A Poem in Your Pocket

Help spread the power of poetry -- share ideas on twitter for how to share poems on 4/30 for "A Poem in Your Pocket Day" on April 30th. Label tweets #ppocket

Here's the first idea:

Create your own visual poem on Bubblr; blog or email it to friend for "A Poem in Your Pocket Day" on April 30th:

The Poem:

Spring
Barren earth
Blossoms in bubbles
Of delicate dew
For butterfly blessings
Mother Earth to you.

The visual:

Or link here: A Poem for Your Pocket by Sheri Edwards

HOW TO:

Go to Bubblr at http://www.pimpampum.net/bubblr/

Use the "tag" box to type a topic on which you want to write a poem.

I chose these (separately as needed): soil, spring, dewdrop

For your search, many photos will appear for you to drag to the current slide.

As I chose my photos, I added the cloud and text.

Then I published with a title and name from which the code can be created to embed or link or email. Enjoy.

National Poetry Month
Poem in Your Pocket

Go boldly and scatter seeds of kindness...
Reflect curiosity and wonder...

5 Photo Essay Tips from Digital Photography School

• 5 Photo Essay Tips - Annotated

• Express yourself in text and visuals on a topic of interest to you, or as a final project for your graduation.

• Check out iSearch initial assignment: https://whatelse.pbwiki.com/iSearch

• Below are the highlights and annotations for what a photo essay is from the Digital Photography School. Refere to these questions after reading the information:
  

•  

  • What do you know? 
    
  • What do you want to know?
    
  • How will  this help you?
    
  • What will you do next?
    
  • How will you document your journey?

  tags: essay, Photography, photoessay, point of view, theme, voice

  • And for the last one hundred years photography and storytelling went hand in hand.
  • developed by skillful photographers who understand the emotions and concepts behind ever-great story.
  • The form of such a story is called the photo essay.
  • A photo essay is very simply a collection of images that are placed in a specific order to tell the progression of events, emotions, and concepts.
  • the photo essay takes the same story telling techniques as a normal essay, translated into visual images.
    • Think in terms of: Grabber Beginning; Thesis; Main idea focus; Evidence; Conclusion; End with Action/Thought Just like you learned about written essays -- now you express your ideas through photos with captions. - post by sheri42
  • Every human being is drawn to stories.
  • photo essay is a brilliant way to bring your images to life and touch your family, friends, and coworkers.
  • 1. Find a topic
  • make your topic something in which you find interest.
  • 2. Do your research
  • spend time
  • talk with
  • investigate
  • check out the theme,
  • help you in planning out the type of shots you set up for your story.
  • 3. Find the “real story”
  • determine the angle you want to take your story
    • What is the angle? Who's voice will you share? What is the most important theme? - post by sheri42
  • Though each story idea is the same, the main factors of each story create an incredibly unique story.
  • 4. Every dynamic story is built on a set of core values and emotions that touch the heart of its audience. Anger. Joy. Fear. Hurt. Excitement. The best way you can connect your photo essay with its audience is to draw out the emotions within the story and utilize them in your shots. This does not mean that you manipulate your audience’s emotions. You merely use emotion as a connecting point.
    • What emotions did you find in your research and theme? How will the audience understand? How will your words and pictures explain your topic, emotions, and voice? - post by sheri42
  • 5.Plan your shots: Whether you decide to sit down and extensively visualize each shot of the story, or simply walk through the venue in your mind, you will want to think about the type of shots that will work best to tell your story. I recommend beginners first start out by creating a “shot list” for the story. Each shot will work like a sentence in a one-paragraph story. Typically, you can start with 10 shots. Each shot must emphasize a different concept or emotion that can be woven together with the other images for the final draft of the story.
    • Use a story board. Plan your shots and your text. Arrange them for powerful impact, just as if you are writing an essay -- what will explain or persuade? What order is best? What words will pack the punch that persuades or provides the facts for people to act or understand? - post by sheri42
  • Remember that story telling takes practice.
  • All you need is a bit of photographic technique, some creativity, and a lot of heart. And once you begin taking pictures in stories, your images will never be the same.
    • You are on your way to a journey of visual understanding and sharing that will help you understand the world as well as share the world. Learn and enjoy. - post by sheri42

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Research Required? Use Diigo!

Do you have research to do? A question to answer? Information to share? Here's the tool for highlighting, annotating, and sharing that important information.

Writers need information, background knowledge, and quotes to add depth and detail to their work. Diigo makes that task of organizing, notating, annotating, and sharing that information so much easier.

Diigo is web-browser enabled tool that allows users to highlight, annotate, and share information from the web.




Notice the yellow highlights and the pink highlights with an annotation.


Once you have bookmarked through Diigo your page, you can retrieve the link to the page, all your highlights, and all your annotations:










Here is the Diigo site of group bookmarks with annotations (green box) and comments (orange box) expanded.

These can be extracted and placed in a document (wiki, word process document, etc.) to analyze to draw one's own conclusions for research reports or other research needs.








