p e d a b l o g i c a l

6 News Stories to Connect to Orwell’s 1984

Tuesday, August 31st, 2010 | British Literature, Children's/YA Lit, classroom activity | No Comments

Big brother really is watching you. Today we accept a certain amount of oversight by government and business as a part of daily life.

Students know about all the surveillance cameras that follow them as they move about in the world. They realize the U.S. government tracks details on their income and health. They know that online vendors know what they buy and everything they looked at before they decide. They have all heard stories of someone who gets a ticket because of an act caught by a traffic light and toll booth camera.

Still, they can bring a skepticism to class when they read George Orwell’s 1984. Seriously, we could never be watched that closely, right?

Several recent news stories may make the answer to that question less certain. Have students read and discuss any one of the stories as an introduction or supplement to 1984, or arrange students in small groups, having each read a different article and then present the information and their comment to the class.

1. Someone’s watching Granny cook her eggs. A new video surveillance system watches over senior citizens, monitoring everything from when they get out of bed to whether their eggs are fully cooked.
    
2. Aunt Martha’s been in the bathroom for 30 minutes. Motion sensors track senior citizens around their homes, sending text messages to family when a possible problem arises. RFID chips track medicine and the inventory in kitchen cabinets.
    
3. The scanner says you missed class today. Students must flash an ID card near the university lecture hall entrance to register their class attendance. The resulting information feeds into class participation grades.
    
4. Alert! Preschooler has left the building! Thanks to a radio frequency tag in special basketball jersey-type shirts preschoolers wear, teachers and administrators can quickly tell when a student wanders off campus. The system tracks students at recess, in the cafeteria, and even in the bathroom.
    
5. Why is Will still on the school bus? RFID chips and barcodes on student and faculty IDs and various pieces of equipment will allow a high school to track where people and things are at all times if funding is awarded. If someone’s missing or out of place, they can take action immediately.
    
6. Your recycling bin may tattle on you if you throw away too many plastic bottles or cardboard boxes. In Cleveland, Ohio, RFID chips and barcodes will tell garbage collectors how often you put out the recycling. If it’s not often enough, your trash will be searched and you can be fined $100 if recyclables are found.

Student discussion of the articles can be guided with these questions:

• What freedoms or privacy rights does the system affect?
• What is the benefit of the system?
• How would you feel if you were monitored by the system?
• Would you feel comfortable using the system to monitor someone else?
• How do the benefits balance with the loss of privacy? Is the loss worth the cost?

If students read and discuss several of the articles, additional questions can ask them to compare and synthesize the pieces:

• Notice that the targets of these programs are either students or senior citizens. What do you make of the focus of these systems?
• What other ways are monitoring systems used in America? How do the systems in these articles compare to them?
• Create a scale that outlines how you feel about tracking and monitoring. What should always be monitored? What should never be monitored? What falls in-between? Explain how you decide where to place things on the scale.

Note that these articles would also make a great supplement to M. T. Anderson’s Feed.

[Creative Commons licensed Flickr photo by anarchosyn]

Tags: assignments, George Orwell, privacy, RFID

Community Building Classroom Activities: A Round-Up

Monday, August 30th, 2010 | classroom activity, community building, lesson plan | No Comments

How do you take a group of individual, unrelated people and connect them in a supportive community quickly?

It’s a question teacher face at the beginning of every term. Here are some answers.

Begin by establishing reasons for students to connect. You can’t wave a magic wand and build community. It takes work. What’s the Trick to Building Community in the Classroom? outlines four lessons that lay the ground work for connections, no matter what class you teach or what other community building activities you use.

In the writing classroom, personal stories can be the best way to build quick connections. The writing task can make the connection, as explained in Building Community in 15 Minutes a Day. As students embark on a writing experience, they can build fast connections by talking about their challenges and successes together.

In a similar way, ask students to talk about their work as writers—their best work, their pet peeves, and their biggest challenges. Five Ways to Learn about Students This Fall outlines specific activities that ask students to share their history as writers in this way. Lesson plans for Weekly Writer’s Blogs, Technology Autobiographies, and Extended Metaphors about Writing encourage students to build a community of writers as they reflect on their own experiences.

