If you missed last weekend’s second #IMMOOC (Innovator’s Mindset MOOC) hangout, I have it sitting in Vialogues (a collaborative video annotation tool), just waiting for your insights and reactions. Seriously. You’re invited to comment as you watch the hangout session.
And I’m still hoping to get more people on the IMMOOC Map to fully represent the IMMOOC. The numbers show nearly 2,000 participants (I think I saw that number in the Tweet stream) and wouldn’t it be cool to see all of us on this map, together? Right now, we cluster on North America, but I think we have a larger representation of the world than the map shows right now.
I recently co-facilitated a PD session with fourth, fifth and sixth grade colleagues, and my co-presenter and I chose the theme of Collaboration, as we are feeling more and more like we don’t have time to collaborate across the curriculum and across grade levels with other teachers anymore. (We used to have a PLC time but that got lost a few years ago).
We began with a Gallery Walk activity, in which we asked us all to think and notate ways one discipline (say, math) is visible in another discipline (say, social studies), and to notice as we did the activity which subject areas seem a more natural fit than others. It was a great discussion piece, that sparked the idea of how to be thoughtful about lesson planning.
It also laid the groundwork for discussions about collaboration, since each of the grades represented (4,5,6) are all departmentalized to some degree. I teach ELA and technology to all sixth graders, for example. I can’t say we were able to get plans in motion for everyone, as we had hoped. As usual, we ran out of time. But the conversations and activities sparked cross-grade and cross-discipline discussions, and that is always a good starting point.
(This is a post for Slice of Life, a regular writing activity hosted by Two Writing Teachers to explore small moments in the day. Come write with us.)
I was driving into work in the morning. The air felt very much like Autumn — a shaft of cool — and as I drove down a long road that runs beside an old Reservoir, I saw this beautiful scene. So I stopped and looked, and then grabbed my phone to capture the moment.
A few weeks ago, I wrote here about wanting to read some of the latest young adult fiction coming out about 9/11 in order to frame conversations with my students and my youngest son. I have started with this one — Nine,Ten: A September 11 Storyby Nora Raleigh Baskin. I’m glad I did. It’s the perfect kind of story — weaving together the fictional lives of four young people whose world was touched by the 9/11 attack.
There is a moment at the end of this story, where the characters’ stories finally connect (sort of like the movie Crash in this way) that had my eyes watering and my heart pounding. I won’t give the moment away. I’ll just say that Baskin ups her game with the ending here, bringing her story to a close that not only makes sense, but also creates a large understanding of the world … and the tapestry of ourselves.
Her writing style is engaging in this novel, and compassionate. Each of the four characters is facing different dilemmas and challenges — from being Muslim in America to losing a family member who acted heroic to coming to grips with changes in the family and school. I believed in these characters, and how the 9/11 event slowly draws them together. What more could you ask for a novel aimed at upper elementary and middle school readers? For a story for those readers born after the event?
When I was through with Nine,Ten: A September 11 Story, I continued to believe in the goodness of people, even in the long shadow of horrific tragedy. That’s a gift that only a book can give.
“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 has to do with different forms of words in context of a piece of writing and many students struggle with this task because they can’t “hear” the sentence as they “read” the sentence. They only insert the root form, not past/present/future versions. I keep urging them to get the words into the air — their ears will help.
This coming November/December, I aim to do Sound Stories with my sixth graders again. It was so successful last year, during Digital Writing Month, as it allowed me to teach the interconnections of writing, voice, sound and media editing, as well as publishing. We don’t do enough with voice in the classroom.
This week, for #DigiLitSunday and as part of thinking of innovative teaching practice for the #IMMOOC (Innovator’s Mindset), I am exploring the notion of “audio voice” for revision because I think having students use their own voice recordings in order to revise their written draft work may be a powerful tool for them to use as young writers. Just to make clear: there is another concept we call “voice” when it comes to writing – that of the writer’s voice and tone as surfaced in the writing through vocabulary choice and other techniques — but I am thinking very literal here.
I’ve been kicking this idea of voice for revision around for years, thanks to some work done long ago by a Western Mass Writing Project colleague, who used little voice recorders to help her students revise their writing. I always thought she was onto something interesting and powerful.
Which is not to say we don’t tap into the audio for writing in my classroom …
I’ve introduced Voice Typing with my students (via Google Docs) and we’ve done some podcasting throughout the year. We’ve had students use Dragon Naturally Speaking so that they dictate and it types for them when they are struggling writers. And the Sound Stories project– where students have to use Garageband and list of sound effects to write and record a story — has been another way for voice to come into the mix.
But I haven’t yet fully explored how a student writer, during the editing process itself, records themselves reading the rough draft text, and then uses that audio of their own reading to deeply analyze the text itself on a second read. They are their first reader. This seems obvious, but it is not. Many students don’t read through, with close reading eyes, their own writing.
