Using Voice Thread and Google Docs to Make Stronger Writers

To get my Grade 9 HS English students ready for their common assessment this week on The Odyssey, my students began by annotating passages from the text on Voice Thread (see past blog post for more information).  From there I created the following step-by-step directions for writing a mini commentary.  On Monday my students will use a GoogleDoc to create a sample mini commentary (Thank you Keith Miller for the great idea). By the end of class, my students will have written five solid mini commentaries on The Odyssey and we can review them together as a class, make corrections on Google docs, and then share all five as exemplars to the entire class.  And, here comes the best part, instead of grading 20 mini commentaries, I will only have five essays to grade.  This is how technology can make our lives as teachers a little less stressful. 

But it isn't always easy.  Integrating web 2.0 tools into my classroom reminds me of being a first year teacher all over again.  I have all these new resources available to me, but eventually they will become easier to use and over time I will have a tool box of resources to utilize when needed.  The above projects honestly took me hours to learn, put together and then explain to my students.  But in the end, I will be able to use all of these skills as an educator to teach this lesson again and my students will be able to collaboratively learn from one another.  We'll see how it goes, but as always, I never find it wasn't worth it in the end.

 

Read more...

Web 2.0 tools and High School English

Last week my colleague, Jim Fitzgerald, and I, spent the day looking at different version of screencasts and how they can be implemented in the High School English Department at ISB.  Some of the tools we explored are: iMovie, Photostory, VoiceThread, Audacity, PowerPoint, and Smart Notebook.  Each tool had specific tasks we thought could be useful in specific areas of our English department. 

For example:

• 
  
  iMovie is perfect for creating tutorials for ePortfolios and for introducing students to PantherNET.
  
  
  
• 
  
  PhotoStory can be used to record narration for pictures with background music for Creative Writing during the Short Story Unit.
  
  
  
• 
  
  VoiceThread can be used to have students annotate a given passage from a play or a poem.  As each student annotates the piece, students are given opportunities to see how their fellow students are reading and seeing a passage to enable them to draw connections they may not have been able to see before (see my example here)
  
  
  
• 
  
  Audacity can be used during formal oral commentaries for IB students.
  
  
  
• 
  
  Power Point is self explainable, but thanks to lessons and readings from Presentation Zen, by Garr Reynolds, our Power Point presentations at Open House this year were a million times better than previous years.
  
  
  
• 
  
  Smart Notebook allows educators to take our annotations from class and paste them on PantherNET to allow students to listen to the discussion in class and have the annotations available at home.
  
  
  

Obviously this is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to ways to use technology when teaching HS English, but you can find a summary of our work here: http://www.coetail.asia/page/Dana+%26+Jim+Tool+Matrix along with video tutorials for each tool.

Read more...

The End of the Snow Day as We Know It

Remember the good old days when you would wake up in the morning and sit by your radio as the list of school closings would be rattled off in the wee hours of the morning?  Growing up in Buffalo, NY definitely gave me many of these experiences.  I would wait day after day to hear my school listed among the many, only to be disappointed again and again because my school happened to have a reputation as a school that never closed.  But on the rare occasion that it did close, it was amazing.  We would have an entire day where we could play in the snow, drink hot chocolate, cuddle up by the fireplace and watch movies.  They were simply magical.

I am afraid that those days are becoming less and less in our lives.   At the International School Bangkok, we are working very hard to make sure those days won't happen again in the future.  Now I am well aware that we don't have a lot of snow to worry about in Bangkok, but we do have the threat of H1N1 at our door.  International schools are closing to the right and left of us.  To combat the loss of potential school days, we are encouraged to utilize a moodle tool that we call PantherNET.  Our courses are slowly becoming online courses to enable us to teach if unseen foreclosure should happen.  

Although I agree with the purpose, and it is great to have everything online, why do we constantly insist that we take our work home with us?  As a teacher living abroad, I am never away from my students.  I cannot walk out my door without passing the home of one of my students.  They email me, leave comments on the class blog, see me after school and at weekend soccer games.  Most of the time I embrace every minute of it, but there are times I do not.

Are we, as a society, pushing it too far when we require people to always be accountable 24/7?  Why do I have to answer every phone call?  Sometimes, I love not being accessible to everyone.  I will be on a trip in Laos over the next few days, and I am so happy to step away from my computer.  I need to and my children need me to do so as well.  It is the October break for our school, and I have already put in over 11 hours of grading, and 5 hours of planning.  Let me mention that it is only Monday.  Some days I still wish for a snow day and not one where I am required to teach and be accountable to everyone.  We need to remember that education equals more than the content, it blossoms with the proper delivery.  The explosion of web 2.0 has changed the teaching and learning landscape, but is it always for the betterment of society as a whole?

The Snowy day image can be found at Ezra Jack Keats Homepage 

Read more...

Using Voice Thread to Prepare for "The Odyssey" Common Assessment

My last post was a little harsh on the tech side of things, so now I'll try to make up for it.  My grade 9 students are preparing for a common assessment on The Odyssey where they are required to annotate an unseen passage from The Odyssey and write a mini commentary on the given passage.


The directions for the assessment are as follows:


Read and annotate the passage below.  Next, you will turn your annotations into 3-paragraph response.  Remember the basic structure required:


Paragraph 1: State author, name of text, where it comes from. Brief setting up of context. A clear THESIS statement that addresses the 1-2 dominant literary devices you will be commenting on, and how they link to/develop a THEME or MOTIF of mythology.


Paragraph 2: Noting the literary devices and their EFFECT (the “So What?” factor)


Paragraph 3: Tell why this passage is significant (important) to the overall text.


To better prepare my students for the assessment, I have created a VoiceThread for them to practice with in class early next week.  It is attached here: http://voicethread.com/share/676684/.  Feel free to give me some pointers on how to make this better or attempt to annotate the passages yourself.  It will be great for my students to see the insight of others outside their classroom.

Read more...

A Case for Reading-Aloud in the High School

Web 2.0 seems to be everywhere, yet I am still searching for the best tools to enable me to make literature come alive in a high school English classroom. There is a multitude available, yet sometimes it is important to go back to how we were taught and use the tried and true methods of the past. Here is one case in point:




Recently while reading The Odyssey with my grade 9 students, I went back to the antiquated way of teaching literature. I read Book 5 aloud from start to finish. Although it is not particularly long, it took a little more than one 90 minute class period to get through less than 20 pages of text. At each reference to the Trojan War, we stopped, discussed the references and history being discussed, annotated the text and went on. Afterwards we searched for things such as the hero's journey, fate vs. destiny, respect for the gods, examples of hubris, and Homeric similes. And we dug and we dug and we questioned and searched for meaning. With pen in hand, I modeled how to annotate the text to enable them to take ownership of their learning. Not one piece of technology was used in my class for those two days. There were no bells and whistles. But at the end of the day, I believe my students know how to edit a passage really well and they can now transfer this skill to any novel they read for school when needed.

Since then I have used my SmartBoard to annotate a passage in front of my class, we have listened to passages on CDs and viewed scenes of various DVDs.  But sometimes it is just as important to remember the old way of doing things, as much as the new.  I am reminded of a fabulous book I read in undergraduate school by Jim Trelease titled The Read-Aloud Handbook. The power of the spoken word will never be outdated.  And honestly, reading aloud, no matter what the age of the intended audience, will never be replaced by a computer.

Read more...