Peace (slowly),
Kevin
Monthly Archives: October 2023
CLMOOC Silent Sunday
Collection of Digital Poetry
A friend was asking me more about Digital Poetry, and so I gathered together a collection of some of the video and animated and text and art poems that have been gathering dust over at YouTube into a Digital Poetry Playlist.
I added 129 poems (most are very short), a number that surprised me.
It was quite a journey to return to some of these pieces — some I didn’t remember at all, and some were rich moments of a return to the composition and construction.
Peace (and Poems),
Kevin
Digital AI Oracle:The Prophecy Machine
I am teaching The Lightning Thief with my sixth graders and we are at a chapter where Percy Jackson gets his prophecy from the Oracle. I had this idea of finding an online site that could spit out age-appropriate prophecies for my students as an activity. I found nothing and then thought, why not make my own?
I knew the Flippity site had a spinner tool and I knew I wanted at least 50 prophecies so each student in each class could get two different prophecies. But … writing 50 prophecies, myself, in one night? Yikes. Not gonna happen.
Wait … I thought … what about ChatGPT?
Why not make it do the work for me?
Yep.
It worked.
I had ChatGPT create 70 different prophecies, age appropriate for sixth graders, popped the phrases into the spinner, and yesterday, it was a huge hit with the students.
I described the spinner as our Digital Oracle, after a lesson on Apollo and the Oracle of Delphi, and the ChatGPT mix of prophecies were fun and interesting, with some having obscure Greek references for my students to wonder about. The mix of fantasy, mythology and positive thinking made for an enlightened time.
Thanks, AI.
Peace (spinning it),
Kevin
Resource: Gathering AI Tools Across The Curriculum
A few weeks ago, I helped co-facilitate a session about AI in education, and for that session, we developed a resource that might be helpful to others, as it is built around different areas of the curriculum and content.
You can download the digital handout we created for participants of our session. We’ve grouped AI tools by curricular area and then broke out some other assorted resources that we think may be valuable for explorations.
Peace (and sharing),
Kevin
Poetry: A Word Goes Walking
This poem comes via a prompt from Open Write this morning about taking a word for a walk. I used the word “synchronized” and it was a tricky bit of writing here, making sure the six lines with six words had the word moving systematically through the poem from first-word position to last-word position.
Peace (in and out of sync),
Kevin
Write Out: Thank You Notes to Park Ranger
Ranger Scott Gausen of the Springfield Armory National Historic Site visited our classroom for Write Out last week, and along with his engaging personality and vast knowledge of the National Parks System, he has a pretty cool beard. For the Thank You notes, my students drew him with his beard. We’re mailing a package of these to him this week.
Peace (and fun),
Kevin
Write Out: Poetry In The Park With Teachers
Yesterday, a small group of teachers gathered at the Springfield Armory National Historic Site to do some poetry writing, as part of Write Out and the National Day on Writing.
We used the museum site for inspiration, writing Diamante poems in the Innovation and Engineering wing, freestyle protest poems near the Organ of Muskets where a poem about the Armory by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow is displayed, and then found poems near an exhibit of photographs (along with passages from a novel set at the Armory).
Then, we made buttons!
Peace (and poems),
Kevin
CLMOOC Silent Sunday
Write Out Poetry: Wind Whispers Song (multiple version)
This morning’s Daily Create prompt for Write Out was all about the sound of wind, and the music it makes. I did a few versions of my morning poem, including the regular text, a visual with Word Art, a video with the word art and just music, and then a final version in which the words are blown by the wind, with narration of the poem itself.
Peace (listening to the song of the wind),
Kevin