I recently discovered a new tool that has great potential for teaching students the usefulness of outlines and/or organization. Text2mindmap.com allows users to type up an outline and convert the said outline to a mind map. Then the user can manipulate the colors, font sizes, etc and download the mind map.

I know what some of you are saying. “But isn’t that backwards? I mean we usually do mind maps first.”

In response to that statement, I would whole heartedly agree. However I think it still would be useful as far as teaching students to become more organized thinkers. After all, isn’t that what a mind map and outline are supposed to do? By having students created an outline with the structure of a mind map in their heads, we are stretching their ability to visualize and organize in their heads.

It is much easier to organize things visually (as with a mind map). And while I believe that mind maps probably fuel creativity (instead of a linear outline in black ink on a white page), I do feel as though it is still important for students to be able to visualize information they read even if it is from black and white text.

If nothing else, it is a great tool to have students engage in brainstorming/organization.

I just stumbled across a site by PBS TV. On their kids website, PBS Kids (okay, it’s not a really original name), they have a section called Word Girl.

Word Girl is a young heroine fighting all sorts of nasty villians who shoot goop and throw sausages at people. Those villians seem a bit odd, but they’re all done in an over the top Saturday-morning-style cartoon that makes the campiness seem fun. In order to fight villians, there are all sorts of activities where you have to pick the word to describe Word Girl’s next action. If you pick the incorrect one, something goes wrong (usually something silly) and you get another chance. If you pick the right one, Word Girl defeats the nasty villian.

This site would probably work well with mid to upper elementary. It has some great and really unusual words that kids at that age likely won’t know, but could easily use. It’s just silly enough to be fun, and just serious enough to educationally useful.

(Cross posted from Befuddled.)

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.

You can never have too much technology or too much teaching in your classroom. Why not combine them in your English classroom in the form of a podcast?

I just discovered a really wonderful site, Grammar Girl, where Mignon Fogarty holds forth in her podcast on all sorts of interesting and often obscure points of grammar. The episode for May 1 is on Yoda’s grammar and sentence construction, while some other episodes have dealt with topics like spoonerisms or the more mundane run-on sentences.

Fogarty is easy to listen to and pretty clear in her explanations. If you’re not clear in your own mind on a point of grammar, she seem to me to be an excellent resource. She’s also easy enough to understand that you should be able to download an mp3 of her podcast and play it for most high school classes.

The topics also seem to be mixed enough - the mundane and the offbeat together - that I’m likely to become a regular listener of Grammar Girl.

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.

Poetry can be such an internal experience that it is nice to break out of the personal now and then, and make it a social experience. Certainly, poetry slams are one way to do this. Another way is to read and write Poems for Two (or more) Voices, which is an activity I do with my sixth graders. This style of poetry is designed to be read aloud by more than one person, with the voices weaving around each other — sometimes in unison and sometimes, not.

We begin by reading from some collections by Paul Fleischman (Joyful Noise) and Theonis Papas (Math Talk). Fleischman has also created some poems for four voices (called Big Talk) and we do try one of these, but they are tricky as I have to photocopy the pages and he has color-coded the parts. I love both collections but the Math Talk poems are neat because they explore such concepts as Googol (the number, allowing me to talk about the difference between Googol and Google), imaginary numbers, the Mobius Strip and others.

Then, my students work on short Poems for Two Voices. I try to have them consider using opposite ideas (summer and winter, for example) if they get stuck. Or have one voice like something and the other voice not like it. This conflict can give rise to some interesting poems. We then perform them for the class with partners.

We also podcast the poems.

Take a listen to this year’s collection:

• Group One
• Group Two
• Group Three
• Mr. H and Mr. M read a poem (written by Mr. H) Read The Full Story…

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…

I introduce poetry to my sixth graders by using this book — My America: A Poetry Atlas of the United States, edited by Lee Bennett Hopkins– as a way for them to hear some wonderful place-based poetry and as a way for them to consider the many ways the regions of our country have distinct features. The poems in this collection are sorted by region of the country, with poets such as Langston Hughes (”Alabama Earth”), Carl Sandburg (”Laughing Corn”), and Natasha Wing (”Behind the Redwood Curtain”) all featured. The poems lay out a sort of geographic terrain for the reader, through words and verse. And before each section on a region, the book provides an overview of the states profiled in the poems.

I use the book as a treasure hunt of sorts.

I give them a map of the United States, with regions highlighted (such as the Northeast, the Southwest, the Plains, etc) and we talk about what makes those areas different from others. This might mean talking about the dry, deserts of the Southwest or the rainy fog of the Northwest or the impact of the lakes and waterways on the Great Lakes region. This conversation situates them to the map.

I then read 10 different poems from the book and as they listen, they must write down which region of the country is being represented by the poem. The importance of imagery and a sense of place is most important, and they become intent listeners to the poems, which I read two or three times. In my own mind, I am also embedding some rich poetic techniques in their minds. Personification, alliteration, imagery … it is all there and being used effectively.

Later, after we go over the answers, they then write their own Poems of Place, using imagery and figurative language to get at the essence of some place they know, or have visited. They cannot name the place in their poem and the next day, as they read and share their poems, the rest of us try to guess just where the poem is set.

I love that this book crosses the lines between writing and geography and history, and it provides a nice inroad into thinking of the power of poems.

– Kevin