TED-Ed Club Meeting #1

A few weeks back, I heard about this new TED-Ed Discussion Club program being piloted by the TED-Ed folks.  Because I've seen quite a few great things coming from the TED-Ed folks (love their literary analysis cartoons!), I told them I was interested in piloting a club here at WO.

During the meetings, led by a different student each week, club members discuss a TED Talk chosen by the club leader for that day.  My student co-facilitator extraordinaire, Michael Sandoval, agreed to help me kick things off, co-host meetings, and drum up interest.

Today, we held our first meeting.  To help get kids interested, I used pizza as bribery an incentive.  Surprise: the pizza was well-received!  Ten kids showed up, and we viewed this video about curiosity.  Then, we all introduced ourselves and created Alphabetical Awesomeness lists.  I gave them an idea of what each club meeting would look like, and Michael showed them this TED Talk that he particularly liked.  We briefly discussed that TED Talk, but many kids were hesitant to join in the discussion.  I hope this improves, but it's certainly understandable.  There were a few freshmen who may have scared off the upperclassmen with their, um... high enthusiasm, but hey... different strokes.  I'll be asking the social studies department to help me get kids interested in joining the fun next week.  Looking forward to what future meetings look like!

Here we go!

Amidst exciting changes and fall weather, I begin this school year with a big smile.  Thanks to my new teaching assignment at the Dunes, I can devote more after-school time to developing best practices in reading/writing instruction, reaching at-risk kiddos, and tech innovation in the ELA classroom.  So excited!

One literacy-tech experiment I tried last year with my freshmen that I'd love to build on further is the web-based classroom dictionary.  In a nutshell, I assigned my Honors English 1 students to collect and define their own self-selected vocabulary words from the common text their class was reading (in this case, To Kill A Mockingbird), and then post their dictionaries in an online forum.  

Let's give credit where credit's due: I shamelessly stole the idea from Prof. Laurie Miller at George Mason University, whose intro-level Advanced Reading class dictionary can be found here.

Then I changed it up a bit for freshmen, and made a new one here.  

Students had to post words that hadn't been posted by anyone in class yet, so that created a pretty tangible sense of urgency for them.  Fun stuff.

This would be adaptable to any subject involving reading for information, unfamiliar vocab, or literacy in general.  This year's changes will involve more visual and antonym requirements for each entry, and of course more awesomeness.