Digital reading and writing has changed me as a learner. On June 24, 2007, I started my journey into blogging and for months before that I was glued to the screen of my computer inspired how other teachers, book lovers and writers could alter my thinking, energize me to begin more self-reflection and connect me with endless learning.
A Year of Reading and Amick's Articles were some of my first mentors as I began to reflect and blog on my own. The writers behind these blogs (Franki, Mary Lee and Sarah) helped model for me how to create my own voice and share ideas and books that meant something to me. They helped me feel apart of the reading and writing club. And then when I connected with them and others I began to feel like there were people out there who might even read what I have to say. I was gifted some identity. Then, I began connecting to others by linking to their thoughts, responding to other's posts and collaborating in events and now this series.
My point in all this is that digital reading and writing has kept me connected as a learner. So, knowing the excitement and energy I receive from the digital world, I think we owe it to our students to think about how we can keep kids connected as well. In my previous posts on digital reading and writing, I shared how embedding mentors into our best practice and using mentors authentically in digital writing deepens learning and invites risk taking. Today, I want to end this series of posts with how we can invite kids into playing with the possibilities of connecting school learning to home, providing access to digital mentors and inviting sharing with each other.
After all of the embedded work I have being experimenting with digital mentors in the classroom, I have been anxious to find a way to keep kids coming back to these. Knowing how kids need us to come back to the paper anchors we create in the classroom, these digital anchors need to be at kids fingertips as well. So, I played with a resource called Weebly that has allowed me to create a place that we access at school and home. Weebly has allowed me to customize a webpage that holds the learning we experience at school, the digital places we visit and easily embed video, pictures, and documents that are accessible to kids at home. So, in short, here are the top 3 reasons Weebly is working for us:
1. Weebly is allowing us to connect the learning we share at school to children's own homes.
Last year, I posted about the need for connected learning vs. homework. I shared my strategies as a parent for keeping connected with my own children as well as opportunities I provide my students for connecting school to home. Weebly has allowed me to open up our classroom to not only my students but to our parents as well. I have organized pages according to themes and subjects with each page reflecting the big messages kids are learning about through pictures, video and links. Just this week we read an e-book on Beyond Penguins and Polar Bears as well as sang a rhyming song (just the first verse ) about the states of matter on the scholastic site. My students began asking me immediately to please add them to the web page. I know they will come back to the link at home or during their computer choice at school.
2. Weebly has allowed me to scaffold for students. I am specifically thinking here about how the blog page feature. Helping first graders understand blogging has been much easier this year as we all have participated in commenting and posting once on a whole class blog page that is embedded on our webpage. It has allowed me to teach commenting with scaffolding and ease with one posting page instead of multiple pages that will appear later when kids are on their own kidblog page. We can study a comments made, make observations about what kids are writing, and note when a comment may need some depth. I also use the webpage as a scaffold for introducing digital sites (when I am organized) especially math games I embed during our choice time. I have the games organized on a symbaloo linked to our math page. So, when I am ready to study a new math concept and find a game that compliments some of our thinking, I add it to it and navigate kids through our webpage as I introduce it.
3. Weebly encourages sharing. Again, the blog page comes to mind when I think about the sharing kids are experiencing at home and school. This fall I introduced my students to creating stories using pixie software. As students created these digital stories, I have uploaded them to the blog for everyone to comment. What I like about the weebly blog page is that anyone can comment. Kids, parents, grandparents, and anyone with our password can log in and comment using a first name. It has been encouraging to see many family members get on and support our learning community. Weebly also allows me to share the videos and pictures of learning in action. The images allows parents and readers to feel apart of the our community and better understand our work.
My hope is that I can help guide even our youngest readers and writers to experience the excitement of connecting to learning outside the classroom. I know that using digital tools will support the 21st century skills and prepare them for their future. Maybe these little steps will help kids to see the importance of sharing, connecting and collaborating. Every little bit helps:)
One last post here on digital mentor texts for the week, with some time to read and reflect planned for the weekend.
I have to admit, my original plan to end the week was an “oldie, but goodie” (we can we consider 2007 “old,” at least in YouTube terms, right?): The Machine is Us/ing Us by Michael Wesch. It’s still worth a watch, for sure, and maybe I will use it to frame my reflection on this process of writing and thinking about digital mentor texts.
For now, I want to share one in a series of videos that I hadn’t seen before this week. Thanks to Ryan Rish for sharing a link to the “Feminist Frequency” series of videos created by Anita Sarkeesian. Ryan tweeted a link to the first of Anita’s videos in the “Tropes vs. Women” series, and that led me to the FF website, where there are many, many more of Anita’s videos. I watched a few, very much enjoying Anita’s critical, feminist reading of popular culture. She doesn’t hold back in her commentary — either with the critique or the humor — and some of the videos wouldn’t work well in middle, or in some instances, even high school classrooms.
That said, here is one that I think would fit a broader audience, and there are quite a few points/questions about digital writing that can be made from this mentor text.
