Here, finally, is my vlog.
I decided to make it something valuable, and so I made it an introduction of the school I work at and the English program there. It will eventually wind up on my class website for parents or other visitors.
It does include pictures of students, but no names, and my school has media release agreements for all of these students.
Tuesday, October 16, 2007
Sunday, October 14, 2007
On using images as visual rehetoric...
I decided to make my Flickr side show an exploration of my own experiences of place. I've lived a lot of different places, and so I tried to find images that, according to my memories, communicate those places.
See if you can pick out: South Minneapolis, Roseville Minnesota, The San Fransisco Bay Area, Mobile Alabama, Newark New Jersey, suburban Northern California, small town Iowa, Portland Oregon, Port Arthur Texas, China's Jiangsu Province, Shanghai, or Dublin Ireland.
A visual exploration of place in my life.
One of my paras is already using Flickr with the students at my school. So, they've already got an idea of how it works, which is great for projects. We could use pictures for any number of projects, especially ones on blogs and wikis, since Flickr is so easy to link to.
As for this week's reading, I think the visual argument stuff is really cool. I already use pictures to get kids started on writing, but having them create their own visual argument would not only get them fired up, but also give them such a great new way to interact with and organize their own ideas. I'm excited to try this in class. I think it could inspire creative work, argumentative writing, even test prep for the BSTs and MCAs, actually.
Monday, October 8, 2007
On wikis...
I decided to use wikis for my creative expressions class. It is an elective class where I have the freedom to teach anything fun related to English. I have taught theater, creative writing, yearbook, film, musical lyrics, and a whole range of other topics in just the past year.
This year I am hoping to re-visit the Broadway Theater Project. A theater program I started at Broadway High School, the north Minneapolis alternative school for pregnant and parenting teens. At Broadway, I successfully had the students write, produce, and star in a semi-autobiographical theatrical production about being a teen parent in America today.
I would like to take what I learned at Broadway and adapt the curriculum for use in the ALC I now work at.
With that in mind, I am going to take my wonderful friend Nicole's idea and use a wiki to create a collaborative creative writing environment.
Each student will write poetry about their own life, and in the voice of fictional characters. Then, we will use the wiki to create a cast of characters, a plot, and, eventually, a script. All of the initial writing will be done by individual students, and thus I hope to avoid quite so many creative conflicts, while the script itself will be created by the class working in small groups.
I may use also flesh out this unit as my final project so that it will be ready to go next semester.
After looking at Matt Barton's composition wikibook and the media literacy wikibook I have a few basic ideas about organizing my wiki. However, I am concerned about how some of my students will take having their work altered in even the slightest way by their peers. I will have to do a lot of scaffolding for collaboration, and I'm still trying to formulate how that will look.
I think I will do a smaller creative writing unit with blogs and peer review first. Then a unit on reading poetry and spoken word, maybe with the Poetry Out Loud people. Then I will have them write the poetry that will go into the play, and finally, I will explain how the play will actually be written.
Here is the wiki so far.
We'll see if I have time this year for even a staged reading. I hope so.
This year I am hoping to re-visit the Broadway Theater Project. A theater program I started at Broadway High School, the north Minneapolis alternative school for pregnant and parenting teens. At Broadway, I successfully had the students write, produce, and star in a semi-autobiographical theatrical production about being a teen parent in America today.
I would like to take what I learned at Broadway and adapt the curriculum for use in the ALC I now work at.
With that in mind, I am going to take my wonderful friend Nicole's idea and use a wiki to create a collaborative creative writing environment.
Each student will write poetry about their own life, and in the voice of fictional characters. Then, we will use the wiki to create a cast of characters, a plot, and, eventually, a script. All of the initial writing will be done by individual students, and thus I hope to avoid quite so many creative conflicts, while the script itself will be created by the class working in small groups.
I may use also flesh out this unit as my final project so that it will be ready to go next semester.
After looking at Matt Barton's composition wikibook and the media literacy wikibook I have a few basic ideas about organizing my wiki. However, I am concerned about how some of my students will take having their work altered in even the slightest way by their peers. I will have to do a lot of scaffolding for collaboration, and I'm still trying to formulate how that will look.
I think I will do a smaller creative writing unit with blogs and peer review first. Then a unit on reading poetry and spoken word, maybe with the Poetry Out Loud people. Then I will have them write the poetry that will go into the play, and finally, I will explain how the play will actually be written.
Here is the wiki so far.
We'll see if I have time this year for even a staged reading. I hope so.
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