1001 Flat World Tales: The Future

(Cross-posted from Beyond School)

I've been wishing aloud for some time that more non-Anglo countries would join the 1001 Flat World Tales project. So when Hagit from Israel (via my membership in ePals) and another teacher soon to begin work in Kazakhstan expressed interest in joining the project, you can imagine how happy that made me.

That brings the current list of participants to:

1. Korea
2. Denver
3. Honolulu
4. Hannibal, MO, USA
5. New Brunswick, Canada
6. Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
7. Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic
8. Pennsylvania
9. Two schools in Australia
10. Shanghai, China
11. Serbia
12. Israel (fingers crossed)
13. Kazakhstan (ditto)

Imagine the '07-'08 mix for this project. We can all change partners.

But where is the Arab world? The African? The Latin American? The West European?

Patience. This project is only two and a half months old.

(And now is a good time to throw your hat in for next year. Sign up at the 1001Teachers wiki, and we'll take it from there.)

Workshop 2 Underway

We are off the mark with the second 1001 Tales workshop, which features students from Australia, Serbia and China. We have been held up with various Spring/Easter holidays but our first drafts are now posted and I'm looking forward (with a mixure of excitement and nervousness) to seeing how the students will interact and provide meaningful feedback to one another. My students, from a boys boarding school in regional Australia, are keen to collaborate with people from across the world and I'm hoping that this project will utlise the 1:1 environment we are in (as of Feburary). It's been a bit of a struggle to incorporate this in the midst of an already jam-packed term but providing an opportunity for them to write for a real global audience was too interesting to pass up. I'm taking on the axiom that "learning is messy". Wish us luck.

Choose your own adventure

(Cross posted from Always Learning)

In order to create a truly exciting and enticing story for their 1001 Flat World Tales projects, many of our students are choosing to include alternate endings, in the style of the Choose Your Own Adventure books from the 80's.

When we started explaining how to create links between pages, and how they can create as many pages as they want, they realized that they can incorporate reader choice (in this case, the alien king) into their narrative (in an attempt to ensure their survival).

Some are doing multi-faceted stories with many different story paths; others just have two or three alternate endings; still others have created totally interactive stories. Feel free to check out all of their stories (but please keep in mind that they are still in progress).

Slowly, but surely they are also starting to incorporate visual media into their stories as well. We are hoping we will have some time to allow them to narrate their whole story, add visuals and actually vidcast their tale.

The best part is that all of the students, regardless of their English language or technical skills, are excited, enthusiastic and engaged every lesson.

Image: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/f/f0/Cave_of_time.jpg/190px-Cave_of_time.jpg

1001 Project Update Carol Morgan School

What a long strange trip it has been....but we have made it. George, my third grade teacher participating in the 1001 Flat World Tales Project has posted his stories to the CMS Elementary Wiki. I will say this, I am impressed how George and his kids went about this project. George seeing an opportunity to tie the project into his curriculum had his kids explore "known" myths that the kids were familiar with. After partnering George with our writing specialist, Cassia they had kids dissect myths and determine what the "anatomy" of a myth is. From here kids were able to invent their own myths about certain aspects of Do Culture, Music, etc. Truly I am impressed and I think this pushed George's third graders to think a little differently about their writing. Did I mention the art to go along with the writings? Each student also has contributed an illustration of their story and Iminican Republic Geography, have not seen those but with the imagination I saw in the students as I looked over some of their myth stories, I no doubt will be equally impressed with those as well.

I will be honest about the next step of revision. I do feel a little intimidated for our kids being a grade lower than the kids we are sharing with and being the only non-native English speaking elementary class in the 1001 Project. But, I guess that is part of the experience and will hopefully be a cultural learning experience for our kids to read what native speaking children write like and vice versa on the part of the classes in the U.S.

Anyway, I have to now contact Terry Smith and Dean Meyer and let them know that kids can start revising our kids and to let them know that we will be doing the same for their students.

I'll keep you posted...whoever you are.

Logistics (3 Separate Spring Breaks) and Hiring Student Editors

[This is adapted from an email I sent to Chris and Michele.]

Spring Break is hitting our three schools in Denver, Honolulu, and Seoul in three different weeks. Another wrinkle in Flat World collaboration. Honolulu starts Spring Break this week.

It's not a bad thing, from a writerly view. One week off is good. But three weeks off? Uh-oh.

Anyway, concerning the current week, when Honolulu is off the radar, here's what I'm telling my kids:

Hemingway himself said that he lets drafts sit for a couple of weeks so he forgets what they look like. Then, when he re-visits them, he first pulls out his (and I quote) "Shock-proof sh#t- detector" before reading them.

Because he hasn't looked at his draft for so long, the bad parts really jump out at him. It helps him see what needs work.

