This was a different kind of writing activity for the #ds106 Daily Create: write a poem with rhymes at the start of each line. That sounds easier than it is, because what happens is the rhythm gets all crooked in the poem. As I wrote mine, I started to rhyme at the end of each couplet, too. I couldn’t help myself, so you have this overlapping rhyming scheme taking place in my poem.
And this kind of poem deserves some voice, I think.
Audio recording and upload >>
Peace (in the poem),
Kevin
(This is part of the Slice of Life Challenge with Two Writing Teachers. We write about small moments each and every day for March. You come, too. Write with us.)
@TeachWriting2 a5 I think audience is huge for my students. They want to write and share with world, not just their teacher #teachwriting
— KevinHodgson (@dogtrax) March 26, 2014
Midway through the very first #TeachWriting Twitter chat last night, I finally chimed in. I had other things going on and so I didn’t get home until the halfway point of the chat, a bi-monthly chat on Tuesday nights centered around the teaching of writing. The brainchild of Lisa Hughes and Ben Kuhlman (maybe others? not sure), #TeachWriting is another way for teachers to share with and learn from each other, in the fast-flowing realm of Twitter chat.
A5 we also do a lot of creative writing-into-day as low stakes writing. #teachwriting
— KevinHodgson (@dogtrax) March 26, 2014
A few months ago, Troy Hicks and I offered up some feedback to Lisa and Ben as they were planning because Troy and I have done these kinds of chats before (including one together, via NCTE for Digital Learning Day.) Really, though, Ben and Lisa did fine on their own. But when Ben shouted out earlier in the week that he hoped to see me at the chat, I knew I had a conflict and might miss it.
@sullivan884 I agree. Let our students see us writing, revising, tossing around ideas, having fun with words and language #TeachWriting
— KevinHodgson (@dogtrax) March 26, 2014
I’m glad I caught the second half, as the flow of discussion was amazing, rich and expansive, and there were many people in the Twitter Chat that I had never run across before (an ancillary gift from #TeachWriting). It’s heartening to know that so many folks care so deeply about writing, and want to know how best to get their students to care about writing, too. I was a little worried that Lisa and Ben might only have a few folks, but … not a worry! Dozens of people seemed to be involved, sharing ideas and asking questions, and making connections across disciplines and time zones. It was the perfect example of the power of a Twitter Chat.
A6 students need to compose as much as write – with media of all kinds #TeachWriting
— KevinHodgson (@dogtrax) March 26, 2014
So, how do you get involved?
Every other Tuesday night (the next one will be April 11, I believe, with Beth Holland and Shaelynn Farnsworth), jump onto Twitter and find the #TeachWriting hashtag. More information is at the website: http://teachwritingchat.org/ and sign up for the newsletter. Also, follow the chat’s twitter account at @teachwriting2
One word of advice, if you have never joined in a chat: consider using a Twitter Chat client of some sort. I use TweetChat but there are others that allow you to focus on specific hashtags.
See you on the Interwebz!
Peace (in the chat),
Kevin
Wow.
To prove culture is not only everywhere, but that certain references to films, songs, and works of art are critical for our collective understanding of comedy and to the importance of relating to content, I found every cultural, real-life reference from every episode of The Office. – Joe Sabia
This Office Time Machine remix project by Joe Sabia to use The Office and cultural references to show how copyright pushes up against creativity is pretty amazing, insightful, entertaining and just … fun. Sabia pulled all of the cultural references from the American-version of The Office and mixed them into video formats.
He explains that the year-by-year season project (which took him a year and half to do) was designed to see the prism of culture that gets reflected everywhere and how copyright laws “fall flat” in the modern age of digital media and borrowing/remixing of ideas.
Sabia ends his project’s website with some suggestions for where folks can go from here, after being entertained by his video endeavors with The Office and cultural references (he found 1,300, by the way).
Sign up for Fightforthefuture.org. And check out these sites:
Transformative Works, EFF, and Creative Commons
Everything is a Remix by Kirby Ferguson,
Supercut. by Andy Baio.