This is a fantastic and collaborative research tool. The eighth grade students are conducting independent research from which their notes and annotations become resources for their draft conclusions for their thesis focus.

The fifth grade students are learning about Memphis, Tennessee from essays written by their Presbyterian Day School friends and placed on Mapskip. Students will write an itinerary for the choices they would recommend based on their notes and annotations on the work of our friends.

For a more complete How to Diigo, click here and here.

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:


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.

NPR: This I Believe...

Get this widget!

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...

October Observations

Power Writing.

Students stagnate; they need fluency. Writing requires the ability to translate thought into written discourse. The writing is not simply talk written down. It flows in the readers mind IF it is organized, vibrant, interesting, and precise. More precisely, according to William Zinsser, "Four basic premises of writing: clarity, brevity, simplicity, and humanity."

How can I move my students into more fluid and fluent writing? Peter Elbow, Writing with Power, says, "Freewriting is the easiest way to get words on paper and the best all-around practice in writing that I know." In his introduction, he explains that "...writing with power also means getting power over yourself and over the writing process; knowing what you are doing as you write; being in charge; having control; not feeling stuck or helpless or intim­idated."

I know Mr. Elbow didn't want a teacher's intrusion into this powerful, free-writing technique, but I need to encourage my students into unintimidating writing -- to guide them into free-flowing thinking transformed into many words on paper. Without the ability to let ideas flow, my students would not ever become good writers.

A former colleague had introduced me to a National Writing Project class activity, "Power Writing." From her description I created word lists and a power writing format for students to follow to develop writing fluency. Here's the process:

Power Writing for Fluency from Sheri Edwards

Students focus, engage, and write. It's very exciting. An activity this week and next will be creating "Found Poems" from our power writing. Students will find fifteen consecutive words that are interesting or clever to them. We'll read their choices in a performance of a living poem while we listen and admire our fluency power.

With our new power in putting prose on paper, we'll be able to move to manipulating the language into wonderful words, words of brevity, clarity, simplicity, and humanity.

Writing will be power !

Election Selection

Writers write well when they know the topic.

This year in this season, students are discussing the hot topic of elections. Who will be the next President? To help students clarify their limited knowledge, we are investigating the issues of the major candidates. Students will read and take notes from Weekly Reader, Scholastic, and other sites that explain the issues. Then they will discuss the issues with their family so they can sort out the issues important to all of them. It's a great opportunity for family discussions.

Finally, we will vote in the Weekly Reader and the National Mock Election.

Our goal is to learn the process of becoming President of the United States and to learn how to make an informed choice in candidates, based on family input from factual discussions.

How informed are you? Do you know enough to write about the issues? Hopefully, our students will. Democracy in action -- kid style.

Knowledge is Power

"Knowledge is power." Sir Francis Bacon

Several phone calls in the evening and in the morning seemed to help allieviate the firewall problem. By 8:50 am today our class sites were up again. How long will it last? I don't know.

This censorship is an issue debated on Twitter, Blogs, and staff rooms across the country.

Safety, yes. But our power is in the ability to recognize value and relevance. How do we teach this if a software filter makes the decisions after a teacher has already deemed the need and relevance? Why is the software the boss? Why does it take the time of an email to list the sites and then the efforts to unbug them from the filter in order to use the knowledge at the site?

www.reading.org/downloads/53rd_conv_handouts/NetNannyornotPDF.pdf

I appreciate the quickness with which our IT Department responded to remediate the filter's overzealousness. "Block the Bad; Guard the Good." If Google can find 1,000,000+ sites in .2 seconds, surely a filter could be more responsive to the realities of appropriate sites rather than simply block everything.

"The only thing we have to fear, is fear itself." Franklin D. Roosevelt

Let's opt for more teacher input and "guarding the good." Students deserve the right to learn how to search, how to decide, how to ignore, and how to choose, use, or refuse the information.

"More affluent students will have the privilege of ditching the newly censored school computers for their less restricted ones at home, while the less fortunate will likely be stuck in a frustrating and quite discriminatory situation," said Jess Pinkham, a senior at Stuyvesant High School. "This is a blatant violation of one of the initial intentions of the Internet, to provide accessible information to everyone."

http://www.aclu.org/privacy/speech/15123prs20020918.html

How will we help our students prepare for the 21st Century if we block first?

"Knowledge is power." Sir Francis Bacon

Let's not add to the digital divide or multiply the problems of remoteness by subtracting relevant sites from student access.

Thank goodness our ESD responds quickly. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Filtration Frustration: "Block the Bad; Guard the Good"

Filtration Frustration

I worked two days of my three day weekend designing a wiki-quest for students to research election issues. I arrived at school to a new firewall filter and NONE of my wikis, blogs, lesson plans, or links work -- all blocked by the firewall, including Weekly Reader and Brain Bop! All the science teacher's daily links are blocked. What kind of filter does that, and why? Why is a filter deciding what we can use in the classroom?

