I’ll be leaving a week from Friday for Boston and have been asked to boil down what we do at our school news site to a one-minute video that we’ll upload to Youtube and package together with the rest of the panel into an introduction of sorts.

The others on the panel are most impressive, and to tell you the truth, I don’t really feel like I have the experience or knowledge to be more than a member of the audience. Nevertheless, I’ve been invited and I’m really looking forward to getting to hear from some brilliant practitioners of media, media literacy and technology education.

I wrote a script for what I would like to put together for our video. I want to show all of the free technologies that we use to produce the school news site, which launched about 10 days ago. It’s impossible to demonstrate so many technologies in a minute, so my students will hold up hand-written signs with the names of the products we incorporate into the production and marketing of the site. (I wonder how many commercial news organizations use these, or if they rely on expensive quick-to-date special software, the way our school district does for certain programs).

With no budget, no sponsorships yet (save one small one), free is great. It occurs to me that when I began this blog 16 months ago, the only one on this list I’d ever used was Gmail. What will I know 16 months from now? What will I be teaching?

Here’s the list:

Joomla! a content management system that is slick, flexible and pretty complicated to learn for a newbie like me. But I did it.

Photoshop.com: we use this to edit photos before uploading to a central storage site

Picasa: our Google-based storage site for photos waiting to be uploaded to joomla

Flickr: this is where we search for Creative Commons-licensed photos when we can’t or didn’t get a local one for a story.

Freepixels.com: another place to search for photos licensed to be used.

Skype: I am in the process of planning Skype collaboration with three journalism teachers from across the country who I “met” on the JEA listserv. We want to have our staffs video conference and use each other as national correspondents on a few stories. This will hopefully be in place prior to the MIT conference, or shortly upon my return from our Fall Break, the last week in October.

Google Docs: We have e-forms on our site built on Google docs. One of them allows sponsors to sign up for a level of sponsorship. Another allows readers/viewers to suggest stories for us to cover. We also started off the year using Google docs as an editing vehicle. Students would upload their story and share it as a link with their editors (a section editor, copy editor, editor-in-chief and myself) through a four-step process. It sounded good in theory but ultimately (after only a week) I had to drop it because a) kids don’t check their emails regularly and b) I could never tell where the story was in the chain. This might have worked for a print publication that goes out once a month or every few weeks. For a daily news operation, I learned it’s critical (or at least very nice) to have the content loaded into one place and have the editors come to it. Thus, the students now upload their stories directly into joomla, into a special “needs editing” category, where they await the editors.

Clustrmaps: this is a neat little hit counter that puts a red dot on a world map every time someone clicks on the site for the first time. The dots get bigger the more unique hits from any one area. Last week, we got Brazil, South Africa and The Philippines. We have a map of the world on our wall and are putting a pin in it to match the Clustrmap.

Mail Chimp: we are going to be offering an email digest version of our news site to anyone who signs up for it. This will be another way of reaching out and getting our news into “their space.” We will have links to certain stories and videos and each email will also carry the names and links to our top Platinum sponsors for one year. Mail Chimp makes the email auto response and organization very easy.

Google Sites: we use this wiki program as a place to store some documents, such as the handbook and the local style guide that we are very slowly developing. I also foresee it as a place for students to build their portfolios of published work. But that will have to be implemented a bit later.

Ning: We have a class ning page where I place non-deadline assignments. For example, I might ask the students to read a certain article and state why it is so good, so readable or interesting. There are video lessons (TED talks, etc…) on the site, photos from field trips, links to other places.

Twitter: We use Twitter to reach out offsite and we also stream our Facebook fan page updates to Twitter on the front page of our site because Twitter is not blocked at school, while Facebook is (why the difference? No idea. Maybe the district thinks no one could be harmed in 140 characters.)

Gmail: We have an account for the news site. Gmail is great because you can label emails with different colors and titles and the search feature is amazingly fast.

Facebook: We post teasers and links once a day, in the evenings, to stories that we just posted up on the site. We have 410 fans today. (Our school is 900 students).

