The conference was AMAZING!  We had just under 200 people. (Read below to learn why that is impressive.)  We have already discussed changes for next year’s conference.  We hope you will consider joining us.  Check RMWP.ORG for updates.

This conference schedule is a thing of great beauty.  You can now also download the conference program.

When I first started planning for this conference, I was told to expect around 30 people to show up.  As of today we have about 152 registered.  I am amazed at the support.  I have never done this before.  It has been eye-opening.If you are interested in hearing Kylene Beers and Bob Probst along with 12 other presenters speak, I would encourage you to come on down, over, or up to Birmingham, Alabama on Saturday (27 February 2010).Here is a link to the page where you can register: 21st Century Literacies Conference(I will remove the option to register at 11:59 p.m. the night before the conference.)

Because of the nature of English, it is difficult to give concrete definitions to parts of speech (verbs can work like nouns; nouns can be verbs), but grammar books tend to avoid this fact, thereby leaving students completely confounded when they return to the texts to complete assigments. I have found the MOST AMAZING grammar book ever; it has helped many students who couldn’t quite get this often loathed aspect of the English curriculum.

Analyzing English Grammar by Thomas Klammer is be an awesome resource for those students who cannot get past the inconsistencies of grammar. EVEN BETTER NEWS: It is in its 5th edition, but there have only been very minor changes, so you can find really cheap copies (here it is on amazon.com or half.com).

The reason it is so good is because it provides different tests to go through to figure out if a word is a noun, verb, etc.  These tests are kind of like the duck test (if it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and waddles like a duck, it is a duck). This works because the authors focus on the FORM and FUNCTION of each word.  They look at how the word appears (FORM) as well as how the word works in the sentences by using frame sentences (fill-in-the-blank sentences that you can insert the word being examined into to figure out what it is).

Here is the noun chart from the book:

TESTS FOR NOUNS

Formal Proof:

1. Has a noun-making morpheme (governMENT)
2. Can occur with the plural morpheme (governmentS)
3. Can occur with the possessive morpheme (government’S decision)

   Function Proof:

1. Can directly follow an article (THE government, A government)
2. Can fit in the frame sentence: (The) ________ seem(s) all right.

Here is the verb chart from the book:

TEST FOR VERBS

Formal Proof:

1. Has a verb-making morpheme (criticIZE)
2. Can occur with present-tense morpheme (criticizeS)
3. Can have past-tense morpheme (criticizeD)
4.  Can occur in present tense (criticizING)
5. Can occur with past-participle morpheme (had fallEN, was citicizeD)

Function Proof:

1. Can be made into a command (CRITICIZE the novel!)
2. Can be made negative (They did NOT criticize the novel)
3.  Can fit in one of the frame sentences
   1. They must ______ (it).
   2. They must ______ good.

The book does the same thing for clauses and phrases.  I love this book so much that I have purchased two copies of it.

CONTXTS.com is made for business people who run out of business cards. The idea is for people who find that they have run out of business cards to tell the person to send a text message with their username to 50500.

CLASSROOM USE:
I have set up a contxts account. Text davisbg to the number 50500. (For the purpose of this blog I did set it up as a business card–so if you’d like me to speak at a conference–but I will open another account for classroom use.) You can change the information recipients will see as often as you’d like. Therefore, all you’d have to do is put in homework information instead of business contact information and you’d have an easy way for students to get homework assignments and test reminders. Since students of all socioeconomic levels have cell phones, this might be pretty interesting.

Go ahead. Try it. Text “davisbg” to the number 50500.

I discovered contxts at lifehacker.com.

From the Google Docs blog, I learned that the spreadsheets available on Google docs are now going to be more efficient when viewed on mobile phones. This is awesome for a number of reasons:

1. I don’t have a physical gradebook.
2. The server at my school has been known to be down from time to time, whereas Google does not have such a reputation.
3. With spreadsheets on my phone, I can keep my gradebook there. Therefore, when a student asks about a grade, I can whip out my phone (and thereby proudly revealing my nerdiness) to answer their questions.
4. Because these spreadsheets are on google’s server, I do not have to worry about losing them.

