A good blog to follow on how to use technology is Traci Gardner's NCTE Inbox. In just July and August, she has written on

• FeedMyInbox: Keeping Up with Feeds by Email
• How to Streamline Your Social Updates
• How to Streamline Your Social Networks
• Mindmapping Graphic Organizers
• Wordle: Word Maps for Fun and Anaylsis
• Podcasts: The 21st Century Version of the Radio Show
• Online Documentation Tools
• CompPile: One Stop Shopping for Composition Research
• Google Lit Trips: Literary Maps Meet 21st Century Literacy Skills

And Traci covers these tools in detail, making it easy to learn to use them for yourself and in your classes.

A good blog to follow for new software tools is Jane's E-Learning Pick of the Day. Every day, she introduces a new tool, sometimes a software application, sometimes a video. And for those interested in learning, the left sidebar has a link to the Top 100 Tools for Learning and another link to 2400+ Tools for Learning, both maintained by her Centre for Learning & Performance Technologies. I've been keeping my own page on free software, but it comes nowhere close to 2400+ tools.

Another good resource for learning about Web 2.0 tools is CommonCraft. They have videos explaining blogs, wikis, RSS, and many others.

Finally, (via Digital Writing, Digital Teaching) some NOVA science videos are available free. Go here and click on the Download Videos button to see what's available.

Nik Peachey at the blog Quick Shout keeps finding great resources. Here are two:

• PDF Geni searches and finds free ebooks in a variety of topics, including ESL/EFL.
• Yappr provides transcribed ESL/EFL videos with the script to the side so students can follow the voice more easily.

And there are many more.

The graduate course Theory and Practice of Teaching Writing (see previous post) just posted this comment:

Just to let you all know that the readings are here only until the books come in. The readings for your second class will be taken off the page this week.

Apparently, there's no intent to violate copyright law. I imagine that scanning one copy and posting on the Internet can save paper costs, but posting publicly is not fair use. A better solution would be to hand out the URLs for the articles in class, so at least the public could not easily access them, and if possible, the best solution would be posting them in a secured, password-protected environment, which would be within guidelines of fair use for educational institutions.

Is this graduate course Theory and Practice of Teaching Writing at the University of Puerto Rico at Mayaguez violating copyright laws?

It's not my practice to tell others about others about copyright problems. If I did, I would have no time for anything else in my life. But I was curious. This was a graduate course on writing that was posting chapters from books on the Internet. Obviously, they would know about copyright law. Did they have permission to do so? I posted a comment, or tried to, yesterday, just noting that if they didn't have permission, posting these chapters out of books would be violating copyright law. But I see today that my comment is not there. It does make me wonder. Wouldn't a course on teaching writing be interested in such an issue?

A related issue, at least for me, is that of plagiarism. As a teacher of writing at a university, I feel it's important to teach students what it is and how to avoid it. At the same time, I wonder about instructors who go into a tizzy over plagiarism. I wonder if they photocopy materials out of books that aren't in accord with fair use guidelines. Quite a few do. What's interesting is that while inappropriate and not conducive to learning, plagiarism is not illegal while violating copyright is. Yet, I've never seen a teacher get upset over photocopying past fair use.

Apparently, publishing companies don't always get permission for the materials they use, either. Mike Dunford caught Reed Elsevier copying his content without permission (from Stephen Downes).

So, although I'm concerned about students plagiarizing and cheating (It's not conducive to learning), I'm not sure that the Net Generation, as Valerie Milliron and Kent Sandoe in their article "The Net Generation Cheating Challenge" at Innovate (requires free registration), really have a "disregard of societal norms." Just read the news in New Jersey: Almost every month, I'm reading about some politician being indicted—not to mention politicians at the federal level. And, of course, we could talk about Enron and many others. Although I'm aware of the increase in cheating researched by McCabe, I wonder if the Net Generation is just more open about what they do than politicians, corporations, and the average older person are.

I was just rereading Will Richardson assertion that it's about Networks, Not Tools:

Today, it was all about networks, not tools. All about connections, not publishing. All about working together to get smarter, not learning alone. All about how RSS connects us to ideas, how blogs connect us to people, how Twitter connects us to, um, the Twitterverse, and on and on and on. ...

