Blogs on English Language Arts

September 30th kicks off Banned Books Week, a celebration of the freedom to read all across the country. This year is the event's thirtieth anniversary, as the battle against censorship marches on. In this digital society, where we have access to most any kind of information at our fingertips, there are still those who would limit our rights when it comes to what we read. While book censorship is almost always born from the best of intentions -- most often to protect the innocents -- it's a threat to our first amendment rights and something we should all rally to fight off.

Technology can enhance academic conversations, says Anna Des Roches, a community development officer for Collaborize Classroom. The American Association of School Librarians (AALS) agrees, naming Collaborize one of the "Top 25 Best Websites for Teaching and Learning in 2012."

Blake Wiggs, a history and language arts teacher in North Carolina, often uses Collaborize to efficiently "organize classroom participants and sort their contribution to the discussion." He likes that he can integrate audio or video clips and widgets into the discussion pages. Nico Saldana, a high school world history teacher, uses Collaborize to increase student participation: "Nobody can check out of a conversation because everyone is writing."

My 8th-graders do their best writing when it is part of a project that is meaningful to them and will be published in some way when they are finished. So over the years, my students have written and illustrated children's books for schools in Uganda, published magazines on topics of their choice, blogged poems from their autobiographies, and showcased their best work in online portfolios.

At the 2012 Conference on College Composition and Communication, three well-known writing scholars led a discussion on a writing exercise they'd assigned themselves. For 30 days, each wrote for an hour about a different everyday object. After CCCC, three of us -- all friends, teachers and writers -- were energized by the idea of this activity and decided to try it out.