I think all teachers should run a class blog. Here’s mine, iseroma.com. I like it. Please check it out and let me know what you think!

Class blogs offer students a place to publish their work and their thoughts. They also build classroom community. Some teachers prefer setting up individual blogs for each of their students, but I like class blogs because they make learning a shared experience.

But for a class blog to be successful, students must find it easy and fun to post to it. Otherwise, it’s just another ordinary teacher blog.

I’ve been investigating some ways to help my students post to our class blog. Here are my current thoughts:

1. Allow students to post without moderation.
Before this year, I moderated my students’ posts before they got published. This was to make sure my students would not post inappropriate content. But I changed my mind this year and decided to trust my students. The result: Many more posts, and no problems whatsoever (besides a few grammar mistakes). My students took the space seriously even when they were being silly. They even began to do a good job categorizing and tagging their posts.

To make this change, all I had to do was upgrade my students’ user roles in WordPress to “author” instead of “collaborator.”

2. Encourage students to tweet about the class.
Sometimes, writing a post just takes too much time. For quicker communication, Twitter is better. I set up a Twitter widget on the class blog’s sidebar that shows tweets that include #iseroma. Although not all of my students tweet, those who do like sharing their thoughts this way. Twitter is great for exit tickets, quick questions, and random thoughts. In retrospect, I could have improved this year’s nightly texting assignment had I used Twitter. In short, it’s a great way to build classroom community.

3. Make podcasting simple and easy.
Audio is great on blogs, and students love to create podcasts and to listen to their peers, but usually, audio is a pain in the butt. After all, who wants to record and then upload and then post? That’s just too many steps. Even though cell phones and services like Google Voice have made audio easier in the classroom, I’ve never considered making podcasting a significant part of my class blog.

Until now. Luckily, my friend and loyal Iserotope reader Wil suggested that I check out ipadio. Just like Google Voice, ipadio lets students record their voice the easy way: by calling a phone number, instead of messing with their own audio equipment. But here’s where it gets better: You can configure your ipadio settings so all podcasts get posted automatically to your website.

That means students can program the ipadio number into their phone and podcast directly to iseroma.com whenever they like. I’m going to try this feature out this September when my students go off to college.

4. Make video simple and easy.
Even better than audio is video. But uploading video to a blog is similarly complicated. But I’m working on a solution where students can automatically post videos from their phone.

The first step is having a shared YouTube account. That’s the easy part. With a common YouTube account, students can record a video and upload it to the class’s YouTube channel. If they have a smartphone, this process can happen without plugging the phone into a computer.

The next step is uploading the video from YouTube to WordPress. I found a plugin called YouTube Posts that makes the process simple. You can configure your settings so that the plugin automatically uploads videos from a designated YouTube account. It’s not perfect — you can’t upload huge video files, and you have to be logged in for the plugin to work — but it beats having to upload your students’ videos manually, one by one.

5. Encourage your students to post from their phones.
WordPress has excellent and free apps on iPhone and Android that allow users to log in to their blogs, write posts and comments, and add images and video. For many students, posting by phone is quicker than going to a computer. All they have to do is run the app, log in, and add a post. They can also post directly from their camera app. Nice and simple.

Next steps: I’m still trying to figure out a way for students to upload large numbers of photos directly to my blog. I could solve this problem by having a shared Picasa or Flickr account and then syncing it with a WordPress plugin, but they slow down my site. Too bad NextGEN Gallery, which I use, does not allow for public uploading of multiple images. If you have ideas about how I can allow students (in a safe way, with a password) to upload images from the front end, please let me know! 

 A friend called me a few days ago for help on an upcoming interview. He’s applying to become a social studies teacher, and he wanted tips about how to answer the question, “How would you use technology in your classroom?”

I know the “right” answer, the one the interviewers want to hear. You’re supposed to link technology with large-scale, authentic projects. You’re supposed to talk about video and audio and new, obscure Web 2.0 tools. In this answer, the role of technology is to shock and awe.

That’s fine. I like snazzy tech tools, too. But that’s not the real right answer. Today I came across a tweet by Franki Sibberson, a literacy advocate and blogger at “A Year of Reading.” This is what she thinks about the role of technology:

Technology in the classroom must move away from projects at the end and become tools for deeper reading. @frankisibberson #allwrite12

In other words, rather than saving technology for flashy, end-of-unit projects, teachers should use technology day-in, day-out to advance the core components of learning, like reading.

I totally agree. In my class this year, my students and I used technology, and sure, we had fun projects, like “Tech Danger,” a music video exploring the role of technology in Frankenstein.

But the true power of technology in my classroom was less sexy. Here are three examples:

1. Google Docs. Many teachers see Google Docs as old-hat. Been there and done that. But Google Docs was crucial for my students’ writing. They drafted their essays, received feedback from me, a peer, and an online writing mentor, and reflected each week on their writing growth. Less time was wasted printing, waiting for feedback, and making improvements. Writing gets better with extensive practice, and Google Docs is the reason my students were able to complete 16 essays this year.

2. Mass texting. More and more teachers are using texting to communicate with their students and to build relationships. I used texting this year to extend the learning day. After all, five hours a week of class time is not enough to meet ambitious learning outcomes. Time after school and at home are imperative to accelerate learning. To encourage studying after hours, I used SmashText to send texts to all my students. Texting was a popular and effective intervention for my students, who appreciated the reminders and words of encouragement.

3. Class Blog. Teachers have had websites for years, usually to share information, but few have opened them up to their students as shared learning spaces. (My favorite is “Word Choices.”) Last year, I decided to let my students post to iseroma.com however and whenever they wanted, not just for assignments and projects. This decision built classroom community and gave students an authentic space for their work. It made my students’ work and thinking more real and more public.

I’m pretty happy with how technology in my classroom materialized this year. For technology to be useful, it must take hold; in other words, students must return to the same tools over and over again, rather than just one time.

Next year, I hope to expand my use of technology, this time to improve reading. I’m looking at using ipadio or Evernote to record think-alouds and text-based discussions. Capturing students’ annotations will also be important. If they’re on paper, I can just snap a picture. But I’m also thinking of using Google Docs or Diigo (my favorite, though clunky) or another annotation tool (they aren’t that good, actually) to promote a sense of shared reading and thinking.

Please let me know what you think. How do you use technology in the classroom? 

 My friend Wil helped me find ipadio, a wonderful, free phonecasting service that I plan on using next year with my students. (Thanks, Wil!)

Phonecasting is a fancy word for podcasting. The only difference is that you use your phone and call up a number to record your voice, instead of using a microphone and computer.

The advantage of phonecasting for teachers and students is that it is way easier than podcasting. Students can record their voice anywhere — from their home, in a car, and even from your classroom.

This year, I had students record phonecasts and post them to iseroma.com, my class blog (check it out!), using Google Voice. It worked well, except I had to manually post each of my student’s podcasts to my website. This took forever.

ipadio does the same thing but also posts your phonecast automatically online. That means I can have my students call in, record their phonecast, and within seconds, their thoughts are published on iseroma.com.

Next year, I’ll use ipadio to make reading more public. Reading is too private, too internal. Socratic seminars are a good way to assess how students are reading, but they don’t hone in on the reading process itself.

I’ll have students do think-alouds while reading a new text live. With ipadio, they’ll record the cognitive reading strategies they employ. As a class, we’ll be able to compare and contrast what different readers  do when they get stuck. We’ll also be able to see how various readers bring different prior knowledge to a new text and what connections we make.

Even more compelling, students will be able to track their growth as readers because all of their ipadio phonecasts will be saved automatically.