Tend the fledgling connections writers make with activities that talk explicitly about community. Whether they look at communities outside the classroom or those at school, such discussions can ensure you students continue to Build Community After the First Day.

[Creative Commons licensed Flickr photo by luc legay]

List of Ten: Fun with Crayons

Sunday, August 29th, 2010 | List of Ten, classroom activity, composition | No Comments

I’m a sucker for office supplies. Snoop around my desk, and you’ll find colored pencils, a rainbow of Sharpies, and a full range of notebooks and pads of paper.

It’s no surprise then that I was excited when I found a link to a Vintage Crayons, Paints, & Art Supplies Flickr set on a friend’s Twitter feed (John D. Lemke aka @lumpy).

Sadly that collection is limited by copyright restrictions, but you can find plenty of other images, like the illustration on this post. Just search for Creative Commons-licensed content for the keyword crayons.

Once you have found a collection of images you like, students can use one of the topics below to inspire a project such as an essay, a Powerpoint presentation, or a YouTube video.

1. [Persuasion] Look at the vintage boxes in the image included on the Crayola entry on Wikipedia. You can also use more recent images of crayon boxes. Ask students to analyze the boxes for persuasive information. Point out the box that proclaims, “Not injurious to the hands and will not soil the clothes” as an example. There’s also an early advertisement you can analyze. Discuss how the boxes appeal to customers. How do they attempt to persuade customers to purchase a box of crayons?
    
   
2. [Gender & Race] Ask students to look at how gender and race are represented in the images includes in the Vintage Crayons, Paints, & Art Supplies Flickr set. Crayon companies literally have all the colors of the rainbow to choose among. Are the images diverse? Do they accurately represent the people who will use the product? [You might begin this assignment by asking students to consider the Flesh crayon and the current Multicultural Crayons collection.]
    
3. [Naming] Where do crayon names come from? Typically, the name seems to describe the color, but if you read the list of Crayola color names, you’ll quickly see that some are a bit unusual. Consider the Inchworm crayon. That’s hardly a name you’d expect. Review the list of Crayola color names, and choose one color to explore. Consider the connotations and denotations of the name, think about the alternatives that Crayola could have used, and draw some conclusions about their final choice. Your project will be an analysis of the name for that crayon—exploring the name, what it means to people, and why it was probably chosen.
    
4. [Perception] Take a look at XKCD’s Color Survey Results and the related resources the results have inspired. Colors are deeply personal and quite objective. Discuss the role that gender plays in the analysis, and suggest what other personal characteristics might influence the names people choose for colors. If your resources allow, the raw data from the survey are linked from the XKCD site. Try your own analysis of the data and report what you discover.
    
5. [Culture] Consider how cultural connotations of colors (alternative discussion) compare to the names Crayola has used to label various crayons. You can use Poynter’s Color, Contrast & Dimension in News Design to talk in more detail about how color works. Are there names on the list of Crayola color names that could be culturally insensitive? What alternate names would you suggest if the crayons were used by children in a different culture?
    
6. [Color Bio] What if your life were a crayon box? Identify 8 to 12 significant events in your life. The times might be especially happy memories, things that changed your life, or milestones you achieved. Choose a crayon color to represent each event, and explain why the color is appropriate for the event. The project might be published as a kind of graphic life map.
    
7. [Special Collections] Crayola has created special collections of crayons over the years. Some are named for the kinds of colors included, like Silver Swirls. Others are specific to an event or situation, however, like the State Crayon Collection (image 2 , image 3 ) or America’s Top 50 Crayons. Create your own special collection of crayons—choose a theme (e.g., the Mardi Gras collection, the Halloween collection, or Thomas Dale High School collection), and 8 to 12 crayon colors that you would include. Provide names and explanations for the colors that would be in your special collection. The Educational Chemistry Crayons are a great example of such a project.
    
8. [Tell Your Story] Almost everyone has memories tied to crayons—whether coloring worksheets in preschool or filling in the images on a place mat at a restaurant. Write a personal memory about crayons. Brainstorm the things you remember when you think about crayons. Choose one or two, and tell us your crayon memory.
    
