Focusing on Literacy, not Technology

norris tech checkin survey

Yesterday, we began an after-school inquiry group with teachers around literacy instruction and technology. There is a small group of us planning various sessions and I was up first. So, I brought up the Draw a Stickman site (episode two) on my interactive board and asked the teachers to help make the story, referring periodically to the ways in which I use the site with my students early in the year to talk about the main literacy concepts we will touch upon: protagonist/antagonist, setting, foreshadowing, conflict/resolution, etc.

I offered up the view that we need our students with the interactive pens in hand, not the teachers. And here is a perfect site with an engaging activity with many points for discussion about literacy, and even the opportunity afterwards for students to retell or write the story of the hero stickman.

What this allowed us to do with the 15 or so teachers who stayed after school, on their own time, to do is to think in terms of literacy, not technology. In fact, we are working to frame the inquiry group around the ideas of teaching literacies in all of its varied forms through the lends of using technology to engage students. The point is that the focus is not the technology. That’s no small thing, I would argue, and we often fall into the trap of the tool shaping instruction as opposed to the instruction using the tool.

After our interactive story activity, which broke the ice nicely, we shifted into using Edmodo for an inquiry space that I had set up for us as teachers. Our challenge is that we have teachers from kindergarten right through sixth grade, and that is a wide span. But we are all teachers and learners, and one of our goals is to create a community of learners that is built on sharing, reflection and exploration. You can see from the survey results above that we all have a mixed group in terms of their own perceptions of technical savvy (and also, that they want to focus on writing instruction in our sessions). So we went slow and methodical, and Edmodo worked well for our goals (easy set-up, easy to use, familiar format to many), and in very little time at all, we were all busy writing and sharing and replying, and building the connections.

Their writing task was to create a Technology Autobiography, where they were to write about their first brush with technology that made them step back and say “wow.” The responses were fantastic, from one who wrote about remembering an earlier career in programming (who knew?) to another remembering an early version of Logo programming (the Lego-styled system that Scratch is built on), to others whose first brush with Skype opened up a range of possibilities.

And they were writing, which is the literacy connection. The technology — Edmodo — allowed us to connect as writers but we all agreed that, as best as time would allow, we would return to our writing space to share resources. I know that is easier to promise than it is to do, and there are ghost towns of online spaces all over the place. But we facilitators will see what we can do to encourage us to keep coming together as writers and learners (and one colleague reminded us that our new teacher evaluations require some reflective writing, and so, why not our Edmodo space?)

Peace (in the inquiry),
Kevin

 

Walking the Web: Tim Berners-Lee

While I am sure the boys in my Walking the Web comic are excited to meet folks who were key to development of the World Wide Web, you have to imagine that they might get bored every now and then. This is not a knock against Tim Berners-Lee or anything, but I wanted to have one of the characters dream of their favorite snack, Ding Dongs.
Walking the Web Comic 7

Walking the Web Comic 8

Peace (in the snacks),
Kevin

The Animated (GIF) History of Music

1999.  Napster is launched.  Vast amounts of music had never been closer to peoples’ fingertips.  Also it had never been free-er.  This made many bands very angry, especially Metallica, who filed a lawsuit against Napster.
The lawsuit ultimately succeeded, and Napster declared bankruptcy.  But it was too late.  The music industry would never be the same.

I am loving this site. Music History in GIFs, in which a musician tracks the development of pop music through animated GIFs that resemble old 8-bit gaming systems, is fun and informative, and just cool to check out when his updates come through my RSS feed. Yesterday, he posted an image about Napster and music file sharing, and how it upended and continues to upend the music business.

But this other one from last week, about Prince, was pretty nifty, too, and a nice use of animated art.

1993.  Prince changes his name to an unpronounceable symbol later dubbed Love Symbol #2.  At first everybody laughs, but then they remember he’s Prince and he can pretty much do whatever he wants anyways.
Also, Prince’s label had to mail out a bunch of floppy disks with the custom image on it.  That fact makes me laugh.
And a little DEVO anyone?
1978.  Devo releases their debut album, Are We Not Men? We Are Devo!.  Their stage antics are full of wacky dancing, sci-fi outfits, and just all around amazingness.
Also their songs are so, so good.
 Check out Music History in GIFs and get rocked.
Peace (in the music),
Kevin

Walking the Web: Jobs and Woz

In this next installment of my new webcomic, Walking the Web, the boys meet up with Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak as they develop the hypercard for the first Macs, which opened the door to advanced programming and visual information possibilities. Of course, they stole the visual interface ideas from IBM ….
Walking the Web Comic 4

Walking the Web Comic 5

Walking the Web Comic 6
Peace (in the apple),
Kevin

Walking the Web Webcomic: Ted Nelson and Hypertext

Before there was the World Wide Web, and before the Internet infrastructure was in place, there were the Big Thinkers who imagined possibilities that were not yet reality. Ted Nelson was one of those. He developed the idea of hypertext, which has become one of the main underpinnings of the graphic interface of the Web. Here, my two characters — Ralph and Carl — meet up with Ted Nelson.
Walking the Web Comic 2

Walking the Web Comic 3

 

Peace (in the frames),
Kevin

 

Banned Book Week: The Annotated Huck Finn

Huck Finn
I saw this via my NCTE connections. In honor of Banned Books Week, a company has put out for free its annotated version of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.  While the design of the annotated text isn’t all that great (particularly in a Kindle/Nook/iPad world), there is a lot of useful background information at the start, and you can activate various color-coding systems for things like voice, plot, style, point of view and more.
huck finn 2
It might be a nice way to show (maybe on a whiteboard) all of the ways that an author gets at a story, but also, to talk about why this book and others ruffle so many feathers, and end up from time to time on the banned book lists of communities.
There is also this video about Banned Books, which is part of a video playlist from Video Amy over at Edutopia.

