List of Ten: Fun with Crayons

August 29, 2010 by

Crayon Lineup by laffy4kI’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]

Filed under classroom activities, List of Ten, Teaching Composition Tagged with , , , ,

March of Time Newsreels in the Classroom

August 27, 2010 by

Film Canisters by Mr. T in DCBack 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]

Filed under American Lit, classroom activities Tagged with , , , , ,

6 Reasons Blogrolls Are Dying

August 22, 2010 by

Cinnamon Roll by stevendepoloI 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]

Filed under Teaching with Digital Tools

What Are Kidwatching, Microblogging, and Podcasts?

August 19, 2010 by

Writing a Podcast by Irish TypepadSoon 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]

Filed under classroom activities, Teaching with Digital Tools Tagged with , , ,

Activities That Ask Students to Explore Cultural Mindsets

August 18, 2010 by

Wrist watch by sergis blogThis 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]

Filed under classroom activities Tagged with ,

The Back-to-School Organization Bug

August 16, 2010 by

Desk supplies by Russ NeumeierI 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]

Filed under Personal Journal

Tengrrl Cooks: A Collection Space for Family Recipes

August 14, 2010 by

Hanging Pans in Kitchen by रोकावट के लिया खेदEarlier this week, I wrote about my ongoing challenge to organize the bits of paper and pixels in my life. The one category that I was most lost on was how to handle the many recipes and cooking ideas spread around my desk.

I have recipes in a plastic recipe box, in a 3-ring binder, and in a folder on my computer. I have some online recipes hidden in Delicious and others in my Food Network recipe box. I have a few in a wiki I tried to create as an online cookbook. And I have printouts stuck in various piles on my desk and in the kitchen. In short, I’m overrun with recipes, and I never know where the one I need is.

After a lot of thinking and advice from my friend Lisa Fink, who has her own online recipe collection, I decided to set up a blog specifically for recipes. After all, they really do not belong here with the teaching ideas.

I did a little research and found a WordPress plugin specifically for recipes, hRecipe. It adds in the headers and sections to keep the recipes consistent, and uses the hRecipe 0.22 microformat that optimizes the recipes for searching and classification. The microformat is used on the Food Network website as well as a number of other sites.

So if you’re interested in cooking, take a look at Tengrrl Cooks. There are only four recipes there so far, but they’re great ones:

Tell me what you think of the new site, and let me know if you have a favorite recipe I should try!

 

[Creative Commons licensed Flickr photo by रोकावट के लिया खेद]

Filed under Personal Journal Tagged with

Searching for an Organization System that Clicks

August 8, 2010 by

Stack of Papers by quinn.anyaA pile of papers has slowly taken over my desk. Like a vicious mold, it started with a small bit, and it’s grown larger and larger until it seems like there’s no clear area left.

Hidden in this pile I found expired coupons, a couple of shopping lists, some recipes, a couple of articles pulled from magazines, and a very large number of web pages that I’ve printed out over the last year.

Why? I can’t seem to find the right way to organize things. I print them out and try to lie them in useful places so that I can return to them when I need them. Digging through that pile today, however, showed me that things I thought I would need in August of last year were sitting untouched at the bottom of the various collections of paper.

No system seems to click. Nothing gives me that perfect “this is RIGHT” feeling. So I’ve gone through the lists and tried to find a new way to deal with them, a way that doesn’t result in a lot of dusty piles of paper. Here’s what’s evolved:

Gmail for registration information: I have a reginfo folder in Gmail and every email with a serial number, registration information and the like goes in that folder. I don’t try to organize them any further than that. If I need anything, a search of the folder can find it quickly. This system has actually been working for me for years. Previously, it was a folder in Eudora or one in Pine, but Gmail is nicer because of the search and the easy access from anywhere.

Google Tasks for writing ideas: Right now, most of my writing ideas are in a massive to-do list in Google Tasks. I got this idea from Ryan Cordell’s guest post on Profhacker. Ryan was actually talking about Cultured Code’s Things, but I wanted a cross-platform, free solution. Tasks seemed like a great idea back in January when I dumped everything in there, but it’s just not working. I have more than a page of ideas and no easy way to organize them. There’s not even an easy way to count them. There are no printouts involved, but it’s not working.

Evernote for writing ideas: The elephant icon has been up there in my toolbar staring at me for a while, nagging at me to look at Evernote again. When I glanced at it Thursday, I thought it might be a handy way to store ideas I wanted to come back to. I poked a few things in there, but that was about it. Today, however, as I unearthed printouts that I needed, I realized that Evernote might be quite useful. As I found the corresponding pages online, I added them to the proper folder in Evernote and tossed the paper in the recycling bin. Maybe Evernote can work for the majority of things I was printing out:

Recipes? Recipes are my biggest confusion. There must have been 20 printouts, clippings, or jotted out recipes in the piles I’ve gone through so far. I’ve been trying to figure out what to do with recipes for months now. I tried creating a Wiki for them, but it’s not getting very far. I wish there were plug-in templates for different kind of Wikis, but having to figure out the layout and setup is just more work than I’ve had time to do. Tonight, as I found the recipes in the pile, I added them as private Delicious bookmarks. I’m not really happy with that solution either. I don’t want them out in the public, because everything else in my Delicious account is work-related.

Dropbox? I have a Dropbox account, but there’s nothing useful in it. I’m not sure it’s helpful in this great printout organization effort, but I did diligently follow Lifehacker’s instructions to get an extra 250MB of space yesterday. And hey, if you don’t have a Dropbox account yet, sign up with my link and we’ll both get another 250MB of free space!

So that’s what I’m trying right now. Do you have a good solution? Know some way to keep online resources ready and easy to find without printing them out? Let me know in the comments. Please. I need all the help I can get.

 

[Creative Commons licensed Flickr photo by quinn.anya]

Filed under Personal Journal Tagged with , , , ,

BP’s Unintended Lesson on Visual Rhetoric

August 2, 2010 by

Altered BP HIVE Center Photo by BP AmericaIt’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:

BP Multiple-Monitor Pop Culture from Wired

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]

Filed under classroom activities, Teaching Prof Comm Tagged with ,

Easy Supplemental Reading: 100 Best Magazine Articles

August 2, 2010 by

Stack of Magazines by theseanster93No 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]

Filed under classroom activities, Teaching Composition

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