Yesterday, a visitor asked a bit about how I teach the Memory Objects/Narrative Writing/Digital Story assignment, and I am happy to walk through what we do. First, this writing is part of our unit around paragraph structure and paragraph writing. The emphasis for this particularly piece of writing is “narrative” and telling a story. I […]
Search Results for: sound stories
Memory Objects, Narrative Writing and Digital Stories
My sixth graders are knee-deep in iMovie this week, as they use a piece of narrative paragraph writing as a script for a digital story. Their assignment is to find a tangible physical object that sparks strong memories for them, and then write about the object and the memories. Then, we move over into iMovie […]
Quickfiction: Sounds
I wrote this quickfiction piece after realizing that I might never buy another CD again. Sounds Listen to the story Remember when it was vinyl and the bookcases were so weighted down that they bent to the left? You worried so much about what would happen to the cats if it fell and crushed them. […]
#DigiLitSunday #IMMOOC: Using Voice for Revising Writing
“Read the sentence out loud. Speak it to your dog or cat. Or find a corner and read it to yourself. Your ear will hear if something is not quite right. Your eyes might miss it.” That was me, talking to my sixth grade students about some writing last week, during a vocabulary lesson. The lesson […]
Ambient Audio Reverberations in Story and Poem
Yesterday, thanks to a wintry late start at my school but not at my sons’ schools, I had time before school to work on two sound stories. One of the stories was the third Learning Event for the HearMyHome project, and the other was an assignment for the DS106 Daily Create. The Learning Event for HearMyHome […]
#DigiWriMo Interactive Fiction 1: Making a Playable Story
I’ve been doing my best to bring elements of Digital Writing Month into my sixth grade classroom. We worked on Sound Stories and with images earlier in the month, and now, during this theme of “transmedia,” I have my students working on Interactive Fiction pieces. Interactive fiction is a designed story/game in which the reader […]
#DigiWriMo: Too Much Consuming, Not Enough Creating
Troy Hicks, whose books about digital writing and connected reading are must-reads for any teacher, has written a great post for Digital Writing Month about the role that Infographics are now playing in our reading and writing lives — and how the visual shaping of data has the potential to surface stories. I was thinking of […]
Song: Constellations (Moments Left Behind)
I’ve been trying to get myself into a regular routine again of writing songs, and taking any kernel of something to the next steps, of demo recording and maybe making a video to go with it. This one — Constellations (Moments Left Behind) — might still need some work but I like the way I […]
Video Documentary: The Last Repair Shop
When I was a kid, my father (a drummer) used to bring me to visit a musical instrument repair shop for odds and ends, and it would be a place I enjoy just being in, just hanging out in. It was called George’s Music Shop, and George was the man behind the counter, and when […]
Book Review: World Within A Song
Reading how Jeff Tweedy listens is an interesting experience. Tweedy, of Wilco and other solo projects, is a thoughtful musician and music listener, and this book collection of small essays and observations, along with some reflections of his life as a musician, allows Tweedy’s mind to roam. I appreciated learning about some bands I didn’t […]