Besides the topic itself — the gendered way in which television advertisements for toys position our sons and daughters — the video itself helps me think about a number of issues:
First and foremost, how Anita employs techniques from and pushes against the styles of the typical format of television news and Hollywood style talk shows. What are the moves that she makes — as a newscaster, as a producer, as a video editor splicing together elements from commercials — that make this an effective digital mentor text?
In her framing of ads for boys vs. girls, Anita talks about how boys are able to “make” or “construct” things, and how that is the foundation for creativity and a fulfilling adult life. She then juxtaposes that analysis with comments on the girls’ commercials, ones that she describes as __. However, the girls are making something, albeit snow, hairstyles, cupcakes and the like. Yet, one could argue that the boys’ act of “making” — following the directions to build a Lego set, for instance — is actually conformist, not creative. This could make for an interesting discussion in, you guessed it, a student-produced video essay/response.
Clearly, and without hesitation, Anita has an agenda is these videos. From the logical sequence of the segments to her word choice and tone of voice — “How fun!” with a sarcastic tone and giddy shrug of the shoulders — she makes her concerns known. This is both a strength of these videos (making them emotionally engaging and compelling to view) and a weakness, in that there is no viable counter-argument.
That said, the argument that she makes is persuasive, relying on ethos (her appeal to authority, in that she is certainly knowledgable, and has taken considerable time to produce the video), pathos (her appeal to the audience’s emotions, in that she is a passionate speaker and picks pertinent examples), and logos (her appeal to logic, in that she uses both actual examples of commercials aimed at children and statistics from the advertising industry to back up her claims).
She also extends her argument to the video game and technology industry, not just television commercials.
She makes a strong claim, too, towards the end: All advertising towards young people needs to stop, no exceptions.
Finally, there are significant issues surrounding copyright and fair use — because she uses so many clips from popular media — and she includes a disclaimer at the end of each video describing how she meets the standards for fair use. As an example of how someone can employ copyrighted materials in service of commentary and critique, Anita’s work provides a great example, even though she has suffered take down notices, too.
All that said, Anita’s work with Feminist Frequency is amazing, and leads me to think about how we could also invite students to do feminist critiques of Disney films or other pop culture icons. That would provide better fodder for a persuasive essay or research paper than the old stand-bys of school lunches, uniforms, and vacation lengths.
And, with this being my last official entry in the digital mentor text series, I want to send a hearty thanks to my colleagues, Bill, Katie, Kevin, Tony and, especially Franki, for inspiring us to do the series. I have many posts to read, review, and reflect upon, and I have appreciated having some company this week in the edublogosphere.
Any time students are introduced to a text, concept or idea, there is a time period where they are looking to their teacher to make sense of it for them. At this point their understanding is a “borrowed” one in which they have adopted the view of their teacher and their teachers understanding of whatever “it” is. During this time period, they are contemplating, digesting, and transforming the content into their own understanding. It’s not until they have a full grasp of the content that they truly “own” the idea and use it as a part of their own creations. It’s during that initial period that mentor texts can bring meaning and understanding to student work. However, this understanding is dependent on their teachers understanding. It comes with all prior knowledge, biases and background influences of the teacher that is then transferred with that “borrowed understanding”.
In my district we are heavy users of Grant Wiggings, Understanding by Design framework. He refers to this basic concept as A-M-T, Acquire, Make Meaning and Transfer. When we look at mentor texts with students, regardless of the medium, we are acquiring understanding and knowledge. It is strictly fact finding and information gathering. That acquisition will then lead to students making meaning of that knowledge. Whether that’s through creating a video or writing a piece, they are taking the knowledge of the skill or concept that they’ve acquired and using it for an assignment based on something that we’ve asked them to do. This scaffolding gives them practice with the tool and moves their understanding more towards something that they begin to know. However, “knowing” can’t be the end goal. Even having an understanding can’t be where this ends. Until students transfer this knowledge, skill or concept to their own world and to their own work, independent of a teacher-driven assignment, I’m not sure that they “own” the knowledge, skill or concept.
As I think about this series and the course of events that have led to it, I can’t help but reflect on the idea of all of the knowledge that I’ve “borrowed” from this group. It’s expanded my understanding of mentor texts and of the role that they play in the classroom. When I started blogging with my students 8 years ago, I did so to make for a more authentic learning experience by giving them the opportunity for an audience. We floundered through it and I got better through experimentation and looking to my own mentors online. When we tried our first podcast that year, it was because of the mentors that were experimenting at that time as well. Each of these forays into the world of digital writing and creating provided me with the opportunity to borrow my understanding of content, process and technique from others.
I know that my thinking is incomplete here, but I’m spending a great deal of time considering how this fits into what I’ve been writing about the past week.
In previous posts in this series, I have shared things I have already done with kids in my room. I thought it would be goos to share something that is in process in my room currently and two things that will be coming up soon.