And for further study, read Lawrence Lessig, and John Tehranian
Peace (in the remix),
Kevin
(This is part of the Slice of Life Challenge with Two Writing Teachers. We write about small moments each and every day for March. You come, too. Write with us.)
Like many of you who are classroom teachers, we are in the midst of “state testing season.” Or at least, we are entering round one (round two comes in May with Math). This week, my sixth grade students will be diving into the state reading assessment in two two-hour blocks.
There was a time, years back, where I did very little to prep them, feeling that “teaching to the test” was against everything I believed in as an educator. I changed my mind over time as I realized they needed more overt help in navigating the test. I could not ignore the data showing how much my students were struggling and how glaring some of the weaknesses were.
I felt guilty about not helping them.
So, yes, I now teach strategies all year — good, solid reading and writing strategies, I hope — with an eye towards the state testing, which will be undergoing change in the years ahead with PARCC. I still feel a bit odd about teaching a lesson with overt references to our MCAS (Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System) and the kids groan when I mention MCAS. But I’ve come to realize that this is now part of my job. I don’t drill and kill about it. I teach strategies for approaching unknown reading passages and questions. I frame these lessons in a real way — these are the strategies that readers use all the time. I am just making them more visible. I hope.
Yesterday, we did a review of literary terms, partly as a way to lodge some ideas into their heads and partly to connect these terms to the novels we have been reading all year. Still, I have to admit: the timing of that review was designed to align with this week’s testing.
It’s hard to shake the feeling that, even with all of my intellectual defenses outlined above, that this is bad teaching and is still something I don’t believe in, as something that won’t help my students become stronger readers and better writers and more engaged citizens of the world. I walk away from these kinds of lessons with tinges of guilt that I just can’t shake — a different kind of guilt than I felt in the early years after looking at test scores and realizing my silent protest was hurting my students. On any day of the week, I’d rather have them be writing what they want to write, and being creative in a variety of ways with media, technology and words. That is why I got into teaching in the first place.
And so, I still feel guilty about the strategic moves into teaching for the test, even though our scores have gotten better over the years and I now pour over data to see where weaknesses might still exist, and I wish I could in good conscious return to my days of silent refusal, to focus on teaching for learning, not teaching for testing. But I fear those days are now gone.
Peace (in the silent protest),
Kevin
(This is part of the Slice of Life Challenge with Two Writing Teachers. We write about small moments each and every day for March. You come, too. Write with us.)
It seems like Mondays are good days to catch up on busy Sundays, so here is another post of little slices:
I spent part of my morning changing the theme of my blog. Partly, it was time. But also, I had noticed that my old theme looked just awful on mobile devices, so I heeded the note from my Edublog friends to find a more mobile-friendly theme. I like this new one — it’s a clean design. I’m still tinkering with some of the settings but mostly, I was able to “flick the switch” and things are running pretty smooth.
Do you like the change?
In the other part of my morning, I was working on a writing prompt with another online writing community, where the focus was on the idea of a force field or portal. I tried to get serious and failed. So, I moved in the other direction and posted this webcomic:
In the afternoon, I took my youngest son and a friend to see the new Muppets movie. We’re huge Muppet fans here and I thought the movie had lots of those little giggle moments that I love, and seemed to keep my attention for most of the time. The nine year old boys? They loved it.
Finally, throughout the day, I noticed some interesting activity at the #25wordstory hashtag on Twitter where I periodically write short 140-character stories as a way to experiment with writing in short-form fiction. It’s not that easy. But I noticed a CUE group working on the hashtag, retelling fairy tales. Intriguing!