9. [Coloring Pages] Take a look at a collection of Coloring Pages or Craft Projects on the Crayola Website. Choose 5 to 7 pages from a collection, and analyze the images and text that are included. How is Crayola presenting the issue or idea? What is included and what is not? The pages are obviously intended for children, but are there other aspects of the audience that your analysis reveals? [Expand this activity by including coloring pages from one of Crayola’s international sites, which include Canada, Australia, United Kingdom, Mexico, and Italy.]
    
10. [Coloring a Place] Dump a collection of crayons in a bag (or names of colors on slips of paper). Each student pulls out a crayon (or a color) randomly. Have the student look up the color on the list of Crayola color names if you use slips of paper. Imagine that the color is the name of a place. Using the color of the crayon and the crayon’s name as inspiration, describe the place. What does it look like? What happens there? Who goes there? What sounds and smells are associated with the place? NOTE: If a student has trouble working with a color, just have him pull another one. The idea is for the color to be relatively random, but there’s no reason a student should be forced to stick with a color that he’s having trouble using as inspiration.

Most of these activities will work with any collection that is based on colors. You might use paint chips, for instance, or if students do scrapbooking, the names and colors of paper and ink used by Stampin’ Up would be work.
 

Check out the other Lists of Ten for writing activities, professional development ideas, and other classroom teaching tools.

[Creative Commons licensed Flickr photo by laffy4k]

Tags: assignments, color, crayons, symbolism, writing

March of Time Newsreels in the Classroom

Friday, August 27th, 2010 | American Lit, Bedford Bits, classroom activity, visual rhetoric | No Comments

Back in the days before 24-hour news networks, people went to their local movie theaters to see what was going on in the world.

The March of Time, perhaps the most well-known producer of these videos, distributed documentaries that covered everything from American culture and lifestyles, to business and industry, to the nation at war.

To celebrate the 75th anniversary of this precursor to breaking news videos on YouTube, the Museum of Modern Art has a special film exhibition, running September 1 through September 10. Turner Classic Movies has posted background information on The March of Time and will show five of the newsreels on September 5th.

Luckily, highlights from the collection of historical videos are also available online from HBO Archives. Note that a free site login is required to view the videos. Additional materials are also available from the March of Time’s Facebook page.

The newsreels and documentaries on the HBO site include historical events, cultural happenings, and biographical profiles. The videos provide a wonderful snapshot of life in America and around the world.

I first wrote about the March of Time collection on Bedford Bits last summer. You can check my blog entry Use Newsreel Videos for Background and Analysis there for specific ideas.

One of my favorite possibilities for class discussion this fall is the Oil and Men video, which offers a profile of Standard Oil of Indiana from 1951. What a great pairing that 30 minute video would make for videos and news stories on BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil spill.

Here are some others you may want to spend some time with:

• Basic English 1, with text by I. A. Richards, is quite odd, though perhaps not the best “teaching picture.” There’s also a Basic English 2 if you survive the first video.
   
• Tobaccoland, USA might pair nicely with an analysis of cigarette advertisements and anti-smoking commercials.
   
• Leadbelly is a short biopic on the famous musician, which might be compared to profiles on celebrities shown on TV or in magazines like People.
   
• Wit and Humor is a dramatization of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story “Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment.”

It’s unfortunate that HBO has left the running clock on the videos, but it’s still a handy collection with limitless possibilities for the classroom.

[Creative Commons licensed Flickr photo by Mr. T in DC]

Tags: documentary, March of Time, Nathaniel Hawthorne, newsreels. assignments

6 Reasons Blogrolls Are Dying

Sunday, August 22nd, 2010 | social media | 14 Comments

I posted a message to TechRhet this weekend that I thought would yield a fast result. I needed to gather a list of comp/rhet blogs for a project, and I want to make sure I didn’t leave anyone out.

I asked readers to pass along links if they had a great blogroll or knew of some wonderful blogs I should include.

The response? One message. That’s it. One message that pointed to one blog.

So I began searching for the links on my own, visiting friend’s blogs and scooping up links as I went along. I quickly observed that blogrolls are a dying breed.

