Multigenre Writing

This is how our class described our very first collective multigenre writing experience.

Wordle transforms any text you copy & paste into a word cloud, with the most frequently used words in the largest font. You can select the orientation, color scheme & font. It's a powerful way to visually represent ideas, opinions, events, stories, etc. How could you use Wordle in your classroom?

Superior View: A Digital Writing Project

Lake Superior... A cherished place in my heart that is the subject of my Voicethread digital writing project. I first wrote this piece during the 2009 Minnesota Writing Project Summer Institute and I polished it with the help of my fabulous writing group, the Superior Scribes. I hope you'll feel like you are there too.

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I played with Voicethread a couple of years ago but I was only lurking, searching for great examples to send to teachers and incorporating Voicethread in my Tech Camp class on Web 2.0 applications for the immersion classroom. Now it was time to jump in!

I had thought about doing a Voicethread with this piece ever since the MWP Summer Institute. I wrote the first draft right after the MWP Summer Institute retreat (before the 3-week class). As I was writing on the deck, I remembered how we had discussed the power of pictures to not only evoke emotions and trigger writing but also to document and illustrate our writing. So I ran back into the cabin, grabbed my camera, and started documenting all the things I was writing about. Except for the picture of the water, I was somewhat disappointed by the washed out colors on my pictures. The day was truly magnificent. It deserved to be preserved in both words and pictures.

When it came to putting the Voicethread together, the software itself was easy to use and once I was home I was able to upload all my pictures at once within 20 seconds. The school’s network is definitely encountering some filtering issues: we are “under attack” as a recent network email stated… The most intimidating part of the process was the recording: I don’t have an external microphone and it wasn’t until the day after I was all done that I actually saw where the microphone is on my laptop (serves me well for doing this in dimly lit conditions late at night…). You should have seen me balancing the half-folded laptop on my lap, trying various sentences to figure out if it sounded best when I spoke close to the mousepad, or close to the keyboard… when in fact the blasted mikes are on each side of the web cam! Duh… I also found myself becoming very nitpicky about the exact intonation of my voice. Should I let it go way low at the end of this sentence or should I bring it up just a tad? Every little inflection became SO important!

Now that I’ve done it once, I would absolutely do another Voicethread. It’s such an easy tool to use. I have a myriad of classroom applications dancing in my head: teachers doing demos or mini-lessons for kids; kids reading pages of a class book; kids explaining their digital portfolio; kids explaining their metacognition in solving math or science problems; teachers posting a visual and kids calling in their interpretation/answer as comments, etc, etc… The possibilities are amazing!

Online Role-Play Reflection

One week of role-playing online... How quickly time flies! I must admit at first I was leery: What will I say? Where will I find research? Who do I respond to? I was unsure how to start. But, like Debi said, once your toes are in the water, it doesn’t feel so bad and it becomes easier.

On the positive side, I enjoyed speaking from the point of view of a different persona, which allowed me to try on a different voice. This must be how writers who use “un nom de plume” feel. Cool! The only bummer is that none of the discussions got heated enough for me to use my “demanding parent” voice (art imitating reality)… I also enjoyed learning from what others had researched. Some of us found the same (timely published) articles, which gave us something to blog about. There were a few resources that I actually bookmarked so I can use them later.

On the negative side—aside from the initial “what the heck am I doing here?”—the one drawback was feeling overwhelmed at times. There were too many discussions going on at once. Which one do I read first? Am I supposed to respond to each one? Yikes! Maybe it would help to brainstorm a few discussion topics and keep the conversations within those. Also, since we’re all so good at finding and posting resources, I felt overwhelmed by the amount of outside sources to read in order to understand a post. Frankly there are some sources I didn’t bother to read if the topic summary in the post didn’t grab me: I simply went on to another discussion. Now that we’re at the end of this role-play, I wish I’d have more time to go back and re-read more carefully what was posted.

Because I was slow on the uptake, I now wish we could keep going for another week so I could respond to more people. By the way, since we started this Ning project, everywhere I look I see articles and blog posts about digital writing, digital literacy, online game simulations, etc. I’m having some serious Twilight Zone moments…

As far as using online role-play with students, this would work with middle school students and maybe fifth graders. To do this well, students need to know how to type, how to adapt their voice for their audience, how to research a point of view and how to organize their thoughts. A few years ago when I lead the French Language Arts curriculum review in middle school, we listed an online simulation as one strategy for 7th graders. 7th graders were studying fairy tales. Primary students also read fairy tales (since they know the story in English it helps to develop and anchor French vocabulary). The idea was to have the primary students do a shared writing of questions they would like to ask the fairy tale characters. Think of something along the lines of “Why did you eat the second little pig Mr. Wolf? Weren’t you full?” The middle schoolers would then respond to their questions from the character’s point of view. Such an activity gives both younger and older students an authentic audience for their writing, which is so difficult to achieve in an immersion setting.

