See more at our Picassa slideshow. (I'm blogging during class so I don't have time to learn how to embed it!)
Posted at 07:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
For about the past half hour, I've listened to Victoria Wilson, our high school Library Media Specialist highlight fun Web 2.0 tools. Some of her usable ideas:
just hear !t: use this real time player for class room music...A few years ago a Minnesota Writing Project fellow suggesting using the Rolling Stones "Satisfaction" in as many versions as can be found as a lesson in voice and style. Here's an easy way to make that happen without having to compile the songs or pay for them, or to ask students to create their own playlists of other cover songs.
Wordle: create visual representations of word lists or other texts. For example...
Posted at 06:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
OCP Home Page Evolution
After this grammar tortore, we were burned out, so I punted. How could I make writing functional and engaging again. I asked my students, "Hey, what if we could create a website for our school?" We didn't have one, and other Minnesota alternative programs do. The idea of creating a website seemed like the perfect formula for success with nontraditional students. It offered daily computer access, relevant composition tasks, and a highly visual, published product. And truly, most students who chose to work on the website project were engaged as soon as they found their niches. Some wanted to work primarily on visual design, some researching, interviewing and gathering images. Others who never really discovered the content they could confidently contribute, or those who struggled with the technology, quit early.
Students sorted themselves into categories of those confident with technology (even overly so) and those skittish about delving too deeply beyond checking email. Initially, I asked them to work cooperatively across three class periods to contribute research information to a matrix comparing and contrasting free webhosting and authoring service.
Subpages on the site grew naturally according to student interest. For example, Demetrius really wanted to post an image of Barack Obama, but after a unanimous reaction by his classmates that Mr. Obama was not an appropriate graphic illustration for our OCP Rules and Expectations subpage, Demetrius decided to compose an OCP Heroes and Role Models page. Demetrius' process in composing his chosen page was beautifully organic and honest, punctuated by many breaks for You Tube, Firefox crashes, and leaving the classroom to get a drink of water (check his phone messages). First, he interviewed fellow OCPers about their personal heroes. Next, he searched for images, asking along the way who some of them were, occassionally diverting to google them. Finally, he attempted to post them on his subpage. For a reason he and I never discovered, posting an image to Google Sites during his class period involved an incredibly frustrating process of watching Firefox crash each time he clicked the browse and upload buttons, then restarting Firefox an unpredictable number of times until an image would appear in the selection box to be added to the page.
My perception of Demetruis' process is that he surrendered most days to his frustration believing he could never finish. When I asked that he add captions to the images so that site visitors could recognize the heroes and role models, he seemed to think it was an impossible task. Moving images in Google Sites is something neither of us mastered, so finding space for typing names in a consistent way to maintain page design proved impossible. But if I could just find him a tool, like clicking paragraph text in the format menu just to place the cursor for typing, he could persevere. On the last day of the project, Demetrius opened his subpage to discover that another student had attempted to write a brief introduction naming what the chosen heroes and role models shared in common. Finding this small contribution on his page seemed to motivate him for a final effort. Also on this day, another student and I discovered through trial and error over a few days how to insert a Picasa slide show on a subpage. Demetrius discovered his solution. Rather than struggling to manipulate the images on his page, we placed them in a slide show. Although we still didn't have role models' names listed, we did have the introduction and the slide show frame to give shape to the content.
I loved the experimentation and frustration of the recursive thinking and composing, and the clarifying effect both of collaborative writing and translation of information from verbal to visual text. We didn't know what our composition would look like or read like until it was finished. We couldn't just fill in the blanks.
Another student, Devin, volunteered to explain the hard to understand calculation of credits earned in alternative school. He wrote and revised a written explanation, but couldn't clearly communicate how attendance, participation and quality of work could result in a passing letter grade but not an entire credit. When our program assistant produced a fictitious grade report for "Jane Alternative," two other boys were able to use the visual to generate three clear statements summarizing how credit is earned at OCP. I'm going to admit that I sat beside them to facilitate the translation of verbal to visual to verbal again, but they were authorities on the accuracy of the information and the precision of language for each statement. All students learned how a multimodal composition could communicate more clearly than verbal text in this situation.
I feel as though I could type these stories over and over. Adam made the OCP tour movie and posted it on You Tube. Reed created the curriculum subpage, Ana the staff. Jesse struggled mightily with the image uploading issue to create the student work subpage. Sheldon took over the community subpage when others had to walk away from the frustration of the technology. Keyla, Alonte, and Brittany became fully invested in finding and posting OCP's favorite media. Chet didn't want the responsibility of his own page, but assisted many others and allowed me to use the subpages to help him practice identifying main ideas.