1. Fewer people have blogrolls. There was a time when everyone listed every blogger possible in the sidebar. Not the case any more. More than 1/2 of the blogs I visited had no blogroll at all.
    
2. Blogrolls tend to be an unordered list, which makes their usefulness questionable. Presented with a giant list of blogs, you have nothing to go by but the blog name or the writer’s name. Sorted into categories or with tags, the list would be easier for visitors to use. As they stand on most blogs, they seem to be a simple list of friends and colleagues in most cases.
    
3. The blogrolls I did find were not well-maintained. The lists were littered with broken links, dead blogs (i.e., the link works but there hasn’t been a new post on the blog in months), and links to old blogs, with pointers to a new home.
    
4. Gathering a blogroll (and checking its links) is a time-consuming project. There’s a reason these things aren’t maintained. The only way to make use the blog links all work properly is to sit and click on each and every one.
    
5. Blogrolls are suffering because blogs have more competition these days. Many colleagues are foregoing blogs for shorter status updates. On more than one blog, I found a note that indicated the person was going to update via Facebook or Twitter instead of maintaining the blog.
    
6. Follower and Friend lists are replacing blogrolls. When you click follow or okay a friend, you create a list of colleagues that is quite similar to a blogroll—and which is infinitely easier to maintain. They take care of themselves. You never have to chase down the URLs or check for deleted accounts.

Ultimately, I collected a list of nearly 70 blogs. Feel free to copy it for your own site or send links to anything I left out. I just won’t promise you that I’ll maintain it for the long term.

[Creative Commons licensed Flickr photo by stevendepolo]

What Are Kidwatching, Microblogging, and Podcasts?

Thursday, August 19th, 2010 | Education, assessment, social media | No Comments

Soon NCTE will be launching an online site for members that will include many cool features, including an online glossary for English teachers.

My assignment this afternoon was to come up with 3 definitions to add to the collection as examples—and to make sure they were backed up in case they get accidentally erased. So here are my three rough drafts. What do you think? I’d love to hear suggestions to make them stronger!

Kidwatching Definition

Kidwatching, a term popularized by Yetta Goodman, is a way to record your students’ development by observing their behavior, strategies, and ways of making meaning. In the simplest explanation, kidwatching is exactly what it sounds like: watching kids—as they read, write, collaborate, and participate in your class—and taking notes on your observations of students’ effective use of skills, concepts, and strategies.

Observations alone can be useful; but what makes kidwatching a particular strong tool in the classroom is the step that teachers take to move beyond observations and note-taking to analysis and curriculum building based on on those observations and notes.

For more information, see O’Keefe, T. (1997). The Habit of Kidwatching. School Talk, 3(2). 4–5. [Available online at http://www.ncte.org/journals/st/issues/v3-2]

Microblogging Definition

Microblogging is an online publication method that allows writers to publish very short updates, typically in 140 characters or less. Tools used to post microblog updates include Twitter (the most popular tool), Jaiku, and Plurk. Status updates posted in Facebook can also be microblogs.

Microblog updates can touch many kinds of writing, from exposition to fiction and more. Twitter originally asked writers to post a response to the question “What are you doing?” The question has evolved to “What’s happening?” today. Microblog posts can include any of the following:

• a status update on where you are and what you’re doing
• comments and reviews on a book, movie, concert you’ve attended
• links to pictures with short comments on their significance
• pointers to websites, news articles, and other resources you’ve found valuable
• questions and calls for suggestions (as well as related answers)
• haiku (or Twaiku, as they are sometimes called) and other ultra-short poems
• one-sentence stories

As far as the content is concerned, anything goes. What primarily defines microblogging are the length and its publication in an online forum.

Some teachers use microblogging assignments as part of their class activities, to share quick updates on class business and as a writing activity. See Profhacker’s Framework for Teaching with Twitter for additional tips if you decide to try microblogging with students.

Podcast Definition

Podcasts are serial audio or video recordings, posted regularly online. Some people call video podcasts vlogcasts. You might think of a podcast as a kind of blog that posts recordings (rather than webpages) on a regular basis. Some call any audio or video recording a podcast, but in the strictest technical sense, the word refers to episodic publications.

