2 posts tagged “alternative education”
For about the past half hour, I've listened to Victoria Wilson, our high school Library Media Specialist highlight fun Web 2.0 tools. Some of her usable ideas:
just hear !t: use this real time player for class room music...A few years ago a Minnesota Writing Project fellow suggesting using the Rolling Stones "Satisfaction" in as many versions as can be found as a lesson in voice and style. Here's an easy way to make that happen without having to compile the songs or pay for them, or to ask students to create their own playlists of other cover songs.
Wordle: create visual representations of word lists or other texts. For example...
This is a really simple example, but more complex texts are available in the Wordle gallery--like Wordle interpretations of presidential speeches. I'm definitely going to use it as a poetry interpretation tool.
Finally, I would add two sites to my graphic storytelling toolbox-- SUMO Paint and Animoto. Beyond storytelling, too, Victoria suggested photographing students at work during a particular unit and dropping those photos into Animoto to reflect their process back to them. Years ago, I had a TV student follow us around to make a documentary--a long, intense and worthwhile process. Now with a few clicks I could be making minidocumentaries myself through the year.
OCP Home Page Evolution
I started second quarter with a test prep unit, assigning students to prepare for either the MCA/ GRAD in Reading or Composition, the GED, or the SAT. We studied a lot of usage and syntax, took practice tests, and almost killed each other. I hate teaching to these tests because the curriculum tends to be inauthentic and boring. I did the best I could embedding choice and high interest reading, but really. This is a curriculum even an English teacher can't love. Ideally, we shouldn't need to "prepare" for these tests. If my student population weren't transient, truant, and chemically addicted, I could teach a scope and sequence that would end organically with success on the tests.
After this grammar tortore, we were burned out, so I punted. How could I make writing functional and engaging again. I asked my students, "Hey, what if we could create a website for our school?" We didn't have one, and other Minnesota alternative programs do. The idea of creating a website seemed like the perfect formula for success with nontraditional students. It offered daily computer access, relevant composition tasks, and a highly visual, published product. And truly, most students who chose to work on the website project were engaged as soon as they found their niches. Some wanted to work primarily on visual design, some researching, interviewing and gathering images. Others who never really discovered the content they could confidently contribute, or those who struggled with the technology, quit early.
Students sorted themselves into categories of those confident with technology (even overly so) and those skittish about delving too deeply beyond checking email. Initially, I asked them to work cooperatively across three class periods to contribute research information to a matrix comparing and contrasting free webhosting and authoring service.
Subpages on the site grew naturally according to student interest. For example, Demetrius really wanted to post an image of Barack Obama, but after a unanimous reaction by his classmates that Mr. Obama was not an appropriate graphic illustration for our OCP Rules and Expectations subpage, Demetrius decided to compose an OCP Heroes and Role Models page. Demetrius' process in composing his chosen page was beautifully organic and honest, punctuated by many breaks for You Tube, Firefox crashes, and leaving the classroom to get a drink of water (check his phone messages). First, he interviewed fellow OCPers about their personal heroes. Next, he searched for images, asking along the way who some of them were, occassionally diverting to google them. Finally, he attempted to post them on his subpage. For a reason he and I never discovered, posting an image to Google Sites during his class period involved an incredibly frustrating process of watching Firefox crash each time he clicked the browse and upload buttons, then restarting Firefox an unpredictable number of times until an image would appear in the selection box to be added to the page.
My perception of Demetruis' process is that he surrendered most days to his frustration believing he could never finish. When I asked that he add captions to the images so that site visitors could recognize the heroes and role models, he seemed to think it was an impossible task. Moving images in Google Sites is something neither of us mastered, so finding space for typing names in a consistent way to maintain page design proved impossible. But if I could just find him a tool, like clicking paragraph text in the format menu just to place the cursor for typing, he could persevere. On the last day of the project, Demetrius opened his subpage to discover that another student had attempted to write a brief introduction naming what the chosen heroes and role models shared in common. Finding this small contribution on his page seemed to motivate him for a final effort. Also on this day, another student and I discovered through trial and error over a few days how to insert a Picasa slide show on a subpage. Demetrius discovered his solution. Rather than struggling to manipulate the images on his page, we placed them in a slide show. Although we still didn't have role models' names listed, we did have the introduction and the slide show frame to give shape to the content.
I loved the experimentation and frustration of the recursive thinking and composing, and the clarifying effect both of collaborative writing and translation of information from verbal to visual text. We didn't know what our composition would look like or read like until it was finished. We couldn't just fill in the blanks.
Another student, Devin, volunteered to explain the hard to understand calculation of credits earned in alternative school. He wrote and revised a written explanation, but couldn't clearly communicate how attendance, participation and quality of work could result in a passing letter grade but not an entire credit. When our program assistant produced a fictitious grade report for "Jane Alternative," two other boys were able to use the visual to generate three clear statements summarizing how credit is earned at OCP. I'm going to admit that I sat beside them to facilitate the translation of verbal to visual to verbal again, but they were authorities on the accuracy of the information and the precision of language for each statement. All students learned how a multimodal composition could communicate more clearly than verbal text in this situation.
I feel as though I could type these stories over and over. Adam made the OCP tour movie and posted it on You Tube. Reed created the curriculum subpage, Ana the staff. Jesse struggled mightily with the image uploading issue to create the student work subpage. Sheldon took over the community subpage when others had to walk away from the frustration of the technology. Keyla, Alonte, and Brittany became fully invested in finding and posting OCP's favorite media. Chet didn't want the responsibility of his own page, but assisted many others and allowed me to use the subpages to help him practice identifying main ideas.
Students didn't articulate these outcomes on their unit reflections, but here's the kind of literacy skills I believe we practiced:
- task and risk management, resilience
- recursive revision
- information gathering and evaluation
- comparison and contrast
- translation between verbal and visual modes
- criticizing, using criticism
- collaboration
- editing and proofreading
The outcome that students nearly unanimously appreciated was collaboration. While they had plenty of criticism for other aspects of the unit (one student called it "chaos"), all but three students said they felt like they were all working together on this project. Jeff said, "Yes, we all played our parts and helped others who asked for it." John pointed out, "You had to get help to finish." Nikki said that she "saw people getting other people to finish." Adam noticed that "we all had different jobs to finish the project."
Over the 20 days of our unit, assessment became a matter of triage. What problem can we solve today, and who's going to be in charge of working on it? Who can help? If we all worked toward making progress on the site, we all earned our participation credit for the day. We also stopped at the midpoint and at the end to view the site as a whole to evaluate it, reassessing our to do lists. In the end, students received academic points for completing their individual projects (subpages) and writing feedback at the midpoint and end of the project. They will share an academic grade for the site as a whole.
And here's our page. I enabled the comment function, so please sign into your Google account and freely comment to validate and extend our learning.