To share or not to share?

A post on the Writing Everyday Works blog I follow intrigued me because of its title: What generation are you? What generation are your co-workers? Does it influence your point of view?
Baby boomers, Gen X’ers, Digital natives, or generations in between (like mine) all have a different view of the world. So I went on to read the post, which takes you to this interesting article from the Walls Street Journal, The Facebook Generation vs. the Fortune 500. In a nutshell: how do corporations need to change in order to attract and retain workers from the Facebook Generation?

It lists 12 “work-relevant characteristics of online life.” I find some of it interesting, some of it right on, and some of it downright scary (hackers are heroes?)! The one characteristic that has fascinated me in recent years is that “power comes from sharing information, not hoarding it.” With the Creative Commons and all, so much is shared on the web, for free, that it often makes me wonder “How can these people make a living if they give away all their thinking and work?” I suppose they use their noteriety to sell bigger and better ideas?

The author, Gary Hamel, explains that “to gain influence and status, you have to give away your expertise and content. And you must do it quickly; if you don’t, someone else will beat you to the punch—and garner the credit that might have been yours. Online, there are a lot of incentives to share, and few incentives to hoard.” As a teacher, I see in this the promise of cooperative learning we try to teach children: by working together we can help each other reach larger goals. On the teacher front, we are also (for the most part) great at sharing lessons and strategies with new teachers on our teams, and increasingly, we share across the web. But we’re not all ready to say: “Sure take my stuff--which took me hours of work to create--and use it!”

On Thursday, I organized a workshop for 90 teachers. One of the presenters reluctantly agreed to sharing her PowerPoint on our website but only after adding a copyright warning on every slide, basically asking people to not share her work. On the other hand, another presenter sent me every single file and example shown to post on the web so others could adapt her work as they see fit. Quite a striking difference! Some are in it to make money (the first presenter mentioned is starting her own company) while others reap different benefits. Which generation do you think these two teachers belonged to?

Update on Internet Searches

This post came from the Technology in the Middle blog that I follow. It's about how to teach effective strategies for searching the vast Web to older kids. I liked this visual from Information Fluency:

Role-Play & Simulations

In what ways have I used role-play and simulations in the classroom?

When Australia was part of the Social Studies curriculum, I would have my second graders role-play various positions in an academic controversy about the endangered habitat of koalas. This was a culminating activity after having studied marsupials, the Australian habitats, and the concepts of perspective and points of view. The question was: should a direct road be built to link a remote yet growing settlement to a main city, even though the road would cut through a grove of trees where koalas lived? Each student had an assigned role and prepared a position statement with other students who had the same role (groups of 2-3 total). Students used simple language but they felt passionate about their positions.

After they argued their individual positions in their discussion groups I gave them a chance to reverse their position so that they could all get to defend their favorite perspective. Switching roles helped students understand the opposite perspective, empathize with both sides, and—in the end—realize that complex issues don’t have clear cut answers: rather they require compromises. This came out of the post-activity discussion we would have after the role-play.

With second graders learning in an immersion setting, I would still do this role-play activity face-to-face rather than online: speaking remains these students' strongest productive language skill. By 5th grade, they could possibly engage in an online role-play during some of the social studies units?

As a second grade teacher, the science curriculum lent itself well to simulations. For example, students had to create boats out of various materials after predicting which materials would float and which ones would sink. They also had to create various shapes of foil boats and simulate loading them with cargo to figure out which designs were the best ones and why. In fourth grade, the electricity unit is largely as simulation unit. In the new science standards, the engineering standards are really all about simulations. However, those are hands-on simulations, not complex online models as those described by Jenkins.

Math games also seem to ideal for simulations. This video from Teacher Tube describes a variety of Math games, some of which could be described as simulations:




In the current curriculum I would like to see an online simulation element to some of the Social Studies’ Storypaths. For example, in the Main Street Storypath, students could create their ideal community online. I haven't seen anything online from the publisher. Has this been done by others at the elementary level? If so, how did teachers structure the simulation for younger students’ limited skills in reading, writing, and typing?

iGoogle & RSS Feeds

In some of our blog conversations we talked about RSS feeds as a way to organize and keep up with information on the web. I use RSS feeds within my iGoogle home page. Here are some videos that explain what iGoogle looks like and how to add RSS feeds:

iGoogle: short, sweet and wordless!


RSS feeds: a short and to the point explanation by the famous guys of In Plain English.


iGoogle details: how to create an iGoogle page The resolution isn't great but the content is detailed. Part two shows how to subscribe to an RSS feed.

(If anyone knows how to make those links open in a new window, please let me know!)