To listen to a podcast, you can either play it directly (streaming) on your computer or download the file and listen to it later (on your computer or on an MP3 player or smartphone).

Podcasts can be used for any purpose a text might serve—they can tell fictional stories, share and comment on recent events, inform listeners about a topic, and persuade listeners to take an action or adopt a stance. As a result, podcasts are valuable tools for teaching students to use spoken language to communicate effectively with a variety of audiences and for different purposes.

For more information on podcasts, see the ReadWriteThink strategy guide Teaching with Podcasts.

[Creative Commons licensed Flickr photo by Irish Typepad]

Tags: kidwatching, microblogging, podcast, twitter

Activities That Ask Students to Explore Cultural Mindsets

Wednesday, August 18th, 2010 | classroom activity, community building | No Comments

This week’s release of the Beloit List got me wondering about how the resource might be used in class.

Officially known as the Mindset List of the Class of 2014, the Beloit List has been published each August for the last 13 years to remind us teachers of the cultural knowledge that first-year college students bring (or don’t bring) to the classroom.

This year, we’ve learned that the incoming class thinks Barney is a dinosaur rather than a Mayberry Deputy, telephones have never had cords, and wrist watches are not part of their wardrobe. Or at least that’s what the list wants us to believe.

The Chronicle of Higher Education published an article yesterday that explored the background of the list. Tom McBride and Ron Nief, “The Minds Behind the Mind-Set List,” explain:

the list started on a lark back in 1997—some old college hands unwinding on a Friday afternoon, musing on how much freshmen don’t know about recent history and culture. But such blind spots are to be expected, they had agreed, given the relative youth of the incoming class. They had concluded that professors should be mindful of how very different their students’ life experiences are from their own.

What struck me when I read The Chronicle article though was the picture of the lists creators. There they were. Two, white-looking, men. I couldn’t help but wonder how the lists might be different if the authors were, to put it politely, a bit more diverse.

What began as that little curiosity turned into this short list of ways that you might use the list in class:

• Analyze the list for diversity. Think about race, gender, and ethnicity. What’s missing? How would you revise the list to be more accurate.
   
• Consider the accuracy of the list. Take one of the items on the list and do a little research to see how correct it is. Anecdotal research and simple surveys would be enough. For instance, observe people in the library or dining hall and count the number who have on a wrist watch. Think of yourself as on a mission to bust myths and misconceptions.
   
• Share your personal mindset, using the Beloit List as a model. What cultural markers do you consider important? Are there things that have always been a part of your life (or have never been)?
   
• Create a list for a historical figure or fictional character. The list should clarify how the world of the figure or character is different from that of today. For instance, Chaucer’s pilgrims never had indoor plumbing and travel was normally by foot or by horse. Pop culture figures would work as well (e.g., characters from television series or movies).
   
• Gather a list on the cultural mindset of a different social group—veterans who served in Afghanistan, working mothers, or firefighters, for example.
   
• Refocus the list to outline 5 to 10 items that fit the topic “I live in world where . . .” Try to think of specific details that communicate how your world differs from that of others in the incoming class. Use the list to show how you’re different.
   
• Satirize the list with an irreverent collection based on a more humorous touchstone. How about “ever since I got a job” or “since I’ve been on a diet”?

The language of the Beloit list is an easy model to follow, and many of these activities can be a fun community building activity.

And speaking of fun, I know it’s a terrible stereotype, but I really want to write a list that begins “Ever since we started dating, the cap has always been on the toothpaste, the toilet seat is always down, and my dirty socks are usually in the laundry basket.”

[Creative Commons licensed Flickr photo by sergis blog]

Tags: assignments, Beloit List

The Back-to-School Organization Bug

Monday, August 16th, 2010 | Home Organization, classroom activity, community building | No Comments

I couldn’t figure out why i suddenly cared about the mess on my desk and the piles of papers sitting around this week. Why did it suddenly matter?

I did think it funny that the printouts at the bottom of every pile were dated August of last year. Apparently, the last time i had a blank slate was last year this time. Since then, it’s all been piling up.