So a one-week hiatus (and Michele, you and I need to coordinate our own Spring Breaks and find a way not to let this sit too long) is good.

That will give us time to breathe, figure out who should be "fired" (if necessary), and prep some exercises for word choice, sentence fluency, and conventions.

Also, I'm going to start my editors interviews. Announcing it tomorrow: prepare resume (our college counselor just hooked the freshmen up with an online resume builder, so why not hook into that), samples of blog and other writing work, and samples of good peer editing from the project.

Expectations? Maybe two conference calls: first for our student editors to plan the process; second, for them to discuss and select submissions? Both to be podcasted as digital portfolio bullets of authentic publishing experience?

How does that sound? Can we set April 1 as the deadline to have our student editors selected? April 7 as the date (roughly) of their first conference call?

One problem: Skype conferencing only allows 5 callers maximum. That means one school either only selects one editor, or else we find a creative solution to enable more (for example, two students using a line-in headphone splitter (double jack) to plug two headphones into one computer).

Thoughts?

Podcast: Hawaii Students Sound Off on Classroom Blogging, Wiki Collaboration, More...

On Sunday, 11 March 2007 (oh wait--that's Korea time. It was Saturday in Hawaii), Chris Watson was nice enough to invite three of his students in Hawaii to join us in a Skype conference call/podcast. And Lindsay, Eddie, and Blake were nice enough to accept.

His two sophomores and one freshman did most of the talking, and Chris and I listened. What they had to say (and the relaxed, intelligent way they said it) was, I hope you'll agree, worth the listen. The talk was long and wide-ranging, but focused mainly on their experience of writing on blogs and wikis in the Language Arts classroom.

I have to add this: class discussions inside classroom walls--and tyrannized by classroom "factory bells"--don't hold a candle to what we did on Skype. There was no clock-watching, no hierarchy, no policing. We were just five people talking about writing and learning in this new world.

It was enough to make me consider getting a Ph.D. in administration--something I've never been interested in--simply to have the credentials to find funding to create a school without bells and factory rules, and with more conversations like this.

The podcast, if downloaded to iTunes, is extended with a time-stamped Table of Contents. For your convenience (I know I never have time to listen to hour-long podcasts), I've copied it below the podcast player.


Click here to get your own player.



00:00:00.000 Intro
00:01:31.000 Opening Questions on Student Blogging
00:02:31.484 Lindsay on Student Blogging
00:03:16.326 Chris' approach (Lindsay) and privacy
00:04:49.000 Frequency Eddie
00:05:27.333 Content Eddie and Lindsay EssenQs
00:06:25.000 Pitfalls: Rambling diaries
00:06:42.000 Reading other sts blogs
00:07:42.250 Lindsay: Reading Adult blogs for inspiration
00:09:47.375 Blake joins: reading blog habits
00:11:57.000 Lindsay's blog recommendations
00:12:26.250 Assigned to read/comment on others?
00:13:37.625 The Art of the Title
00:14:46.625 edit and revise, or just post?
00:19:34.875 Finding ideas
00:20:42.375 On sts who DON'T like blogging
00:26:35.625 Will you keep it after class is over?
00:26:59.875 Blake on 1001: Don't want it to end
00:27:52.375 Permissions and School restrictions
00:31:12.750 My school's "fresh start": anagrams and anonymity change writing?
00:34:49.375 On MySpace writing v. blogging
00:38:38.139 Does Blogging Feel like Homework?
00:42:20.526 How Teachers Can Ruin Blogging
00:44:37.838 Blogging Across the Curriculum
00:47:15.750 Students on Best Assessing
00:52:39.500 Flat World Time Management
00:54:01.969

Podcasting to Improve Writing

EyePod (Revised)
Originally uploaded by LeggNet.

(Cross-posted from Beyond School)

Real quick: for the 1001 Flat World Tales project, we had each writer record and podcast him/herself reading the first draft for an audience of one: him/herself (gender pronouns stink).

Podcasting for self-criticism. I know it's not new, but it's so easy now. And it seemed to help the young writers hear the parts of their writing that needed improvement. Here's one student reflection:

The first thing came to my mind was that I had extremely simple and frequent grammar mistakes. I was kind of embarrassed when I heard it. Also, ideas and details sound incomplete and insights are shallow in depth; it was just shallow that proves not much thinking and brainstorming. I should work on 'showing' since my second draft 'told' everything. It sounded like a lecture about Korean cultures. Well, it was embarrassing to listen to my own podcast anyways.

It's all so easy now. Odeo, Podomatic. Students pick it up quickly, often without needing the teacher to know anything about it at all. How many teachers realize how easy it is to do this sort of thing?

Just thought it was worth a share.

(Photo credit: "EyePod (Revised)" by LeggNet on Flickr.)