“I think the big mistake in schools is trying to teach children anything, and by using fear as the basic motivation. Fear of getting failing grades, fear of not staying with your class, etc. Interest can produce learning on a scale compared to fear as a nuclear explosion to a firecracker.” Stanley Kubric

For the past couple of years, Nikos Theodosakis‘ The Director in the Classroom has been my top recommendation to teachers wanting to venture into filmmaking as part of their curriculum. In addition to tips and wonderful graphic organizers, Nikos also lays out a compelling argument (on behalf on his own children - and all children) for why filmmaking belongs in the classroom, starting with Part 1:

• Learning in a world of change
• Living and learning in a visual world
• How filmmaking develops higher order thinking skills
• How filmmaking develops personal and social skills
• How filmmaking raises awareness

I have a new favorite: Reading in the Dark: Using Film as a Tool in the English Classroom, by John Golden. I found this gem while attending the July National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) Institute for 21st Century Learning. What a great resource for secondary teachers - and probably upper elementary too. “Even though this book deals with cinematic technique and film study, it is ultimately a book about using film to help students improve their reading and analytical skills.”

Golden includes over 30 films, ranging from E.T. The Extraterrestrial to Life Is Beautiful , and provides strategies for viewing each, including reading strategies (e.g., predicting, responding, questioning, and storyboarding), textual analysis (e.g., characterization, point of view, iron, and connections/comparisons between authors’ and directors’ choices) and classroom tested suggestions for developing units. Tons of powerful images pulled from films, along with thought-provoking “Questions to Consider.”

I’m working on a presentation right now for our Sacramento Educational Cable Consortium’s upcoming Video in the Classroom event.  I’ll be sharing both books during my session - and am seeking a third to add to the list.

Whether it be by voice, cell phone, email, iPod, blog, wiki, video, websites, or another as yet invented thing, I will communicate my message via any means that students will hear. I will not be afraid of the medium if it a highway to my students’ psyche. I will not erect roadblocks where I should build on ramps.”

I’m updating the wiki I use for my workshops to include some new resources such as Vicki Davis’s slideshow presentation, which includes the above quote, and am thinking about some recent conversations with teachers who are fast becoming contributors to the blogosphere. Teachers from my local Writing Project, for instance, who are using their wikis to extend content resources beyond the school day. Take, for example, the fabulous Ms. Duenas, who has uploaded her entire set of PowerPoints to accompany her district’s 6th grade math program to her wiki. I suspect through Dee’s enthusiasm and commitment to sharing best practices, she’ll be bringing others at her site on board with Web 2.0 technologies.

I’d like to address two questions from teachers who have recently joined the blogosphere and have also added wikis to their toolkit.

The first question is about subscribing to a wiki. With wikispaces.com, readers will not see the RSS button or link, so how do they follow? Here’s the answer:

Step 1: From the sidebar, click on the Recent Changes link.

Step 2: From the Recent Changes screen, click on the Notify Me tab. Decide whether you want notification when anything has been changed or just changes to specific pages in the wiki.

Step 3: Choose your reader and that’s it.

The second question is from one of the most dedicated, outstanding teachers I have ever worked with, who happened to join me for my A3WP Summer Tech Institute. I’ve know this teacher for 16 years. Believe me, the list of students whose lives she has changed and the teachers she has mentored and supported (including me!!)is an incredibly long one! She left the workshop with a blog and a wiki ready to go. Her immediate goal was to provide a strong school-to-home connection and to open the world to her students (from a location where the deepest differences diversity-wise are economic). She called yesterday with this question: What do I tell my superintendent in a meeting I’ve requested to talk about why the tech guy has blocked access to Wikispaces.com?

I suggested maybe starting with Karl Fisch’s Did You Know? or Michael Wesch’s Information Revolution, plus the NCTE’s recent definition of 21st century literacies.

I’d like to keep adding to her list. What are your suggestions? How are you using wikis with your students and/or staff? What should I add to her list?