Students didn't articulate these outcomes on their unit reflections, but here's the kind of literacy skills I believe we practiced:
The outcome that students nearly unanimously appreciated was collaboration. While they had plenty of criticism for other aspects of the unit (one student called it "chaos"), all but three students said they felt like they were all working together on this project. Jeff said, "Yes, we all played our parts and helped others who asked for it." John pointed out, "You had to get help to finish." Nikki said that she "saw people getting other people to finish." Adam noticed that "we all had different jobs to finish the project."
Over the 20 days of our unit, assessment became a matter of triage. What problem can we solve today, and who's going to be in charge of working on it? Who can help? If we all worked toward making progress on the site, we all earned our participation credit for the day. We also stopped at the midpoint and at the end to view the site as a whole to evaluate it, reassessing our to do lists. In the end, students received academic points for completing their individual projects (subpages) and writing feedback at the midpoint and end of the project. They will share an academic grade for the site as a whole.
And here's our page. I enabled the comment function, so please sign into your Google account and freely comment to validate and extend our learning.
Posted at 06:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)
After spending the opening few weeks on writing true, personal stories and the next few studying visual literacy, it seemed logically to put several graphic novels in front of my students to see what they could make of them. Their three favorite texts were clearly Fax from Sarajevo by Joe Kubert, Silverfish by David Lapham, and the graphic novel version of the 9/11 report.
Posted at 07:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)
Someone at my MWP presentation last week asked me to post this slide:
After my own presentation, I listened to Julie Landsman remind me about the racism inherent in low expectations and the need for white teachers to reclaim their authority in their classrooms to maintain high expectations. I wondered about this slide of mine. Is my decision to step outside of mainstream curriculum and pedagogy an excuse? Does it allow students to avoid the cultural capital of traditional curriculum? Do I use all the circumstances in the top half of the slide to apologize for students' poor performance?
I tend to see the glass half full--the unfinished draft is two more pages than he had ever written before, she can't spell but what insight!, he has attended every day for 10 days in a row. These are real successes. Yet, I can call them successful because my expectations for my students are just one step more than they've walked before. For some students, "low" can't even describe how simple success can be. He decided to show up today. And the accumulation of weeks of walking students toward progress so slowly and carefully overwhelms and drains, disheartens and disillusions. Until some of them gain enough confidence to make a leap. Some of them do.
Alternative school teaching presents an exhausting daily dichotomy: would it be better to start with high expectations (that send a large group back out the door to learn by suffering the consequences of dropping out), or to attempt to repair the damage of years of school failure and apathy with careful, measured steps toward accomplishment (that may grant motivating credit for substandard work)?
And the truth is, I feed them as often as I can. Though it is against district policy, I have on rare occasions transported them. I present myself as their role model and talk about my own healthy and unhealthy families. I talk about drugs, drinking and smoking more openly than I should. I try to teach them to analyze the media critically. I challenge their personal fables as often as I can in ways they understand, telling about my student who died, the ones I taught in jail. I don't take them into my home, tell their parents what I really think about them, call the police when I suspect I know of some dangerous choice they are considering. These boundaries shift because every kid is different, because I believe like Atticus Finch that knowing you can't win doesn't mean you shouldn't fight.
The top half of the slide doesn't offer excuses. It lobs in variables for good teachers to consider as, during one of the 4,000 decisions they make in a day, they calculate a fair, useful expectation for a child.
Posted at 07:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
I told my students in the middle of last week that we would be learning to "read" and "write" images, that written composition and image composition have more in common than they might think. It was a brash claim, and they wanted to argue. We'll see if they're too worn down to pick a fight by our last day of the unit just before MEA break.
On day one, we "read" this Target ad using Critical Response Protocol:
Posted at 06:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Thanks for the opportunity to present today, friends. I love putting my students' best work out there so that I can go back and tell them how impressed all of you were. I'm posting a few of the slides that seemed to capture most people's attention today, and I added the links from my Power Point to my resource list on this page. Check the sidebar.
I welcome further questions and discussion because as I told a few people afterward I'm still working on understanding all that I learned on my sabbatical last year. As often as I can find a curious, critical friend to talk to, I need one. You can get my email from Candance, or leave comments here on Vox.
Posted at 06:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
One of the hardest lessons of alternative school teaching is to let students be who they are and not judge them for it. Most of their life experiences have been censored out of mainstream classrooms. The burning stories they have to tell are about getting arrested, getting high, unconventional home lives, being different in ways that are not appreciated as "creative." So my purpose in starting the year with this unit is to make space for their honest voices.
- What kinds of stories are "life stories"?
- What writing strategies do good storytellers use?
- How does language create emotion?
- Who is the audience for your life story, and what's your purpose in telling it?
- What is the best form for your story?
Posted at 09:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Posted at 08:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)