Author Archives: dogtrax

Book Review: Nicholas St. North and the Battle of the Nightmare King

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I know the movie Rise of The Guardians comes out soon, but I wanted to read the books in the series (Guardians of Childhood) first with my son. Honestly, I had some trepidation. Books that revisit and reboot the back stories of famous figures like Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and others? Yeah. I don’t know if that needs to be done.

So I was pleasantly surprised by Nicholas St. North and the Battle of the Nightmare King as a read-aloud with my son. The story (which never mentions Santa Claus, ever) of the swashbuckling pirate, Nicholas St. Nick, who joins an aging wizard and a young girl named Katherine to fight off the (literal) armies of darkness under the command of the evil Pitch is a rollicking yard, moving at a quick pace with just enough magic and sword fights and mystery (and connections to popular culture’s understanding of the man from the North Pole) to keep both of us interested. It was a quick read but we were both wondering what was going to happen next.

A number of times, the writing got bogged down with over-dramatic flare, as if they were given a bit too much literary license. Luckily, it wasn’t all that often, and the action overtook the writing anyway. There is some tricky vocabulary in here for younger readers, and I had to stop a few times to talk about some words, but that’s OK — if the story draws them in and exposes them to new words, I am all for it. But I did wonder about the audience for the books. Is it the younger kids who still believe? Or is it the older kids who are hanging on to the myths of childhood? Maybe it is a little of both.

There are two other books in the series so far (with picture book star William Joyce being one of the co-writers and the main illustrator) and while I am sure I will be dragged to the see the movie soon, my son is also antsy to read the other two books in the series (the next is about the Easter Bunny and so, my trepidations rise again). Still, I was pleased with the first book, so maybe I just need to be wide open for some more magic to enter our lives through the pages of our read-aloud experiences.

Peace (in the north),
Kevin

 

Digital Writing Month: Compose the Web

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Using Thimble

I really enjoyed a session at the National Writing Project Annual Meeting called Composing the Web, which began with a neat “toy hacking” activity and then moved into exploring the Mozilla Foundation’s suite of tools for remixing and creating content on the web. Using one of the activities on Thimble (a webpage creator of sorts), I created this quick “shout out” project using a claymation video my son and I had made.

What I like about these tools is that it puts more agency and understanding into the hands and fingertips of users (ie, our students) and can make clear the underlying code structure of our media-saturated world. Use Hackasaurus Xray Goggles, for example, and you can make visible the coding strategies of a website designer, AND then remix it for yourself. Thimble allows you to create and publish a website in minutes, and the new Popcorn video system is a robust video editor that opens the doors for all sorts of remixing content.

Which brought up a long discussion about copyright, ownership of content, and more in our session. In the end, there was some agreement (I think) that these tools are part of what digital literacy is about, and that we do a disservice to our young people if we don’t find ways for them to understand and use the web for creation. I don’t think we all agreed on all points, though, and that points to continued confusion over the remixing/hacking world in educational circles.  (I am not clear, either).

But I am going to be bringing these tools into my class as part of a unit I am starting around media criticism — using Xray Goggles to hack a news site and then maybe Thimble to create an alternative news site, and then maybe even Popcorn video editor to annotate a news video. The ideas are still unfolding here ….

Anyway, here is a link to my Thimble-created site: Yo! I’m Creating Claymation!

Peace (in the hack),
Kevin

Teaching Media Criticism without Cynicism with Three Cups of Tea

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http://prodigy3cupsoftea.pbworks.com/f/1269627337/cups.jpg

We started what could unfold as an interesting unit yesterday around media criticism. Our work will revolve around the reading of Three Cups of Tea, which we read a few years ago but then abandoned when the controversy erupted last year with a 60 Minutes investigative report on Greg Mortenson and Jon Krakauer’s scathing Three Cups of Deceit book. We’ve decided to revisit the book with our sixth graders for a number of reasons:

