Archive Page 2
Go hard, go GRUEN!
Last week I had the pleasure of team-teaching with my wonderful English coordinator Michele. Like myself, Michele is a devoted fan of ABC’s Gruen Transfer, a program about how advertising manipulates our thinking. We used the program’s Consumer’s Revenge feature to access video and audio snippets in order to assemble advertisements around the ficticious “Gruen Beer.”
The idea we proposed to the students was that parodies of advertisements have the power to challenge and critique (and sometimes even overturn) media-based assumptions about how we think. Good parodies often reveal hidden agendas, expose truths and show how stereotypes have been used to advance prejudices or maintain the status quo. Coming up with this kind of a parody was our challenge for the students.
Here’s a video with the original concept, students at work and some of the products they came up with:
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Tags: critical literacy, English, Gruen Transfer, video
Collaborative Writing (part 2)
This morning I was hunting around for ways to integrate multiple editable sections from pages within wikispace all onto the one page, as you would see in a typical wikipedia.org page. Discovering this post on a wikispaces discussion forum, I was easily able to set up a complete essay page which combines all the essay components (intro, paragraphs 1-3 and conclusion) that my students had created.
The final result can be seen here in my class’ Jouneys Essay – which is one of the four essays my students collaboratively wrote during the lesson. Without being brilliant, it is no doubt a very solid essay that is, for the most part, structurally sound and coherent. Perhaps more importantly, the process behind the product involved much higher-order thinking and was continuously metacognitive for all engaged students.
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Tags: collaborative writing, English, wikispace
Feeling the weight of the HSC world on our shoulders, obstacles in the path of innovation – syllabus dot points, exams, misperceptions of incompetence – all too frequently plague our thoughts and stop us from taking risks where it often matters the most. Sometimes I have to stop and take a deep breath before I realise that I’ve been relying on lecturing and note-taking for far too many lessons with my year 12 Standard English class.
Yet – what can we do when we’re simply teaching to the test all the time?! Many a year 12 teacher has succeeded in scoring high marks on old-school brute teaching force. Does that make it ok? Well, if your goal is to simply score the marks (and let’s face it, as far as many schools, teachers, parents and students are concerned, that is the goal), then well and good. But if you’re of the variety that don’t sleep well at night in ordinary circumstances (and I’m an insomniac par excellence), then I don’t think you can have a true sense of integrity as a human being, let alone teacher, if you simply teach kids to mindlessly rote learn in order to succeed in life (because if you define success as a real sense of self-worth, then in reality you can’t succeed on those terms).
Where am I going with this? Well, yesterday, my class took a trip to a new BOS 2006 wikispace I cooked up based on the Board of Studies 2006 English HSC exam. What were my instructions for the lesson? I told my class we’d be doing an HSC paper together, by which I meant literally writing it together - one series of essays, multiply authored and edited to the point where we as a class were happy with what we’d written.
A word of warning to the wiki-novice: as one quickly learns, although wikipedia spaces of all kinds are pushed as collaborative spaces where all can contribute, one flaw is that if two users are editing a page simultaneously, it is easy for one to save a version ‘over the top’ of another, meaning that changes are lost and efforts wasted. With this in mind, I decided to compartmentalise four HSC questions – each into five sections which represent parts of an essay (introduction, paragraphs 1-3 and conclusion). By doing this, I created 20 editable sub-pages, corresponding to the 20 students in my class.
So – the idea in this case is that 20 students are each allocated a section of an essay which they work on for a short period of time, before the whole class is rotated and each student moves onto the next section. The hardest part? Students tend to resist the idea that they should start the process by working on a third paragraph or conclusion and, in the case of my class, failure to see exactly where I was going with this task meant that many students groaned and grumbled their way defiantly through the first 30 minutes of the lesson.
But – persisting in the idea that we were making collaborative pieces of work, telling students they could (and should) talk to each other about where the essay as a whole was going (for example, student A working on a third paragraph asks student B working on an intro “what should the third topic sentence be?”) I rotated my students through the first five edits. Gradually, the students became more involved, the groaning subsided and what emerged was fascinating. As we were writing together (I had allocated myself a part after discovering a student was off sick) a collective sense of ownership began to emerge. Students began arguing about what others had written, saying what had to be “cleared up,” “fixed up,” “changed” and so on, going to great efforts to justify why. The level of the argument overall was much more an intellectual debate, the quality of which I rarely see with this class. I was kicking myself for having left the camera in the library on this occasion!
Testing the water, at one point, I remarked “who was the last person to work on the Billy Elliot conclusion? They did a fantastic job!” to which a student (usually a classic non-participator) replied “it wasn’t just them who came up with it, all of us over here worked on that section too!”