Networks and connections are important in learning. But as Richardson goes "on and on and on," he says little about what he actually learned from skyping over to Utrecht during his presentation. Instead, he gives us words like "cool", "passion", and "glow", but no indication of what learning, if any, took place. We can now "buzz" around in streams of information overflow, but it's not clear how that makes us "smarter." There seems to be an emotional conflating (1) of fact aggregating with learning and (2) of stream of consciousness socializing with mastering a body of knowledge to the extent that you can use it in novel situations. Twitter, like any other tool, can be useful, but it is just as likely to lead to frittering our time away. As I wrote earlier about twitter,

Twitter can keep us from achieving, as noted in [Kathy Sierra's] article How to be an Expert, Philip Ross's The Expert Mind, and my post Forget IQ. Just Work Hard! Twittering one's time away may be momentarily pleasurable, but real pleasure, real achievement, and real learning--whether it's learning a language, learning to write, or learning in general--come from real, focused, and challenging endeavors.

American Educator has a 19-page article titled Teaching English Language Learners: What the Research Does and Does Not Say (pdf) by Claude Goldenberg, Professor of Education at Stanford University. The article looks at the findings of two reviews of the research, one by the National Literacy Panel and the other by the Center for Education, Diversity, and Excellence. Here's an excerpt from the conclusion:

Although there are numerous areas in which there is insufficient research to guide policy and practice, we can lay claim to some things that matter for the education of ELLs. Chief among these is that 1) teaching children to read in their primary language promotes reading achievement in English; 2) in many important respects, what works for learners in general also works for ELLs; and 3) teachers must make instructional modifications when ELLs are taught in English, primarily because of the students’ language limitations.

Practically, what do these findings and conclusions mean? In spite of the many gaps in what we know, the following is the sort of instructional framework to which our current state of knowledge points:

• If feasible, children should be taught reading in their primary language. Primary language reading instruction a) develops first language skills, b) promotes reading in English, and c) can be carried out as children are also learning to read, and learning other academic content, in English.
• As needed, students should be helped to transfer what they know in their first language to learning tasks presented in English; teachers should not assume that transfer is automatic.
• Teaching in the first and second languages can be approached similarly. However, adjustments or modifications will be necessary, probably for several years and at least for some students, until they reach sufficient familiarity with academic English to permit them to be successful in mainstream instruction; more complex learning might require more instructional adjustments.
• ELLs need intensive oral English language development (ELD), especially vocabulary and academic English instruction. However, as the sidebar on critical unanswered questions explains (see p. 12), we have much to learn about what type of ELD instruction is most beneficial. Effective ELD provides both explicit teaching of features of English (such as syntax, grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation, and norms of social usage) and ample, meaningful opportunities to use English—but we do not know whether there is an optimal balance between the two (much less what it might be).
• ELLs also need academic content instruction, just as all students do; although ELD is crucial, it must be in addition to—not instead of—instruction designed to promote content knowledge.

Paul Kei Matsuda has recently set up Symposium for Second Language Writing Interactive. Here's some information from the site:

The purpose of SSLW Interactive is to provide a centralized resource portal for second language writing teachers and researchers from around the world. Currently, SSLW interactive provides the following features:

Blogs. Any registered user can create blog entries to share their experience and perspectives on various issues related to second language writing.

Groups. The site hosts group space for various related groups, including: TESOL Second Language Writing Interest Sections (SLWIS); CCCC Committee on Second Language Writing; CCCC Special Interest Group on Second Language Writing; Symposium on Second Language Writing; and Journal of Second Language Writing, among others.

Forums. Forums provide a space for the discussion of various topics related to second language writing in the traditional, hierarchical list format.

E-lists. A list of email lists related to second language writing. Recent contents are available from this site. Links to subscription information and list archives are also available. If you are aware of any other email lists, please post the description. (Anyone can add an edit the descriptions--you don't have to be the list owner to contribute!)

Conferences. A list of conferences, workshops and other meetings related to second language writing. If you are planning an event that may be relevant to second language writing teachers and researchers, please feel free to add an event.

Journals. A directory of journals that publish articles on second language writing. Please contribute by posting information about your favorite journal. (Anyone can add and edit the descriptions--you don't have to be the editor or the publisher to contribute!)

