A comic about an non-comical time

Using Comic Life I created the following comic strip about our family's Christmas 2009 experience. I kid you not, our entire family came down with the flu within about 3 minutes of one another and were up the entire night before Christmas doing laundry and cleaning up after sick kids. Needless to say, Christmas was not very jolly at our house last year. We are keeping our fingers crossed that this year is a bit more joyful in the Johnson household. I enjoyed using Comic life and I could see how kids could really get into this as well as they weave together images and text to tell a story.

My husband and I are actually hoping to teach a class this summer about graphic novels/comics to elementary and middle school students. My husband, being the more graphically-savvy guy is going to be in charge of helping the students create their images and I will be coaching them in creating complimenting text. It is an eight day course for elementary school students and a five-day course for middle school students. We are really looking forward to it. We're hoping for success, especially given the recent attention being paid to Graphic Novels as an exciting new literature genre.

I promise...

Hi everyone,
Okay, so finally I figured out my whole podcast issue. You can listen to the podcast at:
http://teachermomof4.podomatic.com/entry/2010-11-08T18_35_51-08_00

As for this week's assignment, incorporating the use of podcasts in the classroom, I thought about this quite a bit. Here are some things that I thought would be good ways to use podcasting.

-For a few years I had the kids create a radio show complete with different segments (school news, weather, sports, commercial breaks, jokes, etc). I tied the preparation part of the radio show into researching different topics and writing different stories (focus on journalism and technical writing). The kids would rehearse and then record their shows and then we'd listen to the completed show as a class via a cassette tape. A lot of the kids would ask for copies to share with parents and the copying became so tedious that often times it just fell through the cracks of the piles of stuff that one must accomplish as a teacher. I see podcasting as a very easy way to eliminate the hassle of making multiple copies of the finished product because as a teacher I could just provide the link. Additionally I think this is great because the sharing doesn't have to stop at the classroom level. More parents can hear what we are doing as a class.

-Along with the radio show idea for sharing work completed in the class, I feel like this same mechanism could be used as an avenue by which students could really share any kind of writing. I think it is so great to hear students read their own work because it gives a voice to their work but it also allows the students to hear their work read out loud. The use of podcasting would be a way for students to read their work and, again, share it with others via a link. Parents, family members and other students could hen hear what students are accomplishing. I think this could be especially cool for poetry because reading poetry aloud is a skill that I believe helps students develop their fluency and I love hearing students read their own work, giving voice to their own words.

-One of the projects I used to do with my students was a Legacy project for which I had students interview a member of an older generation about how times have changed, what school used to be like, what their childhood activities were like, advice the older generation would give to younger kids, etc. The students would then take the interview and create a written story from it. I believe that the interviews could just as easily be done and used to create podcasts. Not all students have access to individuals with computers/Skype but for those that do, they could use Skype to record interviews or record directly into Garageband or Audacity.

-Each quarter I gave the students a list ofoptions that could be done as "Quarter Projects". All the project options required some use of language arts skills but varied from creating posters to performing skits. One of the options was to read a book, or a portion of a book and create an audio recording of the reading. I think it would be neat if students would use Audacity or Garage band to not only read aloud the text, but add multiple tracks/layers, adding sounds to enhance the story, or read with multiple people to create an engaging read aloud. Then the final projects could be posted for others to hear.

Now that I'm teaching at the college-level and don't always have an extended period of time during which I get to engage with my students, I struggle to come up with ways in which podcasts would be helpful. I supervise practicum students in their initial experiences in elementary school and then each week students turn in a weekly journal reflection. I can see how asking the students to complete their weekly reflections using a voice thread would be advantageous but because of the personal nature of some of the things which students take up in their reflections, sharing these journals wouldn't be something that I would suggest via podcast.

I know you were waiting...

Hi there!!
I know you were waiting anxiously to hear my first podcast. Here it is!!! Visit me on PodOmatic!

http://teachermomof4.podomatic.com/

The podcast

So I really liked making my podcast. Once again, I struggled with choosing a topic, but once I did, I felt really comfortable. I took up the topic of book recommendations. I LOVE talking to people and finding out what they are reading/have read/would recommend, both for themselves and for children. So my podcast was called "Love Books?" and it highlighted four books that we hold in our library at home, and that I recommend to others. The first one that I cover is a book appropriate for infants and toddlers related to bedtime routines. The second features Mo Willems' pigeon and his hotdog adventure. The third book, appropriate for middle schoolers, teens and adults, "The Hunger Games," is a page turner for readers representing a range of ages, and at first wasn't a book that I thought I'd ever fall in love with. Finally I selected a book, "The Soloist," that is a great non-fiction adult book. Don't you want to hear the podcast?? Me too... but I'm still trying to work out the sharing part of the project so though its done, it is still secret until I can figure out how to share it with you!!! To be continued!!!