I just finished a week-long tech workshop for the Area 3 Writing Project. What a treat to hang out for five days with 18 enthusiastic teachers, eager to add Web 2.0 tools to their classroom toolkit. For many it was a steep learning curve, but all left with at least one Edublog ready to go. Throughout the week I would periodically suggest that they check out the wealth of tips that the wonderful Sue Waters keeps sending our way via The Edublogger. The post I most often referred them to was 100 Edublogs Themes Separated into Categories .

This morning I’ve added another post and a comment to my list of favorites from The Edublogger:

• Here’s My First Five Tips for Writing Better Blog Posts - From Sue - Once again, Sue puts it all in a nutshell.
• Teacher and Student Blogging that Succeeds - From Dean Shareski (via Jan Smith’s comment on The Edublogger) - I like how Dean has nailed down some realities about blogging, e.g, ” Blogging is way more about reading than it is writing. Many teachers don’t see this at first.” Lots of food for thought contained in each of the five pointers.

Heading into my workshop wiki to add these three links to my blogging resources.

Helen Barrett is sharing her commitment to life-long portfolios and building the argument for portfolios in our own personal lives, not just for our students.

• Recommended book: The Power of Portfolios by Elizabeth Hebert - Aimed at elementary level.
• Link to Helen’s PowerPoint for session.

Realizing I had my camera with me, I logged onto UStream.tv.com and recorded Helen’s session.

Ernest Morrell is opening the session with 4 discussion questions:

• What will be demanded of students in terms of literacy in the 21st century
• In what ways is the nature of literacy changing?
• How should the discipline of English change in response to the changes in literacy?
• What are the ways that your students practice literacy when they are not in class?
  • filmmaking
  • video games
  • virtual worlds - adopting different identities

Issues:

• “Historical Memory” - Important to teach students that once they post something, it’s there forever
• Very complicated now to figure out what is reliable information
• Switching from the “you need to learn to do this by yourself” to “you need to learn to do this collaboratively.”

Dynamic, challenging time for teaching English and literacy - and meeting increased literacy demands. Teaching 21st century literacies can help us to address many of these challenges while providing opportunities for youth to produce socially and academically powerful texts in ways that were not previously possible - democratizing access to literacy.

Big Question: Motivating students - Expectancy Value Theory of Motivation - 1) Motivation is measure of how confident you are in your ability to perform a task and 2) motivation is measure of how relevant the task is to you. Value + Expectancy = Motivation

Examples:

Elementary Students: Teatro- Theater of the Oppressed (Pablo Freire)- Education for humanity’s sake. Elementary students out of Watts neighborhood of L.A. doing tableau on violence in their neighborhoods. Actors (students) then invite audience in to dialogue. Students were producing both academic text and socially relevant text.

11th Grader English Students - Great Gatsby unit on critical media literacy & the American Dream. Students analyzing images in 50 Cent and Seventeen and learning to read images. Between the gangster image and glamour image, teens die due to inability to read the media. Critical media literacy is a citizenship skill! The American Dream tied to wealth, not citizenship. Assignment = counter media campaign (e.g., female athletes, tough guy tutoring younger students) If you don’t like the media, make a new media - that’s the difference with 21st century literacy. Students must learn to de-construct images - and to create their own.

Critical media production: documentary filmmaking - (www.tcla.gseis.ucla.edu) - Students documenting cultures of their communities. Link between academic literacy and documentary filmmaking. Students become experts on their topics. Requires a high level of literacy to produce a documentary.

Teaching film and television:

• Watching a film in English/Language Arts class (The Odyssey/Godfather example). Using an epic text that talks about ideology of western civilization. Students use analysis of film to inform their analysis of text. Looking at camera angles to “privilege” certain characters. Having students write essays around popular culture.
• Spoken word and hip-hop in the English classroom - If young people are engaged with it, it’s important to talk about. Hip-hop reflects problems we have in society. It’s one of the few youth-created popular cultural forms. Involves complex uses of language and literacy. The Poet in Society Unit - poetry is cool again. But everything we do is mediated by the poetry of our time. Think of T.S. Elliot as a social activist, writing apocalyptic poetry about the demise of civilization. Assignment: comparing Grand Master Flash to T.S. Elliot.