Some guiding questions I see surfacing from this audio-revision concept:
Where does the audio reading veer from the text reading because you (writer/reader) automatically made it better in the moment of the live read?
What sounds “wrong” to the ear on second listen and how can you fix it?
What do we notice about our writing when the text becomes audio?
How does your physical voice play a role in what you read?
Where in the text can we now revise to make it better and clearer and smoother for the reader?
There’s so much learning, and teaching, swirling around in those questions.
The problem, as always, is time to do it, but I need to make time if I think this might improve the editing and proofreading skills of my students, right? I need to give them as many strategies for improving their ideas and writing. They need an entire toolbox. Their voice might be another tool in that box. (We won’t get into the discomfort many have about hearing their voice .. but it is something that will come up in the classroom setting.)
Certainly, there is no shortage of ways to record voice. Audacity. Garageband. Vocaroo. Soundcloud. There are tons of apps and programs for recording voice. What I want is simplicity — the fewest bells and whistles possible, so that students focus only the sound of their own voice and the words on the page, where the two converge and where the two diverge.
I am inspired by the work of Dawn Reed, who has been writing about the use of podcasting and This I Believe audio essays in her high school classroom for some time. At the National Writing Project Digital Is site, Dawn shared out this observation that connects with my thinking on this issue. Here, Dawn writes of the moment when one of her students made this connection between his voice and the writing on the page, and how one can influence the other:
When we started this podcasting project, however, Jonathan told me he was amazed by how the recording of his speech made an impact on the way he viewed his voice. He also told me that he had never read his work aloud before, and he was impressed with the role it had on his revision. Without the step of the actual recording of his voice, Jonathan skipped the reading aloud of his work. It wasn’t until he needed to record that he saw the value in reading his work aloud, and he additionally listened to his voice, which gave him insight on his writing and revision strategies. In this way, digital literacies have become a revision tool for Jonathan. It was when he heard his voice being played in the recording that he noticed himself not sounding real or genuine and that’s when he went back to revise the piece in the print and spoken text in order to have his writing and speaking show his voice. Through this process, Jonathan affirmed the role of his unique voice in his print and spoken essay. — from Digital Is, via Dawn Reed
I was creating a Storify of all of the short video reflections that folks are making for the IMMOOC (Innovator’s Mindset), grabbing them and tucking them into the curated project. (see it here) But when I was tinkering with the template of the Storify, and tried to use the slideshow template, suddenly, my speakers were filled with all of the voices, talking all at once.
At first, I panicked — too loud! too loud! — and turned the volume off. After some reflection and a spark of curiosity, though, I turned it back on and … I listened. I listened to the swirling sounds of all of our voices. I could hear different textures of sounds. I could hear individual words and phrases lifting up from the chaos, every now and then. Clusters of noise came together and then apart, weaving this noisy tapestry.
Which got me thinking: could I record all of those voices together (yes, I could) and then add a looping music track underneath it all, guiding the sounds into some sense of song? I could. What made it all work, in fact, is that towards the end, voices begin ending, slowly, like an audio tail wagging, and we are left with one lone voice, and her daughter, telling the entire IMMOOC community to “have a great day,” and that voice of that young daughter of Sheila Vick (@sheila_vick) was the magic sauce that made it all work.
Listen in headphones, if you can, and tell me this is not beautiful in its own way. It is longer than I would have liked, but I could not force myself to cut out anyone’s voice. (And some videos were added to the Storify later that did not make it into my audio recording. Sorry.)
I wrote a column for our regional newspaper about teaching the election to our students. The quote above is how I began it, as I wondered how to make an election in which they have no voting power meaningful.
You can read my column, although the newspaper has a paywall. I believe the first few views are free. Our Western Mass Writing Project has a partnership with the Daily Hampshire Gazette around the Chalk Talk column and writing, in which we help teachers get published once a month.
Meanwhile, I also joined in on Teachers Teaching Teachers webcast the other night, as host Paul Allison and other guests and I were talking about how we might extend the Letters to the President concept to students under the age of 13, by considering the revamped Youth Voices online space. (The Letters to the President publishing site is open to students 13 and older)
We’re making some plans …
Paul also shared out this great video documentary — Letters to the Next Mayor — which, while being site specific, lays out a foundation for how Letters to the President might unfold as a (digital) writing activity.
The most innovative idea that I came across this summer? How about John Hunter’s World Peace Game concept? The game is incredible and complicated and pushes all sorts of learning in all sorts of directions.
Hunter’s story of how he developed this intensive game that upped the ante for his fourth graders (and other assorted age groups as he brings the game elsewhere … including the Pentagon, where military leaders played it, too) as he asks players to help solve problems facing the world. His story is certainly worth a look, if only for discovering another way to re-examine our classroom spaces as something beyond testing and mandates.
