MACUL 2016

After attending the two-day MACUL conference with several of my WO folks, I am re-energized about next year's 1:1 adventures.

Keynote speaker Jaime Casap emphasized the importance of preparing our students for the real world that awaits them rather than the one that many of us experienced in our youth (Research then = a trip to the public library. Research now = the world at one's fingertips). He talked about what education has made possible for not only him, but also his three kids and the generations to follow. It was a great big-picture reminder of why I do what I do.

Blended Writing Workshops with Joanna Van Raden

Van Raden, a veteran elementary special-ed teacher whose tech-savvy methods helped her find success in her 1:1 classroom, demonstrated how she uses the flipped-classroom format to teach K-5 blended writing workshop. She finds value in allowing students to work at their own pace by providing linked minilessons and mentor texts, partnering students up according to ability and current projects. Here are a few apps, sites and add-ons she likes that looked pretty fantastic:

• WriteAbout: An online venue dedicated to providing students with high-interest writing prompts, an authentic audience, and ways to get feedback. This is a great site for any ELA classroom, or for any teacher trying to engage reluctant writers. Love the authenticity of this site's writing groups and the collaboration among writing classrooms across the country.
• Pixton: An app that allows students to create comic strips. What a great way for students to storyboard dense texts, or chunk longer works into manageable, visual pieces. Hello, Romeo & Juliet!
• Kidblog: A blogging site with a few more kid-friendly, privacy safeguards in place than most. The teacher moderates all content before it goes live, and it's easy for students of all levels to use.
• www.easel.ly: Website that allows students to create infographics. This would be a great way for students to make sense of informational text or create a list of character traits for a novel character, for example.

ELA & Digital Storytelling with Amy Brown

Brown is a literacy specialist whose way with words appeals to the book nerd in us all (e.g., “You’re either a Gatsby person, or a Holden Caulfield person"). Her work emphasizes how educators can help students construct their own meaning in an information-rich culture.

• Digital Footprints and Critical Thinking: Resources that help students answer the question, "What is a digital footprint, and what does yours convey?" Great digital citizenship resources.
• Actively Learn: Active reading site with a repository of texts that has some incredible potential for 1:1 ELA classrooms. Allows the teacher to import classes from Google Classroom (yesssss), and assign a text containing cues and questions they have personalized for a class. Students respond to assigned questions and can then respond to their classmates' responses. Great for annotation of texts from many genres. The free version allows a teacher to assign up to three texts per month and do all of the above. The premium version includes analytics like activity reports for all students. Both versions look awesome. I love the idea of students annotating a text, responding to each other's critical-thinking questions, and then discussing related video clips (“This Youtube link is a video for a song that relates to this text.”)
• Zoho: A backchannel site that allows students to view and respond to teacher slides, ask questions, and interact virtually with the class during a lesson. Provides the teacher with reports about active student engagement, ratings of lessons, and which slides were most engaging to students.

Creating a Mini-Empire in the Classroom with Jamie Vollrath

Vollrath, a HS English teacher at Saline Area Schools, began to see some of the writing he was teaching as unrelated to most adults' real lives. He decided to create a writing course that is more relevant to the work lives his students will face. Thus, Zines 10 was born. Students’ focus in this core class is to write to publish in student-edited, online, special-interest magazines (zines).

• Students produce a total of 17 zines for 2 sections.
• Each group of 3-4 kids produces one zine. Same groups all semester.
• Each team chooses the topic of their zine, but must pitch topic for teacher approval.
• Students earn writing awards from peers (“Zulitzer”), teacher, and No Red Ink.
• Students are in teacher-assigned teams (assigned after one month of class), which then they’re in for the whole semester. Collaboration with non-friends = forging good working relationships.
• Success depends on how many of their peers they can get to write for them. Must sell their product, so everyone’s a freelancer.
• Students may only use one piece of their own writing. Other writing in their zine must be pitched and done by others. Zine students may hire writers from Zine 10 class, or “work the hallways” to get students outside class. Social media is very effective for this.
• Know Your Audience: To find writers, Zines 10 students put on a bazaar. They advertise their zines at stations featuring posters and snacks, and pitch zines to potential writers in other English classes.
• Grading and accountability: Students evaluate groupmates; teacher grades collaboration.

Storytelling with Google Maps with Karen Chichester

Chichester is a veteran ELA and special-ed teacher (grades 6-12). She uses Google Maps to generate text-to-text, text-to-self, and text-to-real-world connections in her writing lessons. Some related apps and sites that provided some food for thought:

• Secret Door: A website that takes the user to one of several panoramic virtual settings. To get students writing at the start of the year, a teacher might give them the link and require a quick-write about the scene they see. Teachers could also incorporate grammar (Ex: describe this scene using at least three correctly-punctuated appositives, to/too/two used correctly, etc.).
• Student Memoirs with Google Maps (My Maps): Students create a memoir by choosing and describing five important places from their past. Student samples are sweet.
• Google Lit Trips: Library of student-created geographical journeys of book characters, real and fictional. Mapping out the present-day locations mentioned in The Odyssey, for example: so many cool possibilities!
• Google Tour Builder: Students create a tour, embed their own images & video (or search for related ones) with Google Earth. Could be good for documenting location-rich works like The Things They Carried (O’Brien’s tour of duty, story locations), historical fiction, Romeo & Juliet, world languages, important events in a novel, or events in a student’s own past.

Final Reflection

My time at MACUL 2016 provided some great ideas, new connections, fine camaraderie, and lots of added excitement for next year's 1:1 roll-out. Here's to an excellent adventure in the weeks and months ahead!

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.