you hope. Do you want hope?
Because they’re the same type of When someone writes
something up there that doesn’t go well, where it’s not exactly the most perfect grammatical French or English, what are you going to do with it? Now it comes out of your vision doesn’t it. What are you going to do? ?S: PF: Praise him. Praise him. For trying. Thank you. So you’re going to do that. So good bad or ugly, this poem, you’re going to praise me, and you’re going to do it collectively; you’re going to give me a round of applause. I’m sorry to be so explicit about this, but often we just assume these
Identifier
Text things, and I can tell you what it’s like, corpsy. Do your poem, and
then suddenly you realise, oh my goodness me, I’m dying here, but it’s the same process that your pupils will go through when they’re writing on their blog for a potential worldwide audience. Okay this, the setting of this poem is a dinner party, okay. Oh I’ve forgotten it already, that’s scary. The setting of the poem is a dinner party and there is a number of people from different professions there, and there’s a lawyer there who is attacking the teaching profession and then a teacher that is there responds. Okay. That’s the setting for this. I’m just waiting for a fantastic, I thought I’d keep them on their toes and give a bit of poetry. He said the problem with teachers is what’s a kid going to learn from someone who decided that their best option in life was to become a teacher? He reminds the other dinner guests that it’s true what they say about teachers. Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach. I decide to bite my tongue instead of his, and resist the temptation to tell the other dinner guests that it’s also true what they say about lawyers, because we’re eating after all, and this is polite company. Hey Peter, come on, you’re a teacher, come on, be honest, what do you make? What do you make? And I wish he hadn’t done that. Ask me to be honest, because I have this little policy in my classroom about honesty and asking. If you ask me for it, I’ve got to let you have it. You want to know what I make? I make kids work harder than they ever thought they could. I can make a C+ seem like a Congressional Medal of Honour and an A- like a slap in the face. How dare you waste my time with anything less than your very best. you may not work in groups. You want to know Put what I make? I make kids sit through forty minutes of silent study. No No, you may not ask a question. your hand down. Why don’t I let you go to the toilet? Because you’re bored and you don’t want to go to the toilet, do you. I’ve had parents tremble with fear when I call home around lunchtime. Hi, it’s Mr Ford here, I hope I haven’t caught you at a bad time. today in the playground to the biggest bully in the class. I wanted just to tell you something about something that your child did She said,
2
Identifier
Text ‘leave that kid alone. I still cry sometimes, don’t you. And it was the noblest act of courage that I’ve ever seen’. I make parents see their children for who they are and what they can be. You want to know what I make? I make them criticise. I make kids wonder. I make I make them apologise and Defin-itely, Beathem question.
mean it. I make them read, read, read. I make them write. I make them spell, definitely, beautiful, definitely, beautiful. utiful. Over and over again until they will never mis spell those words. I make them show all their working in maths and hide it in their final drafts in English. I make them realise that if you have this and you follow this and anyone tries to judge you based on what you make, then you give them this. Let me break it down for you so you know what I say is true. I make a goddamn difference. What about you? [applause] Why did I throw that in there? Apart from putting myself under immense pressure, why do I do that? I do that because it is teachers that will make the difference when using technology. Your project with blogs will live and die by how well you model the process, how well you get stuck in, how well you realise what your vision is for teaching and how this can help it. But you know what, being a teacher is all about making memories isn’t it. It’s all about giving kids audience of their work. I had a teacher who did this and I remember his name. I have exactly the same memories. You know, we want to be teachers that inspire, but we can’t be teachers that inspire if we are continually not willing to move into areas that are engaging our children outside school. That’s the way it goes. Let me just give you another definition for blogging. Web blogs are a tool to help teachers and students apply the principles of good teaching and learning in a 21st Century context. Listen. What constitutes good teaching for you, you can use this blog to serve that vision. That’s what it is. It’s a tool in your hands. It’s not the solution to all your problems. Governments are trying to throw money into schools for
