A couple of weeks ago, I added a graphical user Interface to Class Blogmeister. It came after several teachers, who were planning summer professional development, said that a word processing-style GUI would help the teachers in their workshops adjust more quickly to blogging. I can certainly understand that.
As you can imagine, the arrival of bold, italics, underline, hyperlink, insert image, etc. buttons met with enormous excitement and satisfaction. The only disappointment seemed to be that the feature had arrived at the end of the Northern Hemisphere’s school year. But even at that, there was a minority of teachers who immediate expressed displeasure with making it so easy for students to format their texts. If I were teaching students and using Class Blogmeister, and especially if I were using it to teach writing, I would probably be with them.
They objected because limiting students to just text, forced them to concentrate exclusively
on the words
on the writing
on the communication.
They felt that giving students access to bold, resizing, indenting, and COLORING of text would distract the students from the communication. Learners would spend more time playing with the look of their blog entries, and less time with the wording — and I think that this objection is well founded. I’ve said as much before, and it’s the main reason why I hadn’t added GUI before now — that and the fact that I’m not a good enough programmer (I found FCKeditor, an open source code set that I was able to integrate into Class Blogmesiter).
However, I wonder if, in a time of overwhelming content, the look of your blog, how the information is laid out, it’s bolding, bulletting, and even the color of the text, has become as important as the content itself. As we struggle to find and select information to accomplish our goals, we will seek out that which not only seems valuable, but also looks easy to use — efficient. So perhaps it has become important to make it easier for students to work the look of their blogs at the same time that they are working the ideas.
Certainly, they are going to get distracted and even abuse the feature, wasting time. But we have to make them accountable for their work, not only the quality of the content, but also the quality of the communication. It’s ok if students turn a line in their blog to pink, as long as they can convincingly answer they question you ask nearly every day, “Why did you use pink for that line? How did that improve the communication of your ideas?”
When in the “real world” would students ever do writing where they didn’t have the option of text formatting? I guess I’m having a hard time coming up with a time when text-only would be really useful and applicable outside of a school setting. SMS messages, I suppose, but I doubt that’s the kind of writing teachers are explicitly teaching.
The GUI interface provides better opportunities for communication with depth. I do agree that initially there will probably be a drop in quality. However, the long-term benefits of learning to communicate effectively with formatting outweigh the short-term dip while students play with the new tool.
Your idea of asking students to provide the rationale for their formatting choices is terrific. I think that’s a much better approach than limiting the tools available.
I also think that learning to avoid distractions, and having to make decisions such as “Do I change the font size or not?” is all part of necessary learning. If we filter it all away, taking the choices away from students, have we really helped them become competent users of electronic media? Not really. I do remember teachers who, even though we had 64 coloured pencils in our case, telling us we could only underline in red. For the longest time, after leaving those teachers, my fingers couldn’t pull out anything but the red pencil for underlining!
Reading in Pink’s “A Whole New Mind” about the value that style and image has in differentiating one’s work it would seem that allowing students to custom fonts and color schemes would be allowable. As far as students wasting countless hours on fonts and colors I don’t think that is a real risk. It may be present the first time they blog with such freedom but other than a handful of font-obsessed youths it is probably irrelevant.
I agree with the comments thus far. But I also understand the other side of the argument. Just like I’ve suggested that we teach students to communicate by making a compelling PowerPoint without any words, pictures only, I can see giving them assignments where they have to express their ideas only with words — challenging them to become resourceful communicators.
Kids read in hypertext all the time. They also understand that the look of words can add to meaning, impact, and understanding. They need to be able to know how to write well in this medium, at a very early age.
It is up to the teacher to define the parameters of student writing. Thanks for giving us the opportunity to teach in another dimension! – Mark
To me, it seems absurd to limit the communication tool set that we make available to learners. I believe that in almost every classroom, a significant proportion of learners are simply disengaged when we insist that they use nothing but plain text. That’s because they have learning styles and learning needs that are not well served when we restrict their options.
If the goal is effective communication, then I believe we need to set up ALL learners for success, not just the relatively few who have a strong aptitude for working with words. Most of us who have become teachers are reasonably good with words. I think it is egocentric, and just plain wrong, to expect all the learners in our classrooms to be like us. I believe that the physical appearance can actually facilitate or hinder comprehension for a significant number of learners.
I am grateful for the digital options that today have the potential to facilitate effective communication by a far greater proportion of learners than ever before. So, thank you Dave, for adding the GUI to Class Blogmeister. I believe it was the right thing to do. –Paul
Hi David,
I am using a WYSIWIG control (Rad Editor) from a company called TELERIK — it’s pricey but definitely worth it. One of the features allows you to specify which formatting options will be available on the control. Depending on my goal, I eliminate or add controls. You can take a look here:
http://www.digitalpencil.org/Projects_AllGrades/Research_StudentChoice/Research_StudentChoice.aspx
If you click the links on the two rows you’ll see that sometimes I use straight text boxes and sometimes WYSIWIG — but with limited controls.
I have no relationship with TELERIK just love the product.
Sarah
David-
I appreciate your post and your concern about kids becoming too distracted using the text formatting features – I too was concerned about this with our class blogging and wiki projects. However, creativity – visual as well as writing – is a big deal for today’s kids. Maybe it has always been, but the tools are so accessible today. For my students, the creative possibilities were a big draw, and probably resulted in better projects and blogs.
