Category: Writing

Student Writing: Blogs

This post is a bit specific, written for a colleague: if none of this helps you, swipe on by.

The question is how to start student blogging and grading with an LMS like Canvas.

There are a few paths to take, and of course, if your district allows Google products, things like Blogger, etc. are easy. However, Blogger can be a bit risky for students, and I had a lot of trouble with it with my district’s firewalls, etc. For over ten years, my greatest success came with Edublogger. Before a district contact left the district, he was asking me about it, but unfortunately, my recommendation left with him.

Here’s what I love about Edublog:

  • You can set up a ProAccount for a very low yearly cost.
  • You can have students create their own blogs you can supervise and manage. That gets a bit advanced, and I would try it at the start:
    • Set up an Edublog site for all students, (and go through the Gmail process if students don’t have email addresses) (Edublog’s support is unparalleled)
    • Important: make sure students do not use their real names but come up with an avatar name. You will be able to see your users
  • In Canvas, set up an assignment that requires the students to either a. put in a URL or b. a Text file and they’ll past the URL DIRECTLY TO THEIR POST. Yes, ALL CAPS because this is important: when you have 150 students writing blog posts it’s is up to them to direct you to their post.
    • Canvas assignments will allow you to provide a rubric to a post, give it a score, etc. This is a 21st Century technology standard. Have students learn how to import media, YouTube, embed HTML code, tag, and add the proper categories.

Canvas.jpg

Canvas has great discussion capabilities, but it doesn’t have a blogging option.

4. ALSO IMPORTANT: give them author status so you don’t have to approve of every post. You are still the administrator and can delete or edit any post a student writes.

5. You can change the privacy settings in Edublogs so only students and parents can see what’s posts.

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This is the site I’ve used in the past and will continue next year (back to ELA/SS! YAY!) http://readingroadtrip.edublogs.org/

If you want to try to join my site as an author to see what it looks like from the students’ point of view, here is a link: https://edublogs.org/?join-invite-code=153925-testcode

I’ve had students post on class blogs, writing club blogs, etc. You may have noticed I use WordPress for my personal teaching blog, and no longer Edublogs. The reasons are simple: it’s my professional work and I may choose to monetize it.

Students’ voice and choice are critical to their engagement and growth. There are few things more powerful than a student who chooses to write and share his thinking.

 

The Writer’s Retreat

 

IMG_4070Deliciously, when many teachers around the nation are going back to school, this is sweet revenge for those of us who do not return until the last week of August. We may have had to slog it out through late June, but dang we are sure happy in July and August. I have a lot to do, that’s for sure, to get my new room set up, continue to beg for DonorsChoose donations for #ProjectLIT, and mentally prepare myself for the year as best I can.

IMG_8104

However, I’ve been so obsessed with TEACHER TEACHING that I forgot that I am also a person who had an identity and spirit before this all-consuming profession.

IMG_4035This week, I told my grown sons and husband that since I couldn’t afford to go anywhere, I was going to give myself a “writer’s retreat” at home– the dining room has long been overrun by an old dog, a table, and all my stuff. It faces the southerly window with a view of red camellia and a very tall pine tree we started as a sapling. This entire vignette is brought to me by luck. Luck, privilege, hard work, time, thinking, planting, waiting, and loss. And growth again.

What am I doing during my writer’s retreat? My personal play-fort of creative fun? Well, I’ve asked the gentlemen in my home to ignore me, and by and large, they are always respectful of my time and work. Any mental energy I afford them stems from my own doing: they are not the high-maintenance ones in this scenario. My husband and I have built a family culture that allows for creative pursuits: music, language, art, writing, and photography. We are all dilettantes, however, and I hope that each of us can break out of amateur mode.

My plan includes:

The process:

  • Setting a timer to chime every 50 minutes. I’ll get up, stretch, make a snack, drink water, pet the dogs, pull a patch of weeds, etc.
  • Cleaning up Scrivener and trying Omni Writer
  • Ignoring Facebook and Twitter (already failed a few times this morning)
  • Plan for my writing life with intentionality–and it must extend beyond August. And I need to let go of any thoughts of NaNoWriteMo: it ain’t going to happen and puts this weird pressure that kills writing joy. Nothing against the concept: I just need to kill it.
  • Ignore the insanity that is our nation now. Is that privilege? Yes. Do I feel guilty? Yes. Not sure how I conflated keeping track of the news with actually doing something. The only way I can mitigate this guilt is by creating something in its place.

