On Saving Poetry from "Schooletry" - with ToonDo

[Update: By the way, the student comments in the first panel are quoted from our class Ning. So are my comments in the following two panels. I'm not making this up.]

Thanks to Diane Cordell, librarian/educator and word- and image-smith extroardinaire, for inspiring me to take my first stab at ToonDo. True to my worst nature, it’s way too wordy. But damn, I have a lot to say about this: so many of my students hate poetry - because of school.

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Written by Clay Burell

August 18th, 2007 at 11:35 pm

Posted in language arts

Tagged with edtech, lessons, literacy, multimedia, reading, web 2.0/ read-write web

6 Responses to 'On Saving Poetry from "Schooletry" - with ToonDo'

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Diane, your last name isn’t McCordell at all, is it? I just learned that by commenting on a new edublogger’s blog in Austalia that you’d commented on too Funny century we’re in. So it’s Cordell, is it?

[Reply]

Clay Burell

19 Aug 07 at 3:40 am
Yes - been Cordell now for 34 years, as of September 1 (I married in the cradle!).

Did your students supply their own avatars? Definitely adds a coolness factor that might appeal to my kids. Can’t wait to get started with them - hope our district technology can keep up with us. In a perfect world, everyone would have equal access to tools and technology. Ah, well, it will spur our creativity.

I remember during the last century, on my first trip to Europe, sending home letters written on tissue-thin air mail stationery. Yes, times have changed. “So get out of the new world if you can’t lend a hand…”

[Reply]

diane

19 Aug 07 at 11:43 am
P.S.

(With me, there’s always more)

Re. Creativity:

“Because of their courage, their lack of fear, they (creative people) are willing to make silly mistakes. The truly creative person is one who can think crazy; such a person knows full well that many of his great ideas will prove to be worthless. The creative person is flexible — he is able to change as the situation changes, to break habits, to face indecision and changes in conditions without undue stress. He is not threatened by the unexpected as rigid, inflexible people are.”
-Frank goble, US psychologist

I’m still working on the “without undue stress” part.

[Reply]

diane

19 Aug 07 at 11:46 am
Diane, you mean avatars for the comic? No, that was a Saturday morning whim after reading your post. They would have hated me for the wake-up call. But that’s a GREAT idea.

“Undue stress”–I hear you. Part of the territory?

[Reply]

Clay Burell

19 Aug 07 at 5:19 pm
Clay,

You DO realize that the next step might be to create graphic novels - or graphic poetry anthologies.

I loved the Illustrated Classics comic books (not the abridged novels we use now for reluctant readers) that were published when I was a child - I’d be interested in seeing how your class portrayed good old J. Alfred - or tackled Blake’s Tyger. Or re-interpreted Beowulf (maybe you could collaborate with Christian Long’s Brit Lit class). Frankenstein might also be fun to tinker with.

These are all from Western Lit. - any seminal novelists, poets, folk tales from Korea that would work?

[Reply]

diane

19 Aug 07 at 5:46 pm
Clay,

I had a comment on my blog from
Rajendran, the creator of ToonDoo (www.jambav.com) asking for teacher input.

ToonDoo has an RSS feed
http://blogs.toondoo.com/blog/2007/08/20/Teachem-a-Lesson-says-van-Pelt

and there are instructions on how to make a flipbook here
http://blogs.toondoo.com/blog/2007/07/31/ToonBook-A-flip-book-of-toondoos

[Reply]

diane

20 Aug 07 at 2:36 pm