For the last two years I have been inspired by the work of Katie DiCesare and others I know that have their kids "blog" on a regular basis, but incredibly frustrated with the fact that it is nearly impossible to blog without an app on iPads, I haven't really had the chance to explore blogging with my 4th graders. However, sometime in the fall, I discovered Kidblog made an arrangement with Wordpress so that you could link up a Kidblog accounts with the Wordpress app. I nearly jumped out of my skin when I realized that, yes indeed my students were going to start blogging.
About two weeks ago, I created our account and started to play with the app version of blogging. To be honest I had some difficulty with it. Primarly because blogging on an app does not have the same look or feel as using a web-based portal to blog. After I worked on figuring out what some of the issues for me were, I started looking for potential problems for the kids. Then on Tuesday, we as a class started "playing around" with the app. Not surprisingly, most of the kids had none of the issues I had. The class has no concept of what it would be like to blog without an app.
For our first "post" they are publishing the literary essays (a required form of writing in our district) As I write this most of the class is about halfway done with their revised version. Next week we are going to pause and revisit how we have been conferencing with each other on our writing, then we are going to work in small groups to post comments on each other's work. Before we do this I am planning to have a quick mini-lesson on thoughtful comments. I have already started collecting lots of examples of comments from this blog, other blogs I follow and from a list of great kid blogs that Katie references in her post I linked above.
I am intentionally slowing down on this work of commenting, because I want the kids in my room to see the power of what strong comments can do for a writer. I feel that using the mentor texts of both good and bad comments and encouraging the kids to think, "What would this do for me" or "What would this do to me" will be a powerful step in moving toward a place that when they start to comment on the blogs of their classmates we can get beyond, "Hey! You rock!"
Besides using the iPads to blog, I loaded two more free apps recently that will take me some time to find good mentor texts for the kids to use when we start to explore them. I have never tried podcasting with my class. I know that this can be a powerful tool to share thinking and ideas, but I couldn't quite figure out what to do with it. However, having the iPads has pushed me to jump in. The app audioBoo is a neat little recorder that instantly sends an audio file to the web. After playing around with this app at home for a while, I discovered that not only could you send a web-based link to share the podcast, but you can embed an audioBoo into a blog. I am thinking my class will love this. We will probably start slow, like maybe adding a few podcasts about what we have been doing to our class blog, but then build into what ever direction the class leads me. I am definitely excited about this tool and it's possibilities.
The second app we will be exploring is Show Me. Like audioBoo, this app uploads work to the web that can be embedded into a blog or shared with a link easily. The difference is that Show Me uploads a narrated video you make while using a whitboard like app on the iPad. I am still trying to figure out how to use this app, but one way could be to share thinking about diagrams or pictures. Here ia an example of a mentor text I might use if I go that route.
This work of creating digital texts can be very messy and it can be frustrating at times. I would not want to list all the times an idea didn't work out the way I thought it would. So the three things I shared in this post, our journey into blogging, podcasting and using ShowMe to create simple narrated screencasts could end up being a mess. However, I think that the risks of trying these new tools will be dwarfed by the reward of the kids being able to see or hear their work online and receive feedback from peers and family members about their work. It is important for children to see that their work can be viewed, appreciated and critiqued by a wider audience than their teacher and a select few others. It builds their self-efficacy as producers of content.
(Note: this blog post and a few more this week is part of a series around mentor texts and digital composition. The blog posts are all being collected over at Mentor Texts in the Digital Writing Workshop)
It’s been quite a week as I joined some friends in the Blogosphere — Bill and Franki and Troy and Katie and Tony — around considering how mentor texts can help with digital composition and I have thoroughly enjoyed not only writing my own posts, but reading the rest of the tribe as they shared their experiences. I found it fascinating that as the week progressed, more and more us began to reference the work of the others — so that our work become mentor texts for each other.
Could that have happened in a traditional writing environment? Perhaps. But not in a week’s time. If we were writing a book together, instead of creating an RSS-fed site that collected our posts, we might slip our writing into the mail, wait for a response, and then revise and add references to our work, and then — no doubt, weeks or months later — ship our writing off to a publisher, wait for the editors to tear it apart, revise for a few months, and then a year or two later, a book might emerge. And much of the technology would have changed, right? That’s the textbook industry and all of its problems in a nutshell, isn’t it?
It also demonstrates how digital tools are changing the way we write and publish. Some of our posts, no doubt, could use more revision and more thought. But in this format of RSS-collected archived, that is less important than our ideas coming together and coalescing around the issue of Mentor Texts in the Digital Writing Workshop. Our ideas bounce off each other. We seek out resonance with each other’s thoughts, and validate or question what we are doing. We improve our own instruction by joining the conversation. It’s all good.
I’ve tried to pay attention to some common themes that have emerged among us, too.
