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.

Kevin, one of our most famous authors here at TeachEng.Us, has bestowed on me the great honor of hosting Day in a Sentence, a weekly post he does that consists of the writings done by you all, the readers. So, dust off your commas and semicolons, and compose one of those refined Faulknerian sentences we all love and adore. When you have milled it, sanded it, smoothed it, and polished it all up nice and shiney, add it to the comments below so that I can gather them for release over this weekend.

(You can read more of Kevin’s DiaS posts at his Kevin’s Meandering Mind.)

A few posts back, I mentioned using blinklist.com for research (THAT POST). I experimented with this with my students to see how well they would do with it.

I created an account and told the username and password to my students so they could all use it. They went home and used varioius databases and websites to research The Great Gatsby. I also taught them about tagging and how useful it would become for them in the future. After one week, here is what they created.

(Note: Some of these links require you to be logged into the Alabama Virtual Library.)

I am MrDavis this is on Blinklist.com

Last week, I ventured into the world of Cybersafety with my sixth graders.They admitted to times when they have used their names and other information when in chat rooms and other online sites and I could see the minds working as we talked. That is good, right?We read an article from Time for Kids magazine about how to keep your personal information private and why, did a chart around their perceptions of various aspects of the Internet world, and then I had them create something to show their understanding of the issue. We also talked about how kids use Instant Messaging to bully other with words (mini-lesson on the power of language) and there were many stories that they told me of this very issue.We then turned to MakeBeliefs Comics, which is an easy application and advertising-free, and it allows students to email their comics directly to me. (I made little intro comic for the movie version with ToonDoo, however).I am hoping that the creation of comics will keep the issue of safety in the back of their minds in the weeks ahead.Follow this link to view the Flickr PhotoSet of all of the student comics.Or view the YouTube movie compilation (with student-generated music)– Kevin

BRIEF:

Screencast-o-matic is useful because it allows you to record what you are doing on your screen. You can hook up a microphone to your computer and it will record your voice as you explain what you are doing on the screen. Then, those watching could hear your explanation and even listen while they attempt the same task. If they really wanted to geek out, they could download it to their ipods to show all of their friends. This kind of software can be rather pricey, so I was very glad to find this FREE website.

IDEAS:

(If you have other ideas post them in the comments below.)

1. You could take one of last year’s essays, upload it on your computer, hook up a microphone, and record yourself editing it. Students could then go to your website (or check out DVDs) and watch it for use as a model.

2. If you cannot access youtube from your school (who can?), but you know there is something useful for your curriculum, record the video using this site from home, and put it on your website. That will not be blocked.

3. Instead of spending a day of class learning how to use the library’s computer, students could go home and watch the screencast. OR if students are going to be working on powerpoint presentations for your class, you could make a series of 30 second screencasts that answer those questions you get over and over and over and over and over.

4. If you have a homebound student, they could listen to you edit his/her paper from home. This may also be helpful for querulous parents.

5. This would be a great little extra feature for a webquest.

HOW TO:

CREATE A SCREENCASTThankfully, the site has tutorial videos on there. They are very thorough and clear.

Before I go to the topic of this post, I would like to know how you see twitter/microblogging being used in the classroom. If you have a suggestion or some ideas, please comment below.

The Post:

Chris has mentioned twitter.com before (here), but I’d like to return to it. I have learned so many interesting things about the people I have discovered on there. I have also found several useful links. Today I discovered tweetscan.com . Through this site you can search for topics in twitter as a whole or by user. I figured this could be useful in discovering new sites and other teachers outside of your circle, if you are a twitter user (my user name is davisbg).

More about Twitter

If you want to read more about it, head over to Kevin’s Meandering Mind, a blog composed by one of our authors, to read of his experience with twitter. Here he covers some interesting sites and add-ons like TwitterBin and TwitterLit.

Some Other Uses

Everyone would benefit from comments you leave!

Living in the burbs of Birmingham, Alabama, I find myself buzzing with high blood pressure as I make my daily hour-long commute–that is each way. I have thought time and time again how productive I could be if I could hop a train and grade all the way to work. Or what if I could edit a podcast on the way. However, I cannot because Alabama does not want a mass transit system. Also, while we are supposed to be nice and all, we like our alone time. Since I have to resort to driving myself, I have found some ways to be productive without fear of injury.

1: Listen to your students.

I have found these handy dandy little Macally iVoiceIII Microphones ($24). You just put them in the bottom of your iPod and start recording. The next time you connect your iPod to your computer it puts the recording into yoru iTunes library, listing it by date and time.

At least four students in each period have and iPod (just a guess). Whenever you have a closing activity or group discussions, pass these out to your pod people and have them record their groups discussion. To keep them from goofing off, I warn them that I want a solid recording with no interruptions. That way they are not stopping and starting the recording. When they go home, they can email it to you and then you can put it on your ipod for the next day’s commute.