If you want to see how students are using Google Docs, check out the link and video below.
This video (from a series of videos about Google Docs on campus) features students discussing how Google docs have made them more effective.

Check out other posts dealing with Google here.

Screen grabs are AWESOME because they allow you to take a snapshot of a specified area of your screen. That is how I made the thumbnails for my post about using Wordle with Gatsby. Below are some options for both Mac and Windows users (I have divided them accordingly).

For Mac Users:

To select the whole screen:

You probably already know about this, but mac users can hold COMMAND + SHIFT +3 to take a picture of your whole screen. This picture will be saved to your desktop as a .png file. If you are sending it to someone, you may want to save it as a .jpeg.

To do this on a mac simply

1. double-click the picture on your desktop (that will open it in preview)
2. click file
3. save as
4. then select the file type as a jpeg

If you want to use preview to mark on it and add notations, save that .png file as a pdf and use the tool menu to mark away.

To select a specific area on the screen (like a menu):

Hold down COMMAND + SHIFT + 4 and follow the steps above if you want to change its format or manipulate it.

Here are some more options showcased by lifehacker in a post about screen grabs with leopard:

While you hold down Cmd+Shift+4, you can also hit the:

• Spacebar to drag the selected capture region around the screen.
• Shift key to vertically or horizontally lock the capture region.
• Option key to expand or reduce the size of the region proportionately.

To see the new keys in action, hit up the QuickTime video over at Macworld that demonstrates.

Use new screen region capture options in 10.5 [Macworld via MacUser]

For Windows Users:

There are a number of options for windows users. Since I am a mac guy, I went to LIFEHACKER, which happens to be my homepage, for some ideas. Therefore, I will showcase some of their posts for you to explore.

Take and Edit Screenshots with Flatstone Capture

See the rest of this post here.

Windows Only: Reader-recommended application FastStone Capture is lightweight and feature-rich screen capture tool. In addition to saving its captures in a multitude of formats (BMP, GIF, JPEG, PCX, PNG, TGA, TIFF and PDF), FastStone Capture can send any screenshot to your image editor of choice, printer, email client, open it in a Word or Powerpoint doc, or upload it to an FTP site. There’s no need to send the capture to an image editor for simple tasks however, since FastStone Capture’s built-in editor can easily handle simple annotations and editing tasks such as cropping, adding text, arrows, highlighting, watermarking or enhancements like drop shadows or frames. FastStone Capture is freeware, Windows only. Sharp eyed readers noticed that the new versions of FastStone Capture are no longer freeware, updated to link accurately to the handily portable freeware version. Thanks guys!

You could also use this Firefox extension discussed by Lifehacker:

Firefox extension ScreenGrab lets you save screenshots of web pages by what is visible in your browser window or, more importantly, by scrolling and stitching together the elusive whole page.

ScreenGrab joins the ranks of great, free screen grabbing tools like Snippy that are really nice to have around in a pinch. Of course, if you’re looking for a more full-featured screen grabbing app, nothing beats good ol’ SnagIt. ScreenGrab works wherever Firefox does, requires Java. — Adam Pash

Click here to download this Firefox ScreenGrab

Using SnagIt to capture a whole page on a website (which is pretty awesome!):

(Taken from this post on Lifehacker)
Not-free SnagIt captures screen shots of scrolling windows from top to bottom.
In Windows, the Alt-PrintScreen key combination copies a screen shot of the visible bit of an open application to your clipboard. But that’s just not enough. SnagIt will grab an image of an entire scrolling document from top to bottom - very useful for web pages that change often or might disappear at any moment. SnagIt can record videos of application usage and save them as AVI files (for you time-strapped and good-hearted computer tutors). It will even copy text to the clipboard when the usual Copy and Paste doesn’t work (like a list of files in Explorer.)

SnagIt’s free to try, and a license costs a steep 40 bucks. Handy for the oft-screen-capturing set. IE integration and Firefox extension available.

SnagIt Screen Capture [TechSmith]

 

I hope this is helpful. Let me know if you have any questions or have other ideas for screen shots.

