I have been reflecting lately on storytelling, particularly visual formats, my thinking spurred by the Multiliteracies PD that I attended last week and hope to blog about more extensively soon. One of the benefits of maintaining an online personal learning network is the ‘aha’ of realising that you are totally on the same page as other educators.
The irrepressible Lauren O’Grady is running a project that several Oz/NZ educators and others are becoming involved in, “6words”. Lauren has set up a the 6words wiki which explains the purpose and scope of the project. What inspires me about is is the possibility that it may create some very powerful dialogues between teachers and students. The simplicity of distilling an idea into 6 words makes it an easy win for teachers and students alike.
Here’s my first, and I imagine there will be more to come.
Much has been posted lately about the Wordle tool, which allows users to convert any piece of text into a word cloud, with the most frequently occuring words shown largest. Warrick speculated on his blog about the capacity of Wordle, could you paste a WHOLE BOOK into it?
The answer, happily, is yes. Here’s my Wordle word cloud of George Orwell’s 1984. I sourced the free e-book from Project Gutenberg, cut and pasted, waited about 30 seconds, and there it was.
Although Wordle seemed to be the next big thing, I didn’t see the benefit until now. So long as you can source an e-book version of the text you want to see, this could be used to introduce any text to a group of students, and to highlight in discussion what the most significant aspects of the text are.
One simple example: look at 1984 - how many of the larger words refer to the body? I see face, mind, hand eyes, voice, man. This could be used to highlight how Big Brother’s tactics lead to bodily control.
I will definitely be using this with my students. I just need to track down an e-book of In the Lake of the Woods, which my Year 12 students are starting now.
a. Type your answer to each of the questions below into Flickr Search.
b. Using only the first page, pick an image.
c. Copy and paste each of the URLs for the images into fd’s mosaic maker.
The Questions:
1. What is your first name?
2. What is your favorite food?
3. What high school did you go to?
4. What is your favorite color?
5. Who is your celebrity crush?
6. Favorite drink?
7. Dream vacation?
8. Favorite dessert?
9. What you want to be when you grow up?
10. What do you love most in life?
11. One Word to describe you.
12. Your flickr name
I found this great mashup via Pea Soup, and thought it was a great opportunity to experiment with Flickr’s mosaic maker. I’m sure that students would enjoy using this process to respond to a series of questions or to accompany a piece of writing.
I’m sharing this presentation on the text Inheritance, by Hannie Rayson, which my Year 12 class have just finished studying, and which is on the text list for VCE Units 3 & 4 in 2008. I hope it may be useful to other VCE teachers and students out there.
This week my Year 8 class commenced a unit on poetry, starting with a survey that I constructed using Google Docs. Now that we’re done with it you may want to complete it yourself, using the form I have embedded below (another cool new feature from Google Docs). I was able to export the data easily into Excel, create pivot table reports, and generate graphs of the closed questions, which we then discussed in class.
It was a great experience to use Google Docs for this purpose, and certainly saved a lot of my time in collating the results. Another great outcome was the opportunity to highlight the utility of web 2.0 applications at school. Currently Google and Google applications are blocked at my school’s junior campus, which means that students until year 9 cannot usually access these resources. In order to get access, I spoke to my school’s Resource Centre Co-Ordinator, who removed browsing restrictions for that single period. In seeking this, I was able to show the form and the way it collated results, and the potential applications of this web 2.0 technology were well appreciated.
Incidentally, one of my students realised that he had open access
“Does this mean we can access Google?!”
This was evidently a rare treat. I watched over his shoulder, worried about what he was going to do with his new-found freedom. He proceeded to open a Google search page and Google himself. Perhaps our Google restriction is a little heavy-handed: what do you think?
I have started thinking about this topic as Jabiz is exploring the topic on his new ‘Intrepid Classroom’. See the blog here, and the Ning here. Check out the conversations that have been happening there, it will be worth your while. Music and politics is a topic I’ve always been engaged in, in fact, my music listening is political. I don’t see much of a distinction or difference.
So I thought I’d take you through a couple of musicopolitical connections that I have been pondering lately. First of all, the title of this post comes from the Disposable Heroes of Hiphopcrisy song of the same name. The Disposable Heroes are a previous incarnation of Michael Franti and some members of Spearhead. If you haven’t yet discovered their music, you need to do so here.
Today in class, we continued our work on political cartoons. The students are really into it, and I’ve spent more time on the topic than I originally intended. We started off by talking about stereotypes, and how these are used in caricature. Some of the stereotypes that they came up with included bogans, emos, yobboes, migrants and blondes. This is pretty easy for secondary students to do, their social lives are sometimes dictated by stereotypes. We then talked about the features of politicians that are exaggerated for caricature, including Kevin Rudd’s spectacles, Julia Gillard’s nose, John Howard’s eyebrows, and of course, Peter Garrett’s head.
Some of the cartoons that we were looking at today were satirising the Australian Labor MP Peter Garrett, previously the lead singer of the Australian band Midnight Oil. Many claim that by becoming involved in party politics he sold out on his old ideals (Many Oils lyrics were about indigenous rights, uranium mining, environmentalism, etc). Very interesting discussions here - is music politically involved? Is it party-political?
Some of the students needed Peter Garrett put in context - they knew him as a Labor MP, but hadn’t heard Midnight Oil’s music, and weren’t aware of his role immediately before entering politics as President of the Australian Conservation Foundation. So, recognising the teachable moment, I fired up my laptop and portable speakers, and we listened to ‘Beds Are Burning’ and ‘Power and the Passion’.
Still on the theme of music and politics, Number 2 on our ARIA charts last week was a remix of Paul Kelly & Kev Carmody’s song ‘From Little Things, Big Things Grow’, performed by the Get Up Mob, re-released to acknowledge the Australian government’s apology to the Stolen Generation of indigenous peoples. It gives me shivers.
