Today was a very satisfying day in my fieldwork school. I was able to show my students the books they wrote and designed earlier in the semester uploaded onto the wiki site I created for them. It's actually the same wiki I started in computers class before the break, though I've been expanding on it slowly and will continue to do so as students complete assignments I've been giving them. Trying to get it up and running within the confines of the school's content-blocking software has been a slow and arduous process, though I'm now realizing that part of it goes with the territory. Virtually all of the teachers who responded to my survey complained about the school's AUP policy, and that it regularly interferes with what they are able to accomplish on the school's network. I can certainly see how it would make them crazy, and I touched on this in my classroom observation powerpoint (slide 6).
My fieldwork teacher has been incredibly generous about letting me 'experiment' on her kids, most of whom have significant behavior and/or learning problems. However, as I had anticipated, they have been extremely receptive to the idea of publishing their work on the web for the world to see. I've read several articles in English journals and literacy books about the motivation potential of web publishing for reluctant writers. For many of these kids, they often can't or won't produce classwork because it feels 'pointless' to them. But when they know it's going up on the web for other people to see and and comment on, they summon an energy I seldom see applied to more traditional writing tasks. It's been a valuable learning experience for me, and hopefully for them as well.
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I''m so glad that you stuck with this and you were persistent. It may seem like a long process to you but getting it done in this semester is a major accomplishment. I think we can talk and read about how much audience makes a difference and making it authentic but actually seeing the difference is rewarding for teachers and students. I'm glad it was a positive experience. You need those days to keep you going and sometimes it changes your relationship with the students and they may try other things that they didn't in the past. Keep up the great work.
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