The products:

  • Three short stories
  • Outline of a novel
  • Poetry
  • One ghost story
  • Drafting an outline for a project suggested by my friend John Spencer
  • Write blog posts
  • Perhaps…publish one post on Medium?
  • Collect an anthology of works previously written

Writing has been challenging the past two years. I used to write all the time, and not just on this blog. I modeled my writing life for students, and consider myself to be an excellent writing teacher. (Although: had a need to look through my National Boards information and that was one area I scored low on: not sure how I feel about that. I can only imagine what our students feel.) What is happening to me is beyond procrastination–it’s trauma. Scenes or dialog from the past two years of teaching pop in my head randomly, and throw a range of pebbles to boulders in my emotional serenity well. (I just had my Tarot Cards read, and yeah…pebbles indeed. Time to buy a singing bowl and recenter.)

I do need to leach out the trauma. Some people in power did some pretty awful things. I’ll make the list and keep it folded up. As my friend Sharon said, when we revisit bad memories we grow more dendrites in our brains that carve out thick, worn paths to that bad memory, and it gets easier to stay trapped in it. Perhaps I am struggling to give up the bad stuff because it feels like forgetting is forgiveness. That there is no cost or justice.

But that’s what writing is for. Perhaps folks who don’t consider themselves writers don’t fully connect with this: my dendrites write my narrative. I can funnel that energy into a story. The characters may or may not recognize themselves, (shrug) but that is where the true power and magic lives: I have a voice. A pen. And a blank sheet of paper. And there’s no stopping or censoring the power of a story.

ace of cups.jpg

 

 

 

Summer Series of Saves: Disrupt the Essay, Continued. (IV)

Three examples of how an essay structure can be dismantled and put back together:

I. Chuck Wendig retells The Three Little Pigs: #literaryanalysis essay:

Chuck uses the medium of Twitter to take on a writing challenge and analyzing The Three Little Pigs and how it relates to capitalism.

II. This is America, Childish Gambino, Donald Glover – from Genius

Think how we co-construct meaning and share insight into art and music. Quotes and sections of these insights provide help and mentor texts for students.

https://genius.com/Childish-gambino-this-is-america-lyrics#

III. The Face in the Waves 

This is how a story can be told with imagery, compassion, and share the voices of those affected by tragedy and loss.

https://mrskellylove.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/430d5-face-in-the-waves.mov

Work in progress:

 

Summer Series of Saves: Dismantling the Essay (III)

My goal this summer includes curating a new concept of what an essay is and can be. 

I sent my request out to the good educators on Twitter, tagging @ncte and @writingproject, and received a few ideas. Some switched up the medium, such as “do a video essay” and that’s partly what I was looking for, but not quite. I’m looking for essays that don’t feel like the rigid essays of “school” — one of the most unnatural forms of structured writing.

This post doesn’t have answers yet, or the curated list. It’s a start, a placeholder for the process. My goal is to encourage and foster true excitement about what essay writing is, and reading of essays. Though I have bristled over the structured, formulaic writing of essays it’s a love of reading essays that motivates me. I don’t want students to hate writing. None of us do. So why do we keep ignoring all the rich content and mentor texts that are shared? Not a single writer uses the five-paragraph structure. I can understand its use as a foundation, but we need to have some hard conversations about when to take the scaffold away.

Summer Series of Saves: The Cockroach (II)

When Kelly Gallagher tweeted about prior knowledge, he hit on something critical in this idea: that prior knowledge is also culturally dependent.

And this is key: culturally dependent also includes time, place, setting, generational, and fluid. Our cultures are not fixed, but change and shift over time, knowledge, growth, education, movement, context and emotions. We live in our own spaces, and those spaces and ideas are constantly shaped and tested by our times.

icebergculture.gif

So how do we help students acknowledge that because they might not understand a reference, passage, joke, etc. it does NOT mean they’re ‘dumb?’ Because over the dozen years of teaching students from all walks of life one of the first things I see is this helplessness or fear of saying “I don’t get it.” Metacognition is a big word, but students get it. Teach it, have students practice, and recognize when they don’t get something, and most importantly, not be afraid to ask, question, discuss and research.

During my ELL Endorsement coursework this past year and into the summer weeks, we had the pleasure of a teacher in the KSD walk us through culturally relevant teaching practices. I highly recommend AVID Culturally Relevant Teaching: A Schoolwide Approach. Well-organized and accessible, it’s chockfull of lesson and conversation ideas. One lesson was the Where I’m From poem template. 

Here’s my offering:

Where I am from

I’d share other photos, etc. but need permission first. Others wrote beautiful, powerful poems, which again reaffirms my belief that writing saves us all.

