Enjoyed the conversation with colleagues from across the country about giving feedback on writing. Larry Ferlazzo does such thoughtful work with his Q&A each week on EdWeek and his BAMRadio show. Listen to our conversation: LINK HERE.
Category: Blogs
Blogs, Syndicated
Thank you to Larry Ferlazzo, Sarah Woodard, Anabel Gonzalez, and BAMRadio
by kjaxon •
Blogs, Syndicated
Thank you to Larry Ferlazzo, Sarah Woodard, Anabel Gonzalez, and BAMRadio
by kjaxon •
Blogs, Syndicated
Amplifying Student Voice Through Digital Resources, Part 1 & 2 on DMLCentral
by kjaxon •
Grateful to the students who generously share their writing with us…
Blogs, Syndicated
Writing for DMLCentral
by kjaxon •
Here’s a link to recent contributions for the Digital Media and Learning Hub site, DMLCentral.
Connecting Making, Designing and Composing
In her closing keynote at FabLearn a couple years ago, Leah Buechley turned a critical eye on the maker movement. If you don’t know Buechley’s work, she is arguably one of the maker movement’s central players, founding the former High-Low Tech group at the MIT Media Lab and inventing the LilyPad Arduino, among many other contributions. She is a champion of making, which makes her all the more thoughtful in her critiques. Buechley asks us to consider who gets to make and who is represented in the maker movement…
Like many of my friends and colleagues, August is the month for deep engagement in course design. If you were to shine a flashlight into this world, you would find me on a couch in the living room, hair disheveled, clothes unchanged for days, various plates and cups tossed to the floor, surrounded by books ranging from Vygotsky’s Mind in Society to Scieszka and Barnett’s Battle Bunny. I love this time of year. And, once I get started on design, it is almost impossible to stop. For me, imagining a learning environment, curating the texts, and…
Connected Learning in Teacher Education: Come Make With Us
A couple of years ago, I worked in the summer to build Connected Courses with some amazing colleagues. I dabbled in the work of connected learning prior to this invitation, but this was my first real attempt to put the principles into practice. Our goal with Connected Courses was, and remains, to support faculty who are “developing online, open courses that embody the principles of connected learning and the values of the open web.” At some point in the middle of our week of building, Mimi Ito made a comment, an aside, that stuck with me…
Building Community With Peer Mentors with Keaton Kirkpatrick
“The more I give my teacher-power to students and encourage them to take more responsibility for their own learning, the more they show me how to redesign my ways of teaching.” — Howard Rheingold, “Toward Peeragogy” Howard Rheingold has been a champion of peer-to-peer learning for years. Howard’s ideas are often in my head, milling about with Lev Vygotsky and social theories of learning. When I set out to design a large writing course for college freshmen, I was particularly focused on the role more capable peers would play in our writing class. In fact, I…
Like many of my colleagues who think carefully about digital literacy and pedagogies, I began seriously considering the use of social media platforms in educational settings — sites like Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr — around 2008. Despite nearly a decade of innovative uses of digital platforms in educational settings, the use of these platforms and spaces continues to be trivialized by the public and teachers alike, with cries echoing about attention spans and nostalgia for the loss of face-to-face interaction, which seem more “real.” But, to continue to dismiss digital platforms, particularly those focused on social…
Making Science: When Does Spaghetti Become a Light Ray? with Leslie Atkins Elliott
For the past few years, we have been fortunate to work together in a scientific inquiry class. Bringing together science faculty and composition faculty makes for some lively conversations about the teaching of writing. The course is offered to future elementary school teachers who are typically non-science majors. We recently co-wrote with Irene Salter Composing Science: A Facilitator’s Guide to Writing in the Science Classroom (TCPress 2016), which describes our work with these future teachers and our practices for teaching writing in science. The book lays out how we engage students in practices that mirror the…
Last October, I gave an Ignite talk at the Digital Media and Learning Conference called “Epic Composition.” Below, I offer a more extended look at the design and structures of my “jumbo” first-year writing course at California State University, Chico. Walking into our “jumbo” first-year writing course as an outsider can be a bit intimidating. The room is packed with people: 90 students, nine writing mentors, and the instructor. Students sit in new desks: rolling chairs with a bottom “saucer” for storing backpacks, a moving tray designed for a laptop. Students have nicknamed the chairs…
Blogs, Syndicated
To Badass 70 Year Olds…
by kjaxon •
Meet my mom: a 70-year old, badass, motorcycle racing woman. Perhaps this is why I believe we never stop growing, learning, and pushing… #TeamMert
Why Not Now: Mardelle Peck from Objekt Films on Vimeo.
Blogs, Syndicated
Writing Mentors FTW
by kjaxon •
Spent the last few weeks working closely with our writing mentors at Chico State thinking about their role in the success of first-year writers. Grateful in particular to Geoff Bogan and Brittany DeLacy for their participation in our Educator Innovator conversation (with Tom Fox), and Keaton Kirkpatrick for his DMLCentral blog–“Building Community With Peer Mentors”–this week. Fortunate to work with such amazing students at Chico State.
Blogs, Syndicated
Leslie & I On BlogTalk Radio
by kjaxon •
Summary: We discuss teaching writing, teaching science, and how to create classrooms in which students use writing to learn and think scientifically with Kim Jaxon and Leslie Atkins Elliott, authors of the new book Composing Science. Kim and Leslie talk about concrete approaches for engaging students in practices that mirror the work that writing plays in the development and dissemination of scientific ideas, rather than replicating the polished academic writing of research scientists. They also address a range of genres that can help students deepen their scientific reasoning and inquiry.
Excerpt from Show
Leslie Atkins Elliott on using the ubiquitous scientific notebook the way scientists use it:
“For me, when I was in K12 and perhaps even beyond, they were very formulaic. You would need to start with your hypothesis and then list your materials, and then take your notes, and it was pretty rigid in what had to be in there, which is not what scientists’ notebooks look like. It’s pretty easy online now to find examples of really famous scientists’ fascinating notebooks. One of my favorites is Linus Pauling who, he’s scribbling in the middle of the night saying how he’s been thinking about this problem forever and it just came to him that he’s been doing it all wrong and now he has to go back and change the last few weeks of work, and how excited he is….Students are often surprised to see this…to see that they’re not following any kind of rigid procedures….So we start by showing students what scientists’ notebooks look like, and then develop our own rubrics for our own notebooks out of that. The idea is I want to be able to look at your notebook and know you were doing science, what should then we be looking for in your notebook.”