Archive for April, 2007
Fascist America, in 10 easy steps | Special reports | Guardian Unlimited
- Good warmer for World History unit and/or for Animal Farm or V for Vendetta? By Naomi Wolf
- post by cburell
SFETT’s iCan Film Festival de Cine
- Marco Torres’ San Fernando HS student galleries, annually, since 2001 or so.
- post by cburell
Barbara at Dare to Dream, whose Photo-a-Day for Schools Flickr project found the flesh [spirit] willing but the body weak for me (sorry again, Barbara), asked this question to me in a recent post.
How can we encourage exploration and following interests with our students and still hold them to some kind of timeline? Clay, you are building a text with your students so how do you handle the time line?
My answer to her there became the most thorough description of my history class’ first wiki textbook project, “A Broken World: WW I to WW II,” that I decided to post my comment to her here. So here it is:
The wiki textbook project has not been difficult to manage at all, so far (but at the same time, it’s not a very student-centered project–the only choice students got was to choose which chapter of WWI to WWII history to turn into a textbook chapter). All students have drafted their re-write of the textbook chapter (paraphrasing skills, reading comprehension, writing), added multimedia (using del.icio.us searches, rss searches, etc–research skills), made a presentation (normally Powerpoint, but that’s fine, and they’re improving impressively at that, possibly because their slideshows are published for real audiences on the wiki), then given, with their partners, lectures to the class using their Powerpoints (speaking skills). I film the lectures, capture them in iMovie immediately after, and upload them to Google Video daily.
To keep the other students learning from these student-taught classes (rather than zoning out), they are quizzed each class on the content from the prior class’ lectures. (And yes, I do some post-mortem teacher lecturing after each student lecture to clarify points and model the “presentation as storytelling” approach I’m pushing them to learn. That is filmed and posted on the wiki too, which has interesting applications for semester exam reviews, next year’s classes, and general uses for world audiences as well.)
Finally, students self-assess their embedded lectures with a rubric my English dept colleagues made, and write goals for improvement for their follow-up lecture. They post these metacognitive skills-reflections on the discussion tab of their wiki page.
They’ll do the whole process again in a “Cold War” wiki textbook, and be graded for their lectures that time as an oral test grade (this first round is just a quiz grade for the lectures).
So the wiki textbook project is really traditional in terms of content, but offers a legacy product for future students with multimedia offerings a paper textbook obviously can’t offer.
Above all, my objectives for this project (like all my projects, really) are about literacy: reading, writing, speaking, listening, researching.
And collaborating.
Did I answer your question about time management? I get about 2 chapter lectures per 85 minute class from my students (though the over-achievers are going overboard, which is good and bad). The schedule fits what we’re doing.
I can’t imagine getting anything done, though, in a 55 minute class [Barbara's school's schedule]. Why?
* * *
For a look at one exemplary lecture, check out these two students’ lecture on the causes of World War I. Great Powerpoint, impressively clear and interesting lecture. Not bad for a ninth grader! (And we can’t wait to compare this to lectures we film when they’re seniors.)
Phuket sunset
Originally uploaded by rosswebsdale.
Nothing like an illness to clear your head. Mine taught me a lesson in balance. I’ve been so fascinated by the possibilities of our sci-fi educational reality that I’ve forgotten to take care of myself well.
It’s also a good time for silence in other ways. Things are slowing down, getting calmer. Thank Goodness.
Chris in Honolulu, Michele in Denver, and I are wrapping up our first 1001 Flat World Tales workshop (more on that when the student publishers choose the first stories for the “blook” in a few weeks).
The World War I to World War II online wiki textbook my history students are making is coming along nicely, and since they are lecturing for at least 75% of each class session, I’m more of a coach than a teacher (you can see their lectures on the wiki, since we filmed and embedded them–come back next month to see them try again with a second lecture, and we’ll see how this improves their presentation and speaking skills).
The endless 1:1 planning meetings with my admin are also winding down, and I’m waiting, with everyone else, to hear what the business department and owner finally decide. (Which gives me time to catch up on my grading.) Bless them for having the sense to include a teacher in these discussions.
The student blogging Grail still evades but still beckons. Let it. I can’t push the river.
And I’ve taken a break from my RSS subscriptions, from reading edublogs (at least reading so many), and from constantly holding my laptop to hold other things instead. Things like books, and EunJeong’s hand.
It’s nice to be reading again: Harvard historian of religion Elaine Pagel’s Adam, Eve, and the Serpent is a fascinating look at the culture wars between pre-Church Christians concerning sexuality, the body, and gender politics. It’s my second Pagels this year. During Chusok (the Korean Thanksgiving, Buddhist/Taoist style) I read her Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas, along with ex-minister and New Testament Greek professor Tom Harpur’s The Pagan Christ: Is Blind Faith Killing Christianity?, and learned how much closer to Buddhism and other advanced viewpoints early Christianity was, before Roman Imperial politics put an end to all of that. So Adam, Eve, and the Serpent continues this jag for me. I’ve got Pagel’s The Origin of Satan, another historical study of early Christian thought and politics, waiting after that. It all fascinates me. I wish I knew more Christians–any, actually–who it fascinates as well. All the amazing discoveries we’ve made about Christian history due to the Nag Hammadi Texts, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and other pre-Catholic writings burned by the victorious Roman Church, yet nobody reads them. (Or even bothers to consciously read their Bible, for that matter.) It’s a shame. “The Christianity that was, but is no more” is a Christianity far superior to the current brand, in my book. (DaVinci Code fans, there’s more history there than pop churches are comfortable to admit. Again: fascinating.)
But enough of unsolicited book recommendations.