I think that now, as I am about to move with this class from political cartoons and persuasive language into a unit on poetry, I can see a convergence emerging. Other political artists that I enjoy include Ani DiFranco, John Butler Trio, Public Enemy and Rage Against the Machine. ‘Do yourself a favour’ and check them out. One of my students also mentioned Green Day as political. Note that note all of those artists’ lyrics are ’student appropriate’.Happy listening!
Last week, my year 8 students spent some time learning about political cartoons, as part of our unit of work on persuasive language and techniques. This is a group of fantastic thinkers, many of them with a wicked sense of humour. They have really enjoyed learning how to read critically and form their own perspective and interpretation.
By far, however, the task they enjoyed most was the opportunity to create their own political cartoons. To start off with, we brainstormed some of the issues that we have been looking at recently, or issues that they were interested in. Some of these included:
China, Tibet and the Olympics
Childhood obesity and food advertising
Changes to AFL rules
Whaling
Rights for same-sex couples and their children
Political correctness in childrens’ television programs
I was really impressed with the range of topics that they generated, and as I walked around the room while they were working, I could see that the cartoons they were producing were far exceeding my expectations. Not only in the quality of their drawing, but also the evident understandings that they had about caricature, satire, parody, perspective, juxtaposition, and many of the other concepts that we had discussed.
One student drew a cartoon entitled ‘Childrens’ TV Overboard’, featuring a slowly sinking Tellytubbie, a great pun and showing excellent understanding of the topics that we had discussed in class (including refugee issues); another, entitled ‘Kevin Rudd’s Working Families’, was composed of two panels. The top one showed a row of very suburban houses, with the bottom panel showing a ‘zoomed in’ view inside the homes: a mother channel surfing, a teenager playing Grand Theft Auto on the computer, and dad lying in the hammock in the backyard with a can of beer. I love their thinking!
I’m now looking at suggesting to some students that they might like to ‘publish’ their cartoons, either by hand or by computer. The National Museum of Australia runs an annual competition for primary and secondary students, which I’ll encourage my students to submit an entry for. The NMA website also contains the recently published Reading Between the Lines unit of work, and an Australia Day Flash Interactive activity.
I was going to be sensible and avoid overcommitment, but I kept finding posts in my reader from some of my favouritebloggers involved in the 31 Day Comment Challenge, and I wanted to join the fun. I would like to get more comments on my posts, and I’m aware that I need to focus on two things in order for this to happen:
Make time to reflect and write more often on my own blog
Comment on others’ blogs and contribute more effectively to the community.
The Challenge comes with a daily task, posted on Michelle Martin’s blog The Bamboo Project. I’ll be doing the first three today as I was a little slow getting started:
Day 1: Do a Comment Self-Audit:
How often do you comment on other blogs during a typical week?
Because I read blog posts in my Flock Reader, I’ll only comment if I click through to a blog. I don’t usually comment on reflective posts, unless I really have something to contribute. So I tend to comment in order to thank the writer for a resource that they have posted which I intend to use. That probably only happens 1-2 times a week, currently.
Do you track your blog comments? How? What do you do with your tracking?
I do now (see Day 3 challenge). I look forward to being able to follow the conversations I am involved in more effectively. Sometimes I would comment on a blog and completely forget that I had done so, making it impossible to complete the conversation.
Do you tend to comment at the same blogs or do you try to comment on at least one new blog per week?
I tend to comment on the same blogs, and these are generally people that I have built rapport with through other networks such as Diigo, Twitter or Facebook, or with whom I have a real life connection to. Going the extra step and commenting on a ’stranger’s’ blog is often a little daunting.
I have plenty of areas to improve upon, and will be keeping Gina Tripani’s advice in mind.
Day 3: Sign up for a comment tracking service:
I was going to give this one a miss, because at first I thought that getting CoComment to work on Flock was going to be a hassle, but Sue Waters provided some really clear instructions on her blog, and I’m all signed up there as nrwatkins.
Want to get involved?
The best place to start is the Comment Challenge Wiki. Join the fun! It may seem like a lot of effort to get started and get involved, but it’s worth it!
I’m a big fan of Visual Bookshelf, by Living Social, which is a Facebook (and stand alone) application that allows users to search for and display books they are reading in real life.
Moreover, it allows for categorisation of books into ‘Already Read’, ‘Reading Now’ and ‘Want to Read’. The marketing part of the application also allows users to select whether they ‘Own’ or ‘Want to Own’ each listed book. Users can rate books, write reviews, and view other users that also have that book listed.
It has also come in handy for ‘recommending’ to my husband which books I might like to receive for my birthday - he just logged into my Facebook and selected a couple from my ‘Want to Read’ list. How romantic.
The only issue I had with Visual Bookshelf was that it was not embeddable…until now. Check out my new page on this blog for My Bookshelf. The widget doesn’t embed in the sidebar very well, so I’ve just given it its own page. That keeps my home page uncluttered too.
I know many others are using Shelfari, which has similar features, but as I’ve gone to the effort of listing and reviewing over 400 books, I’m not quite ready to jump into Shelfari as well! Perhaps if they add an ‘import’ feature I’ll be more receptive.
The VCE English Ning is primarily focusing on the Identity and Belonging Context, but I might ask Pennie if it may be used for networking in relation to other Contexts, and/or Outcomes 1 & 3.
A Ning is a customisable social network, and allows users to interact on topics of their own creation.
education as a cradling of the soul as much as a feeding of the mind (Aitken in Kane, P. The Play Ethic: A Manifesto for a Different Way of Living. Basingstoke and Oxford: Macmillan, 2004).
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