computers and technology at schools. It doesn’t solve the problem. It
3
Identifier
Text doesn’t solve the problem. Excellent teachers will. Well let’s have a look at my old class web blog. Let’s go live on the web. Shall we take a chance? As a teacher in about the year 2000 because I wanted to publish my children’s work to the web because as a teacher I was convinced by the power of audience. That’s what drove me. When I was teaching language my class was a class of 24 ten year olds where there were eight different languages and fifteen different nationalities where we used English as the platform. I was convinced that if I could give them an audience, and give them real purpose for their work, then it would be motivating for them. And that was, that’s true whether you stick a bit of technology in my face, or that’s true whether I’m just teaching them poetry without technology. That’s just what drives me. Real audience, real purpose, real communication. And I know teachers that have given me a real voice, and I just wanted to use tools that would help me do that. And this is what’s my class web blog, it’s on a very slow server somewhere, but what I did was, before I even got to this point, I thought I’m going to try and make a website. This was about the year 2000 I think. And I got the kids work on it. And it was too much hassle. It was beyond me technically, and it took me three That’s really wonderful, excellent weeks, with a lot of help, to finally get that flat website up. And I said to myself, that’s a great project. stuff, I will never do that again. I’m a busy, busy teacher. And then a parent said to me, after reading my website, he said listen, why don’t you have a look at web blogging. So I was a bit offended because I thought my flat website was absolutely brilliant. But I was off sick one day and I had a look at it, and I went through the process that we’d just been through. I wrote in a box and published to the web, and suddenly I realised it was such a stunning contract to the FTP software upload hell that I’d just been through. I could do it in the midst of my routine as a teacher. And so I started with ‘Mr Ford’s web blog’. Now if you look at your article when you run through it, this is an example of a tutor web blog. It is centred around a teacher and it is set up by the teacher for the students to interact with, for the teacher to offer further
4
Identifier
Text opportunities for independent learning, and to offer audience. And I
was very pleased, this is a later version of it actually, but I was convinced that if for example, I wanted my children or my students to read, I would show them I’m a reader. So I would let them know what I’m reading. If I want them to review books, then I must do that So I would like my own book myself. I must model it. That’s where I come from. That’s what drives me, that’s my vision as a teacher. reviews on there. I would give them information on the blog. I would give them websites to go to. And then I would ask them questions they could respond to in their discussion groups. communication opportunities on the web. they had done. It’s just good teaching isn’t it. Hey, Florence has done a cracking picture there. I’m going to scan it in. It deserves a wide audience. It’s not magic is it. It’s not like a magic new thing because we’re doing it on the web. encourage my kids. It’s actually just principles and good teaching, using this particular instrument. I would I would give them an audience, some of their work, I would give them sites to go and look at. I would just model, actually I quite like writing in my language. It’s quite nice to do that. I have a real desire to do that because I want to awaken that in them, and I knew lots of teachers when I was a young kid who seemed to hate their subject. Who seemed to hate it. And that’s not where I was coming from. I wanted to instil a love of stuff into my pupils, and so I would put all sorts of stuff on there, put in poems and write about Everton Football Club, most important, God’s own football team. But you know, if I was wanting them for example to do some proper review work, autobiographical writing, I would model it to them. I’m scaffolding. They could read my work so that when they write theirs it will give them a vocabulary or ideas or inspiration hopefully to do their own, and that’s what good foreign language teachers do, isn’t it. They have to scaffold the process. So when … it’s nice that web blogs often have short posts, because as a teacher you can model the writing and then they can read your writing and produce their own. But that’s not new is it. That’s not new. That’s what good teachers have always I was giving them real I would pull in good stuff
5
Identifier
Text done. So this was my past weblog, but I just want to show you one example of what happened. your article. hub. This is my tutor blog, you’ll see that in I was the centre of that And you’ll see that Everything went through me.