2: Conduct a one sided conference.

When my students are working on papers, I will conference with them. As you know, some students need more help than others. For those who seem to have it down, I still want to talk to them. I will hook my podcasting mic (a microphone made by Blue called the Snowball $99) up to my computer, pull 2 desks next to the door inside (one for me and a needy student) and another desk outside with the mic on it. Each time a student goes outside to talk to the mic, I start recording. When they return, I stop. At the end of the day I throw it on the ipod and listen on the way home. While listening, you can make notes (mental ones if you are driving) at traffic lights you encounter so that you can bring up areas of interest at the next class meeting.

I’ve been given the task of working with a Grade 8 English teacher and trying to inject a little computer tech into her class. The topic she was currently working through in class was grammar. Naturally, I thought this was incredibly dull. I was pleased to discover that computers could actually make it more interesting.

Grammar Ninja (found in various places on the Net) was an immediate hit with these Grade 8s. In the game you are a cartoonish looking ninja. You are given sentences and told to toss throwing stars at the various parts of the sentences, such as the nouns, verbs, or adjectives. If you hit the write parts of the sentences you go on to the next one. If you the wrong parts, you get little explosions.

Within minutes, all 25 kids had mastered the game. Within a few minutes more, several had figured out that if they intentionally aimed at the wrong parts of the sentences, they could get lots more of the explosion sound effects than if they hit the sentence parts they were supposed to. I have to admit that this frustrated me for a moment since the kids were obviously getting the game to do what it wasn’t supposed to. Yet by hitting every part of the sentences except, for example, the nouns, they were also showing they knew exactly where the nouns were in those sentences.

Even when the kids did the wrong thing, they were learning. That’s my kind of game.

Students can use hole-punched file folders throughout the semester to create lists of important terms and facts. By the end of the semester they will have created a study guide if they are diligent in keeping up with it.

I got the idea when teaching summer school. I was going to buy them one of those two-page laminated study guides for grammar, but I realized that they could create their own and reinforce their learning along the way.

It is not a life-changing idea, but it is one of those little things that can help students throughout their academic career (and perhaps even in the work force).

For teachers with a lot of formulas and meticulous information (like computer directions and/or passwords), this might be helpful.

To read another study guide tip read THIS article titled, Make a Foldable Study Guide.

For other study tools that can be found on this site click HERE.

Can you think of other uses? If so, leave a comment for us.

It’s interesting to get inside the heads of our students and sometimes, along with reflective writing, it helps to have a tool to gather information and present it back to the class in varied forms. The Web 2.0 World has many free survey tools that allow you to easier create items and collate the responses.For my sixth grade students, I often use SurveyMonkey (the free version) because of its relative simplicity of use. In the past, I have used this site to gauge impressions of my students as they relate to technology. A recent survey, for example, will help spark an upcoming lesson on CyberSafety. We’ll be looking at the results of the survey and then doing some reflecting on what it all means. In a world becoming flatter, with more and more flowing data, these are crucial skills for our students to have. (Note: I use Fireshot add-on for Firefox to take a screenshot of the survey results and then share out at our class blog for parents to see, too)(sample survey question and results)

A recent notice from Google also pertains to data collection. In Google Docs and Spreadsheets, there is now an option that allows you to create a “form” (or survey) that you can share with others in your collaborative community. The Google platform then moves the collected data into a spreadsheet, which you can, in turn, share out. You can even embed the form option on your iGoogle homepage.So, under some conditions, you can have students developing questions and possible answers, predicting outcomes, collecting data, sharing out the results and then analyzing what they have discovered.– Kevin

Lifehacker had a post about the Firefox 3 beta yesterday. I was so excited that I downloaded it immediately. The options on this version include one click bookmarking and tagging for your bookmarks. Though I will still use blinklist.com, I will definitely have to say that this option is very helpful for people doing research on the internet.

With this tagging feature, all you’d have to do is click bookmark and type something like “research,Fitzgerald,Gatsby” Or “research,Fitzgerald,bio” and the browser will categorize the sites you find for you for years of organized use. Pretty cool stuff!!!!

Those of you who have discovered iTunesU know of the storehouse of lectures from established institutions like Duke and MIT. Therefore, I will say that you should encourage those who do not access this cornucopia of knowledge to do so. After all, it is free to download iTunes, and these podcasts are free; there is really no excuse.

For those who do frequent this nook of iTunes, you may not know you can now learn about a variety of topics dealing with a variety of content areas on the PBS page in iTunes U. You can up on some professional development podcasts at WETA; or can even watch podcasts about digital storytelling podcasts at KQED. If you have a long commute, you can watch these podcasts on your laptop or video ipod.