Digital Story

WRITING LEADS FOR YOUR ESSAYS

  I. Lead with a question.

 If there were a terrible war in your country and you knew that the 30,000 books in your town library were in danger of being burned, would you risk your life to save them? If you answered no, don’t feel badly; few would risk their life to save some books.

 This lead is meant to introduce a piece about a book titled, The Librarian of Basra, which is a true story of a librarian in Iraq who risked her life to save the books in her town library.

  II. Lead with an interesting fact.

 Imagine a composer of music who was so prolific that if you were to copy all of his music by hand it would take you 40 years to finish the job! That composer is Johan Sebastian Bach, a true musical genius if ever there was one.

 

 III. When you finish writing your lead, here are some questions to help you analyze its effectiveness:

 Did you learn what the piece is about?

What did the author do that grabbed you?

·      What made the lead boring?

·      What did the lead make you wonder?

·      What details does the lead include?

·      How could this lead be improved?

·      Which lead would you choose? Explain why.

 From: Nonfiction Writing From the Inside Out,  by Laura Robb p. 116

  See:    http://voicethread.com/?#u556664

 

Reflection on Improving a Past Presentation With Visual Images

A presentation that I have done in the past is one on the characteristics of a good essay. In this presentation I would use an exemplary essay to explain to students these important characteristics:

*    Momentum is built in the opening.

*   There is movement and flow throughout.

* It sticks to the topic.

* It brings you back to an earlier point in the essay.

*  It leaves you with something memorable.

However, the above procedure is top-heavy with teacher talk and could be vastly better with the addition of just the right video. An idea that I got from Dr. Roger Everett is to use various activities or sports as metaphors for a good essay. Some of these activities/sports are: a roller coaster ride; scuba diving; a small airplane ride; flying a kite; and car racing.

Dr. Everett shows his students a YouTube video of a good roller coaster ride. Coincidently, a good roller coaster ride has exactly the same qualities of a good essay given above. (For the third bullet point substitute the word tracks for the word topic.)

After having the class view the video twice, students in small groups can come up with their own examples of metaphors for good essays and present them to the class. The class can then read and analyze an essay to see if it has the above characteristics. Take a look at a video of a roller coaster ride to see if it demonstrates the characteristics of a good essay.

Final Reflection

This course has given us the opportunity to discover and experience using many visual tools that can be incorporated into our teaching. Everyone clearly understands the power of using visual images whether they be in  advertising, entertainment or the teaching field. We all know from experience that visual images have the power to capture our attention like no text can.

 As teachers, we also know that it is important to differentiate the content of our lessons so that they meet the varied interests, learning styles and readiness of our students. Visual images meet the needs of students in ways that text alone cannot. So many of our students have grown up surrounded by movies, DVD’s, and digital games that their brains readily receive and respond to the visual images contained therein.

 I have always loved words, reading, and language in general whether it is English, French, Spanish or Arabic. (Sorry, Thai is not there yet.) However, after seeing the Power Point from ISB (Brussels) I was struck by how much more powerful the right text is when accompanied by visuals. Again, I mention the example from the Power Point that sticks in my mind: One picture of a group of students from ISB and the words: Everyone included, Everyone challenged, Everyone succeeds. Anyone who can master the art of melding text and visuals the way David Willows of ISB Brussels has is truly a brilliant communicator.

 As teachers become proficient in using visual images in their work with students, and students in turn become more proficient, a really powerful connection to millions of others opens via the Web. This connection or network is ultimately very democratizing because individuals have the means to speak to a vast audience – or as Kevin Kelly says, “The fluid and fleeting symbols on a screen pull us away from the classical notions of monumental authors and authority.” Clay Shirkey, in his book Here Comes Everybody, made a similar observation that through the Web like-minded people now have the chance to organize without belonging to an organization. Lastly, using visual images and the Web is another powerful tool toward what Ray Kurzweil takes to be the evolutionary mandate of our species: infusing the universe with intelligence and order.

FINAL PROJECT REFLECTION

The team 7 final project involved students making a SmartMovie to help them learn 20 geography terms that they would subsequently need to know for the “Create an Island” Project. In the Create an Island Project students are meant to create an island community which involves positioning the island at a latitude and longitude that would support the crops and agriculture to sustain the size of the community - in part determined by the island’s area. Students will also need to place needed landforms on the island and have an understanding of its climate.

 The SmartMovies gave students the chance to learn and internalize the vocabulary needed for the Create an Island project. Students used audio, text and images to create their SmartMovies which were placed on the teacher’s blog. Thus, students learned vocabulary and concepts from creating their own movie as well as watching other students’ movies.

 We feel that the SmartMovie project was highly successful as it gave students the opportunity to participate in a hands-on project that was shared with other students. Students successfully learned the needed technology skills as well as the geography curricular content.

 

 

 

 

 

How could Screencast be used in your classroom/department?

In our Humanities 7 classroom we recently had the students learning geography and mapping concepts such as: latitude, longitude, locating a city using latitude and longitude, the Prime Meridian, the International Dateline, the tropics, the temperate zones, the eight cardinal points of the compass, the difference between weather and climate, the effect of elevation on temperature and climate.