As I was working through the weekend’s news articles, I happened upon “Kids heading back to school? Create some room to think in your home.” The quotation that showed up in Google Reader said, “"I always spent my first month of teaching fourth- and fifth-graders teaching organization.”

Suddenly everything made sense. I had switched into back to school mode.

I haven’t actually been in a classroom in years, yet my brain switched me over just the same. Given the dates at the bottom of the piles, I did this last year as well.

I guess the back-to-school fever shows up differently for all of us. What comes naturally to teachers, however, may not occur to students and families. If you’re teaching younger students, you might share that NOLA.com article with families. If you’re teaching secondary or college students, have students read the article themselves and think about concrete changes they can make to ensure they have a great school year. You can use the article to evaluate the classroom as well and embark on a community-building activity with students to improve the learning space.

Me, I have to get back to cleaning up paper and straightening books on the book shelves. What have you been doing to get ready for the new school year?

[Creative Commons licensed Flickr photo by Russ Neumeier]

BP’s Unintended Lesson on Visual Rhetoric

Monday, August 2nd, 2010 | classroom activity, professional communications, visual rhetoric | No Comments

It’s politically correct to be disappointed with BP and their little oil well problem in the Gulf. But how can I be angry when they provide me with such wonderful gifts?

First, BP America digitally enhanced some of their oil spill clean-up photos. The images are great for pointing out the sloppiness of the Photoshop work and, more importantly, discussing the ethical issues related to tampering with the images. Be sure to look at the face-saving explanation BP has posted with the BP Altered Images Flickr set. Any class exploring visual rhetoric should spend time with these photos. So a big thank you to BP for classroom material.

But that’s not all. Next, the folks over at Wired took the faked BP images and challenged readers to create their own digitally altered photos. The results are marvelous. Everything from Godzilla to Rick Astley is out there in the Gulf causing mayhem.

The submission showing pop culture images on the different monitors is probably my favorite:

How could you NOT like an image that includes Max Headroom, War Games, Star Trek, Poltergeist, and The Matrix?

As part of a visual rhetoric lesson plan, the Wired challenge images open up the topic of satire and parody. Students can discuss how the different images critique the way BP has handled the oil spill—both in its actual clean-up and in the images they have shared with the public.

So politically correct or not, I’m a little thankful to BP America for providing me with the materials for a timely lesson on an important topic.

[Creative Commons licensed Flickr photo by BP America]

Tags: assignments

Easy Supplemental Reading: 100 Best Magazine Articles

Monday, August 2nd, 2010 | classroom activity, composition | No Comments

No matter what textbook I choose for class, there’s always a class or two where I wish I had a few more readings available. Nothing in the text seems quite right, so I end up searching for something online that will fill the gap.

For those class sessions, I now have a collection of 100 best magazine articles, gathered by Kevin Kelly, cofounder of Wired and author of the forthcoming What Technology Wants (Viking/Penguin, October 2010).

Links are included for most of the articles; however, many go to only abstracts or snippets. To access the full article, you’ll need to pay for the download. Of course, on a college campus, you’re bound to be able to find any of these articles at the library with the citations that are included.

If I were teaching a graduate course, I think I’d ask students to divide up the articles and create short abstracts and keywords for each. I’d definitely ask them to include an indication of whether the article was free, subscription-based, or one-time fee-based. Published as a class collection, the annotated entries would give every student a rich resource for the future.

The list of articles could also help me point undergrad writers to key articles for research projects. For instance, a student writing about online bullying would certainly want to look at Julian Dibbell’s “A Rape in Cyberspace,” and the list gives me both a link to the article and a citation to find a print copy at the library.

My favorite find on Kelly’s list is Tom Junod’s Can you say- Hero?” from the November 1998 Esquire. The creative nonfiction essay weaves several anecdotes about Mr. Rogers into a profile that casts everyone’s favorite childhood neighbor as hero.

Take a look at the list yourself. You’re bound to find something new or forgotten that will be worth a read. What’s your favorite on the list? Be sure to email Kevin Kelly, who is building a Top Ten list.

[Creative Commons licensed Flickr photo by theseanster93]