  • It’s non-fiction (or is it?) and we need to be exposing full-length non-fiction to our students
  • It provides a platform to cast a critical eye on the publishing process
  • It allows us to talk about hero worship, and potential and pitfalls of that trait in our culture
  • It allows us to re-examine the nature of lying
  • It allows us to see how one person can still make change in the world, if they have passion
  • It allows us to not only look at Mortenson, but also the media’s response to Three Cups of Tea in light of the controversy

In short, a reading of the book in light of the controversy is a foot in the door to teaching media criticism on multiple levels — from the writing/publishing of the book (Mortenson defends the “truth and lies allegation” by blaming the use of a ghostwriter and publisher); to the slippery slope of retelling of false events and facts in support of the larger ideal (he raised a lot of money to build schools in places in the world that require our attention but rarely get it); to the genre of investigative journalism and the fairness of those kinds of reports; to the media portrayal and our own perceptions of the Middle East (ie, everyone must be a terrorist).

Yesterday, I showed my class the 60 Minutes piece but first, we had a long discussion about fiction versus non-fiction, and where the “truth” resides in writing a book, and whether a writer as a “literary license” to tweak with the facts in order to tell a good story. It was an amazing discussion that unfolded differently in all four classes, and yet, it went deep into our conceptions as readers and our expectations as readers to be sold a true bill of goods. If it is non-fiction, my students said, they want it to be true. Otherwise, they do not trust the messenger (ie, the writer).

We also talked about our school, like many others, raised and donated a few thousand dollars to Mortenson and his organization via the Pennies for Peace program. Almost everyone raised their hands when I asked if they had contributed to Pennies for Peace when we ran it at our school. A fifth grade teacher who organized the coin drive also took a group of students to see Mortenson speak, and they met him personally, handing over the check from our school. In other words, my students have a vested interest in this story.

Today, we will be looking at an interview Mortenson gave to Outside Magazine to rebut the charges against him and his foundation — The Central Asia Institute — so that we get his own voice into the mix, and begin talking about how to make sense of the various sides of an issue.

The trick for me as the teacher is to avoid teaching cynicism here. What I want are critics — young people with eyes wide open to the world of media and information, and the development of internal filters around what they read and what they view on screens (for example, many students ripped into 60 Minutes for not working harder to bring on supporters of Mortenson to rebut the claims against him, although they did try to contact him and even ambushed him at a book-signing event.) If all I have done at the end is nurture cynicism, then the time has been wasted.

Peace (in the cups),
Kevin

 

More from the National Writing Project Annual Meeting: Game Design

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(link to slideshow)
I was a co-presenter at a session at the National Writing Project’s Annual Meeting last week on the topic of game design. I joined Steve Moore, Rafi Santos and Janelle Bence to present a variety of ways that gaming and video games might have a place in the educational setting, starting from a systems framework idea of the ecology of a school, to integrating game design theory into the curriculum, to connections to the Common Core, to how to build a game. It was a lot of fun, and full of interesting insights by the participants, who spent a chunk of time collaboratively constructing a game and then reflecting on the experience.

First, we brainstormed what we knew about games:
What We Know About Games

Later, after games were built, we asked them to reflect on what they discovered about game design, and what they struggled with:
Discoveries and Challenges of Game Activity

You can also access the agenda online, which has resources that the presenters and the audience have pulled together.

Peace (in the sharing),
Kevin

 

Book Review: The One World Schoolhouse

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Let me first admit: I certainly know of the Khan Academy but I have never actually visited it or viewed any of the videos. I’ve followed some of the ways that Salman Khan’s video tutorials have sparked the Flipped Classroom concept, and some of the controversy that comes with both the academy and the flipped idea. But I am relatively outside of the loop on Khan. I offer up those words because I spent the plane ride back from Las Vegas devouring Salman Khan’s book about educational change, The One World Schoolhouse (Education Reimagined) , and found it very intriguing.

