My challenge this year, is to broaden my read aloud literature choices, since I know that several of these students have heard my favorite choices already. Do you know of any good choices for this lesson?

We use a read aloud with richly drawn and highly realistic characters (Evelyn Minshul’s The Corn Husk Doll, or Susan Woodward Springer’s Seldovia Sam, for instance)–they get the sympathy of my students. Next, we hear a story such as Roald Dahl’s The Twits and appreciate the author’s ability to develop outrageous, unreal characters and manipulate his readers into not empathizing with them. We talk about how we enjoy the Twits’ nasty high jinks and look forward to their eventual come-uppance.

These literature experiences give us a chance to discuss story elements (such as plot and character) and compare and contrast them among stories we all have experience with. Students learn to make and share personal connections, and are enriched by the connections others bring as we explore various themes.

We especially enjoy contrasting the very realistic characters and illustrations of Evelyn Minshull’s The Corn Husk Doll to the outlandishly drawn and far less charming Twits in Roald Dahl’s book. After discussing how the authors design characters we care for (or that we don’t care for), the students all design their own “Bad-‘Un.”

Linking text, student reaction, and technology: Our story reactions and discussion of character development combine with our enthusiasm for working with the computers in the technology studio! Each student creates their own “Bad’un” (a character that is fun to dislike and not too scary), by first imagining and describing with words, then drawing on paper, and finally creating a digital picture using Kidpix®. Students choose whether they want to use their paper drawings or their digital creations, and each student’s choice is imported into a Primary Class slide show. Each student uses our digital camera and takes a picture of a classmate for a slide. Then each student is recorded introducing their own and their Bad’un’s slides for our show. They love the chance to pick the transitions between their slides, and to hear themselves speaking on the final presentation.

My children have led me into new uses of technology ever since they were little. It’s happened again!

The Back Story

12 years ago, when we brought my two older boys away from school for half the school year, to rural New England, we learned how to get a computer in the public library to dial up and log on to another computer at a university in our hometown (techno-babble term: telnet). My children’s classmates also had logged onto the hometown computer from their classroom, and people from the two locations typed messages which appeared at both locations, thus enabling classmates and teachers to “chat” long distance.

Years later, when we were vacationing away from home, our boys figured out they could play a role-playing game (RPG) with their friends back home, and with no long distance charges, by using the “voice chat” option in IM (techno-babble: using an “Instant Message” computer program to transmit sounds back and forth in real-time).

Now, I have one son using an online project monitoring program to coordinate collaborative efforts of a team of writers and editors–most of whom have published together before, but never met in real life.

And Now…

I’m at Autism Network International’s Autreat (a conference/retreat run by and for autistic people-read the web site for a better description) with one of my sons. People came from Japan, Canada, Israel, and the U.S. for the event. One presenter set up an informal discussion session about the future of their aims and the direction members want to pursue. He had a projector on the screen at the front of the room, and it showed the window of an IRC chat channel that had been set up for this. A typist was at the keyboard, transcribing the discussion in the room onto the chat channel. The presenter moderated, passing a microphone to people in the room, taking time now and again to read aloud the comments being posted in the chat channel from members who were not physically present, and passing along questions or comments from those physically present to those present in the chat room. The typist had her hands full from time to time, but the people in the room helped her recap, and everyone was valuing the inputs. It was a rich discussion, enhanced by those who joined via the internet–people from Britain, the Netherlands, Georgia (U.S.), and so on who could not join us physically.

It was amazing! The level of discussion, the consideration of everyone including each other in genuine discussion, the head-spinning ability to ask “so and so, what’s your experience with government regulation of this educational program in Britain?”

I had no idea what a wonderful resource IRC could be. Frankly, I’d overlooked it, assuming it would be too clunky and slow, difficult to use. Yet, here I was barely keeping up with the conversation sometimes. I am aware that it was the conversation, and the people having it, that made the session so wonderful–but their use of this tool was superb, and they used it to enhance their ability to have a genuine interaction–to connect.

And it wasn’t a fluke, there was another discussion later that evening–different topic, different moderator, same rich quality and international connections.

I’m so glad my children are educating me!

Photo: “Lead Me” courtesy Spleenboy http://www.flickr.com/photos/spleenboy/270741497/

(A moment of reflection)

I have three tech chore lists going:

1. the regular (mostly maintenance) chores,
2. the “keep up” and “keep advancing” with tech changes chores,
3. and the end of school year chores.

Blogging is actually on the “keep up” and “keep advancing” list.  At least, that’s where it was when I started blogging.   Re-evaluating where it belongs is on my end of school year chore list.

My end of school year chore list has a lot of annual maintenance (back up or clear out files, clean up desktops (oh, those icons!), write the annual thank you letters to tech volunteers).  It includes reflection and planning (what worked, what didn’t work, review the AUP and bullying pieces, who do I need to reach differently).

There are a lot of reflective pieces, and planning pieces, in the “keep advancing” chore list, too.  Finding teacher planning and training time to integrate and support the advances is always a big piece of this.

Challenges include not letting the regular chore list crowd out the others!  Our school year’s almost over, and my “teacher” chore list includes writing Individualized Student Evaluations for all of the students at our school.  But, I’ve given myself a brief hour here to look at the other chore lists, hence this little post!

In the process, the students have formed a valid survey–and experienced how to keep the preschoolers from saying whatever the person before them said, or what to do if they just refuse to talk…and how to explain to the K’s what “favorite kind of movie” means, and how to come up with a few categories that cover the wide range of things we think of when someone says “candy.” That last was a particularly fine discussion!

Each student was to form a valid question, anticipate the nature of the data he or she would collect, and create a colorful and understandable prompt sheet to use during the survey. Pre-primary students were often particularly interesting communication partners during the actual surveys!

After tallying the data, each student entered it into Excel spreadsheets and produced a traditional bar graph or pie chart using that program.

Looking at the results, the student was then asked to find a point that he or she wanted to communicate about the data. For example, one student chose to emphasize the fact that we come from a large number of school districts, rather than highlighting which district supplied the most students. His display became a single school bus, divided into more than a dozen different colored stripes, each color representing a different school district.

We printed the resulting graphics out large, as part of a “who we are” display.

Here are a few samples of the final information graphics:

Willing’s image made a great poster, and he labeled each sports symbol with the number of people who said that sport was their favorite. He decided he did not want to highlight the percentage of the total number of responses for each sport. He imported clipart into a word processing program and changed the page size to be twice as long as normal. We printed it out 4 feet long!

Aidan worked in our photo editing program, and wanted to make the point that, as he says, we love chocolate! His sense of humor comes through, too!

Cassidy did a great job communicating her survey results. Each color strip is labelled with the exact percentages, and even young students can gather that summer had a slight edge. This made a very attractive poster. Cassidy used clip art, imported it into a picture editing program, sliced and colored it, and then imported the new graphic into a word processor.