I’m really just writing to say that I’m off to Thailand for a nine-day Spring Break. No computers, no students, no “Mr. B.” Just a guy with a backpack full of books and a snorkel, looking forward to reconnecting to more elemental things.
See you on the flip-side.
I just visited “Rambling Reflections,” a classroom teacher’s blog from New Zealand, and thought it worth passing on.
Why? Because it’s anything but “rambling,” from what I saw, and full of terse, reflective quotes and thoughts, and useful tools for geeky teachers like us.
I’ve been wishing aloud for some time that more non-Anglo countries would join the 1001 Flat World Tales project. So when Hagit from Israel (via my membership in ePals) and another teacher soon to begin work in Kazakhstan expressed interest in joining the project, you can imagine how happy that made me.
That brings the current list of participants to:
- Korea
- Denver
- Honolulu
- Hannibal, MO, USA
- New Brunswick, Canada
- Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
- Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic
- Pennsylvania
- Two schools in Australia
- Shanghai, China
- Serbia
- Israel (fingers crossed)
- Kazakhstan (ditto)
Imagine the ‘07-’08 mix for this project. We can all change partners.
But where is the Arab world? The African? The Latin American? The West European?
Patience. This project is only two and a half months old.
(And now is a good time to throw your hat in for next year. Sign up at the 1001Teachers wiki, and we’ll take it from there.)
[I've been side-lined for the last week because some medication I'm taking--only for a few more days--has side-effects that make my hands shake too much to efficiently type. I'll be back soon.]
Real quick:
All these conversations about “Blogging as Conversation” spinning around right now among Jeff Utecht, Barbara at Dare to Dream, Patrick Higgins, and other sites have produced this irony: Patrick and I connected on the topic of how teachers can kill blogging for students (the thinking starts here, extends to here, here, here, becomes a conversation here, which continues here, before reaching its climax–for my practice and pedagogy, at this stage anyway–here [Updated:] and here.). He helped me think on my blog, and I tried to reciprocate on his. This stranger-reader-interlocutor and I, in short, began to “blog-converse.”
The irony? In one of those conversations, I had a bit of an “a-ha” moment about the “teachers as blog-vampires” topic above, a light-bulb in my writing and thinking (or at least a better-than-usual moment of articulating the idea)–and I had it while commenting–strikethrough–writing–on Patrick’s blog.
But it belongs here too (and I mean that seriously, despite the lightness of this post. It’s below.). So why did it feel like I would be plagiarizing if I “stole” my own comment from Patrick’s blog?
The upshot? Patrick and I, as you’ll read below, don’t know what to call what happened next. Just read it. It’s partly comic, partly neo-literacy, blog-style. Here it is, cross-posted from Patrick’s fine Chalkdust blog (with his kind permission):
In order to get some of these ideas going a little deeper, I will re-post Clay’s comment on “Blogs as Conversations,” here:
Clay Burell said…
This is an observation that I have not heard about too often in my travels. As digital immigrants, we expect that we will have some issues with cognitive dissonance as we enter into blogging-as-practice and pedagogy, but Clay brings up examples from what he is seeing with his students. This is new for them as well, and this is equally as hard for them. By becoming consistent writers through blogging for larger audiences, we are kicking the chair out from under them, so to speak.
Think about the structures we have always placed on the writing process. We still use those structures, only the end piece is shifted dramatically. Audience is the most intriguing factor for us as teachers of writing because of the stress it places on the earlier steps of the writing process. Just by allowing for other students to access your writing openly and without the constraint of a 40 or 80 minute class period, it places new stress (what I would call “good stress”) on the writer as he or she develops ideas, formulates syntax, and revises. Eliminating the time constraint that a student’s work is open to others really transforms the whole process.
Professional development for students? I like that one, and our teachers will like to hear that as well.
2 comments:
I don’t know what to say about this all, other than that it’s another historically new literacy wrinkle brought to you by web 2.0. It’s like, “Oops–I wrote a page of my book on your book! Mind if we share?”
And I guess that’s okay. It is for me, anyway. I like writing with like-minded strangers, which is what all of us are–at first.
(Jeff Wasserman’s plug for cocomment might be a bit of a “solution” here, though I’m not sure it’s a problem. The site was down when I tried it, though.)
Zamzar – Free online file conversion
- Online tool that converts YouTube, Google Video, and other file types to .mov or .wmv so you can edit them. (Also converts .pdf to Word, PPT to Flash, much more.) There’s a 24-hour wait period, though. [Correction: It's almost immediate.]
– post by cburell
Patrick, you really do nail the pedagogical affordances that, in my book, only blogging offers to developing student literacy–writing AND reading.
What I’m now experiencing with my own students is this: the idea of being writers is unsettling to them. After 9 years of schooling, they have only written homework and “schooly” writing assignments–have only been students, and never writers.
So they are resistant to this shift. They don’t want to learn to be writers, because it’s harder. It makes them find their own ideas, instead of hacking out some tired exercise based on ideas that Teacher prescribed to them.
So students have to be “professionally developed” as well as teachers into what the read-write web means for their learning. It’s new to them too, and just as uncomfortable.
Which brings me back to your main point: the training I’m pushing on my students now is precisely what you highlight: reading with writing in mind; writing with an audience in mind; conversing with other writers and readers via comments; hyperlinking and connecting.
Some get it faster than others. All need to hear this: we know you’ve never been a writer, and we know you’re a novice. We’re forgiving that way. This is a long-term journey you’re starting, so start where you are as a writer, and we’ll take you as far as we can in the coming years. Trust that you’ll grow.
That sort of thing. Enjoyed your post.