I am the teacher, the curriculum designer incorporating technology into my classroom to help students meet 21st Century standards; yet I am constantly defeated by the Technology Department. I just don't understand why ITs decrease access and disregard the teachers moving into the 21st Century. Is it because we are so rural and remote that the ITs who come to our school think we are not 21st Century learners and teachers?

What do other teachers and schools do? What are we who are attempting to move forward supposed to do to convince IT Departments to include teachers in their planning?

Now tonight at home I need to print the information to show overhead, and redo lesson plans because we no longer have access to our sites.

So frustrating to have this filter on legitimate knowledge, especially with absolutely no warning. I don't believe in Pop Quizes. I provide my students with everything they need to be successful-- and then some. Shouldn't teachers be provided the same support? If we all supported each other -- collaborated -- wouldn't that help students even more?

Deep sigh.

My colleagues and I simply want to teach, and be supported in our endeavors to engage students --- who are also wondering why their access is limited at school. Responsible use only comes with the ability to make decisions about the relevance, accuracy, and appropriateness of the sites we choose.

I just had to tell a colleague who phoned to prepare for no internet use; there is no answer at this time.

There is, however, much information on the issues of student safety, censorship, and teaching and learning in the 21st Century:

PEW Internet Safety
PBS: Frontline: Kids Growing Up Online
Student Learning: Center For Applied Research in Educational Technology
Get Net Wise
First Amendment Center
First Amendment
Center for Democracy and Technology
Citizens Internet Empowerment Coalition




www.reading.org/downloads/53rd_conv_handouts/NetNannyornotPDF.pdf

The Scores

Blog delay. It's two years later. In 2007, 75% of the writing students passed their WASL scores! In 2008, 58% of the students passed, with 43% improving their fourth grade WASL scores.

Statistically, our class sizes are too small (less than 30 -- actually, less than 20 students) to compare. There's not enough data to support trends.

The scores don't reflect improvement of individuals, and the efforts or obstacles employed and overcome over the years.

We are teaching children, not building airplanes. We focus on needs and strengths of children, not input of data into a computer. Anyone who works with children, and any one who has tried to learn something, knows that the components of learning involve more than the teacher, more than the lesson, more than the content, more than the learner. It's all the "more than" that is not shown on tests.

We are more than the tests; and schools must be allowed to continue to nurture and nudge learning, rather than press and punish. Standards are the goals to reach, and each child can achieve given the knowledge and time to grow in his/her style and need.

Why can't we see the human element in education?

Just asking. Just for kids. To succeed with standards, we need equity in resources and time for each child. We can't force kids to learn at the same rate. We can ask all kids to learn each day.

Please visit:

PBS The Whole Child
ASCD The Whole Child
Brain-Based Learning
ASCD The Brain and Learning
WEAC Standardized Testing
Fair Test
Standards-Based Learning

Test Tension

Last year's scores will soon be released. What do they mean, and how have they changed education? Are we now just teaching to the test instead of teaching to the child -- the child's needs with regards to becoming a thinking, caring, productive person? Are we causing children to lose talents because they aren't exposed any more to art, music, and the joy of learning?

Visit: http://www.wholechildeducation.org/ an new website sponsored and promoted by the Association for Curriculum and Supervision Development (ASCD). Also, watch the video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XTRKHR-6i3k



What do we really want for our children?

PB Wiki

PB Wiki allows me to easily keep lesson plans, links, student pages available for all five of my classes.


Link to
http://educators.pbwiki.com/PBwiki-educator-videos



Link to our new
PBwiki tour

Learning

I applied a slideshare in my second post. It took over my blog. Do I fret? No! I'll try to fix it with this blog! As I said in the Wiki 1 slide show: Have a go!

Wiki 1: How to Start on the Wiki

Update:
This is for early Wikispaces and also worked with initial PBWiki 1.0 sites. It was adapted slightly for my PBwiki student users two years ago (2007). Much has changed since.

The original is from Chris Smith here:
http://wikivideolibrary.blogspot.com/2007/05/wiki-1-getting-started.html

Also see the more current information in the library of wiki information Chris Smith has created about wikis at:
http://wikivideolibrary.blogspot.com/

Welcome

Writing is hard fun. ~ Donald Murray

Welcome to Nespelem Writes

Join us in puzzling through the process of writing well. Dare to delve into your thoughts and learning, and share those ideas with others.

Why is writing "hard fun?"

William Zinsser explains:

"Writing is thinking on paper."

"Writing and learning and thinking are the same process."

Our brains solve puzzles. Transferring ideas onto paper is a puzzle; it's a process that requires careful thought, and the puzzling, although hard, is fun --- we feel accomplished when we've done it right. And doing it right means, according to Zinsser,

"Four basic premises of writing: clarity, brevity, simplicity, and humanity."

So lets keep it clear, brief, and simple: engage your brain, enjoy the puzzle, and join in a collaborative effort to learn writing by writing.

Ms. Edwards