Thursday, February 19, 2009

Poetry and Pictures with PicLit

Love poetry? Here's your chance for focusing ideas and imprinting images by adding text to pictures.

Here's an example:

PicLit from PicLits.com
See the full PicLit at PicLits.com

The text says:

Lincoln
Remembered
dreams
for
us.

Will
we?

I chose the picture to honor President Abraham Lincoln's 200th birthday this year. I chose the words from a list provided for me. I chose those words because Lincoln knew we needed to stay together as a Union -- united together. He remembered the dreams we all have, and worked to keep the dream of America and us alive. Will we?




How to create your own poetry pictures?


1. Go to PicLit
2. Choose a picture.
3. Connect to it with your ideas and experience.
4. Read the words in the list provided. Develop in your mind a message that expresses your ideas.
5. Choose the words that express your connection to the image. Be short and concise -- the picture should dominate, and the words should draw out a theme from the image.
6. Save, email, blog, etc.
7. You can also take a screenshot, but be sure you credit PicLit.

Poetry in Pictures, a fun way to learn to be concise and exact.

Thursday, February 12, 2009

How We're Writing

Our wiki is growing. We've written letters to the future president, created voicethreads on our service, and collaborated with each other on our wiki.

In the Letters to the President project, we drafted and revised collaboratively on Google Docs.

After the Inaugural Address, we discussed the President Obama's call to service, and began a journey through personal journals and goal-setting to make a change to act in ways that would help our community. We are documenting our journey in a form created in Google Docs.

That led to recording our service in a voicethread in which we invited others to join us in serving our country.



Schools in Wisconsin and San Diego are joining the call to service. President Obama may be presented with our voices.

Please look through our work on our wiki. The wiki allows us to draft and revise easily, and receive comments with suggestions so we can improve our writing. You will notice that our new friends from Presbyterian Day School have commented on the Grade 5 pages. Their fifth grade and ours are working together, collaborating and sharing writing projects to become powerful writers. We will Skype, voicethread, wiki, and blog together.

So how are we writing? We are writing in 21st Century ways: collaborating online using the tools of technology that help us work smarter and smoother.

How are we doing?

My Learning Network

Always learning...