Jing: I used this video component to make a 2-minute video screen capture of our news site for Back to School night. We had a booth in the quad but our school doesn’t have wireless except in the cafeteria, so I had the kids play the video loop to show parents. This was our launch day, so it was important marketing to give people a visual sense of what we were all about. The problem with jing is I can’t figure out a way to export files. I may have to pony up $30 or so for a commercial version.

Photo Credit: Creative Commons-licensed “Web Refractions” by ecstaticist on Flickr.

Tomorrow is the big day. Our news site launches for the first time with real content: articles, video, photos, polls, Twitter, Facebook, commenting, article ratings, etc… Yesterday I worked from 7:30 a.m. to 10:30 p.m. and today has been the same. It’s been a race to the finish with stories coming in at the last second and photos frantically being shot, edited and uploaded. The kids operate in the “nearly now” and it’s nearly killing me. My prefrontal cortex is screaming: why can’t you guys do things ahead of time, meet deadlines, plan for the unexpected? Their prefrontal cortexes, which are not completely wired, are asking where the cake is and who’s on Facebook right now.

The kids want to put the site up online at midnight, which currently is 1 hour and 15 minutes away. So this evening we have been working on it from our respective houses, trying to edit stories and fix little flaws from the back end of the site (the non-public end), and now the entire thing has crashed. Turns out the hosting company is doing some server changes RIGHT NOW. Luckily, I got a prompt response to the email and the owner says it will be back up soon, but still… what are the odds of this happening right now? We are one hour from our stated launch time (stated on our Facebook page, at least), we are 12 hours from the entire school watching it after morning announcements and we have… nothing.

Just one more thing about technology that I need to get over: the inability to actually control anything! You can plan and plan and build and build, but you can’t seem to count on the technology to work all the time.

I’m trying to roll with it…

…with joomla’s strange behavior that I can’t seem to get a handle on (why does inserting a “read more” tab into a story wreck the frames of the entire section page? why can’t photos be resized in the image editor?)

…with the hack job that was done to the hosting company last Friday, rendering the site useless for a day. Is that something that will happen again? Should I move our site?

…with the way my Google Docs system of editing turned into a disaster (hint: have the kids upload stories to one place and let the editors come there; sharing stories in Google via emails just confuses everyone because nobody really knows “where” the stories are at any one time)

…with the way Safari, Firefox and Internet Explorer all display the website differently and how that makes no sense to me and I can’t control it or make the site look good on all three at the same time

… and now with the site I’ve been working on for seven solid months being just hours away from its reveal and the server (from Canada!) going down for the first time in my experience. Should I move the site? Of course, today I just upgraded our account to get more bandwidth and storage space. Naturally.

I never thought I’d say this, but I think printing a paper — even by hand — might just be easier and more sane.

Starting with the basic Gmail service has led to an exploration of the Google suite of tools, of which I currently use Google Reader (to keep track of dozens of blogs and websites), Google Docs (to store, edit and share documents, build surveys and post pdfs to the web), Google Sites (to run a wiki site for my Journalism class). In the near future, I plan to test out Google Moderator in a class assignment.

My comfort with Google led to experimenting with Ning, the free social network site that allows you to create and maintain a closed-gated community. I have created four nings and trained lots of teachers on how to make and use them. EtherPad is next on my list to try.

The nings led me to blogging, including this blog on Edublog.com. And all of my experience with these programs finally led me, with a push from a colleague, to joomla! when it came time to start my online news site for school. And that is where my high feelings of technology competence came crashing to the floor.

Joomla! is an open-source content management system (CMS) that is very sophisticated and built by computer programmers around the world sort of as a service to the world. Most do it for free; some try to sell extensions and templates for profit. Most likely these programmers think that mere mortals such as high school teachers comfortable with Google and Facebook can use such exotic offerings like their joomla! with few problems. Sort of like, in theory, they should be able to come into my 6th period classroom of 36 10th grade world lit students and lead an orderly discussion on the themes in Oedipus Rex. Right.

I’ve met my match in Joomla! I’ve been using it since last April and I told my colleagues at the ASNE institute this summer that the first 20 hours Joomla! kicked my butt, the next 60 hours we were in a tense standoff and the last 20 hours I kicked it’s butt. That was all true, and it still would be true if I were the only user of the site I’ve set up. Now that there are 28 other users, I’m running into issues. For example, today somehow some of the text on the site has mysteriously turned to italics. I have no idea how or why. Not all the text, just some. There’s no logic to it, and I can’t seem to undo it because I don’t know how it got that way.