It all happened through me as a teacher.
when we go to look at the ECML blogs, you will have a tutor blog. But then, what happened, a kid came to me and said … a ten year old kid, this is 2001, I think. ‘Do you know those boring projects you give me to do Mr Ford, that you’ve given every year since the year dot. You know those projects that you do and we all go away and print off endless stuff from a CD-ROM and don’t bother looking at it and then just hand it in as our own. You know those kind of projects? I want to do that project as a web blog this time. I want to do it live on the web. She wasn’t really that rude, but I said, okay. Off you go. I created her a web blog which, this was on a free web blog server and she produced this. This is live on the web. You can still see it. I’ve put links to this, in the ECML blog. It’s a project about the rainforest. But it’s a project that is live on the web, and it is a project that had real purpose really. Because normally, when you say to kids, listen, you’re going to do a project on the rainforest. going to read that? Who is going to read that? Who is really You’ll all be Well, the average audience is two.
good teachers won’t you, because you’ll make them read through it themselves, and then the teacher will read it. The average audience is two. But this girl, she said ‘I’m going to get people to read it, and I’m going to really … people will be able to use it as a resource’ and she’s still a ten year old kid writing, don’t get me wrong, who’s first language was Dutch. Okay. But she was a ten year old kid writing. It’s not a magic tool that makes it A-level or University standard, but it was somebody that was writing with real purpose now. And she didn’t have to suspend disbelief that let’s write a letter to the council knowing that the council is never going to receive those letters ever. Well, this is … I can’t remember when I took these. This is a year ago when I took these. That first page has been read 21,230 times. Besides being read over half a million times overall, I mean she hasn’t looked at it for three or four years, but when you talk to kids
6
Identifier
Text about real audience, and real voice, and you say to them, listen, you’ve got to take real responsibility, most of the time they just are suspending disbelief, because it doesn’t really matter because teachers are just really … But this is a kid who … listen, you must get this right, because 21,000 people read it. It goes up every year. Do you know what? The thing is, in 2000 I was just coming to grips with the fact that often children are just consumers of information we give them. Even the web. It was kind of a one-way thing. But now, more and more, students expect to be producers of information and will throughout their life be producers of information on the web. And the earlier we get them dealing with big audiences, getting hold of the issues that are really, really scaring us as teachers and schools, but the sooner we get them equipped to deal with those issues in real life, then the better. So she’s wrote with real purpose; real audience that is measurable. You know, I have people, technical people saying to me, what about if she was clicking the refresh button all these number of times. I said listen, you don’t know Christina. She wouldn’t even bother pressing the refresh button to get more hits. It’s just not her thing. But imagine, if 99% of these hits were her doing. offer. It’s not, but if it actually was, that 1% is still an enormous audience compared to the audience of two that we normally So real audience, real purpose, and then this is, I mean her referrer’s log here. And what you can see is, this list, the sites that are referring to her piece of writing project. And if you see, it’s all from search engines. It’s all from Google. So if someone types into Google, what’s the biggest (unclear-00:18:46) in the world, Christina’s site comes up as a source of knowledge. That freaked me out. I was petrified by that. How can that be? But increasingly, the internet is just a rag, tag, bag of good, bad and ugly things, and the quicker that we get pupils to write with real responsibilities. Listen, it’s important that you get it right on the web. It’s important that you’re responsible on the web, then the better. Because you know what happens. If you project, if you don’t deal with these issues, it’s in higher education and increasingly in secondary education when the problem of plagarism
7
Identifier
Text comes up. Let’s produce a piece of software that stops children
cheating. That is not the issue. That will not solve the problem. What will solve the problem is giving pupils real responsibility for writing to the web. That’s controlled and secure and all those things, but is real. And so I could have conversations with Christina here. that you, you know, this is your stuff. know, given knowledge. real responsibility. # music NA: You want to find out what happened? Join us at the MFLE Podcast at www.ltscotland.org.uk/mfle or subscribe to the MFLE Podcast at iTunes. Listen, it’s really, really important that you get this right, because people will think They’ll think that it’s … you And so and encouraging could be digitally
savvy and digitally literate is crucial. But I think it always starts with So we’ve got a real audience, real purpose, real responsibility, and then this happened.
8