I was listening to George Couros on a hangout for IMMOOC, and he was telling the story (if I remember it right) of a high school student building a car, and when George asked how the young builder how he learned to do build a car, the student replied … on YouTube.
My class was waiting for dismissal on the first days of school and in the back of the room, a student pulled out a yo-yo and started to do acrobatic yo-yo-ing tricks. Where did he learn some of his more complicated moves? On YouTube.
A student once brought in video of friends skateboarding, flying across the air off ramps and other objects at the local skateboard park. The camera angles and the music and theatrical editing of the video had me asking the student, where did you learn how to shoot movies and edit like that? On Youtube.
My son wanted to hack and mod Minecraft. Where did he go to learn more about how to do that? On YouTube.
A student is very interested in anime. I mean, obsessed with the Japanese art-form. Where did they go to learn how to draw? On YouTube.
I had a plumbing issue. I am not mechanical. But this seemed fixable, and I didn’t want to pay our plumber $100 a hour for so simple a job. Where did I go to teach myself how to fix the plumbing? On YouTube.
And on and on and on … right?
Remember when schools universally blocked YouTube from student access? I hope those days are fading away. The more I talk with young people, and watch my own sons interact with the world, and reflect on how I learn new things, the more it becomes clear that YouTube has become the largest classroom in the world.
People of all sorts, in all parts of the world, are willingly sharing their expertise and creating narrow communities (what Chris Anderson called “The Long Tail” of marketing in the business world but which might have applications in thinking about students’ interests) and niche interests, and people are finding those communities more readily than ever before. Videos are a key component. Showing what you know. Sharing what you know. Learning from each other. Sure, there’s still a lot of flotsam and jetsam on YouTube (some of it wonderfully distracting) but more and more, there is amazing teaching and learning going on.
Check out Gary Haye’s Social Media Counter, and zoom in on the hours of YouTube video being uploaded in any given time. It’s staggering. In a 60 second period in which I was watching, there was nearly 400 hours of video uploaded to YouTube.
And those of us (you, me) who share their knowledge and expertise to our students in this venue are the teachers. Not necessarily us, the classroom teachers in the school building. Us, the world at large.
We openly share our knowledge with others, by pointing the camera at ourselves and saying, this is how I do it. You can, too. We learn by clicking pause, rewinding, watching again and again and again. We comment (sometimes, not so nicely, alas), and follow our “teachers” for the next video. We join communities of others with our interests, and discover new things and share what new thing we have invented or discovered or found out how to do.
Now, this is both an idealistic view of the YouTube world, and yet, the reality, too. Ask any kid. They’ll tell you. As Google seeks to monetize more and more aspects of YouTube, this might all shift to something different. For now, if you want to learn something, you don’t necessarily ask your teacher. You search YouTube.
The question is: how do we use that awareness and understanding to help our students in their own learning? I don’t think teachers and schools are obsolete, or that they even need a complete revamping. That doesn’t mean I don’t believe we don’t need change, though. The discussions in the IMOOC may give us a chance to envision the future of school, and make strides to get there.
But what if we could do a better job of teaching:
Search Engine Queries (and Search Engine Differences … Not Everything Starts and Ends with Google)
How Algorithyms Shape Our Internet Experience (and How to Navigate Technological Bias)
(This post is for Slice of Life, a regular writing invitation from Two Writing Teachers to find small moments to write about, and reflect. Come join in.)
We have a family tradition this time of year. We go apple picking. In cold and hot, in rain .. we try to stay true to the idea that we will all make room in our busy schedules for apple picking. We used to go to this orchard up in our hilltowns, with amazing views of a valley. It closed down after a few particularly bad seasons. So we started to go to another orchard not far from the school where I teach.
But my oldest son is now off to college, so that made an Apple Picking Adventure a bit more tricky. And my sister-in-law’s family, who used to live ten minutes away, now lives in Rhode Island, so that makes it tricky. My middle son works and my youngest son plays baseball. Tricky.
But my wife is determined, and she made it happen.
Sure, we had to drive nearly two hours — first to pick up our son from his college outside of Boston and then drive another 30 minutes to meet my sister-in-law at the orchard found by Googling apples. But we made it happen this weekend and it was great to see the cousins together again, and my sister-in-law and brother-in-law. The weather was overcast but not too hot, and the trees were dripping with apples (the drought has brought a good year for apples, bad year for peaches, I guess).
I even grabbed a few Asian pears from some trees. Biting into those is like biting into a small container of sweet water. They were simply delicious.
It is these kinds of traditions that keep a family connected, even as we disperse geographically. Apples, for us, are always more than apples — they are a reason to find time to come together. Plus, they taste pretty darn good, too. So, there’s that.
Peace (together),
