Writing = Complicated

This is me bouncing my new daughter Ella (7 weeks. Awesome baby) on my knee while I review transcripts because writing = complicated. She woke up early from her nap, and if this dissertation is ever going to get written, sometimes she has to help by snuggling while I write 1-handed.

As a recipient of a grant from the Agnes & Sophie Dallas Irwin Foundation, I wanted to document my summer writing, partly to ground myself as I try to keep working through moments like this, and partly as a way to say thank you to the Agnes & Sophie Dallas Irwin Foundation. 

When I wrote the application for the grant, I said, "When Virginia Woolf said that a woman needs a room of one’s own to write, I wonder if she ever thought about the impact of a five-year-old." And here is Ella, on my second day of working, demonstrating just how true that is. I wouldn't ever want to give up the hugs and cuddles and time with Ella, and so my first entry is written one-handed while I bounce her on my knee.

Collaborative Close Listening: Spanish Class VoiceThreads

Last week, I had the chance to collaborate with Señora Marrecau and her Spanish students as they used VoiceThread to describe one person in their family or to describe themselves.

Señora created one series of  VoiceThread slides per class and posted the link to the slides on her Google Classroom page. Señora wrote a comment on each slide that said which student should post on that slide. For homework on the first night of the project, each student made an audio recording responding to the three prompts on the slide.

Listen to one of the student's recordings here.

The next day in class, Señora paired up the students and had them listen to each others' recordings. Each student then wrote a transcription of what their partner had said in a comment box on VoiceThread. In addition, students then shared ideas with each other about ways to improve their pronunciation, clarity, and fluency.

Since the class is an immersion class, this use of technology slowed down the pace of speaking and translating so that each student had the chance to speak in the target language, listen to her own speech, make corrections as necessary, and listen to others' speech with the purpose of understanding.

Making the Hallways Speak: QR Readers and Vocaroo

A quick and wonderful way to merge posted work with digital publishing: students read their poetry out loud and record on Vocaroo. Then, they take the QR code for the recording and post it at the bottom of the page.

It's not just an English class idea. Consider some of these ways of using Vocaroo-based QR codes in other content areas:

• Math: students complete a new style of problem, explain how they solved it, and put the QR code on a class blog.

• Science: Students take photos during a lab. They explain the observations they made of the photos.

• History: Students have an asynchronous virtual debate and save their responses in a Google Doc using QR codes.

• Modern Languages: Students make posters of their families and place QR codes on the posters explaining details about the families in the language being learned. 

Need more info about using QR readers?

How to install a QR Reader by Susie Simmons

We have Macs at my school, so a QR Reader App for your computer. (I usually use the one on my phone, but it's nice to have access on other devices, too)

3 Connected Reading Ideas

I've been meaning to document these ideas from NCTE 2015 for awhile now, and today feels like the right day.

First, connected reading involves both traditional print-based books and also digital forms of reading - that article that your friend posted on Facebook, your Twitter stream, a series of memes that you think are hilarious.

At NCTE 2015, I went to a presentation by Kristen Hawley Turner, Troy Hicks, and Sara Kajder where they both talked about some of the ideas from the book and shared what they're doing in classrooms.

Here are three that I really enjoyed:

Building a community of readers: On the first day of class, assign students to make a book spine poem and then have that be each students' first post on a class blog or Instagram page:

Audience & Book Selection: At the end of an independent reading project, students make a book trailer. Then, they link the book trailer to a QR code that's placed on the spine of the book in the classroom library. Free QR Code generators are easy to find, so here's a link to a Google Search for them.

Bringing Digital Reading into the Classroom: Some sites are great for digital reading, but the world of teen (and adult) brains might get distracted by all the places you can click to. Symboloo is a great site for gathering together often-visited sites (like The Atlantic, Huffington Post, NY Times), and Adblock helps you stay focused.

Cards Working!

Today's mini-maker conversation:

Student: May I bring my card home? I got it to work!

Me: Not until I get a video of it.

Love the time, thought and care that was put into these cards!

Because Philly (And also Westerns) - Teacher Resources

I have to admit - I have a soft spot for Thomas Jefferson.

Photo by Tina Matzcak

(Yeah. That's us taking a selfie together. NBD.)

So, I'm really excited about this science class primary resource from fellow PhilWP-er Trey Smith about Thomas Jefferson's Proposed System of Weights and Measures.

And, since we're on the subject of American History, the National Humanities Center has a whole bunch of free webinars available during the Spring of 2016, from teaching war fiction to religious freedom and religious intolerance in America.

And finally, since I love digital storytelling with a passion, and Westerns kind of fit into the historical theme of today's post, Kevin Hodgson posted today about Alan Levine's new, open invitation, Western-themed DS106 course. Sounds like a pretty great place to jump in and see how people are using the internets for creativity. And then steal borrow ideas for my classroom.

Screenshots of Online (and not so online) Platforms for Audience

This post is actually just a sneaky way for me to create links to some images that I want to project at the NWP Annual Meeting in Minneapolis tomorrow, 11/19. I'm presenting with other writing projects that run summer writing projects in partnership with the National Parks (Here's a link to our presentation. Sorry that you have to scroll down. I'm not enough of a wizard with hyperlinking).

To explain the images, in the Project Write summer camp, we've been experimenting with lots of different types of audience. Among other sites of audiences, we've used a class wiki where students post work in progress and posted to a National Park Service Blog. We also publish a printed literary magazine. To see some more of the places we go to share our writing, check out the presentation PPT here.

Example of a Class Wiki in Blogger:

National Park Service Blog:

2015 Project Write Literary Magazine: