Survey reveals that student bloggers are more prolific and appreciate the value of writing more than their peers

After blogging last quarter for the independent reading project, some people wondered why we bother having kids blog. I enjoyed this article from last year. Check it out.

I use to write a novel each November for nanowrimo.org and that last three years until my daughter could walk/run/talk. Now I need a new outlet, and tonight I found NaBloPoMo.com. So my goal is to post one (or more) blog posts each day for this whole month. Here is #1. I don’t care that it’s just after 12 on 11/2. That’s a technicality, since my MacBook Pro battery died on me at dinner. Tech life got very interesting today, and this will head into tomorrow, but for now check the new icon on the right! W00t!

Grammar Girl is Mignon Fogarty who has taken her award winning podcast and created a book! Her no nonsense look at grammar is refreshing (although I still believe we should all own a copy of Strunk and White’s Elements of Style, which I thought was about how to wear cardigan’s when my grandfather bought me a copy in 1986). Here’s an excerpt she shared with us on Twitter recently.

If you’d like to meet her, come on out to Changing Hands Bookstore in Tempe, AZ on Monday July 14th.

Excerpt from Changing Hands’ website:
Are you stumped by split infinitives? Terrified of using “who” when a “whom” is called for? Do you avoid the words “lay” and “lie” altogether? Grammar Girl is here to help! Mignon Fogarty, a.k.a. Grammar Girl, is determined to wipe out bad grammar—but she’s also determined to make the process as painless as possible. One year ago, she created a weekly podcast to tackle some of the most common mistakes people make while communicating. The podcasts have now been downloaded more than seven million times, and Mignon has dispensed grammar tips on Oprah and appeared on the pages of the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and USA Today. Written with the wit, warmth, and accessability that the podcasts are known for, Grammar Girl’s Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing covers the grammar rules and word-choice guidelines that can confound even the best writers. From “between vs. among” and “although vs. while” to comma splices and misplaced modifiers, Mignon offers memory tricks and clear explanations that will help readers recall and apply those troublesome grammar rules. Chock-full of tips on style, business writing, and effective e-mailing, Grammar Girl’s print debut deserves a spot on every communicator’s desk.

Write before break a student asked me “Did you get my email?” I suddenly just wanted to laugh. I receive more than 50 emails a day, and that does NOT include any of my listservs. So perhaps instead of asking such an absurdly vague question, he could’ve said anything else. I was doubled over with the whole situation, so I turned to my student teacher and asked him if he had a response. See, we’d recently made several copies of a famous poem response to: “What’d I miss yesterday?” So Joe wrote a response, which I read to the student and class an hour later. It went something like this:

The most popular question

posed to teachers post Year 2000
Did you get my email?
Why, Yes! I just happen to be
perfectly in tune with my email
and knew the instant you emailed me
at 4:45 A.M. and I gladly roused myself
out of the some insignificant dream
to answer your desperate questions
about the project assigned 2 months ago
due in the morning.
No. Nope, no, no I didn’t
Apparently the tubes that make up
the internet were clogged due to some
information traffic jam
and your vital email hopeless floated
around the net only, arriving apparently
much to late to be any use to you now.

Why Yes! And I even took the time
to reply to you anxiously with
full in-depth analysis,
a researched 3-pronged thesis
and I included for your viewing pleasure
a Work Cited in MLA, APA, and Chicago formats,
complete with proper spelling and punctuation.

No. Nope, no, no I didn’t
I decided that I was going to change up
my email address and not tell anyone
so I could avoid having to answer all
and any questions you may have
which could have been simply solved
by Googling the information
to save me the time or even better
by checking the syllabus you requested
and I forwarded to you multiple times
again and again.

Oh, wait…

You did get my email, right?

© 2008 Joseph Abbruscato

Today the students had to write an AP Prompt, and Mrs Crabtree said that her only real requirement was that it was argumentative. Some of the students are weaker when it comes to choosing a side of a written argument and sticking to it, so I agreed. I found a nice one by Postman where he contrasts 1984 & Brave New World. They wrote for 40 minutes and then took a pop quiz on Twelfth Night. We fear some people didn’t read much of Fast Food Nation, and we wanted to reconfirm the importance of preparation. One of the classes today had about half the people prepared, and that’s never fun. The prompt was great, and I saw some good essays. The kids haven’t peer assessed recently, so I don’t know if we should do that again now. We’ll see.

The other evening I participated in a monthly Cyber Salon, which is a group of like minded technophiles who teach in secondary schools and higher education. This meeting held up north included Alan, Shelley, Biray, Alisa and me. I walked into this swanky sports grill after 5pm on a Friday to find these four with their PC laptops and MacBook Pros huddled around screens above a network of wires plugged into any nearby power supply. I added myself to this wonderful foray, and Shelley and I began discussing the English 101 curriculum at Mesa Community College. See the curriculum has been pretty much static since the dawn of time, or at least for several years. Our who philosophy is that “composition” is no longer just a written essay in a style like MLA or APA printed out and submitted to a professor for his or her red inked comments and letter grade. Shelley and I are revamping this program, and we are focusing on the 21st century Student 2.0 who learns and creates in a multimodal world. This means no more focus on the written artifact in a luddite land. Honestly, we’re still working on this idea, and don’t get me wrong, the written language will still play a part on this course although we’re approaching an audience that reads on the screen, through visual media, and by creating artifacts that can include videos on YouTube or Google Video, they blog their responses through Blogger, TypePad, WordPress, et al. But what are these modules they create, if not papers? I appreciate the importance Shelley places on the process rather than the artifact, and do we necessarily need to have completed modules for each step? I suppose so, since even our English 102 sections have some “thing” to turn in at the culmination of the course.

Some tools the students will use is anything deemed Web 2.0, which are those tools online that the user interacts with rather than reacts to. Some of these include twitter & tumblr, but as Shelley points out here, we need to remember our audience. This initial audience includes our peers who teach English 101, some of whom are not as net savvy as others.