Bedford Bits

Spring Ahead: Bits Flashback for March 13

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springWhen I was little, I couldn’t remember the difference between Daylight Savings Time and Standard Time. Mom always repeated a little saying: “Spring ahead; Fall back.” I haven’t seen a flower pop its head above ground yet, but as I set my clock ahead this weekend, I know Spring can’t be too far away.

We’re springing ahead with a brand-new website for Bedford/St. Martin’s. It has a cleaner look and feel, new navigation elements, and helpful resources that make your search for course materials quick and easy. Check it out, and let us know what you think!

You probably noticed that we’ve been busy at Bedford Bits this past week too, with posts on posts on plagiarism, class discussion, video games, and more. Here’s a look back before you spring ahead into a new week:

—Traci Gardner

[Photo: spring by Aunt Owwee, on Flickr]

ReadWriteThink

Lesson Plans and Resources for Script Frenzy

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Day 30 - Fade In:If you are thinking of challenging students to take part in the Young Writers Program (YWP) for Script Frenzy, you’ll want some resources to support the project.

As I explained in more detail yesterday, Script Frenzy is the free event that asks writers to spend April writing a script for a screenplay, stage play, TV show, short film, comic, or graphic novel.

The YWP site has information for teachers that includes lesson plans for all age levels walk students through the basic tasks from setting their goals to building conflict and developing dialogue. You can even apply to borrow computers for classroom use during the month—deadline March 15, so hurry!

Help students find the focus for their scripts by trying one of these ReadWriteThink lessons (plus one from Thinkfinity partner EDSITEment):

 

Cross-posted to the Reading and Language Arts Discussion Group in the Thinkfinity Community and to the NCTE Community ReadWriteThink eGroup and Graphic Novels eGroup.

 

[Photo: Day 30 – Fade In: by Kurt Thomas Hunt, on Flickr]

classroom activities

Challenge students to take part in Script Frenzy!

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P170409_20.38Script Frenzy is a free event that challenges writers to compose an entire script during the month of April. There are many more official details on the site’s About Page. All kinds of scripts are welcome: screenplays, stage plays, TV shows, short films, comics, and graphic novels.

Students from elementary, middle, and high schools can take part in the Young Writers Program. These writers set a personal page-count goal, begin writing on April 1, and upload evidence that they’ve met their goal by April 30. There’s a step-by-step page of instructions as well as information for teachers. You can even use the letter to families to keep everyone in the loop.

College students and the rest of us can take part in the adult program, which challenges writers to compose a 100-page script. All the details for adults are on the site.

The site includes how-to’s for all the genres, like this Intro to Graphic Novels, and there’s even a Plot Machine to check out on the homepage. Here’s the first plot I got:

In an attempt to evade taxes
a disgruntled child actor
must cross a ravine on a tightrope

Obviously, they may not all be classroom-friendly :-)

The event is the dramatic cousin of the National Novel Writer’s Month project, which takes place in November.

So are you interested? Will you tell students? Thinking of organizing class participation? I’d love to hear some stories from other teachers thinking about getting into a script frenzy.

 

Cross-posted to the NCTE Community Teaching Writing eGroup and Graphic Novels eGroup.

[Photo: P170409_20.38 by robbelaw, on Flickr]

Bedford Bits

In Like a Lion! Bits Flashback for March 6

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Lions & Lion CubsAccording to the old adage, March should come in like a lion and go out like a lamb. With rain and flood watches here in Blacksburg and reports of new snow from colleagues across the country, I guess the saying is true to its word. Here’s hoping that you got a mild, little lion cub rather than a big growl lion of weather.

This past week, Bedford Bits has had posts on everything from poetry to propaganda. Here’s the round-up, in case you missed something!

[Photo: “Lions & Lion Cubs by fortherock, on Flickr]

NCTE Inbox

Black History Month Links for 2011

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Virginia Civil Rights MemorialI gathered a list of links for Black History Month for the NCTE Inbox Blog in 2010. Lots of new resources have come online in the last year, so I’ve updated the collection with the most recent and best K12 and College resources for for African American Read-Ins and Black History Month celebrations.

As I wrote last year, click away, read, and marvel at these rich resources. There’s enough that you can visit a new site every day this month!

