On My Current Digital Teaching Activities...

I've got a lot of ideas on how to use some of what we've been talking about in class in my own class, getting it all together is another mater, of course.

Let me tell you what I am doing right now.

My ELL English class (high level ELL students who aren't quite ready for a regular English class) is working on writing in preparation for the BST. We are spending some time on five paragraph essays since I've got to get these kids to pass, but we are also spending a lot of time on a digital writing project.

I started by having all the kids make a time line of their life. It had to include the ten most important events that they were willing to share with the class. I included the comment about "willing to share" because some of these kids are refugees fleeing from some terrible things, and i don't want to make anyone uncomfortable. However, with that said, I also encourage the students to choose important "difficult" and "sad" things, not just the ten best things that ever happened to them.

Next, we went through a series of writing exercises on story telling. Then they had to choose one of the events from their life to create a story about. They started by hand-writing their stories, but eventually they had to move to a computer and type. This is the arduous portion of the lesson. Most of the students have used a computer to surf the internet and watch itube, but few have ever typed something. I made up several lessons on word processing skills and made them as interesting as I could.

Finally, I am now having them create blogs (I created them and invited the students to join later) and post their short autobiographies on their blogs. It took days to sort out signing up and setting up their blogs to look like they wanted. Of course, these blogs will not have their real names on them and will be set up as private when I create them. Next, they will have blog partners that will comment on their autobiographies, and I will post feedback for their autobiographies. We will continue to work and edit these stories until they are pretty polished.

Lastly, when this is all done, I am going to take volunteers who would like to share their stories with my other classes at the school. Depending on how many volunteers I get I may have to offer extra credit or some such thing. There is a good amount of prejudice and animosity from the American students toward the ELL students at my school. My other English classes will have to read the ELL students electronically published autobiographies and post comments (after some scaffolding about appropriate comments). Hopefully, these very honest and intense stories will help my regular ed students empathize with their foreign born peers a little more.

Also, showing my regular ed students the on-line work of my ELL students will hopefully create some excitement about digital writing and kick off a unit for them in which they will be researching the work of a poet of their choice (and the definition of poetry here is pretty broad) and create a blog about that person.

It's not the most high tech of assignments. Just blogs, you know? But it is something they can do, that they have never done, and will really stretch their computer skills. It has also gotten them pretty exited about writing...

On Tappedin

I'm sorry that I've fallen behind over the past two weeks. It's been very busy for me, and then, of course, because I was so busy, I got sick. That's what I get for letting myself get stressed out and not getting enough sleep. It's that time of year.

I will try to get completely caught up today!

Anyway, I've had a lot of experience with Tappedin as an example of an on-line synchronous discussion forum. We used Tappedin during Tom Reinartz's media literacy class back when I was in the English cohort at the U.

I liked some parts of it. I liked how you can create a private community for your students to use, and how you can track their activity on the site. I liked that it had a chat function and also that you could post documents, schedules, assignments, etc. I liked that it has real live people for tech support.

However, it had some problems. It was not as user friendly as I would have liked. I was able to figure it out, but I'm pretty tech savvy. Some of my students would pick it up in seconds, but others would really struggle with the look, the layout, and the chat function in particular.

Some people in the class had some on-line conflict on Tappedin, but my group was able to get together and get a lot of work done...

I'm sure there are other similar programs out there that might be better, too. But from what I've seen so far I think I prefer asynchronous posting.

My students do not all have access to computers at home. Some of them have pretty low technology skills. We do not have a computer lab and I've only got seven machines in my classroom. All of this makes on-line discussions very tricky. I am doing some work with blogs, but even that is tricky because we don't have enough computers...

I think in a different building or a different context on-line discussion would work great. I love how mush potential it has, and I'm excited to try some of these programs someday. Maybe my students could work in groups to have a on-line debate or something? Buy in would be huge, though, and probably one person in the group would work and the others would goof off. I'll have to think about it a lot more.

On my vlog...

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.

On my vlog...

I swear it will be done tomorrow.

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.

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.

On My Vlog...

The work continues.