Peace (on the pages),
Kevin

Graphic Novel Review: Tune (Book 1 – Vanishing Point)

Loaded with references to Star Trek and Star Wars and plenty of comics that have come before it, Tune by Derek Kirk Kim is a fun graphic read in which the main character — Andy Go — is at a dead end with his life dream of becoming an illustrator and gets talked into becoming an exhibit at a zoo in a parallel universe. Talk about job opportunity! Much of this first book centers on the character of Andy, who loves a girl who may or may not like him back, battles his parents who demand that he get a job or move out of their house, and is a bit frustrated with his own vision of art.

Derek Kirk Kim has created an interesting character in Andy Go, and the interdimensional creatures that come to recruit Andy for his zoo at the end of the book have a lot of slapstick possibilities. This graphic novel nicely mixes science fiction and comedy, and while never taking itself too seriously, the story does have a solid emotional center around Andy and his own insecurities about life and the dead ends that seem ahead of him.

And Kim keeps the story going at his online site — Tune — where you can also read the entire first book (which I am reviewing) as well as the second book that he published online. How cool is that? Pretty darn cool. This book would be fine for high school students (some profanity), but not so much for middle and elementary students.

Peace (in the other dimension),
Kevin

Webcomic: Walking the Web (intro)

Yesterday, I shared out a resource that creates a timeline of the development of the World Wide Web. I was so intrigued that I got inspired to create another webcomic series called Walking the Web, in which two characters — Ralph and Carl — invent a machine (The Wayback Machine, which is a website in real life that does allow you to view websites from long ago) to go back to various points in the development of the Web, and meet some folks. I’m hoping to have some fun with recent history. I hope you enjoy it, too. It will be a short-run series, although I can’t quite say how long that will be.

And now: Walking the Web
Walking the Web comic 1

Walking the Web Comic 1a

Peace (in the frame),
Kevin

 

A Many Forked Path: The Historical Timeline of the Web

web history timeline project
I found myself lost in this Web History timeline, which is put together smartly and which brings you right into the history of the Internet and the Web. There are many links you can follow, but what becomes clear is how recent the history of the web and hyperlinks and hypertext really is. It’s another reminder that we are living “in the moment” and yet, we still are trying to make sense of it all.

And can I just say that I found it incredibly fascinating to think that the first point plotted on the line is a short story (by Borges) called The Garden of Forking Paths, which prefigured hypertext choices of the reader and provided a conceptual framework later on for the integration of hyperlinks to connect information (or stories) together. I don’t know the story, but I am going to try to find it and read it.

Check out what Wikipedia has to say about the story:

“Beyond its façade as a spy narrative, “The Garden of Forking Paths” has similarities to today’s digital media and hypertext projects. Borges conceives of “a labyrinth that folds back upon itself in infinite regression”, asking the reader to “become aware of all the possible choices we might make.”[4] The elaborate hypertext is much like the book which Borges suggests to be the labyrinth, (“Every one imagined two works; to no one did it occur that the book and the maze were one and the same thing…the confusion of the novel suggested to me that it was the maze”[1]) in a sense of how the site offers different approaches to how you may interpret the information provided, yet you’re not trapped in the dilemma of choosing one and eliminating others; you may choose to unfold all possibilities. You “create, in this way, diverse futures, diverse times which themselves also proliferate and fork” (Wardrip-Fruin, 33). Although the story appeared before the advent of modern computers, Borges seems to have invented the hypertext narrative structure. Wardrip-Fruin and Montfort write: “Our use of computers is … based on the visions of those who like Borges—pronouncing [The Garden of Forking Paths] from the growing dark of his blindness—saw those courses that future artists, scientists and hackers might take.”[1]

— from Wikipedia

Peace (along the line),
Kevin

PS — Reading the timeline inspired me to begin writing a new webcomic, called Walking the Web, about two kids who go back in time to see the development of the World Wide Web. It’s sort of like Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure but the boys meet up with folks like Steve Jobs, and Tim Berners-Lee, Steve Case, and others. I’ll start sharing that comic tomorrow.

Fantastic Resource: Reading Like Historians

One of the points of discussions with my fellow teachers on my sixth grade team, in relation to the Common Core, is how to keep developing ways for reading and writing to become the center of learning in the science and social studies classes. We’ve been making good progress for the past two years, but the more resources I can share, the better. That said, check out this wonderful collection of videos from The Teaching Channel around “reading like a historian.” We’re brought right into the classroom, and the issues of teaching content-area reading are really front and center along a few threads: an overview, the evaluation of sources, putting history in context, and corroboration of information. I am definitely sharing this with collection with my colleagues.

 

Peace (in the reading),
Kevin