IMovie and Podcasting

So for this week's adventure I explored iMovie. I really struggled with a topic for a movie because I'm not in a classroom (besides to observe practicum students) and no other part of my own life is that exciting that it is worthy of a movie. I wanted the movie to serve a purpose as well. My son was just diagnosed with a Pervasive Developmental Disorder about two weeks ago. For those who may not know what PDD is, it is a category that includes Aspergers Syndrome and Autism, probably two disorders most of us in education have at least heard of, if not have dealt with in the classroom. As a family we are trying to find ways to help our son deal with social outings, particularly those that are a break from his routine, which can be extremely challenging. Because Halloween was coming up, I decided to create a movie "social story" for McKail to prep him for what to expect during our Halloween weekend. McKail would then be able to watch the movie repeatedly, see himself and hear his name in the movie and know what to expect. The use of social stories is pretty common place in working with children with these types of developmental disorders. I wish I could say that our Halloween was flawless, which I can't, but McKail did love the Social Story and perhaps it did help out! It may seem very elementary in the word choice and the flow, but that is how social stories usually are; they are meant to be very simplistic but very reassuring at the same time.

I thought I'd say more...

I didn't realize that there were some questions that I should have included in my initial post on role play so here are my responses for those:

1. What were some things that you did to create your role through use of language, information in/images used for your bio?

I played the role of a private school administrator. For me, I made language choices that would be things that I could imagine our principal saying (the principal at my daughter's Catholic school). Because private schools do cost money I felt like I was always have to "sell" my viewpoint so I used persuasive words and looked for research that supported the work that private schools are able to do, that public schools can't always accomplish.

2. What arguments were you making to convince other roles to support your position?

I made arguments that private schools are able to tailor their curriculum to have higher standards and focus on core curricular values without getting distracted by the "fluff" of schools. I sited studies that shared statistics that private schools score better on standardized tests as well and that parents have a choice in picking a school that supports their beliefs/views about what education should/should not be.

3. What evidence or reasons were your employing to support your positions? Do you think that this evidence or reasons were effective in convincing others to adopt your positions?

I highlighted many of my reasons for choosing private schools over public in the previous question. The evidence was okay, but I feel like it wouldn't necessarily convince someone that public schools need to be disbanded. Additionally, because I was trying to convince people to PAY for private education, that is simply not something that everyone can do, even though I did share a lot of situations in which people can get scholarships, that still takes work and cultural and social capital to which not everyone has access.

4. Which roles had the most versus least power in this role-play? What are some reasons that these roles did or did not have power? What were some strategies that the roles with power employed?

There was an individual that often made jokes rather than stated facts and though I really loved that from a humor standpoint, in a real debate I would be irritated by someone who wasn't taking a serious matter seriously. I was most impressed by those who included data in their responses but also comments packed with a lot of emotion are, to me, effective.

5. Were there differences between your personal beliefs and those of your role? Did your own personal beliefs on this issue change at all due to the role-play?

Well, this is complicated. I feel like I, as a parent, utilize my role as a white, educated individual, especially being a past K-12 educator when thinking about education. I send my kindergartener to parochial school and will most likely send my other 3 kids to parochial school as well. I will do this because I know what is involved in being a teacher in public education, and how sometimes instruction suffers under the pressure of administrators concerned only with test scores and not with students' well being, moral and social development as well so playing the role of a private school administrator was okay for me. It was hard though to not slip into the role of parent. Right now our kids' school is possibly going to close because of budget cuts so I have been playing the role of very active parent lately in trying to save our school so my emotions are running high right now. It was easy therefore to support a private school option because I do feel that my kids, in classes which are right around 15 kids, with teachers who are invested deeply in their religious development as well as their academic development will meet my child's needs better than, let's say, the public school down the road that has not met AYP in 3 years, where the kindergarten classroom has 27 kids in it. The role play didn't really change my opinion much. When I used to teach 7th grade, I worked on a team with 5 other teachers and all but one of us sent our kids to private school because we all were frustrated with the state of public education, even as public educators. And we weren't alone. In the school where I taught, more than half of the teachers who had kids sent them to public school. Our administrator actually called us together at a point and questioned why this was? She said we were setting a bad example by not supporting public school. I felt like saying to her that she was setting a bad example by not caring about kids... but I thought better of it!

Online Role Play

After our role play activity in class I have a lot of thoughts on using this in the classroom. I think there is a lot of potential, especially for students who may not speak up in a face-to-face debate, students like me. It is quite a bit easier (in some ways) to take on a role that you may not necessarily agree with and push an agenda associated with that role because everyone knows everyone is just playing a role and therefore hopefully no one would take anything that was said too seriously and wouldn't be out to judge what students are saying. In our debate in class I know I said things that I wouldn't have ever said in my true self role. I was much more verbal. It was also exciting to take on a role that was vastly different from my own perspective. I've been asked to do this for a number of classes and I always enjoy the experience. As a teacher I used to teach a debate unit and wish I would have considered using the online format to carry out that unit. It opens up a lot more possibilities for students who are naturally more passive in class. I also feel like it could be used to debate issues that come up within novels as well. So many possibilities.