New Writing North

@NWNyoungwriters

@NewWritingNorth

http://www.cuckoowriters.com/features/detail/young-writers-talent-fund-call-applicants/

This post is half-done: curating a list of resources for writers of every age. This stood out.

Insomnia is different when it’s summer break: I am determined to carve out care and creativity and try to be patient with myself.

If you come across resources for writers and ways to publish works, please link them in the comments section or send them to: karen.kelly.love@gmail.com

 

Storytelling for the digital age

This is a tragic story. It’s the story of how we lose one another, how men hurt women, the women who bear them children and love them. It’s of a sister’s pain and a mother’s despair.

And it’s beautifully told.

http://apps.bostonglobe.com/metro/graphics/2018/05/jaimee-mendez/?camp=breakingnews:newsletter

https://www.bostonglobe.com/2018/05/31/the-face-waves/vmVVYvXOHRjk4ZO5UYyojO/story.html

https://longform.org/posts/the-face-in-the-waves

As I am deconstructing the structure of this piece: it is a living article, with voice, movement, a story told with deepfelt heart and humility.

I am an amateur when it comes to understanding how structure affects our relationship with texts: but the only way to get better is to practice and reflect. I am wondering what digital tools are at my/our disposal to create something like this? Perhaps I’ll start small, very small, and tell a short anecdote.

My curious questions, though: are is this one possible now and future path of storytelling structures? An interactive text/image/voice path? Will it help students grow as readers and writers? What is its relationship with rigor? It does sit squarely in relevance, however. Is it nothing more than a digital pop-up book? Too gimmicky?

If anyone out there has any links to stories similar to this one please send them my way.

poetry month

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/video/142394/we-real-cool

https://eveewing.com/

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/video/77400/snake

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_ZOkJg7G0qh3rz1lYp_dCjvlmp0KMTJI/view

https://blog.ted.com/10-spoken-word-performances-folded-like-lyrical-origami/

https://www.theodysseyonline.com/top-50-spoken-word-poems?sec=pop24&utm_expid=.53hHQ_sIS_GVYl9TPM4psw.1&utm_referrer=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2F

30 ways to celebrate national poetry month

  1. Request a free copy of the National Poetry Month poster until mid-April; posters can be purchased for $5.00 each in our Poets shop thereafter (while supplies list).
  2. Sign up for Poem-a-Day and read a poem each morning.
  3. Sign up for Teach This Poem, a weekly series for teachers.
  4. Memorize a poem.
  5. Create an anthology of your favorite poems on Poets.org.
  6. Encourage a young person to participate in the Dear Poet project.
  7. Buy a book of poetry from your local bookstore.
  8. Review these concrete examples of how poetry matters in the United States today.
  9. Learn more about poets and poetry events in your state.
  10. Ask your governor or mayor for a proclamation in support of National Poetry Month.
  11. Attend a poetry reading at a local university, bookstore, cafe, or library.
  12. Read a poem at an open mic. It’s a great way to meet other writers in your area and find out about your local poetry writing community.
  13. Start a poetry reading group.
  14. Write an exquisite corpse poem with friends.
  15. Chalk a poem on the sidewalk.
  16. Deepen your daily experience by reading Edward Hirsch’s essay “How to Read a Poem.”
  17. Ask the United States Post Office to issue more stamps celebrating poets.
  18. Recreate a poet’s favorite food or drink by following his or her recipe.
  19. Read about different poetic forms.
  20. Read about poems titled “poem.”
  21. Watch a poetry movie.
  22. Subscribe to American Poets magazine or a small press poetry journal.
  23. Watch Rachel Eliza Griffiths’s P.O.P (Poets on Poetry) videos.
  24. Watch or read Carolyn Forche’s talk “Not Persuasion, But Transport: The Poetry of Witness.”
  25. Read or listen to Mark Doty’s talk “Tide of Voices: Why Poetry Matters Now.”
  26. Celebrate Poem in Your Pocket Day today! The idea is simple: select a poem you love, carry it with you, then share it with coworkers, family, and friends.
  27. Read Allen Ginsberg’s classic essay about Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass.”
  28. Sign up for a poetry class or workshop.
  29. Get ready for Mother’s Day by making a card featuring a line of poetry.
  30. Read the first chapter of Muriel Rukeyer’s inspiring book The Life of Poetry.

 

Think I’ll try #s2, 14, and 21.

And, I’m going to use these graphics for a display case (photos to come):

Poetry Month