Here is what comes to mind:
Many of us picked apart a digital composition from the inside-out, in order to deconstruct it and make the intent of the creator visible, so that a blueprint could be made available to our students. This requires a certain way of looking at things, particularly if you are dealing with video or other multimedia tools’
I started off my posts by talking about how teachers should be building a repertoire of digital mentor texts for students, and others also picked up on that concept. I think we recognize that not only do we need to be doing what we are asking our students to be doing, but we need to be reflecting on experiences in honest ways (the pros and the cons) with them, too;
Digital composition engages students in many non-traditional ways and that is one of the powers of technology. The question is how to guide the learning so that the tools are just that — tools — and their use is not the goal. The goal is a specific learning goal that the tool supports. Mentor texts help keep this learning visible;
Design elements matter, perhaps more than ever. Use of color, and media, and more influence the compositional skills in ways that rarely impacted traditional writing. This thread emerged lots of times in our posts, I think;
Assessment is still a difficult area for many of us. I tried to explore this a bit, but not too many of us explored how assessment tools can be created from mentor texts. I think this lack of discussion is emblematic of the difficulty that many of us educators have of how to best evaluate and critique digital compositions. They may look polished and professional, but what is going on in there beyond the flash? As teachers, we need to be addressing this lack of good tools more (me, included);
Although all of our posts are being collected at the RSS site set up by Bill, I wanted to draw your attention to some writing by my colleagues that really stood out with me this week, and will be worth a visit (and a revisit by myself). These are my mentor texts, in a way, that are inspire me to think about the issue of mentor texts in a new way.
Franki reminded me about “teaching the writer, not the writing” and how that holds even more true in the digital age. Since so much of technology is new, we can easily get sidetracked into teaching the tool itself. Franki draws a nice connection back to strong writing ideas around the writer/creator as the center of our activities.
Troy has been doing great analysis of professional videos as mentor texts. His ability to really dive deep into the concepts and production and construction of video projects is worth checking out. Touching up some complex elements of parody and emulation, Troy makes visible so much that at first seems hidden. His use of the “Dove Evolution” video was quite interesting.
Tony’s post about students using design principles to create, revise, and recreate a project was intriguing, and his ability to show us that work in stages was priceless. That’s what we need: more examples of student work in process. And that’s what our students need, too, so that they don’t feel overwhelmed when they encounter a piece of digital composition and think: I could never do that. Pulling back the curtain opens more doors.
Katie shares her journey into blogging with her students, revealing the rationale of why moving writing online has power for her young students. I noted in a comment that her post can become a mentor text for other teachers. Her references to authentic publishing and motivation of writers is an argument for other teachers to consider.
Bill’s post about how one video idea spurred on another, and then created a sort of resonance loop, was interesting, and it reminded me of how much of that is going on with my students outside of school, particularly around video. More and more of my students have their own YouTube accounts, and when they share what they are doing with me (and I ask them “why did you do that kind of video?”), they often answer with “I saw it on …” I suppose this was always the case — we saw something on TV and tried to replicate it — but now the tools for composition are in the hands of more young people, and they are unafraid to make a ripple in the world.
I thank my friends for all of their hard work, and hope our writing has caused some ripples of their own out there in the world. If you have been following this work, thank you. Another element of online digital composition? It remains archived forever. So, come on back when you get a moment and explore. Then, create.
Last Friday, at The Opposite of Indifference, Tabatha shared several centos that she had found while reading THE GREAT GATSBY. A cento is a poem created with the words of another author. You might have missed that she followed up on Saturday with this digital cento -- a poem created by editing a video of a commencement speech by Steve Jobs.
When I saw this, I realized that Poetry Friday had a way into the Mentor Texts in the Digital Writing Workshop conversation that's been going on here all week. I can honestly say:
Poem Flow is the first place that comes to mind when I think of where I might look online for poetry in a digital form that makes me say, "I could do that!" Not only do they have an online presence on thier website and on Poets.org, but Poem Flow also has an iPhone app that delivers poetry line by line, word by word, phrase by phrase on a simple white background. Click here to view Walt Whitman's A Noiseless Patient Spider in Poem Flow. Seems like that would be easy enough to do with PowerPoint or Keynote, but I know better than assgning it until I've tried it myself! (Franki's reflection on the importance of the teacher as digital writer is here.)
I would also love to create a typographic poem. I've been stuck at the "How do they DO that?" stage, but I really have no excuse -- there are MANY how-to sites and tutorials online. Maybe I'll challenge myself to learn to make one before April! Here's an example that's perfect for Monday's holiday/remembrance. It's a poem that is a combination of typography and cento (and it was created for a school assignment).
I used ToonDooSpaces, an online comic-making site, with my students for a couple of years. I could never convice any of my students to make a poem into a comic, but I had fun with Gerard Manley Hopkins' Pied Beauty.
Here's an easy way to make a digital book of classroom poems. Show your students Laura Purdie Salas' 15 Words or Less weekly challenge. Same as Laura, start with a photo for inspiration. Then invite your children to write a very short poem that's as descriptive and original as possible. Drag your photo onto a page of PowerPoint/Keynote (ideally while projecting on your screen/whiteboard for students to see), then have the students bring their poems up for you to type, one on each page. Voila! A digital poetry book! (Sorry the print is too blurry to read the poems. I'll try to fix that. If not, you get the idea...)
