xtra normal again

I was trying to use voki to work on my ESL student's writing skills, but she became so obsessed with changing her avatar's hair and clothes that it distracted her from the writing, which was the real purpose. (Quite possible the distraction was also avoidance, since she knew writing was the next step and is a reluctant writer.) I'm wondering if xtra normal would push the writing more, since you naturally want the characters to have a dialogue. Here's a sample that I'm going to show her to introduce her to the web site. (I heart pawz!)

The power of modeling once again!

I was taking a webinar with Sharon Taberski (great experience!) and Solana was out of school on break. Since the webinar was an hour long and I had come into the office to take it, I wanted Solana to be occupied, so I put her on a web site with videos of one of her new obsessions, “the Swat Kats.” Every so often, she would come over to my desk to see what I was doing, and I would glance back to make sure she was okay. I had my notebook out and was jotting notes and ideas down from the session. When it was time to leave, I noticed that Solana had been taking notes on her video (see above). “How cute,” I thought and showed it to my husband that night. He immediately pointed out the power of modeling. This was just another reminder to me about how important it is to model with our students.

We can also make use of modeling by referring to series such as the Magic Tree House, where we see the main character taking notes from nonfiction texts. Since so many students have read the Magic Tree House series, this is something to draw on when we model notetaking for older students. Some fantasy books, such as How to Train Your Dragon and Dragonology (dragons are popular in our house!) also have notetaking pages: even though they're on a fantasy subject, you can make the analogy to notetaking for research.

Vokis for paragraph writing

I'm working with some teachers who are using voki to work on the goal of having students write a complete paragraph that sticks to one topic. I modeled brainstorming about my interests, family, and experiences and had students help me choose the most interesting ones to use for my paragraph. They helped me write a first draft of an "About Me" paragraph last week. Next week, I'll show them these final drafts. If we had more time, this would lead really well into digital storytelling. (I had a little difficulty getting my voki to say "La Mega se pega," but I think she got close enough.)

Diigo bookmark (weekly)

• Wylio

  Free pics!

  tags: creativecommons

• Mr. Avery's Fourth Grade Classroom Blog

  Great use of flip cams with fourth graders!

  tags: blogging

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

Readwritethink lesson on persuasive writing

In our booktalk podcasting assignment, I've been working with teachers and students on how to "sell" a book that they would recommend to other students. During the college football season, the TV was on at home more than I would like. One thing our family ended up doing was talking about funny ads. Now that we can play them on the Droid, we can look up and share a funny commercial with each other whenever we feel like it. We all laughed at the Piggy Geico commercial, and then I had to revisit one of my favorites, the Old Spice commercials, which Solana thought were hilarious.

Our enjoyment of the commercials made me think there must be a way to bring in the creativity and humour of advertising to help students write better leads for their booktalks. One of the teachers I'm working with thought we could introduce the different types of advertising (bandwagon, etc.) as a springboard for ideas. Although the main goal is improving student writing, looking at persuasive techniques in advertising is also an important lesson in critical media literacy.

I haven't found any great lists of advertising techniques for use in the classroom online, although this site's list of examples does use visual cues. My favorite resource so far is a lesson on persuasive writing from readwritethink that uses a more sophisticated description of persuasive rhetoric that is used in advertising or any persuasive argument. It might be adaptable for a younger age group and for the booktalk assignment.