SoulCradler

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.

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

Original Image from Flickr user tyggy under Creative Commons

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.

The Game

Originally uploaded by soulcradler

The concept:

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.

You can play too!

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?

For the commencement of the new 2008 VCE study design in Victoria, my school chose to begin with Outcome 2: Creating and Presenting.  For this Outcome, students are required to read and respond in writing to a given theme, or ‘Context’.  It is the element of the new study design that has drawn the most discussion, as it is the most dissimilar aspect between old and new.

Given that I grew up in NSW and studied for the HSC in year 12 there, and that this is my second year teaching/1st year teaching year 12, I have the (dis?)advantage of not having a great working knowledge of the old study design to draw comparisons.

I really enjoyed the concept of studying texts ‘in context’, and using this as the basis for student writing.  It seemed to be a lovely way of setting up a thematic inquiry, supplementing this with ideas drawn from the text, and then capitalising on this in student-directed responses.

Given that our school started the year with Outcome 2, there may be other schools that are just commencing or are soon to commence their work on this Outcome with students.  I’ll do my best to collate some thoughts, interpretations and resources on The Imaginative Landscape here over the next few days, based on our inquiries using Fly Away Peter, by David Malouf.

I’d love to hear from other Victorian teachers working with the new Study Design, regardless of the particular context that your school is studying.

Tags: VCEEnglish, Teaching, Reflection

It’s been almost a year since I undertook any significant blogging activity.  That was at my old Blogger site, which I’ve now disabled.  I have imported a couple of old posts from there as a bit of background, but not all.

I want to make a fresh start here at Edublogs, and this platform is a clear choice as I have decided that honing my focus is an important part of being a valuable contributor to the blogging community.  I’ve been improving my networks with Twitter and Diigo (nrwatkins), and reading a vast array of others’ blogs through my Flock browser, and this has reinforced the impetus to put my voice out there once again.

This time around I hope to focus specifically on classroom pedagogy, personal professional development and networking, English teaching and leadership, reflecting on literature and integration of ICT in the curriculum.  Still seems like a lot!
Thanks for listening, and there will be more to come.

Image credit here.