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 recently signed up for a project called Word Count Journal. As I was writing my daily journal entry this morning, I started thinking about how great this would be in the classroom. Here’s how it works:

Sometimes a little bit really does go a long way. In Word Count Journal, by gradually building up your writing stamina and discipline, you will see just how easy it is to get a whole lot done. By simply writing a set number of words each day, every day, you will write a whopping 66,795 words at the end of one calendar year. Little by little, through the power of series, the total of your written words will add up to more words than contained in the average novel.

It is hard to believe but 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 … + 364 + 365 = 66,795. Just like the Confucian saying that the longest trip begins with the first step, your journal journey begins with the first word.

So, imagine having your students log on everyday to do their daily journal. I think they would find the format less intimidating that a regular notebook journal, where a big blank page is staring up at them, waiting to be filled. A lot of pressure! I remember that well from school, and even now, in my own notebook journal. With Word Count Journal, it’s easy to feel a sense of accomplishment since the daily goals are so manageable and I’m willing to be that many students would end up writing a lot more than the alloted daily word count.

In terms of privacy, teachers could create private groups and instruct their students to keep their journals private, so that only classmates can read it, or maybe just the teacher. Teachers could choose whether to use the commenting feature and have students comment on each other’s journals. If any of you teachers have tried it, leave a comment with your thoughts or contribute a blog post about it!

Not all hacks are technological. Sometimes students need a mental hack to help them generate content for writing, and help them build writing stamina. Try this activity that usually worked without fail with my students.

Writing Down the Bones

This activity is best used when you have a direction or topic in mind. For example, when my 9th graders were doing a unit on identity, I wanted them to retell the stories about the places in their lives, past or present. Identifying the places is the easy part. Telling the story? Not so easy!

Prepare for this activity by selecting three topics, related in some way. For the above example, the topics I chose were City, Neighborhood and Block. Students are only given one topic at a time, so if you want to list them on chart paper, have a way to cover up the topics until they are ready to be shown. Otherwise, just write them on the board, one by one.

Ask students to take out a sheet of looseleaf. Explain the following to them: They will be given a topic, then asked to write on that topic nonstop for x number of minutes. With each subsequent topic, the writing time increases. I usually do 3 minutes, 5 minutes and 7 minutes with a few seconds to rest between topics. The trick is to write silently and nonstop until time is up. Grammar doesn’t matter. Spelling doesn’t matter. If they get stuck and can’t think of anything to write, they can write the same word over and over again until they get “unstuck,” but they cannot stop writing!

When they are done, you have some options as to what to do with all this writing. You can ask them to pick the topic they think they could write more on. You can ask them re-read what they wrote and circle sentences, phrases and words they like, and use those as new starting points for writing. You can ask them to simply edit the writing they created into coherent short pieces. And so on.