I had to add a few of my own:
One house. Three chairs. Three bowls. Three beds. Three bears. One Girl. The End. #25wordstory #cue14
— KevinHodgson (@dogtrax) March 23, 2014
You’ve got some straw? I can spin gold. You get rich. I get the kid. My name? You’ll never guess. Never, in a million years. #25wordstory
— KevinHodgson (@dogtrax) March 23, 2014
Humpty never saw a wall he didn’t want to parkour off of. Unfortunately, this was not the wall you’d want to parkour off of. #25wordstory
— KevinHodgson (@dogtrax) March 23, 2014
Peace (in the day),
Kevin
(This is part of the Slice of Life Challenge with Two Writing Teachers. We write about small moments each and every day for March. You come, too. Write with us.)
Some of you know I play saxophone and write songs for a rock band, Duke Rushmore. We’re in a bit of a quiet spell right now because our lead guitar player has some medical issues that are not yet resolved and our other guitar player has sold his house where we practice (that’s another slice for another day). The other night, we were working on a song that I wrote a few months ago, and which I have shared as a Slice earlier in the year.
The quality of the recording is terrible (our singer used his phone and then had trouble sending the file to me, so he recorded it off the phone with a digital recorder … and that’s never a good thing when you add a second layer of recording — you can hear it in the wavy gravy element of the sound), but you can listening in on how a new song is developing here. We’re still figuring it out, together, making changes and trying out parts. Seeing what work and what doesn’t work. As the writer of this piece, it’s such a powerful experience to be in a room with musicians who are my friends, playing and learning a song that I wrote, and having it slowly come together, section by section.
I left this practice on air, really, and I thought back to where this particular song started months ago, with me on the floor of my bedroom, an empty piece of paper and an acoustic guitar in my lap and some vague notion of lyrics.
Take a listen to Set My Anchor on You
This is a shout-out to my bandmates in Duke Rushmore.
Peace (in the song),
Kevin
The #DS106 Daily Create assignment for yesterday was to capture a drip. I aimed the camera at our bathroom sink (which does not normally have a drop, thankfully) and then decided to do a collage of views. Capturing a single drip was more than my skills and camera could do. Or maybe I didn’t have the patience for it. Probably that.
I really liked the heat-element one because it seems like a face staring up at you. Right? It has to do with my shadow in the reflection of the faucet. And the ears. It looks like a pet.
Peace (in the drop),
Kevin
You might guess that we are into standardized testing time in our school and state. Hey. You’d be right! I was reading the comics with that on my mind and frames began jumping out me. I just had to hack and remix the comics as a sort of commentary about testing. I used ThingLink as way to embed some comments for each frame, although I suspect you could get my message even without my words.
Honestly, though, it was that kid staring at his test in the Nancy strip that got me going. He looks so … sad.
Wondering how I did this kind of remix?
First, I read all the comics and tries to piece together a possible story sequence. This is the most difficult part because you need to look for narrative threads and understand there will be some gaps in whatever story you remix with the frames. Once I started to identify possible pieces of comics, I got to work.
I started with old fashioned scissors and tape, and blue paper. I scanned it as an image file (when I have taken a picture of this kind of remix in the past, the words get fuzzy. You might have a better camera than I have, though). Then, I uploaded the image to Flickr, where I used the Aviary app in Flickr to add text, and “borrowed” the completed image over at ThingLink. That allowed me to layer in some commentary.
Peace (in how we frame things),
Kevin
(This is part of the Slice of Life Challenge with Two Writing Teachers. We write about small moments each and every day for March. You come, too. Write with us.)
You can’t seem to find a counter-top in my house without a college basketball bracket cluttering it up. It’s March Madness, and although our local University of Massachusetts got crushed yesterday by Tennessee after reading the NCAA tournament for the first time since 1998 (lots of groans from the living room of our house as we watched that game unfold), the lure of bracketology is pretty strong.
All three of my boys have brackets going (with my youngest son creating up to three different ones in his first year of understanding a little bit of what is going on), and I have my own bracket (in a few pools). My youngest son even made one for my wife, who is only vaguely interested in the tournament.
Even the dog has a bracket, which is an annual tradition in our house.
