Serendipity35

Just a short post to send you over to Tom Barrett's blog. It's a good example of a classroom teacher blogging and putting together useful  and creative classroom resources and ideas. Tom teaches at a large primary and nursery school in north Nottinghamshire, England.

Okay, so a bunch of people reading this post who teach in the upper levels and higher ed just clicked off to another site. Too bad. Educators need to look at what is being done at other levels and in other disciplines more often.

Tom has this "Interesting Ways to Use" series that has been quite successful. In his own words, his role is just to "kickstart them and point them off in the right direction" and then they become examples of crowdsourcing as others add to them.

Take as examples, "Interesting Ways to Use Search Engines in Your Classroom" (now with 36 suggestions in a Google Docs presentation) or the "43 Ways To Use Wordle" presentation.

He has collected many of them on one page at http://tbarrett.edublogs.org/interesting-ways/.

It would be great to see more global collaboration such as this at other levels. Perhaps, this is one good educational use for Google Wave. (Tom has a presentation for Wave all ready - right now it's called "Zero Ways to Use Google Wave in Your Classroom" - which is the way a lot of us feel right now.)

I discovered, a bit late, that the National Day of Listening is this Friday, November 27, 2009. Not a great day to choose for teachers (who are likely to be off from school digesting turkey) or for most Americans who might be shopping on this "Black Friday."

StoryCorps launched the first annual National Day of Listening last year. The idea is to encourage people across the country to record and share conversations with loved ones and neighbors using our Do-It-Yourself materials. (I suppose that's the Thanksgiving connection - family gatherings.)

Their target audience includes schools, libraries, and service organizations.

StoryCorps is an independent nonprofit whose mission is to honor and celebrate one another’s lives through listening. Since 2003, more than 50,000 Americans have interviewed family and friends through StoryCorps, making it one of the largest oral history projects of its kind.

Record a conversation with someone important to you and preserve the interview using a cell phone, tape recorder, computer... check out the Do-It-Yourself Instruction Guide.

Teachers can download a kit to use on the site. There's even a question generator to get conversations going.

 

Apple co-founder and CEO Steve Jobs has become known for his product launch presentations. So, it's not a big surprise that a book like The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs: How to Be Insanely Great in Front of Any Audience would be published. It's written by communications coach Carmine Gallo. In it, he tries to describe how to use some of Jobs' strategies in your own presentations.

Gallo is aiming at a business audience (he also wrote 10 Simple Secrets of the World's Greatest Business Communicators), but as he says in the book, Steve Jobs doesn't really sell computers and iPods - he sells an experience.

Does this translate to a classroom? I think most of us also hope to inform, educate, and entertain, and some of us are equally theatrical - being concerned about our "script," use some props, and try to use strong visuals.

Oversimplified, Gallo notes five elements of Jobs' presentations that you might use to sell ideas.

HEADLINE(s) Short, Twitter-age main ideas (MacBook Air = the world's thinnest notebook)

SIMPLE SLIDES  Simple, clean Apple products and simple, clean presentation slides that are more visual and devoid of bullet points. Gallo says the average PowerPoint slide has 40 words, but that Jobs might have 7 words in 10 slides.

DEMO(s)  Jobs is into demonstrating a new product or feature by the 10 minute mark.

HOLY SMOKES MOMENT(s)   It's tough to have what neuroscientists call an "emotionally charged event" in every class. (Steve Jobs doesn't have to present 180 days a year or every Monday and Wednesday in a lecture hall.) But, if you have one "mental post-it note" moment that students can take away...  Okay, when he launched the iPod in 2001 and said, "In our own small way we're going to make the world a better place" that may have been a bit lofty, but he's good at presenting a sense of mission, passion, emotion, and enthusiasm. Does that describe any teachers that you had, and that you still fondly remember?



    BusinessWeek interview with Gallo

Anne Frank and literature is the type of topic that is more likely to appear on one of the other blogs that I use, but in this instance, it was the tech side of teaching her diary that caught my attention.  

Many teachers use Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl as a reading in their courses. It's one of those titles (like To Kill A Mockingbird, Of Mice and Men et al) that is a standard, especially in high school English classrooms, which make them perennial bestsellers. Maybe that list is too narrow, (It's also the list of Cliff Notes, Spark Notes and all those publications too.), but her diary continues to have interest.

Part of that interest may be that we have the diary to read at all. The story of its discovery and publication is part of the entire story. (It was turned down by plenty of publishers.)

Francine Prose has a new book called Anne Frank: The Book, The Life, The Afterlife. Prose's book looks at the diary in a different way: as a literary work. She doesn't approach the diary as a teenager pouring out her inner life, but as a more consciously crafted work of literature.

For students who read the diary in middle school or high school, this might be an interesting approach to the book in an upper level English class or college classroom. Prose shows evidence that Anne did a lot of revision before her arrest with the intention of being published.

There are still those that criticize Anne's father for "minimizing the Jewish essence of the Holocaust," and might criticize Francine Prose as over-inflating Anne's literary abilities and ambitions. That's just more for the discussion.

I also wonder how many teachers take advantage at the media freely available online to supplement this kind of discussion. Why not assign students as an "outside reading" to listen to Francine Prose talk about new book online?

What discussion might come from students looking at the only known film footage of Anne Frank herself? This video (yes, on that terrible time waster - YouTube, which is probably blocked in some schools) was shot July 22 1941.



"The girl next door is getting married. Anne Frank is leaning out of the window of her house in Amsterdam to get a good look at the bride and groom. It is the only time Anne Frank has ever been captured on film. At the time of her wedding, the bride lived on the second floor at Merwedeplein 39. The Frank family lived at number 37, also on the second floor."   The Anne Frank House offers this on their YouTube site.

I also heard Francine Prose on my local NPR station (WNYC) interviewed and that is available online. It's from The Leonard Lopate Show which is also available by subscription in iTunes, so you can download the files. That's useful for classrooms that have limited bandwidth or block all the good media sources.

The show site's comments also led me to discover that "NYC houses the US partner organization to the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam right here in Soho on 38 Crosby Street. It provides exhibitions on AF and her times and other related materials, as well as public and in depth educational programming going into the schools (such as the one Ms. Prose visited in Queens) dealing on issues of intolerance, creative writing, always using the diary as a piece of literature."


Another Recommendation: Francine Prose's Reading Like a Writer - a good book for students who want to write, that encourages them to first be readers.