Granted, this was my first year integrating web 2.0 technologies into my classes. I will keep you in mind when assigning projects next year.
Last year, I found myself preparing for a keynote presentation. It was all I could do to escape the tyranny of images, videos, and return to the comfort and simplicity of the words alone. I found that by focusing on what I wanted to say, the words that would trigger the whole cascade of images and videos and sound,
It was black and white, monospaced font on the screen. Powerful.
But,when asked what I would want for my budding writer in the family, I’d want her to learn more than the words. I’d want her to know how to mix images, video and sound into those words.
Miguel Guhlin
Around the Corner-mGuhlin.net
http://mguhlin.net
P.S. You wouldn’t happen to know how to add Fckeditor to PmWiki so that it worked, would you?
Last year, I found myself preparing for a keynote presentation. It was all I could do to escape the tyranny of images, videos, and return to the comfort and simplicity of the words alone. I found that by focusing on what I wanted to say, the words that would trigger the whole cascade of images and videos and sound,
It was black and white, monospaced font on the screen. Powerful.
But,when asked what I would want for my budding writer in the family, I’d want her to learn more than the words. I’d want her to know how to mix images, video and sound into those words.
Miguel Guhlin
Around the Corner-mGuhlin.net
http://mguhlin.net
P.S. You wouldn’t happen to know how to add Fckeditor to PmWiki so that it worked, would you?
Communication (at least as far as blogging is concerned) is the total experience of interacting with the page. Creating that experience requires thinking about the content as well as the presentation. Sure, as students are given fonts, colors, and such, they will use them all. But peer review and comparison with other, more effective communication will help students (and teachers! – all of us) learn what works and why for various contexts and types of media or message. The visual cues of how facts are presented (and how to craft those cues into powerful messages) is part of learning to be a communicator in the 21st century.
The catch is that we often have the blind leading the blind: teachers who don’t really understand document structure, online style conventions (check out Nielsen’s Law), etc are the ones leading students in these exercises…whether they realize what they don’t know or not.
I have had several teachers make the same comment recently when faced with the text-formatting options recently implemented by Wikispaces. Almost every teacher in my school uses wikis for student content-creation, and the students were not long picking up on the changes. Of course, this led to much distraction while students played with the look, rather than the content. I have shared these comments with the folks at wikispaces.
However, I firmly believe that engaging students means letting them express themselves in many ways, and the look and feel of their blogs and wikis is a part of that. I am currently trying to convince IS staff to support WordPress MU on our own servers so we might move away from blogger, edublogs and classblogmeister (all of which we have used).
This has met with support, but their question is why not utilize the blog/wiki features in our MS Sharepoint-based portal. Sharepoint will never be able to compete with what’s available on the web for many reasons, one of which is the ability for students to tweak their blogs by adding widgits, templates and yes, even altering fonts.
It’s all part of the creative learning process.
I can see where some might be coming from, but I have to agree with those who feel it’s better to allow students access to the whole tool.
Consider that it is typically best practice when giving students novel things (tools, manipulatives, etc.) to allow them time to just play and experiment and get their hands dirty for a while. Once the novelty wears off, then they can learn more subtle ways to USE the tool instead of just playing with it.
I see it all the time when I have my students create word processed documents or presentations. The first time in, they want to try every little bell and whistle. Their documents are in huge, colored, elaborate fonts–just because they can. Their presentations include every sound effect and animation in the program–just because they can. Once they’ve played, then I can reel them in and talk about when those tools are useful…and when they just get in the way of the message.
One book I recommend for reading is HOT TEXT by Price and Price. Not for everyone, for sure, but for folks who blog a lot, or are involved in the design of websites (that was its audience), it was a great book that came out several years ago.
It teaches you how to design the text for the Web so that people will read it!
Two important points I’ve picked up on from it was how to LINK (beginning or end of sentence) and how to BOLD to facilitate scanning.
We’ve had arguments where I work over what the best writing tool is. We use Macs, and I’m in the TextEdit camp. Most teachers call for Word (or in some schools, NeoOffice).
You want to blow time with a 5th grader? Stick them into Word and show them a few toolbars. Chaos! So, yes, I prefer text edit. It’s clean, simple, and still gives some typographical controls.
But this is my point: By in large we aren’t teaching kids how to write for digital media. A new toolbar in your blogging software? Great. Will some get distracted? Sure. But look how expressive we can be on an unlined piece of paper. We can mix cursive, calligraphic strokes, underlines, circles, color, big, small–and we give so much of that up on screen.
We should give students the tools to be expressive beyond the mere choice of words. But, we also need to be pragmatic. Time in the lab is precious, and the critical lesson there is likely working with words, thoughts, and the ordering of paragraphs. But when writing becomes digital, we ought too to be teaching how to use those underlines, bolds, and font sizes to the advantage of their writing. In this world today, and only more so going forward, YOUR ideas (and your students’ ideas) will be in competition with so many more ideas. Kudos to Dave for enriching the potential depth student writing can find, but let’s not forget that these are just decoration. Use these tools to project emphasize what we have to say.
> but let’s not forget that these are just decoration.
What I meant to write, of course, was:
but let’s not forget THAT THESE ARE NOT just decoration.
My bad, as they say.