Involving students in researching their own communities, with goal of making world a better place. Using an Inconvenient Truth, for example, as a key piece, moving kids beyond their own issues to issues of world. Engaging in research to make the world a better place = Youth Voices.

Critical Minds Project: English class for 9th grade, low-performing students - “A Day in My Life” was first prompt for these east L.A. students. Turned essays in photo essays > digital film.

“There is absolutely no inevitability as long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening.” Marshall McLuhan

“The question is not whether English will change, but how it will change.” Ernest Morrell

To see Ernest’s PowerPoint: http://www.ernestmorrell.com/ (user=profmorrell; password=morrell).

I’ll send out a Tweet as soon as I’ve uploaded the podcast for the session.

Kathy Yancy is the opening speaker for NCTE’s Institute for 21st Century Literacies.

• First task: Define literacy
• Second task: Define 21st century literacy
• Third task: Identify 10 key terms that define 21st literacy
• Fourth task: Put key terms onto chart paper in some form. Here’s what our group of 4 came up with (using Wordle.net)

Bonus of opening session: Kyene Beers‘ explanation of “dip in/dip out” approach to Holt Language Arts program - very different than the scripted approach! I’ll be doing a podcast with her later in the conference.

One widget I’ve not added to my sidebar is my De.licio.us account. I tag sites to Delicious on a regular basis (although I am slowly moving over to Diigo), but have never taken the time to keep it very organized. After reading an email from Kevin this morning with an invitation to jump in and play with Wordle, I have a new spin on Delicious…

Note: To upload your Wordle image, first take a screenshot with the PrintScreen option (or via SnagIt or Jing) and save it as a jpeg in MS Paint. Once you’ve saved your image, you can upload it with the Add media - image option.

I’ve been having a ball this week at EDCOE facilitating some Web 2.0 workshops. Last week’s sessions were on blogging and podcasting. Right now I’m working the agenda and resources for Tuesday’s Tools for Collaborative Writing workshop. Between conversations with EDCOE’s Kate Doyle and emails from NWP colleagues, I’ve discovered three new resources that have made it to my “Three New Favorites” list for the week:

• Yahoo Avatars - Tons of choices for pulling together an avatar for your blog, wiki, etc., that captures a glimpse into who you are. I haven’t completely read through Yahoo’s Terms of Service document yet, but you are definitely allowed to download your avatar and use it outside of Yahoo. I’m hoping as I read through their agreement, I’ll find it’s ok to photoshop a touch of gray into my new blog avatar’s hair style:-)
• Race and Me - Collaborative activity from CTAPIV’s Kathleen Firenze for introducing teachers to wikis. I love the way this activity introduces teachers to the power and possibilities of wikis while promoting some pretty deep thinking at the same time.
• Information Revolution - I’m familiar with Kansas State University professor of digital ethnology Mike Wesch’s work. For a couple of years I’ve been sharing his The Machine is Us/ing Us video in my Web 2.0 workshops. I’m glad Kate Doyle pointed me to one of his latest videos: The Information Revolution:

Many thanks to glassbead (Clarence Fischer) for sharing a Tweet with the link to In the Time of Trees, a beautiful photo essay. The topic is a multimodal match for NPRs This I Believe podcasts in terms of providing rich visual + text possibilities for student - and teacher - writers. Besides the slide show format, Voice Thread would be also be an effective format for an “In the time of….” photo essay genre.

http://www.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1731606,00.html

Knowing that I needed a little inspiration and a bit of humor to jump start writing my district’s EETT Round 7 grant, CTAP3 mentor and friend Lauri Bailey referred me to Ken Robinson’s 2006 TED presentation. It’s worth the load time.  And I’m now sufficiently inspired to sit down and write Web 2.0 technologies into the proposal.