As we continue to look at professionally produced videos as digital mentor texts, the fifth video genre that I want to explore is what I would, for lack of better term, call “infotainment with a creative twist.” I mean this less in the sense of “soft journalism,” as described in this Wikipedia entry, and more in the sense of information presented in a creative manner that — while not exclusive to the internet — is powerfully enabled by distribution on the internet.
For instance, the often-humorous, yet clearly-written and produced “Common Craft” videos offer overviews of many technology-related topics, all “in plain English.” I use them all the time in workshops and courses.
Another slightly different (and more “live action”) take on the genre has been made popular by sites like eHow, which also uses videos, and who knows how many individual examples of how-to videos on YouTube and other video sharing sites. In short, people can make videos about how to make stuff, or do stuff, and they keep on making those videos.
One of the interesting takes on this kind of video comes from the group RSA (Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce) and their RSA Animate series. What I find amazing about these videos (besides the animation itself) is that they are, in many ways, born of the collaborative, open nature of the internet. For instance, the video below is crafted from Sir Ken Robinson’s RSA Talk (he also does a similar talk on TED), which was made available online, for free, and then adapted to this animated storyboard. For a little more info on how the videos are made, check out this (and other) forums on Quora, this overview on Cognitive Media’s site, or this interview with Abi Stephenson from the production team. So, on to the video…
As an exercise in visual literacy, then, I wonder how we can use RSA Animate — “scribing” ideas as they are spoken to create a visual synthesis — as a digital mentor text for students. Some possible questions:
As you view the video, note which concepts are drawn and which are printed as text. Why would the scribe make that choice for each of the different ideas?
What are the drawings representative of? Are they meant to be literal or symbolic? How is the main speaker represented?
There is very minimal use of color in the video, so what does the use of color say about the importance of ideas? What is emphasized through the use of color?
When the scribe chooses to write words that are not spoken (for instance, at about the :54 second mark when writing, in a speech balloon, “I know where I am from”), what meaning does that add to the spoken text and the visual synthesis as a whole?
At about 1:15, notice the animation of the baton and the hearts. How does this contribute to/detract from the “scribing” approach that has been used up to that point in the film?
At about 2:23, notice how the scribe changes one of the existing characters in the scene. How does this approach work as compared to drawing an entirely new character?
From about 3:40 to 5:50, the scribe draws a map, most likely one similar to what the speaker used in his actual talk. How does the scribe’s representation of (and additions to) the map accentuate the speaker’s point in ways that he may not have been able to do himself in the live speech?
The editing of the actual speech from about 9:10 to 9:46 leaves out the subsequent statistics from the speaker’s talk and the scribe does not write them down and, at about 9:50, begins making a claim about the results. What are the challenges in making meaning from this?
At the very end of the video, what effect does the camera panning back and out on the entire visual synthesis have for you as a viewer? Would a different panning/zooming strategy have been more effective for you?
Also, we can consider stop motion, as Kevin and others in our series this week have shared. Punya Mishra, for instance, has worked with his own children to create a wonderful series of stop-motion videos highlighting ideas about creativity. This led to a series of stop motion videos we produced this summer in MSU’s MAET program, too, as well as this one that I did with my own children. Although these videos do not rely on narration, specifically the type of natural speaking that occurs in the RSA lectures, they do require digital writers to think carefully about the story being told. With the right kinds of questions from a thoughtful teacher, those decisions can be seeds for great discussions about the storytelling process.
Finally, when thinking about the possibilities for creating videos, I also wonder how we might invite students to construct infographics and, via screencasting, capture their thoughts. Almost like a kinetic type construction of an infographic. Hmm…
I hope to get one more digital mentor text tomorrow and, over the weekend, some reflections on what I have read from everyone else’s posts this week.
(Note: this blog post and a few more this week is part of a series around mentor texts and digital composition. The blog posts are all being collected over at Mentor Texts in the Digital Writing Workshop)
I’ll start with a little story.
Remember this? This was a commercial created by Google for the Superbowl one year, and the video itself went viral, partly because of it storytelling (as an advertisement, of course).
Two years ago, as we were discussing the concept of “inference,” we watched the Parisian Love video and talked about what we saw. We talked about what was missing and who the typist might be. I then brought my students up to Google Search Stories — a digital storytelling tool by Google that lets you create a short digital video using only search engine tools. The inferential part of it is that the viewer has to fill in the narrative gaps between the search criteria to understand the bigger story. As is usual, I had created a search story myself, and shared the video and my own reflective analysis, with my students. Then, I set them loose on the site.
The result?
