I heard about this site that lets you create movies simply by typing.
It’s pretty simple and I think the results speak for themselves. I can think of a lot of educational applications, particulary for the media literacy strand of English. What do you think?
Then I realized, maybe this could be an opportunity. Maybe this will be the push teachers and administrators need to stop trying to ban cell phones and mp3 players and see them for the potential learning tools they are. Maybe we can’t afford a class set of clickers, but most of our kids have cell phones they can use in conjunction with something like polleverywhere.com. Can’t afford a class set of digital cameras? Most of your kids already have them.
Thanks to Mike for his thoughts below:
Necessity is the mother of invention. Right?
I’m not really sure how this ties into what I usually blog about (if you have any suggestions I’d love to hear them) but I just had to share it.
This is a clip from Britain’s Got Talent. When the contestant got up to perform, there were clearly low expectations on the part of the judges. People clearly expected one of those embarrassing William Hung types of performances, but what they got was anything but.
I’d love to know how you think you could use this video in the classroom.
Click here to read Vicki Davis’s post on this topic
And today, I got a response from Shannon (who I follow on Twitter) that came out of a discussion about fresh takes on Hamlet. What do you think about this?
Tomorrow I will be working with some teachers on using Comic Life with struggling/reluctant writers at the high school level. I wanted to model writing a piece of procedural text . So here is my “mentor text”. Read below to see what we did:
Great session today! Here’s what we did:
When teaching a new format of writing, it’s helpful to have student examine a number of samples first. I brought up this article How to Fold a Paper Airplane. Then I modeled using think-aloud to highlight some of the features of procedural writing. We then moved on to look at a second example, a recipe (one of my favourites!). This time I had the “students” (teachers pretending to be students) join me in pointing out the features of the text. We also talked about what the author could add to make it easier to understand.
Based on these texts I had the “students” help me create an anchor chart outlining the features of a good piece of procedural writing. We then discussed whether or not the features were “Gotta Haves” or “Nice to Have”.
(Keep in mind that each of these lessons are meant to be “mini lessons” of about 15 minutes, spread over a number of classes.)
We then moved into modeled and shared writing. I also showed the teachers how I used Comic Life to make the recipe above.
It’s nice to have sessions where you feel like you shared something useful!
I was going to do a little screencast on this topic myself, but why reinvent the wheel?