Other problems: I took the site offline last week so we could prepare it for the opening day, which is now four days away. The kids all had user ids and passwords and I assumed this would let them log in and submit their stories, but apparently not. After several frantic emails (on a Sunday! and trust me I was at my computer all day), I figured out I had to upgrade their status from editor (on the front end) to manager (on the back end) so they could submit their work. Shortly after doing this, the italics appeared. Sigh.

Creative Commons image courtesy of clairity

My initial reaction to this article was one of but of course it is plagiarism! When I work with students, I fight against them copying and pasting (without thinking) and changing words here and there and calling that their own work. What I really want from students is for them to think about the information, organize, analyze, synthesize, and evaluate the information from a number of sources before they write.

I am in full agreement and responded on Julia’s blog with this comment:

I’m afraid that students believe they are writing when they are merely searching for and rearranging information. This process seems to be an attempt to not have to think, because thinking is hard, and much of what we are asking them to think about has already been said/solved; in other words, they might be wondering why should they have to reinvent the wheel? Just to get a grade? Just because the teacher said to? This gets us back to creating problems for them to solve — new, relevant problems, where they can apply the existing information in novel ways. It makes thinking a bit more fun, but still hard. And that makes us have to do a bit of thinking as teachers, right?

Thinking is hard. Original ideas are the hardest to produce. It’s much easier to cull a few online sources, gather the thoughts of others who have been down this road before and remix the voices into something that is, if not original, at least uniquely arranged. But what do such student products actually reflect, aside from (usually) varying degrees of plagiarism? Good Googling skills, mostly. Perhaps exposure to a variety of perspectives on an issue, if students took time to absorb the ideas as they arranged them into paragraphs. Maybe a better understanding of how others would answer the question or present the thesis. 

It’s very tough to make a case for true synthesis when reading a patch-work quilt of (hopefully) attributed ideas. And few students go the extra mile by adding personal reflection, much less their own original take, to the mix. They figure if it’s long enough, it’s done. 

Running their work through plagiarism detection websites is not the answer… Getting them to remix more thoroughly their compilations and attribute their borrowed words more accurately will not get us to true synthesis; it’s just a more tortuous path to the same end: the glorified summary.

What I see as the real problem is that teachers are continuing to assign the types of independent work that we were assigned as students and that our parents and possibly even grandparents were assigned as students. In English, this might be a take-home paper that explores the theme of George Orwell’s Animal Farm, for example. Or one that asks students to explain the gun/flag metaphors in the novel. A quick Google of “theme” + “metaphors” + “Animal Farm” easily produces numerous sources and an endless possible melange of ideas. Before the Internet, these assignments year after year made more sense because high school students who wanted to glean the answers from someone else would be out of luck unless they had access to Cliff’s Notes at a local bookstore or knew a student from last year’s class who’d saved their paper. Even then, at most they might be able to find one source. Not 250,000 from a single Google search. 

Clearly, these particular wheels have been invented. And reinvented. Over and over. The answers to these assignments are not only in the back of the book, they are at the tips of our students’ fingers. And this makes them seem perfunctory and incredibly boring, just one more hoop to jump through, rather than an opportunity to produce something altogether new and different and perhaps even personal. How many 15-year-olds in the past half century have explained the theme of Animal Farm? Millions! What possibly new could be added to the discussion, so why not(!) just survey the field and see which explanations you could edit and edit into one that you agree with? The internet has become a infinite recipe book and there is simply no need (in a busy student’s mind) to experiment with Metaphor á la Orwell when there are hundreds and thousands of proven recipes ready to use.

So the onus is on us, I think, as teachers to come up with better assignments for independent work. If we must assign essays on theme and metaphor, we can assign them as in-class essays or timed writing tests (giving students no class time to survey the online field). But we need other, better assignments for independent work, ones that can’t be Googled, copied or pasted, ones that are meaningful and personal and require thinking (analysis) and creativity (synthesis). 

What do those look like? And how hard will they be to come up with year after year? 

In my next post, I will present one possibility. I would love to hear your thoughts, too.