About a quarter of the class created search videos that looked and sounded and “read” almost identical to mine. I hesitate to call them remixes but it was if my idea for my story had gotten lodged into their brains and could only be shaken free by creating a replica of what they saw the teacher doing. This problem of how we can bring students into something new, share an example of our own making, and hope for original work is one is that not confined by digital tools — but it seems to be made easier with technology. Visually, the digital stories were appealing (it is a Google template after all), and the student work seemed polished, almost professional. This is something a digital tool can bring to the table, right?
But underneath the hood, many of them had not gone off in their own directions, as I had hoped. They had closely stuck to what they saw in the Mentor Text and followed that line as closely as possible. I understand the reasons why this is, as they were no doubt thinking “if the teacher shares out a piece work with X, Y, Z elements, my project must have X, Y, Z elements to get a good grade”) but I wish it weren’t so. I always try to remain open for students taking a piece of work in a new direction, and actively encourage it.
For example, here is what I shared with students:
Here is just one example of a student video that echoed mine:
Sometimes, Mentor Texts hem them in.
And sometimes, given the affordances of a tool of technology (like the Search Stories, with its limit on search queries and its format), a user can still feel stuck and confined. I didn’t regret the use of my own Mentor Text for this kind of video project, but I did wish I had found more ways to encourage students to push beyond what they see, instead of just creating a bunch of “Mini-Me” replicas.
So, the next year, when we did Search Stories, I took a different tact. I had them create a digital search story based on a short story they were already writing — this gave them some of their own content to pull from to use as the narrative frame of their video, and allowed the Mentor Text to become a way to talk about format and technique, but not content, since my own story that I was writing with them was different from their own. The result was a much wider array of interesting videos.
Peace (in the story),
Kevin
PS: Also blogging about Mentor Texts and Digital Composition this week are:
Bill Bass,Technology Integration Specialist in Missouri and author of the upcoming ISTE book on Film Festivals tentatively titled, “Authentic Learning Through a Digital Lens” will be blogging on his blog MR. BASS ONLINE.
Katie DiCesare, a primary teacher in Dublin who runs an incredible writing workshop will be blogging at her blog, CREATIVE LITERACY.
I realize that my posts have been anchored on the things I believe about the teaching of writing and how I have been thinking about those when it comes to digital writing. Anchoring my work in the powerful things I've learned working alongside writers in writing workshops over the years is key.
Writers' notebooks are hugely powerful tools in the writing workshop. It is not so much the notebook but the practice of living your life as a writer by keeping one. A writer's notebook is hard to define as it takes on a bit of a different personality for each writer. Ralph Fletcher says, "It's a place to collect, to react to ones world, to play with language, to stalk your inner voice, to find your stride as a writer." And in her book Notebook Know-How, Aimee Buckner says, “A writer’s notebook gives students a place to write everyday...to practice living like a writer.”
As a writing teacher, inviting kids to keep notebooks has always kept writing workshop authentic. It was a tool that reminded me that living your life as a writer was key. It was also a place to focus on growing and being a writer, rather than on writing "stuff" and focusing on projects/products.
So, I have been thinking about what this idea of a notebook means for digital writing. How do we make time for kids to live their lives as digital writers and what does that even mean?
When I think about the writer's notebook, there are several things that make it powerful. A few things that writers do in the notebook:
They collect great writing--words, phrases, passages They collect images and moments in their lives They collect their thinking They try new techniques They play with language They give things a try
A writer's notebook is the place where writers can play with the things they learn from other writers/mentors and make them their own. For me, a writers' notebook is often where the real work of mentor texts happen. It is a place where they can collect writing they like. It is a place where they can try a technique that they saw another writer use, without the stress of a finished product. It is a place to play with things. Then, it is a place to go back to when publishing to pull out some of the things that will make your writing more powerful.
A Digital Writer's Notebook?
So, what does this mean for writers in this digital age. Obviously, a spiral bound notebook will not help our writers collect digital pieces, try our new techniques in film, or play with sound effects. But these things are clearly things that writers who use digital tools do. So, as the definition of writing has expanded, so has the definition of writer's notebook.
Teacher as Writer I try to look at myself as a digital writer first. What habits do I have that feel like a writer's notebook expanded to include my life as a digital writer? Here's what I know about my life as a writer: I blog regularly. I read other bloggers' writing daily and often try things I've seen I bookmark things I'd like to try in my blog writing I save videos, presentations and podcasts that inspire me to try something new in my composition I collect photos that I may use in presentations in the future I play with new tools and often become obsessed with them as I am learning them I try to create things with new tools for fun I try various drafts of things and save the drafts I revise and edit with online tools I share writing online and immediately for feedback I compose collaboratively using things like Google Docs
I am sure there are millions of other things I do. I did all of these things before there was a digital tool for composing. The difference is that before, my playing with writing, my collecting and my drafting was all housed in a writer's notebook. Although I still sometimes use the notebook, more of these habits happen on my computer, ipod or ipad these days.
As writers, we naturally pay attention to things we want to try. (Yesterday for example, Tony Keefer used a check mark symbol in a tweet. I had never seen that so immediately decided I wanted to write a tweet with a check mark. I investigated and thought of a tweet that would need a check mark. Now that is something I can do. The point is, sometimes these things are very small and meaningless but it is the way writers pay attention to what is possible and try out new things that is key.)
