While I was looking for resources for a lesson on the Grapes of Wrath, I found a National Archive lesson plan that’s interesting in this time of War on Terrorism. Teaching With Documents: FDR’s First Inaugural Address Declaring “War” on the Great Depression. Ties directly to the details from Bob Probst’s talk at IATE as well.

Today, BBC News reports Today’s teenagers ‘more literate’. The article explains that “Teenagers are more literate than they were 10 years ago, one of the largest studies of exam papers suggests.” The problem, of course, is that assessment of literacy in the study is based on those exam papers. The variety of literacies that teen (or any) readers and writers rely on every day cannot all be measured by a written standardized test. Students are very literate. We just don’t ever measure all they know.

Miscellany

Cleaning out my Bloglines clippings folder (e.g., procrastinating):

• Mentioned on datacloud:
  It Figures
  This blog defines figures of speech with current events and pop culture examples. Not all will be usable in the classroom, but many could be tapped. The technique might make an interesting writing project for a cross-curricular project or for an exploration of pop culture texts.

• From Kairosnews:
  Handbook for Bloggers and Cyber-Dissidents provides suggestions for publishing blogs in less than supportive environments (like that in Pope John XIII Regional High School) as well as ideas for getting picked up by search engines, blogging anonymously, and keeping e-mail private.

• From The New York Times:
  • What’s Cool Online? Teenagers Render Verdict discusses a marketing focus group exploring the strategies that attract teens. One of the cited resouces is “The Coke Studios Web site was designed to appeal to teenagers as a place to meet online, hold chats and make their own music.”
  • Got Wit? Make It Visual in Ads Online reviews an interactive exhibit at the Science, Industry and Business Library of the New York Public Library. The exhibit includes “some of the best ads ever made for television, radio, print and the Internet.” I’m guessing copyright will keep the collection from being shared online for those of us who can’t get to NY. The library has some info online. If you click through to the “Online Exhibit,” you’ll find some additional descriptions. The resources link there points to additional Web sites that may be useful for classroom studies of advertising and culture.
  • Forget Blogs, Print Needs Its Own IPod focuses on how “In an attempt to leave the forest of dead trees and reach the high plains of digital media, every paper in the country is struggling mightily to digitize its content with Web sites, blogs, video and podcasts.” I’ll readily admit that I don’t read a print newspaper. When I was in Texas, I got most of my news from CNN’s Headline News, before the show turned into a circus. When I moved to Illinois, I switched to listening to NPR every morning as I get ready for work, and frequently every evening. Now that I’ve been using Bloglines for a while, I’ve returned to scanning the headlines of “print” news”papers” via their RSS feeds. Might be interesting to have an assignment where students look at how they get their news and compare that to how an older family member remembers getting news at the same age and/or now.
  • Getting Your Point Across describes a forbes.com Special Report: Communicating. The NYT article explains that the “package on communication is a tour de force, taking on its subject from oblique angles using counterintuitive approaches.” Could be interesting jumping-off points for student inquiry projects (as well as connections to our own practices in the classroom).

Great. Everyone else gets cool pictures, and I’m the nerd librarian. Bonus. What a reason to live.

I have lovely new soffits, which have appropriate venting that I can actually see. The roofing owner mentioned that this would be one of the features of the new stuff. Now if I had gutters and pressured washed all the cobwebs off the house it might look normal. Though all the trim needs painted. Sigh.

Supposed to be another week or two before I get the gutters replaced. Another exciting odyssey. At least they cleaned up very well today. Even swept the front porch clean of all the garbage that fell when the soffits were ripped down. I can’t tell whether the plumber was here today. Nothing has really been moved that I can see. Who knows. I could go out to the garage for the step ladder and see if I can see up in the attic well enough to figure it out, but I’m not sure it’s worth the possibility of knocking more insulation down.

I added some images to the NCTE Halloween Party gallery and added captions so people who explore have more of a shot at knowing what they’re looking at. Adobe is my friend. Otherwise, I am very dull and boring.

The unauthorized exposé is here:
NCTE Halloween Party. Yes, I know that you all never believed me when I said this happens. Now you have photographic proof.

The dumpster was gone when I got home from the office; so I get to park back by the garage again. But who knows what they’ll come up with tomorrow, so I’m leaving the car outside so that they know I’ll need out. No evidence that the plumber was here. Maybe s/he was very tidy.

Today was a day of much more prom wear. In addition to all the dresses, the office now has bins of makeup and jewelry and other accessories. There was a pre-party meeting this afternoon to coordinate and make sure everyone had what they needed. I’ve pretty much figured out that nothing is going to get accomplished tomorrow. It’s party stuff most of the day.

I found a cute shirt for my niece, the panda lover (Thank you Wonkette). Yes, I was off-task at work today too.

I’ve been working on a Grapes of Wrath lesson plan. I’ve gathered a lot of Web sites into a travelogue, with some specific questions, as a prereading activity. After the exploration, they predict some of the themes that the novel will explore before diving in.

Frappr was just posted on the TAWL list. They’re using it to map the locations of list members, but it got me to thinking of lesson options. Students mapping their extended families. Mapping literary authors. Mapping important locations for a historical period (e.g., the Dust Bowl).

So I got to thinking about a Flash interactive that allowed us to pass whatever background we need via xml. Students choose locations for the markers and write associated descriptive text. In ways it’s just an annotation tool. Perhaps the background could be a graphic of a Shakespearean sonnet, and the markers are features in the text that the student is explaining.

I think the functionality would be relatively simple to develop, because we have tools that do similar things. Dragging the bubbles and creating related text is no different in function than dragging the text tags for the Venn or Plot Diagram. The background could be passed with xml, as we pass in text for the Guided Tour. Or at the worst, we’d have subfolders for each new version (a la the Graphic Map).

I’m hoping to investigate the options on this. Could be a cool tool that wouldn’t take long to develop.

The owner of the roofing company just came to my door. Apparently my soffit is shot, and the facia (?) that it should connect to wasn’t properly done in the first place. $600. He showed me places where someone had tried to use drywall screws to hold the soffit in place.

Before this discussion, I had no idea what a soffit was (“the exposed underside of any overhead component of a building”), let alone that I owned one. I still don’t know how to spell facia. Thank you, Google. It appears to be fascia (not “a thick band of fiberous tissue” but “a horizontal band or board, often used to conceal the ends of rafters; the front of an object”).

He promises that is the last thing. I told him I wasn’t letting him in the house because he was gonna find something else. The plumber is supposed to come at the end of the day to work on the dropped pipe/vent. I’m okay with someone working on the roof while I’m not here, but it’s creepy to have someone in the house while I’m gone. I’m trying to breathe and avoid anxiety. The plumber is probably going to find 15 more broken things. Why did I move far away from family handyhelpers and buy my own house?