Readers of my blog know that I am a sucker for the “inside story” of ideas, and here, Khan brings us right to the beginning of his idea of using video tutorials to help his sixth grade niece understand some basic math concepts, which then spread to other family members, and soon, he found that thousands were viewing his videos on YouTube. For a long period of time, Khan Academy was little more than Khan, sitting in a converted closet, screencasting lessons and publishing them on Youtube. After discovering his passion for teaching, he quit his job as a hedgefund manager, did the tour of various foundations and companies (Google and Gates were intrigued), and then launched the Khan Academy as an experiment in education that is built on some assumptions that Khan has, including:

  • One size classrooms does not fit all students
  • Gaps in math understanding lead to bigger troubles later on
  • Systematic collection and interpretation of data allows teachers to target individual students
  • Education should be available for anyone, anywhere in the world

Now, I am one of those teachers who are part of what Khan sees as a problem. I teach in a traditional school, with one-hour blocks, where curriculum is often (but not always) built on time more than student mastery, and I have classes composed of students in age groups instead of mixed (he is against tracking and is passionate about how tracking students into honors and lower classes traps students, particularly in math). But I am open to change.

What Khan advocates is sweeping shifts in the way we see our learners, and his ideas include:

  • large classrooms (of up to 75 students) run by multiple teachers, bringing various expertise and talents into the pictures;
  • technology as a tool for reinforcement and understanding of student mastery, but also as a way to free up teachers to teach individuals;
  • accessible, affordable learning for students, no matter where they live in the world, so that everyone has a chance to reach up;
  • using summer as an extended learning period, and not as a “time off” from learning;
  • that standardized testing be more precise in testing what kids should know and have mastered (and how difficult that it when it comes to important things like creativity), and not about the test construction itself;
  • building fun and play into the curriculum so that topics like math don’t become rote learning that never really gets learned.

I think The One World Schoolhouse is worth your time and worth a read. Even if you have preconceptions of the Khan Academy concept (and more schools are now partnering with his organization to pilot the use of video tutorials and computer assessments), the book at least centers where Khan is coming from, and it encourages you to re-examine the “why” of our school system, which is built around a framework that Khan argues was constructed by chance and politics, and not necessarily the best interests in young learners.

Peace (in the schoolhouse),
Kevin

 

Reflections on National Writing Project Annual Meeting, part 1

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I’ll be sharing pieces of my experiences here in Las Vegas at the National Writing Project Annual Meeting over the coming days (today, it is on to NCTE). I attended a number of very interesting sessions yesterday, and co-presented one around game design. I also joined 600 NWP colleagues in the main plenary sessions where we wrote (naturally) and got inspired by some terrific speakers.

What stuck out for me over the course of a very full day, however, was something rather surprising and for me, unexpected. I was reminded once again about the power of the narrative. I say surprising because the shift to the Common Core has reduced how narrative writing might figure in our classrooms, in favor of informational, expository and argumentative writing.

But, starting in the first session I attended around Systems Design and Digital Writing, I realized that so much of this theory around elements shaping outcome, and how the parts define the whole, and how one twist in an element can potential alter the system is pretty close to what we do when we write a story. We add a character, toss in a plot twist, design a story through its parts for a larger meaning. It’s really a narrative understanding of the world.

And the keynote speakers at the big session — Jeff Wilhelm, Michael W. Smith, and Jim Fredricksen — have written three books centered on some main elements of the Common Core, but all three spoke passionately about the ways that narratives inform our lives, and provide a framework (again, a system) for understanding. So, when Wilhelm was talking about how making lists for informational text and understanding is one way of organizing our understanding, he also noted how we use narrative to put those lists in order in a meaningful way. The other two speakers touched on narrative, too.

And then, in both our gaming session (where narrative is the design backbone of my game design project, but with a science theme), and in a last session around tools that allow you to compose/hack the web, we talked again about how story and narrative are an essential thinking framework.

All this is heartening. I know the Common Core doesn’t remove narrative, but it does minimize it, and that worries me as a teacher and a writer. If we can find more ways to weave those strands together, of remixing narrative in the scope of informational/expository writing, so that writers have more options, then we are providing an interesting road ahead for our students.

Las Vegas, not New York

Peace (in Vegas),
Kevin