General Background Information

  1. African American History Month, from The Library of Congress
  2. Black History, from The History Channel
  3. Black History, from the National Archive
  4. Black History Month, from Biography.com
  5. Black History Month, from EDSITEment
  6. Black History Month, from Thinkfinity
  7. Culture and Change: Black History in America, from Scholastic
  8. The State of Black Studies: Methodology, Pedagogy and Research, from the Schomburg Center at the New York Public Library

Literature

  1. A Brief Chronology of African American Literature, from San Antonio College Lit Web
  2. African American Poets, from Famous Poets and Poems
  3. African American Women Writers of the 19th Century, from The Schomburg Center at the New York Public Library
  4. African-American Women, from Duke University Library
  5. Black History, from Academy of American Poets
  6. Twenty-Eight Days Later, A Black History Month Celebration of Children’s Literature, from The Brown Bookshelf
  7. Black History Month, from Reading Rockets

Historical and Nonfiction Texts

  1. African-American Odyssey, from The Library of Congress
  2. African-American Quotations, from InfoPlease
  3. African-American Sheet Music, 1850-1920, from the Library of Congress
  4. African American Cultural Heritage Tour, from the Smithsonian Institute
  5. Africana & Black History, from the New York Public Library
  6. American Slave Narratives: An Online Anthology, from American Studies Hypertexts at the University of Virginia
  7. The Church in the Southern Black Community, from Documenting the American South
  8. Electronic Text Center: African American, from the University of Virginia (Includes texts about African Americans as well as by African Americans)
  9. In Motion: The African-American Migration Experience, from the Schomburg Center at the New York Public Library
  10. In Those Days: African-American Life Near the Savannah River, from the National Park Service
  11. North American Slave Narratives, from Documenting the American South
  12. Notable Speeches and Letters by African Americans, from InfoPlease

Personal Histories

  1. Experience War: Stories from the Veterans History Project, from the Library of Congress
  2. Oral Histories, from the National Visionary Leadership Project
  3. StoryCorps Griot, from National Museum of African American History and Culture

Photographs and Other Visual Images

  1. The Civil Rights Era in the U.S. News & World Report Photographs Collection, from The Library of Congress
  2. The Face of Slavery & Other African American Photographs, from The American Museum of Photography
  3. Images of African Americans from the 19th Century, from the Schomburg Center at the New York Public Library
  4. Jackson Davis Collection of African American Educational Photographs, from the University of Virginia Library
  5. Pictures of African Americans During World War II, from the National Archive
  6. Photographs of Signs Enforcing Racial Discrimination: Documentation by Farm Security Administration-Office of War Information Photographers, from The Library of Congress
  7. Portrait of Black Chicago, from the National Archive
  8. Through the Lens of Time: Images of African Americans from the Cook Collection, from VCU Libraries

[Photo: Virginia Civil Rights Memorial by john.murden, on Flickr]

 

Personal Journal

Top Ten Blog Entries for 2010

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HP Winter Summit 2010It’s that time of year when we take a few minutes to look back and reflect. I asked Google Analytics to do some of the work for me, and it came up with these blog entries, written in 2010, which received the most traffic during the year.

  1. 6 News Stories to Connect to Orwell’s 1984
    Big brother really is watching you and the students you teach. These news stories (check the comments for additional links) talk about how schools and communities are using big brother tactics to track what you do.
     
  2. Top 10 Things to Do with a Banned Text
    This List of Ten shares ways that students can think critically about censorship, focusing primarily on argument and persuasion.
     
  3. Text + Image = Tagxedo: The Next Generation of Word Cloud Fun
    Word cloud-driven analysis (like Wordle) is ready to move to the next level with Tagxedo, which shapes your cloud of words into an image.
     
  4. List of Ten: Fun with Crayons
    This collection of assignment prompts focuses on crayons, everything from color names to childhood memories.
     
  5. 38 Ways to Write about Writing
    A collection of links to 38 ways that students can reflect on the writing they are doing, the strategies they use, and the different experiences they have had as writers.
     
  6. What’s the Trick to Building Community in the Classroom?
    Online or off, getting students to talk to each other is a tricky task. These three lessons about building community in the business world, make a lot of sense in the classroom too.
     
  7. 6 Reasons Blogrolls Are Dying
    When I tried to update a comp/rhet blogroll list, I found that blogrolls seem to be a dying breed.
     
  8. Thanksgiving Classroom Discussion: The Meaning of Thanksgiving
    It turns out Mark Twain was a bit harsh about Thanksgiving, according to an excerpt from his newly-published autobiography. Turn the short passage into a classroom discussion of culture and commercialism.
     
  9. Turning Blog Posts Into a Book Draft
    Thanks to NaNoWriMo and Literature & Latte’s Scrivener, I turned a variety of notes and blog posts into a very rough and informal book draft of 52,967 words!
     
  10. Literary Lists of “Ten Best”
    This round-up features unusual literary lists (like 10 best tattoos or 10 best pairs of glasses in literature) from an ongoing series published in the UK newspaper The Guardian. See the comments for links to more.

So that’s 2010. I was surprised by the popularity of the Orwell post. I just happened upon several stories and threw them into the post. Lots of teachers seem to come to it however, and it was even linked in October from the New York Times Learning Blog. Who knew I’d ever get a shoutout from the New York Times? Not bad, as I look back at my personal blog writing. Not bad at all.

[Image: HP Winter Summit 2010 by negotiable_me, on Flickr]