Amethyst Technology Night

Last night I had the privilege of participating in the annual technology night at the Amethyst Demonstration School here in London.  My role was to assist with the Bitstrips demonstration, so I was there to answer questions while people were trying out the program and point out some of the possibilities.  The presenter I was helping, Anthony Friday, gave a short talk about the history of Bitstrips and reasons why teachers should use it in the classroom.  We saw six groups of people for twenty minutes each, and most of the time that people spent in our lab was hands on, creating avatars and starting a three panel comic.  I saw some of my multi-literacies classmates there, which was awesome!  Hi guys!  Wasn't that fun?  There were many other technologies that were being demonstrated that night, including Dragon, Kurzweil, and iPads.  I think what was so valuable about the activities were that it was a chance for people to learn about these technologies by actually trying them for themselves.

The night ended with a panel of students talking about how much their lives were changed by attending the Amethyst School.  I feel sappy just thinking about it, just because the amount of confidence that these kids have gained through literacy is so incredible and inspiring.  First of all, for those not familiar with the school, the students all have LDs and are only accepted to the school if they are reading two or more grades below grade level.  The technology and direct instruction used at Amethyst transforms the students' lives; one student said that he started out reading at a grade three level, and was reading at a grade nine level the following year.  The kids who spoke in the panel obviously loved their school very much and were proud of their progress.  The school is a great example of how literacy is about so much more than text on a page.  Technologies that incorporate visual, aural and digital literacy are proving to be effective in helping students achieve their literacy goals. 

If you like found poetry, you'll love Verbatim Poetry!

I'll start this post off with a poem.

On the Surface

Greed probably undid her in the end.
She was said to have taken a bait of uncooked tiger nuts,
which swelled inside her until she floated upwards.
Telltale empty paper bags were found on the bank of the river.
Or she may have been pregnant,

with 300,000 eggs causing complications, or stressed
after so much catching and releasing,
those constant brushes with extinction.

On the line between life and death, at Kingfisher Lake,
she breathed the fatal air and did not sink again.
And there she lay,
like Wisdom drawn up from the deep:
as golden, and as quiet.

This poem was posted on the website Verbatim Poetry, where you can find "poetry from the ordinary."  "On the Surface" is actually prose from an Economist article describing the death of a famous British fish!  The website features poems from the Shreddies Wikipedia page, fitting instructions for a bicycle wheel, and quotes by GOP candidate Rick Santorum, among many other unusual sources.  I think that the poetry found on this website translates very well to the classroom.  By having students create poems by using unexpected sources of inspiration, they would learn to judge for themselves the "sound" of poetry, and practice using line breaks for effect.  The fact that the words are coming from a source outside themselves takes off a lot of that pressure that students feel towards writing poetry, while allowing them to be creative with free verse.  It would be very fun to read what students come up with for an assignment like this!  

In their "about" page, Verbatim states that "language is everywhere that we are. Poetry is language framed." If we teach students that the everyday world contains little poetic gems, I think we would send a very positive and long-lasting message.

Because they take submissions, Verbatim has some great guidelines on their site for how to create a successful verbatim poem.  While they joke that all it really takes is to arrange the text from a non-poetic source into lines, they also go on to describe what is meant by a non-poetic source, and what kinds of changes to the text are acceptable or unacceptable.  Their guidelines would be fantastic to give out to students, since they are easy to understand and explicit.  You could even add an element of authenticity to the assignment by having students actually submit their poems to the website.


And now for a well-known poem from that famous American poet politician, Donald Rumsfeld:

         The Unknown

As we know,

There are known knowns.

There are things we know we know.

We also know

There are known unknowns.

That is to say

We know there are some things

We do not know.

But there are also unknown unknowns,

The ones we don't know

We don't know.

from Pieces of Intelligence: The Existential Poetry of Donald H. Rumsfeld (2003) by Hart Seely

A Reading Response...

I have been mulling over the article "Curriculum Theorizing for Multiliteracies: A Rebel with a Cause" by Jennifer Powers.  I was planning on writing a response to it, and I was struggling with how to express my views, when we were given our graphic organizers as a guide for re-examining the text in class.  I must say, the P-M-I Chart (P for plus, M for minus, I for interesting) is a handy organizer for reflection, and in particular, becoming in tune with one's opinions on an issue or topic. This is a great way for students to make value judgements about texts, rather than passively consume.  Also, by making points regarding the good, bad and most interesting things about their reading, they are using cognitive strategies that wold assist them in writing an argument or thesis down the road.  That said, I am not going to be writing an argument or thesis today; I am just going to give you the straight-up P-M-I.