Here’s how that system works, which is quite amusing to watch: My middle son holds a piece kibble in each of his clenched fists and then rattles off each of the round’s face-off teams. Whichever fist the dog’s nose hits first gets the nod on the bracket. As you might imagine, our tail-wagging Duke (our dog) chooses quite a few upsets in the tournament. He even picked Duke (the team) to lose, even though Duke is his given name and you might figure some allegiance. (Me, on the other hand? I don’t like Duke. It goes way back to the Bobby Hurley days when Duke seemed to always crush UConn at key moments of time).
Go figure, though. Duke lost, so Duke won. Kibble is a wise thing, indeed.
So far, my Final Four picks (Virginia, Florida, Arizona and Louisville) are all still in the mix (I have Florida winning it all) But my main team — UConn — is still hanging in there, too, with a nail-biter the other night and game against its old rival, Villanova, tonight. We’ll see how far they can go.
How about you? How’s your bracket faring?
Peace (along the brackets),
Kevin
Twitter has done something interesting for its 8th birthday: it is allowing folks to find their very first tweet. I couldn’t resist — mainly because I couldn’t remember how long ago that was nor could I even vaguely remember what I wrote for my very first tweet?
Oh.
How creative! (snark)
But 31,000 tweet later as @dogtrax (I know? What the heck do I write about? I don’t know), I am still wondering how to push the boundaries of the 140 characters. I write 25 word stories, tinker with hashtags, collaborate across the world, make memes, take part in Twitter chats, share with others and steal from others (and remix what others are stealing from others). My professional development will never be the same. It’s an odd thing, this Twitter.
I started to use Twitter in 2008 a few months after a National Writing Project gathering in Amherst, where Bud Hunt (aka @budtheteacher) chatted over dinner one night about this thing called Twitter, and he wasn’t quite sure of all the possibilities and potentials for writers, but he was pretty confident it was not a flash-in-the-pan kind of technology. He grappled to explain it to us, and we grappled to understand. 140 characters? A stream of tweets? What the heck is he talking about?
As usual, Bud pointed us in the right direction. I started tweeting and haven’t stopped (see this post from 2008 that collects my first few tweets.) It’s true that not everyone cares or should care about what I post, but every now and then, something clicks and connects — some ideas that suddenly transforms your view of the world or your view of teaching or your kids, or technology — and in that moment, the power of Twitter is suddenly exposed. You do have to get through a lot of LOL Cats to get there but …. you know … it’s worth it.
Not long after I started on Twitter, I composed this poem:
I Dream in Twitter
Listen to the podcastI dream in Twitter
in 140 characters
that cut off my thoughts before they are complete
and then I wonder, why 140?
Ten more letters would serve me right
as I write about what I am doing at that moment
in time,
connecting across the world with so many others
shackled by 140 characters, too,
and I remain amazed at how deep the brevity can be.I find it unsettling to eavesdrop on conversations
between two
when you can only read one
and it startles me to think that someone else out there
has put their ear to my words
and wondered the same about me.
Whose eyes are watching?Twitter is both an expanding universe
of tentacles and hyperlinks that draw you in
with knowledge and experience
and a shrinking neighborhood of similar voices,
echoing out your name
in comfortable silence.I dream in Twitter
in 140 characters,
and that is what I am doing
right
at
this
moment.
Then later, I wrote and recorded this song:
Twitter This
I get up in the morning and I twitter all my dreams
140 characters is just enough for me
Then, each moment of the day becomes a Twitter storm
until the world is at my doorstep and everyone belongs
toThis Twitter space
inside this Twitter place
I’ve got a little bit of smile
on my Twitter face
Take me as a friend
or shut me out cold
I’m gonna keep on Twittering
until the platform gets oldI’m reading all my friends — the ones I haven’t met
from all across the globe, it’s a safety net
We’re putting pressure on Iran — let the China wall fall
let the information flow so we can all crawl
insideThis Twitter space
inside this Twitter place
I’ve got a little bit of smile
on my Twitter face
Take me as a friend
or shut me out cold
I’m gonna keep on Twittering
until the platform runs cold
Peace (in the tweet),
Kevin