Mentor Texts as Invitations So, I want to make sure to use mentor texts in ways that go beyond creating products. I believe in study and I believe that if we are writing persuasive essays, we need to immerse ourselves in reading persuasive essays to begin the study. However, I think an equally powerful way to use mentor texts is as invitation. If we want our students to live their lives as writers, invitations and playing are key. Collecting is key. And going back through your attempts is key.
So, I am trying to add more things like this to my time with kids. Quick minilesson type invitations where we study something a digital composer did and try it out ourselves--not to share, not to publish, just so we have it as a possibility in the future.
A few things we've done that support this idea: Our students have access to lots of digital books and they spend quite a bit of time on sites like Tumblebooks. They enjoy audio and understand the idea of podcasts. And they know how to record in Garage Band. If kids are to create audio, I want them to have fun with voice and music. So, I invited them to try a few things.
I created an invitations in the library that we played with in a minilesson and a few kids tried out using the foam board displays. One was a foam board display entitled, "How would the character say that?". Scattered around the board were favorite characters and memorable dialogue. We tried reading it aloud in various ways in the minilesson. Then I invited kids to try recording different ways to read character dialogue on garage band. This was fun for those who merely wanted to play. For others, it helped them when they created audio podcasts of picture books for younger students.
I also try to create invitations by finding pieces that connect to student interest. In the past I have found how-to videos for students who like to build with legos and many give those a try while building--taking photos or video of their process. Our students love to build and a favorite building toy is Straws and Connectors. I wanted to give the students options for visual creation. On the Straws and Connectors site, you can access several PDFs of directions for building different structures. Once I showed these to a few builders, they created visual directions that will be turned into PDFs and put on our school website.
5th graders are currently playing with Numbers, learning how to make graphs, charts and tables. Eventually, they'll be invited to include those in some of the research that they do. They will also be able to use it when they conduct experiments, etc. So this playing time is key. Some may choose to use this tool. Others may not.
And, I love to share the Klutz Tricky Video book with students. These have been amazing invitations for students to see how various film techniques work and to give them a try. Klutz actually has many resources when it comes to giving kids opportunities to try some new and doable techniques.
And kids are finding their own ways to play when it comes to digital writing. When they have play time built into their digital writing workshop, they watch television differently. They look at commercials differently. They examine webpages differently. They listen to sound effects and they notice when a film has a close-up and when the scene is shot at a distance. Then they give things a try. I have to remind myself of this every time someone wants to create a talk show about nothing ("Mrs. Sibberson, don't you watch TV. Talk shows about nothing are funny!") or when they want to spend hours taking a million photos of themselves and embedding them in nonsense pictures on Pixie. The products don't always work, but the students are becoming more sophisticated digital writers every time they play. And they are living their lives as writers.
I have worried about this "play time" and am trying to figure out the balance between playing with tools, strategies, and techniques and creating quality products for an audience. But I have come to realize that this play time is the way digital writers live. It is the way I live as a digital writer. I like to play with things, give things a try, work with new tools, attempt new techniques and formats. Then these things come back in more published pieces when I see the need. This play time is critical and most of my playing comes from mentor texts I've discovered-something I've seen someone else do that I want to try.
My challenge is to help my students find ways to collect and revisit these things as we do in our writers' notebooks--to reflect and reuse in future work. I am still working on this idea but know that I want my students to live their lives as writers--writers who have access to digital tools and writers who are critical readers of all types of texts. If I want them to live their lives as writers, I want them to be awake to all that is out there, to notice what is possible and to think, "Hey, I can do that." I want them find things they want to try and then to have the freedom to play with an idea or technique without the pressure of a finished product--knowing that this will add to the things that are possible for them in the future. Just as in pre-digital writing workshop, I want notebook type thinking that helps kids live their lives as writers, and I want time for students to work hard on a published piece for an authentic audience. Both are equally important.
I am very fortunate to have iPads in my classroom. Getting these tools was some of the most challenging writing I have ever done. It is much easier to fly by the seat of my pants here than it is to write a grant. It has been fascinating watching the class use the iPads to create, explore, and play around with devices that almost seemed to be designed for kids. It is almost like anyone under the age of 15 was born with the genetic predispostion to inreact quickly and fearlessly with a touch screen.
One of the apps that I have on the iPads is Poem Flow. Sure some of the poems are well out of my reach, let alone the reach of my 4th grade students, but the app is free and it is fun. I really didn't think too much else about it. If one of the poems was appropriate for reading and thoughtful discussion we would look at together as a class. Sometimes the kids explore the app on their own during reading workshop time. The kids were captivated how the poem would slide in and out of the sreen, with words fading away only to be replaced by new words.