PLUS

• I support Powers' cause: "to further the development and acceptance of multiliteracies in the English classroom, and to promote discussion about how multiliteracies are incorporated into a school's curriculum."

• Powers gives clear examples of why to incorporate multiliteracies into the English classroom.  She argues that because students engage with many types of texts, they should be able to participate in those forms of literacy.  She also argues that there are many ways to be literate in our society, and by incorporating multiliteracies, you are setting your students up for success. 

MINUS

• Powers does not give clear examples of how to incorporate multiliteracies into the English classroom, or the English curriculum.  She suggests that the curriculum become more democratic, and less about "truth and facts" and more about "subjective understanding for existing knowledge." I feel that she could be more explicit.

• She downplays the importance of print literacy through statements like "unlike many teachers, I am trying my best to figure out how to buck the dominant print literacy system." I am all for incorporating multimodal texts, and like Powers, I believe print media can be limiting. I also believe reading and writing skills are valuable and essential.  I know that Powers is not arguing against this, but I do think she uses a begrudging tone to prove her point.

INTERESTING

• Powers urges educators to be "more eclectic" and allow for uncertainty in their approach, based on the work of Joseph Schwab.  She writes, "people, by their very nature, are eclectic... the way we approach curriculum should not deny this nature."  I find this statement interesting because any statements about "human nature" in an essay jump out at me and beg to be scrutinized.  Here though, I can't really argue with the notion that people want variety.  I also find this interesting because I see myself in her statement, and I like that she frames eclecticism in a positive light. 

   

Lesson Re-Design

I taught a grade ten academic English class on my practicum, and we read Lord of the Flies by William Golding.  In addition to using lots of different approaches and activities, I chose to scaffold the unit through giving them basic comprehension questions for new chapters, then the next day they worked on interpretive questions in groups, and finally moral and thematic questions were explored through supplementary material.

Since the point of this lesson redesign post is to incorporate another semiotic system into my existing lesson, I am going to change up how I presented a radio podcast to my class.  I love radio, and in particular, I love the program This American Life for its many different voices and stories.  It's wonderful.  And their entire wonderful archive is accessible online for free.  I think radio podcasts fit extremely well with the oral communication strand of the curriculum, especially the overall expectation "listening to understand" and many of the specifics that fall under it.  The first time I used radio in the classroom, our novel had led us to a discussion about fear, and we were discussing the impact of fear on the characters' motivations.  I played a reading of Michael Bernard Loggins' "Fears of your Life" to facilitate discussion about rational fear versus irrational fear, and whether they are experienced the same way or differently.  Here is a summary of the hook and the action that I used.

Hook: Students write as many of their fears as they can in one minute.  If students can't think of any, they can write down fears that they believe are common.

Action: Students make a T-Chart with two columns, one for "rational fears" and one for "irrational fears."  Students recieve a handout with the transcript of the radio podcast that they will listen to, for reference.  Students listen to"Fears of Your Life" and write down any fears that they see falling into one of these two categories.  On the board, the teacher will draw a T-chart, take up student responses and facilitate discussion.  Students can talk about both fears in the radio piece and fears from their lists that they wrote at the start of class.  Be sure to discuss how the boys experience fear in Lord of the Flies, whether their fear is rational or irrational, and how it causes them to act.

I think that this lesson could be greatly improved by including a slideshow with text and images to add to the listening experience.  I once included a text slideshow with a different lesson's podcast, and it made a huge improvement to the students' level of engagement.  Compared to having the text in handout form, with a slideshow, they listened very well since they couldn't help but follow along with the text on the screen.  With the handout they read ahead and the impact of the speaker's words became lost.  Micheal Bernard Loggins' piece in particular has the potential for some amazing, fun images to be put along to it.  Consider the following excerpt: "Fear of sharks. Fear of giant man. Fear of gorilla. Fear of Godzilla." How much fun would it be to make a slideshow with those images?  Or you could even use Animoto to take Youtube clips from Godzilla, Jaws, etc.  My question though, and hopefully one of you readers can help me with this - If I include pictures and text with a radio podcast, am I potentially not meeting the oral communication expectations in the curriculum by turning it into something visual?  Or am I aiding them in engaging with an oral text?