One problem I have is organization. I plan to change that this year. When students turn in papers in the past, I would put them in a stack on my desk. As the week of grading progressed, I would find papers of students who had not turned them in on they day they were due. However, I couldn’t count off an accurate number of points because I did not know how late they were. I’ve devised a plan that will help me with that, though.

THE PLAN:

I am going to have a file folder for each assignment. Each assignment will have a very large sticky label (a mailing label) on which I will have printed the name of every student I have (all 98 of them). When students hand them in on the first day, I will highlight them. Each day it is late, I will highlight the name a different color. If they slip it in without me knowing it, they do not get highlighted until I discover it.

This plan also gives me an extra place to record grades because I can write it down next to each name. That way I do not have to carry a grade book around with the risk of misplacing it (remember, I am not organized). To put it lightly, it is always a little disheartening to discover your grade book (or in my case, grade sheets) is missing. Since we use an electronic grading system, we are not required to have a grade book.

I digress.

If you have any ideas about how to keep organized with respect to grading, please leave your ideas in the comment box below.

While sitting in a workshop presented by Donald Leu, who *wrote Teaching with the Internet K-12: New Literacies for New Times, woman in the audience asked if it was true that one could use quotation marks and other symbols to limit search results. I was surprised by thew question because I thought this was common knowledge. However, the crowd gasped with amazement when he demonstrated how to do this.
Since this is a common feature to most search engines I decided it would be a good idea to post the list below. You can use most of these on any major search engine. (I even tried them out on Yahoo’s search engine.)

Therefore, when you are doing research with your students, help them limit their results by using these techniques. Who knows? They might even think you are cool when you tell them you can even use these techniques on facebook.com.

Google Shortcut	Finds Pages That Have…
nokia phone	the words nokia and phone
sailing OR boating	either the word sailing or the word boating
“love me tender”	the exact phrase love me tender
printer -cartridge	the word printer but NOT the word cartridge
Toy Story +2	movie title including the number 2
~auto	looks up the word auto and synonyms
define:serendipity	definitions of the word serendipity
how now * cow	the words how now cow separated by one or more words
+	addition; 978+456
-	subtraction; 978-456
*	multiplication; 978*456
/	division; 978/456
% of	percentage; 50% of 100
^	raise to a power; 4^18 (4 to the eighteenth power)
old in new (conversion)	45 celsius in Fahrenheit
site:(search only one website)	site:websearch.about.com “invisible web”
link:(find linked pages)	link:www.lifehacker.com
#…#(search within a number range)	nokia phone $200…$300
daterange:(search within specific date range)	bosnia daterange:200508-200510
safesearch: (exclude adult content)	safesearch:breast cancer
info: (find info about a page)	info:www.websearch.about.com
related: (related pages)	related:www.websearch.about.com
cache: (view cached page)	cache:google.com
filetype:(restrict search to specific filetype)	zoology filetype:ppt
allintitle: (search for keywords in page title)	allintitle:”nike” running
inurl:(restrict search to page URLs)	inurl:chewbacca
site:.edu (specific domain search)	site:.edu, site:.gov, site:.org, etc.
site:country code (restrict search to country)	site:.br “rio de Janeiro”
intext:(search for keyword in body text)	intext:parlor
allintext: (return pages with all words specified in body text)	allintext:north pole
book(search book text)	book The Lord of the Rings
phonebook:(find a phone number)	phonebook:Google CA
bphonebook: (find business phone numbers)	bphonebook:Intel OR
rphonebook:(find residential phone numbers)	rphonebook:Joe Smith Seattle WA
movie:(search for showtimes)	movie:wallace and gromit 97110
stocks:(get a stock quote)	stocks:ncesa
weather:(get local weather)	weather:97132

*Joining Donald Leu in authorship of this book is his wife, Deborah Diadium Leu, and Julie Coiro.
**This cheat sheet was found in THIS article at About.com.

Okay…so, what does that mean for you? It means having students write their thoughts instead of speaking them, which is, as we all know, an important skill when one depends on the internet/email to communicate. Below I give a very basic explanation of how it works and how you can use Firefly in your classroom.

HOW IT WORKS

When you visit a firefly-enabled website, you can click anywhere on the site and start typing. When you do, a bubble will pop up with whatever you are saying. Pretty interesting.