By the end of the lesson, we had come very close to finishing four essays. Each essay had been in the truest sense written by everyone. I find it remarkable to think that an old saying like “let’s do an essay together” really can’t be said to be collective authorship in the way that web 2.0 has defined it.
For my next post, I’d like to publish the final version of one of the essays and document some of the feedback when we read the finished products next week. In the meantime, I’d love to hear from others who have tried collaborative writing at senior English (or other subject) level.
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Tags: Board of Studies, collaborative writing, English, HSC, Standard English, wikispace
An Open House for Open Source
Who would have thought that with Windows Vista fast going down in history as the slowest, most cumbersome and least intuitive operating system, that a solution was right under my nose all along? Up until last weekend, I’d long since known about Linux, but had put off giving it a try – making every excuse from concerns about navigating through the technical difficulties of installation, to my rustiness with unix commands, to finding enough space on my PC hard disk.
But finally, my moment arrived and I took the plunge. The final incentive? When browsing a wikipedia page on one of the most common distributions, Ubuntu, I discovered a spin-off distribution by the name of Ubuntu Studio. For anyone unfamiliar with this distribution (or with Linux in general), Ubuntu Studio combines a very formidable set of open source audio and video applications, allowing the user to do just about everything: score-writing, accessing software instruments, sequencers, multi-track recording, along with image editing and video production. Best of all, the whole operating system is designed for audio/video production, which means that applications have CPU priority where they wouldn’t in other OS environments. Once I took a look at all the applications available from the start menu straight after installation, my eyes glazed over. Scary to think of all the possibilities, isn’t it?
As a humble teacher (and part-time bedroom musician), this will take some time to get my head around, both technically and conceptually. Audio/video software has long been the domain of companies with extremely wide profit margins, pushing many would-be students, musicians, small-time producers and artists into obtaining pirated software via torrents and in copyright-lax countries like China and Indonesia (leaving aside the issue of the average Indonesian needing to sacrifice an entire six-month salary to afford legal software for themselves in the first place).
Open source is fast taking over the world because its simple democratic principles of free-choice and freedom of speech mean that the operating systems and applications just keep getting better and better. The big question to ask now is – how can I use this in the classroom? Any thoughts?
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Tags: free, Linux, open source, teaching, ubuntu, ubuntu studio
Fifteen minutes of fame…
Some say that Andy Warhol was a visionary when he predicted in 1968 that “in the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.” With the explosion of web 2.0 and the constant demands of maintaining the interest of the online world’s alarmingly short collective attention span, sensationalism of the kind Warhol may have been thinking certainly reigns supreme.
The main question is, then, how does one plan on spending this technologically- assured window of opportunity? Having recently purchased eight digital cameras for my school, I’m delighted to see that by bringing filming into the classroom, we can teach our kids to do much more than set up 24 hour webcams in their bedrooms or film themselves doing chicken dances to broadcast to the world. In Year 8 English, we’ve been exploring some of the rudiments of Project Based Learning through a film activity which involves developing and filming a pretend news program. Students assume one of the following roles (the numbers and natures of which can be adjusted to suit your class):
Graphic designers
Floor manager
Reporters (local interest, overseas, weather, entertainment, political, etc.)
Director
Editors
Camera operator
Musicians/composers
Here’s a video of my class discussing some of their roles and some of the footage from the final cut:
Each role has a clear set of responsibilities which can either be specified on a role sheet or negotiated at some point. Students need to understand their role in the context of other students’ roles and navigate through the various obstacles that naturally get in the way of bringing the program “to air.”
Perhaps not surprisingly, kids take this kind of activity very seriously, as it relates strongly to real life circumstances, is a lot of fun and allows them to tap into their own “fifteen minutes of fame.”
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Musical Mashups and Radiohead
Since the start of my life as a high school Music teacher five years ago, I’ve been steadily exploring the potential of multi-track recording (recording, editing and mixing audio files) in the classroom. It’s amazing to note how technology has really made this accessible in recent years. What was formerly the domain of cashed up producers and musicians mortgaged to the eyeballs is now in the reach of anyone with a computer, microphone, pair of headphones and freeware program like Audacity. It’s also interesting to read and hear about non-Music teachers who are using multi-track recording to create radio-plays, advertisements and other interesting audio podcasts. Still, what’s got my attention in this exciting and unpredictable world of web 2.0 is the “mash-up” potential of what we create. In multimedia circles, this might mean creating a piece of music incorporating midi material from the wonderfully free and ever improving Finale Notepad in an Audacity project. The resulting mix-down might be imported into iMovie or Moviemaker, along with an animation from humble but effective programs like Monkeyjam (for stop-motion animation using a webcam and anything from plasticine to Barbie dolls) or Pivot Stick Animator.
