Glogster

Glogster is another cool medium for presenting information.  This is a glog, a graphic blog, one of my friends from college made in grad school.  She interviewed several graffiti artists in a local high school, and created the glog to share their story and knowledge.



Glogster could be a great way for teachers and students to share what they know. Visit the full-size page to see the glog in more detail.

Wordle

I entered the text of Alice in Wonderland into Wordle's word cloud generator and came up with this.  Click to see the full-size, clear image and to visit Wordle.



This could be a cool way for students to visualize key words and ideas in a text.  The font and color options can also set the tone of the book.

Prezi

Prezi is and web-based service that allows users to create online presentations that do so much more than PowerPoint.  You work with one screen so that your audience can see the big picture, and then you zoom in for details.  Check out the one I made about Rodman Philbrick, who by the way is a fabulous young adult author, for one of my graduate school classes. 

Rodman Philbrick on Prezi

Prezi is free for anyone with a (dot)edu email address.  It is relatively easy to use and quick to learn and would be a great way to engage students during lessons or to give them an outlet for presenting their own information.  My attempt resulted in a relatively simple presentation, but if you take the time, Prezi offers many cool effects that can make your work shine. 

Take some time to explore the Prezi database to see some really great examples.  The following example isn't super relevant to the blog or anything, but it's a great example of what you can do with Prezi.

Future-Proof Your Education on Prezi

Pottermore

Two of my favorite things are coming together: Harry Potter and new media!  J.K. announced today that Pottermore, an interactive Harry Potter experience will be out in October.  Not sure what it entails... it may be a big flop or just a money-making ploy, but I'm excited and optimistic.  Hopefully it will prove to be a great medium for developing literacy skills.  And hopefully it will keep that Harry Potter spark alive!  I'm so not ready for the journey to end.

Writing with Rap

While in grad school, I had the great opportunity to work one-on-one with a fifth-grader over several weeks.  I was tasked with having him respond to a piece of literature in a way that was meaningful to him.  He chose to read Drive-By by Lynne Ewing, a novel about a boy whose older brother is killed in a drive-by shooting and has to learn to survive without him.

When we started to talk about what kind of product he wanted to create about the book, his school insecurities came out.  He didn't think he was a good artist and didn't want to take any risks on a creative project.  He also decided that he really wanted to write about football.  After a discussion about why he loved football and what he thought might have happened if the main character had played football, he decided to try to write a letter to the character to convince him to join a football team.  We tried brainstorming to get ideas for the letter, and I quickly realized that his go-to method, cluster diagrams, was not working for him because he thought in sentences, not topics.

I remembered that he had said he loved Drake and other rappers, and he said he thought he could rap, too.  I played some music and had him start talking/rapping to the main character while I typed what he said.  We rearranged the sentences, filled in what was needed, and he turned the words into a rap song.  I let him record the song, and I burned him a copy on cd for him to keep.  He seemed to be really proud that he had created something smart and cool that he could share with his friends and family, and I learned a valuable lesson about finding alternate routes to meet the same learning goals.

Below is a video I made explaining the creative process and showcasing his rap.

Memoir About Life With Asperger's

Look Me in the Eye: My Life with Asperger's by John Elder Robinson

Interesting fact #1:  John Elder Robinson is Augusten Borroughs's older brother.  We've read about him in nearly all of AB's works, and now we finally have a chance to get his point of view. 

I picked up this book looking for more information about Asperger's Syndrome from a first-hand account, not for a laugh, but in Look Me in the Eye I found both.  A story about growing up with Asperger's during a time when no one knew what it was and so assumed those affected were lazy or even psychopathic would have been interesting on its own.  Likewise, we've seen in Borrough's works that their almost-too-bizarre-to-be-real family makes for some disturbing yet enthralling reading.  Combine the two experiences and you've got a childhood few of us could have survived and the grounds for a fascinating memoir.

Interesting fact #2:  Robinson's adult life is just as strange as his childhood.

He dropped out of high school at just sixteen years of age having made an almost perfect score on the GED, spent his newly found free time alternating between living in the woods and helping his like-minded friends with experiments that often ended with explosions and giant fires, and got his big break when he impressed Pink Floyd's sound crew with his knowledge of audio electronics.  This led to a brief career modifying guitars to do things like smoke, glow, shoot sparks, and explode for Ace Frehley, Kiss's lead guitarist.  He also worked as an engineer in a toy factory, tried his hand at climbing the corporate ladder, and ended up owning his own business.

The most important fact you need to know before reading the book:

Robinson's is a great success story.  For much of his life, what he wanted more than anything was to have real friends and to understand what people expect of him during conversations and other interactions.  He dedicated himself to studying proper social responses in different situations and has had successful careers, has been married, and is a father.  Robinson has also made great strides in understanding his feelings, which is what enabled him to write this book.  As an adult, he is able to look back on his earlier years and write about what he was feeling even though he didn't understand it at the time.  This reflection along with the humor Robinson's life story brings makes this work a powerful memoir.

Follow John Elder Robinson
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Games for Word Nerds

The workload as a legislative proofreader is inconsistent to say the least. Some weeks we have work to do from the second we arrive until it is time to leave in the afternoon. We have also worked the occasional weekend or evening. My record is 8am to 9:30pm during one particularly busy week. I've even seen people tracked down in the bathroom because of some desperate situation or other.

Other times we sit around for weeks with no work to do, waiting on the next step of the law-making process to begin. We often have way too much free time on our hands and have gotten pretty good at finding things to do so our heads don't explode with boredom. Hence my blogging at three o'clock in the afternoon.

One of our early favorites was Merriam Webster's word games. These include your classic flash word games such as crosswords, jumbles, and my favorites, cryptograms, but there are also less common games such as a mah jong-inspired game in which you clear all the letter tiles by spelling words and letter rip in which you try to find all the words that can be spelled with the given letters. These games can be addicting and a good way to improve your spelling, vocabulary, and logic while wasting some time.

One of my long-time favorites is Free Rice, a vocabulary game that also works to feed the world's hungry.  For every question you answer correctly, you earn more grains of rice that are given away by the UN World Food Programme (WFP).  This is a great cause and a great way to improve your vocabulary.  I highly recommend you check it out!

I also love Bookworm, a game similar to Boggle in that you spell words with tiles in a grid-like formation, but there are also bonus tiles and the threat of fire to add excitement.  It's another addicting game that helps you learn new words.