Author Archives: dogtrax

Resolving my rants about our Literacy Conference

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This is a follow-up to my post the other day about the regional Literacy Conference we are hosting at our school in November that had not one iota of a technology or media or New Literacies component to it. I finally bumped into my principal in the hallway, expressed my feelings about our school — which is innovative in its use of technology — hosting a conference without a single nod to the ways kids use literacy in their lives outside of our classrooms. I told him it felt like an “old school Literacy Conference.”

He was very receptive, and did what I knew he would do. He asked me to submit an idea for a break-out session. I told him that I wanted to be a participant, and not a presenter, but that felt false even to me. If I truly believe in this, then I need to be active, not passive.

It just so happened that this conversation took place on the day when I was filling out a bunch of paperwork for a conference that I have been invited to present at in February in Ohio. As I was describing my workshops for the Dublin Literacy Conference (Digital Picture Books, Using Webcomics in the Classroom and Stopmotion Movie Magic for families), I realized that if I am going to help folks in Ohio think about New Literacies, I owe it to my school and fellow teachers to do the same right here at home.

So, I am going to propose a session on using Webcomics as a Writing Tool Across the Curriculum. My hope is to set up a temporary ToonDooSpace (note to self: email ToonDoo folks) so that teachers can use a ToonDoo closed network site to experience the possibilities themselves.

I’ll let ya know if the school district approves my workshop offer.

Peace (in the discussions),
Kevin

PS — Here a webcomic book sample from one of my students. I love how she envisioned the story across multiple frames. This was not an assignment, but merely something she did on her own time outside of school. In just three weeks, some students have made more than 50 comics on their own time and some have created multiple ebooks. Pretty neat to watch our ToonDoo site unfolding:

Spending some time in the National Gallery on Writing

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This notice from NCTE got my attention:

The National Gallery of Writing, hosted by NCTE, now boasts 2,136 galleries and 19,395 submissions at this writing!

That’s a pretty cool number, so I decided to tour around a bit. There is some wonderful writing in those galleries, although navigation through the labyrinth isn’t so easy. How to set up browsing through the online gallery must have caused a mighty headache for the NCTE folks and they clearly did the best they could.

I came at it from my usual lens: are there digital compositions represented in the writing in these Galleries? I’m still not sure, since my search queries mostly turned up empty. I found one that I did (see below) and found a beautiful digital story that my friend Troy did about his family, but mostly, I found … nothing digital. There were plenty of pieces of writing that examined or focused on the world of digital media (I was intrigued by a short story written as Tweets, for example, and filed that away in my head).

Part of the problem was that the format for submission did not exactly lend itself to digital compositions. I set up a gallery for digital stories from my students around their Dream Scenes, but abandoned it when I realized that even though the videos were very small, the site would not allow me to upload them directly and embed right there. I would have to go through some hoops, and I didn’t have the time. How many others stopped at that hurdle, I wonder?

It seems to me that if NCTE is truly committed to the concept of multimedia composition (as evidence by the strong papers it has put out in the last year), it would have built a system into the framework of the National Day on Writing to allow for folks to easily share digital stories, podcasting, etc.

What do you think?

Peace (in the galleries),
Kevin

PS — here is the digital story that I submitted to a gallery around teachers with stories to tell. You can see in the gallery I could only fit part of the written narrative and the links to the video and the full story are not even hyperlinks.


What pets and robots do all day

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I am trying to bring Funk the Llama and Cylene the Cyborg into my webcomic a bit more. So, for this story arc, I imagine what these two must do all day. Just as background: Funk lives for soul music and Cylene was created out of discarded computer parts, with a soul music database inside of her. You can read more about Cylene and Funk at my home for Boolean Squared.

Peace (in the house),
Kevin

The Long Lost Days of Vinyl

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This is my last comic in the Waiting for Windows story. At school, we had a discussion the other day about vinyl records and record players (they are using them in Social Studies for modern archealogical digs and in a novel we are reading, the family buys a portable record player for the car). So, echoes of those conversations filter into the comic today.

Peace (in the past),
Kevin

Well, kids, the world thanks you …

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Here’s the third installment of the boys waiting in line for Windows … (I realized that I could have played up the symmetry of the bug — for the new software and for the flu — missed my chance!)

Peace (in the bugs),
Kevin

Still Waiting for Windows

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This is the second comic about my characters waiting in line for the new Windows 7 Operating System. I had to add in something about waiting for the new flu vaccine, too.

Peace (in the OS),
Kevin

The no-tech Literacy Conference

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My school is the host site for an upcoming regional Literacy Conference, which makes sense as we are at the start of the two-year Literacy Initiative in our school district.

The conference events seem fine and somewhat interesting, with one huge exception (for me): there does not seem to be a single thread of New Literacies anywhere on the agenda. No technology anywhere.

When we had our initial brainstorming session for the start of the Literacy Initiative last school year, I tried to be the voice that advocated for Media and Technology literacies being represented in our work around literacy because students are using these tools and they need to be part of what we are teaching.

Sigh.

My friend and colleague, Gail P.,  pointed out to me that teachers are being asked to do so much more and are feeling the stress (including our new shift to a standardized report card system), and that adding more to their plate is not fair to them, and I know what she means.

Then, I wondered about something. Our single Mac Cart of laptops is always out and about in our school. It’s hard to sign up because it is in such high use. That’s great.

But what are teachers using it for?

If they are using it for student composition, then don’t they need some guidance on how they can integrate that technology into the classroom? Or, my fear is: they are using the Macs for students playing games or acting as gatherers of information (instead of composing it themselves).  Gail, I know, does a lot with her kindergarten students and has them exploring in different ways on the Macs.  Our art teacher and media specialist also use the laptops in constructive ways.

But I wonder how many other of my colleagues are doing the same? How many have been given the tools for moving technology into their Language Arts curriculum? How many have been given time to explore and play? Too few.

Time to get off my high horse, I guess. Sorry for the rant. Maybe what I need to do is go into my principal’s office and say, here is a session that we should offer during the Conference  (such as — using Photostory or Voicethread to create a digital story representation of a writing assignment) and I will offer to run the session. I can’t just complain, right? The problem is that when I present, then I can’t attend.

Peace (on the day after the rains),
Kevin

Waiting for Windows with Boolean Squared

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I know Microsoft came out with its new Operating System this week and I had this image of geeks lining up to be the first to get it — sort of like the old days of standing in line for concert tickets before Ticketmaster pulled a fast one on us all and set up a money-gauging system for music.

I put Boolean and Urth in a line, imagining some sort of take on Waiting for Godot (see? even comics can have high literary goals). There are two or three more comics to this story arc coming this week.

Peace (in the waiting),

Kevin