What’s really exciting for me as a Music teacher, is British band Radiohead’s recent decision (read the BBC article) to release their second single “Nude” as a series of individual instrument tracks with accompanying project files for Garage Band and Logic. What an incredible creative decision – to share the composition process with one’s fans!
Lucky for me – I’m a devoted fan and have quite a few Music students in my classes who are like-minded. We’re going to have fun next term!
Watch this space!
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Tags: audacity, mash-up, multitrack recording, music, Radiohead
This morning I worked with our special needs teacher and school librarian to promote reading amongst a group of year 7 students who struggle in developing their literacy skills. This task involved students reading aloud The Diary of a Wombat by Jackie French and recording their performances with web cams before watching their recorded videos, evaluating their readings and discussing what makes a reading ‘come alive.’
Funny how a $12 web cam can be so versatile, isn’t it? Here’s the video of the process and the end result:
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Tags: literacy, reading, web 2.0, web cams
Today I tried a more advanced sequence of mini research tasks using Google Reader. Students have been using their own RSS subscriptions as part of wide reading for a unit on contemporary Australia, and it’s fascinating to see how the areas of interest they have developed over the past few weeks have really motivated their learning and kept them highly engaged. Here were the tasks:
1. Identify three articles that relate to an ongoing issue which has been in the media for some time, and of which you are already aware. Explain how these articles expand your understanding of the issue.
2. Identify an article that deals with an important issue (different to the one selected for question 1) but does not provide enough information about that issue. With reference to the main speaker’s views and alternative views, analyse the shortcomings of this article.
3. Identify an article that presents information about someone in a negative light (for example, someone involved in a scandal). With further research (for example, a Wikipedia page on that person) argue against at least two views presented in the article.
4. Identify an article that bears some relationship between the issues it discusses and your life at school. Write a short (pretend) note in your school’s daily notices with the preface, “ALL Students: You should read the article entitled “X” because…”
5. Turn a response to any one of the above questions into a creative piece that broadens your understanding of the issues addressed. You may wish to write from your own perspective, the perspective of someone else or through a dialogue between two or more people. You may write in any form you wish.
At the end of the lesson, I asked students to evaluate how RSS feeds (in this case using Google Reader) benefited their learning. The result was this short video that I put together:
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Tags: critical literacy, google reader, junior english, web 2.0
This morning I tried Google Reader in the classroom for the first time. This was a particularly exciting moment for me in many ways. Personally, I regard RSS feeding as the most significant development in the web 2.0 world and one that has major repercussions for teachers. RSS feeds have enabled me to become a literate, empowered user of the web, able to make informed choices about the information I access, no longer a slave to the randomness of a search engine at the last minute. I feel that it’s important for me to take my students on this journey and the results I’ve already started to see have been quite amazing.
For this lesson, I chose my year 8 English class as the guineapigs. We’ve been working on a unit entitled ‘Contemporary Australia,’ and I’ve been making more than ample use of the web, drawing on current texts like this one about the Sea Shepherd caption allegedly being shot at by Japanese whalers; texts rich in multi-modal literacy components – text, video, audio, comments, tags and so on. My students have been participating in online discussions around these kinds of texts, and we’ve also made particularly good use of web 2.0 scaffold tools like Visuwords and Gliffy for unpacking key concepts and understanding issues more contextually.
My task this morning was quite simple:
- Students set up their own Google Reader account
- Students locate five general news feeds with content relevant to Australia (eg. ‘Sydney Morning Herald – National headlines’)
- Students explore ABC online for five specific feeds based on tags of interest to them (eg. ‘ABC News – Tag: sexual offences‘ or ‘ABC News – Tag: Glenmore Park – 2745‘), locating the RSS code and copying it into their Google Reader account.
- Students skim read twenty interesting articles, creating their own tags based on these.
- Students ’star’ five articles which are particularly interesting to their chosen interests.
Despite a few hiccups with account set-up confirmation emails not arriving quickly enough, students easily navigated through the process of setting up their accounts and subscribing to feeds. Because ABC Online has done such a brilliant job of comprehensively listing their tags, students can really focus on news which interests them at the same time as exploring more general news from multiple sources. How fascinating it was to see which kinds of articles students had discovered at the end of the lesson!
Have you used Google Reader in your classes? Drop me a line in the comments and let me know your ideas or links to your blog!
For anyone interested in understanding the basics of RSS news feeding, you can’t go past this brilliant video by the people Common Craft:
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