Programs. A directory of doctoral programs where students can specialize in second language writing. Please post information about programs you are familiar with. (Anyone can add and edit the descriptions--you don't have to be a faculty member or program director to contribute!)

CFPs. A list of call for papers/proposals related to second language writing.

SSLW. Information about the Symposium on Second Language Writing, an annual international gathering of second language writing specialists.

The site is in its infancy now, but it has the potential to become the central interactive clearlnghouse for all things related to second lnaguage writing. That potential, of course, is waiting for your contribution.

Teach for America (TFA) teachers are making a difference (via OL Daily). According to this six-year longitudinal study of high school students in North Carolina,

The findings show that TFA teachers are more effective, as measured by student exam performance, than traditional teachers. Moreover, they suggest that the TFA effect, at least in the grades and subjects investigated, exceeds the impact of additional years of experience, implying that TFA teachers are more effective than experienced secondary school teachers. The positive TFA results are robust across subject areas, but are particularly strong for math and science classes.

This is troubling: Five-week institute trained teachers do better than those with a degree in teaching, which usually includes two years of education courses. (And 34% of the non-TFA teachers had graduate degrees compared to less than 2% for TFA teachers.) How can that be? The report notes that TFA teachers are recruited from highly selective universities but placed

in the lowest-performing schools in the country ... [and] in the most demanding classrooms in these already challenging schools.

Yet, their students do better. Interestingly, TFA teachers also score higher than traditionally trained teachers on the PRAXIS exam. Is their success due to being more motivated? Do experienced teachers suffer demotivation over the years? Or is it because TFA teachers are stronger academically? I imagine it would be at least a combination of those factors, and perhaps others I'm not aware of.

What's troubling is that it is difficult to imagine the same scenario in another discipline. Take, for instance, engineering. Would you expect that a group of new college graduates would be better engineers than a group who had been in the field a while? Even if the newbies were from highly selective schools and the oldies weren't? Lots of questions but no solutions here.

A new study reports on the success of career school programs (Erik Eckholm, NY Times).

Now, a long-term and rigorous evaluation of nine career academies across the country, to be released in Washington on Friday, has found that eight years after graduation, participants had significantly higher employment and earnings than similar students in a control group.

Researchers believe that those who initially expressed interest in the academies may have shared similar motivation to succeed, whether or not they were chosen for the special program.

But this also suggests that something about the academy experience, apart from educational achievement, promoted greater success in the job market. One likely factor is the exposure the academies provide to a range of adults in real workplaces, said J. D. Hoye, who directed a “school-to-work” initiative for the Clinton administration and now heads the National Academy Foundation, which advises career academies on curriculums and other topics.

“The students see what work is like, and they build a network of caring adults at school and in the workplace,” Ms. Hoye said.

Students seem to benefit from being part of a special, small group, said Mark Bartholio, the academy director. Many do not pursue finance careers but instead go into teaching, social services or criminal justice, he said, but one graduate said the accounting skills he learned in the academy had enabled him to help start a small business.

This reminds me of Deborah Meiers (In Schools We Trust), who wrote:

Standardization and bureaucratization fuel the very distrust they are aimed to cure. (p. 2)

Students need to be around teachers they can trust and teachers who ask questions as learners, too. (p. 14)

And it reminds me of Deci & Ryan's self-determination theory in which motivation is affected by autonomy, competence, and social relations.

We often talk about making learning meaningful with a view towards connecting school learning to students' interests and activities, but meaningfulness can be stimulated by positive social relations and dampened by negative ones.

Most of the tag cloud generators tend to keep all of the words horizontal, but Wordle (via Collin vs. Blog) has them both horizontal and vertical, giving it a rather neat appearance.

Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.

I generated the tag clouds below from two of my papers.

It's to be expected that the words overlap quite a bit. One difference is the emphasis on "knowledge" under Learning Networks, which indicates the difference in the emphasis on individuals in Building Blocks and networks in Learning Networks, so that in the former, students construct learning, while in the latter, knowledge becomes a resource in the network.

The size of these tag clouds are fixed when linking to them, and if you increase the size, the words become blurred. So, to get a larger image, you need to take a screen capture of the tag cloud at Wordle and use that image instead as below:

I'm wondering how this might be useful for students. Perhaps it would let them see what their focus was, which words they used the most, and whether they needed to change the focus or the words.