 I think if we were to do this unit again, or a similar one, Screencast would be ideally suited to having the students learn the material in a “Circle of Experts” group and then film themselves so that other students can learn the material. There would be many benefits of having the students become experts in one or two of the topics from the unit and then teach the other students. Also, Screencast would enable a permanent video and audio to be created that could be accessed at any time by the students.

 Another application might be to use Screencast in literature circles wherein small groups of students film themselves discussing a book with each student taking different roles: literary luminary, discussion director, word wizard, symbol decoder etc. The possibilities for using Screencast in the classroom are almost endless as the teacher could make Screencasts that would explain assignments or model some aspect of the writing and reading processes.

 

How has the explosion of web-based video changed the teaching/learning landscape?

In a piece in the New York Times from November 23, 2008, Kevin Kelly writes, “When technology shifts, it bends the culture.” According to Kelly, a new “distribution-and-display technology is nudging aside the book and catapulting images, especially moving images to the center of the culture.” To make his point, Kelly mentions that there were over 10 billion views of YouTube in September, 2008!

So what is fueling this exploding technology of moving images? Kelly gives us the “great hive-mind of image creation” which has produced an enormous database of visual items for use in video. Flickr alone has three billion photos posted on the site. From these billions of existing images films are created image by image.

Once a film-maker has found the images s/he wants to use in the video, a “screen fluency” is needed to manipulate the individual images. The most proficient creators of video respond to other videos with their own new video using a Web site called Seesmic. The result of all of this video creation by millions of people who make up the hive mind is democratization of expression or as Kelly says, “The fluid and fleeting symbols on a screen pull us away from the classical notions of monumental authors and authority.”

 For students and teachers a new vernacular has been created by and for us. In addition to books and writing, we now have an enormously powerful vehicle for communication and expression. Students and teachers have just begun to take advantage of this new technology shift. However, much as our common culture has been bent by video technology, so too will the culture in the classroom bend in ways impossible for us to anticipate.

 

 

How can visual imagery support my curricular content?

In my EAP classes students are often reading two to four grades below the seventh grade reading level. In order to provide students with reading texts that are differentiated for reading readiness, I have students choose from among a wide variety of picture books. With thousands of titles available, it is not too difficult to build a class text set around the various units that we are studying. Such text sets offer students books that meet their different interests, learning profiles as well as reading readiness.

Flickr  Okinawa Soba

Visual images are indispensable for giving students the necessary background for many of the books that they read. For example, one popular book that my students read is Henry’s Freedom Box by Ellen Levine. This book is a true story about a slave who escaped from his master in the state of Virginia by mailing himself in a box to Pennsylvania. To introduce the book to students, I show them images taken from Creative Commons: an image of two slaves in Africa with chains around their necks, and a map tracing the triangular slave trade route from Europe to Africa, to the Americas and then back to Europe.

 http://www.vvgeocivtrenches.com/images/maps/map.slave.trade.jpg

In addition to serving as background to reading texts, students use images, graphs, and charts from the Internet for their blog posts. The result is a richer product that engages students at a deeper level. However, the trick to teaching students to use images is for them to be extremely selective in their choice of images and words.

 For me, the most memorable demonstration of the effectiveness of pairing visual images with text was the web page of the International School Brussels. The power of this web page is captured in one frame showing a few students of various ethnicities engaged in some activity. (I forget exactly what.) The impact of this frame comes from the pairing of the image with just six words: Everyone included; Everyone challenged; Everyone succeeds. Wow! Anyone wanting to use images should study this frame! The lesson learned is to be extremely selective and strive for just the right pairing of images and text.

 

 

How have the Ed Tech courses to date changed my classroom this year?

The courses to date have changed my teaching by taking my classroom from primarily paper-based texts to electronic texts sourced from the Internet. A large portion of student reading material is now from texts found on the Internet. In addition, student writing is now done on a computer and then posted to the Internet as opposed to being printed on paper as in the past. This change to an Internet-based classroom has brought numerous benefits to my students.

 This year the Team 7 Humanities has the theme of “Connected World” as a common thread running through all of the units. Each student has had to choose one country to research in order to develop a deep understanding of its people, culture, economy and political systems. Students have found current events articles on the Internet and have had to read and analyze the articles and then write a blog making connections to prior learning.

 When students write their blogs they are writing for a for a real world audience instead of just for the teacher. As a result, students are aware of a higher standard for written work in terms of content, organization, fluency and conventions. In addition, writing blogs offers students much more feedback to their writing from other students and from the real world audience.

 As a teacher who is always striving to have my students improve their reading and writing, the Internet offers an enormous number of reading texts at many different levels. Letting students choose texts matched to their interests, learning profiles and readiness, provides differentiation to student learning.

 In summary, I think that the biggest benefit of the educational technology courses to date has been to explode the limits that traditionally confined student learning. Students are no longer restricted to paper texts found in the classroom or library. Likewise, my students now write for a real audience that includes anyone with access to the Internet. My classroom, like thousands of other classrooms today, offers an enormous number of texts directly connected to real world issues for students to study and a vast audience for them to communicate their thinking.