 

WAYS IT CAN BE USED IN THE CLASSROOM

1. Have your students look at different documents. Set a timer and do virtual stations. Each time the timer sounds, students would go to a different virtual station (or page of your website) to discuss via firefly.
2. You could anonymously post various students’ work for critique. Then they can print screen when they are done.
3. Put pictures of various advertisements your website and have students evaluate it for bias and/or method of using propaganda.
4. Have students do something like a word cluster.

I like this site because it allows for quiet evaluation of materials while giving a the assignment an edgy feel.

I would love to hear from you regarding ideas for using firefly.

I know the focus of this blog is primarily on writing, but envisioned a place where we, teachers, can go to learn tips on a variety of curriculum-boosting ideas. I hope this is useful even though the content is quite different from our typical articles. (The origin* of this jewel of information comes from the Google Operating System blog.)

 

Tonight I wanted to find a video from youtube by Raidohead to show my students as a journal prompt. I went to youtube and found the video of All I Need** and watched it. At the end of the video, the MTV shared some very powerful words with the viewer, which were a little blurry because of youtube’s resolution.

I remembered a post on LIFEHACKER.COM about how to make youtube videos into higher resolution by adding some code (”&fmt=18″) to the end of the web address will make it slightly higher resolution, taking the video from 320X240 to 480X360. So, the next time you want your students to see a video***, but find it a little difficult to see/read, “&fmt=18″ is your answer.

*The original article for this tip can be read HERE.

**If you do a unit in Social Studies or English on human rights, this video is perfect for front-loading. It is not a tear jerker, but it might be more powerful because not all human rights issues are atrocities. Most slip through the shadows of special interest groups because the victims depend on the violations. If that will not make you want to watch the video, nothing will.

***If youtube is blocked from your school, you might want to read this other handy article.

Just yesterday I was playing around on zoho.com (sorry google docs). I wanted to compare it to what google had to offer. While I like the ability to access my documents and my email simultaneously, I found that zoho had a few extra bells and whistles that would be GREAT for creating a system for an electronic portfolio assessment.

I was making an online form for the Red Mountain Writing Project (which appears at the bottom of that page) so that when people visited the site, they could fill out the form to be added to a mailing list. This was done through Zoho Creator, which is basically a drag and drop form maker that you can embed into your website. When someone fills it out, the information is sent directly to a database.

This really easy service got me thinking. What if I created a form that had a list of items on a checklist in the form based on a certain key objectives for my students’ writing. For each skill demonstrated in the paper they could click a check box. For each mistake I am looking for, they can type in the number of times they found it while editing, or they could count the number of times I found them. Read The Full Story…

Since most of our students have used/are using social networking sites to reveal a little about their characters, why not enourage them to do the same with characters in the literature they read. I recently had the idea of trying this with Gatsby, but this could obviously work with any piece whether your students have experience with these sites or not.

I would suggest asking one of your students to jot down all of the categories of his/her page to give you an up-to-date list of topics. Create a worksheet that requires the task of creating a profile for one or multiple characters. To make this work pedagogically, students must be able to back their answers. You may even decide to require textual examples.

ASSESSMENT OF CHARACTER

You can assess students’ knowledge of how well they understand the characters themselves by asking them to fill the profile with contemporary movies/music/literature. That way you know if the students are thoroughly understanding the characters.

CULTURAL/SETTING ASSESSMENT

For this method you can ask students to write the profile using their knowledge of the character’s cultural/historical background. This would require research, but would be great for introducing students to frontloading materials. Perhaps a webquest would be a good idea at this point.

ADAPTATION FOR MATH/LANGUAGE Read The Full Story…

This email hack has been mentioned in a few blogs over the last year but it is worth repeating for teachers who, like myself, don’t have a system for giving students email accounts through their school and who, like myself, don’t want students to use home email accounts for our school projects.

 

This system allows you to create sub-accounts in Gmail that can be used by students for registering for various online sites, but all access and any incoming mail would come to the main account. (therefore, it is not a hack for providing real email functionality to students)

 

Here is how it works: Read The Full Story…