When we started a poetry exploration in depth that included writing our own poems, I overheard one of my kids say, "Wouldn't it be cool if we could make our poems flow." My first thought was, "Yeeesh, it can't that hard to do, why didn't I think of that." That night I started playing around with making a "Poem Flow" by using Keynote. All it took was some placement of the lines of my poem and the use of the "dissolve" transition. Well that and whole lot of debate about which background, font size, font color and where I wanted the lines of the poem to appear. But in all honesty that was big fun for me.
Note: Unfortunately, I don't think slideshare allows for the Keynotes below of my poem and Janice's poem allow for the transitions that can be seen if you "play the slideshow." So until I can find the time to convert these to movies and upload them to Vimeo, just pretend you can see the "flow" as your navigate the slideshare.
I knew that it would take about 10 minutes tops of instruction to show the kids how to build a project like I had done. So I added "build a "Poem Flow" as one of the publishing options for our poetry unit. Not every child did one, but the ones who did definitely enjoyed the process of manipulating their poem into a more movie like presentation. In the future, I would love to plan the time into the poetry unit for them to do a voice over and make their Poem Flows an actual short movie narrated by them.
When I think about the explosion of app publication that has happened in the last few years, I am sure the possibilities of using some of these as mentor texts for digital work are bountiful .
I think of some of the games that kids (and adults) ferociously play like Angry Birds, Cut the Rope and Doodle Jump. Imagine the possibilities if we look at these games as not games, but pathways to think about design and storytelling. Kevin wrote of this kind of thinking in one of his posts recently and I think looking at games as mentor texts is something we should deeply consider. There is a reason why I still spend too much time trying to get 3 stars on the current level of Angry Birds that I am stuck. Hopefully it is a bigger reason than my son was ahead of me the last time I checked.
I also think some of the productivity apps that are out there can also be examined for design purposes. I have just started playing around with Skitch. I still am not 100% certain how I will help my kids use it in the classroom or if we will use it. But what I do know is that you can create some artifacts that look remarkably interesting with it. The way Skitch allows you to annotate images, maps and webpages with a varitey of tools is fascinating to me.
When I think about the kids I serve, nearly all of them have access to some sort of iGadget or Android device that uses apps. The entrance into these apps is so easy and intuitive that if we start to look at them in terms of design and not just another game, notetaking tool, voice recorder, etc. we may find some ready made mentor text for our children to consider.
Later,
Tony
Late addition: As I was in the process of writing this post at various times today, Troy's post hit my twitter stream. I learned something new about the Poem Flow work we did. I can now sound super smart and call this project "genetic type" or "kinetic typography." I also learned that I might have hundreds of new mentor texts available to me, I just didn't know they were out there. I love it when something that emerges from the kids in my room actually has a intellectual sounding name. Maybe if I get observed during our poetry unit next year I can slide "kinectic typography" into my normally sketchy lesson plans. So thanks Troy, you made me tap my fingers and say "excellllent".
Digital reading and writing has changed me as a learner. On June 24, 2007, I started my journey into blogging and for months before that I was glued to the screen of my computer inspired how other teachers, book lovers and writers could alter my thinking, energize me to begin more self-reflection and connect me with endless learning. 
I am specifically thinking here about how the blog page feature. Helping first graders understand blogging has been much easier this year as we all have participated in commenting and posting once on a whole class blog page that is embedded on our webpage. It has allowed me to teach commenting with scaffolding and ease with one posting page instead of multiple pages that will appear later when kids are on their own kidblog page. We can study a comments made, make observations about what kids are writing, and note when a comment may need some depth. I also use the webpage as a scaffold for introducing digital sites (when I am organized) especially math games I embed during our choice time. I have the games organized on a symbaloo linked to our math page. So, when I am ready to study a new math concept and find a game that compliments some of our thinking, I add it to it and navigate kids through our webpage as I introduce it.
I am specifically thinking here about how the blog page feature. Helping first graders understand blogging has been much easier this year as we all have participated in commenting and posting once on a whole class blog page that is embedded on our webpage. It has allowed me to teach commenting with scaffolding and ease with one posting page instead of multiple pages that will appear later when kids are on their own kidblog page. We can study a comments made, make observations about what kids are writing, and note when a comment may need some depth. I also use the webpage as a scaffold for introducing digital sites (when I am organized) especially math games I embed during our choice time. I have the games organized on a symbaloo linked to our math page. So, when I am ready to study a new math concept and find a game that compliments some of our thinking, I add it to it and navigate kids through our webpage as I introduce it.
3. Weebly encourages sharing. 
Again, the blog page comes to mind when I think about the sharing kids are experiencing at home and school. This fall I introduced my students to creating stories using pixie software. As students created these digital stories, I have uploaded them to the blog for everyone to comment. What I like about the weebly blog page is that anyone can comment. Kids, parents, grandparents, and anyone with our password can log in and comment using a first name. It has been encouraging to see many family members get on and support our learning community. Weebly also allows me to share the videos and pictures of learning in action. The images allows parents and readers to feel apart of the our community and better understand our work.
