Category Archives: HUM8

ask and ye shall learn Blogging Challenge Week One

This year, for our Student Blogging Challenge, I’m adapting some of the Edublogs challenges. I found last year that while there were some that worked really well for our class, there were others that didn’t align well with what we were doing in class.

However, the first challenge is a crucial one for any blogger, and that is to introduce yourself to your audience. There are, therefore, three things you’re going to do this week: first, create an avatar; second, write an About Me page or intro blog post; and third, read and comment on your classmates’ pages or posts.

Continue reading ask and ye shall learn Blogging Challenge Week One

Similarities, Differences and Conflict: Reflecting on Remembrance Day (Blogging Challenge: Week Five)

The focus for this week’s Student Blogging Challenge is “We’re All The Same … We’re All Different.” Thinking about that, and thinking about this week in history, struck me. This Remembrance Day marks the one-hundredth anniversary of the end of World War I. WWI was called “the Great War” and was said to be “the war that ends all wars” … and yet less than thirty years later, World War II broke out. Next year will be the seventy-fifth anniversary of the end of World War II. Although we haven’t had another “world war” since then, we’ve had multiple conflicts that have involved multiple countries. We are all human, and yet as societies, there is still so much violence in our reactions to differences between us.

So this week, I’m going to ask you to go in a slightly different direction with our blogging challenge. One of the things I’ve noticed in past years is that many students your age – and even many adults – don’t really mark Remembrance Day. They attend the assemblies, but when it comes to November 11, and thinking about the sacrifices that were made to bring us the human rights that are so celebrated in Canada and many western countries and so absent in others … November 11 is simply a day off school or off work.

Your tasks, therefore, are to choose one of the following options:

  • Learn about and share information on one of the two World Wars, explaining why students your age should mark Remembrance Day.
  • Learn and write about a current conflict that is wracking the world, and explain why we should know about the conflict.
  • Interview older family members and, with their permission, share their experiences of the war(s).
  • Come up with another topic, something related to Remembrance Day, and propose it to me.

This is meant to be a thoughtful reflection about Remembrance Day, and I will expect detailed, reflective, well-written blogs. Although I’m not expecting an essay, I am expecting more than a short paragraph or two. Consult the I’m a Blogger page or see this post for advice about writing good blogs.

Challenge, Connection and Community

Student Blogging Challenge 2018

As discussed in the last post, I frequently call our classroom a learning community instead of a classroom. Learning is not an individual pursuit. We learn best by building on the knowledge of those who have come before us, by asking questions and sharing ideas with those around us, and by working collectively to challenge each of us individually. Learning is individual in that we each are at different stages in our learning and have different strategies that work best for us. However, even with that, we require the assistance and presence of other people to explore and verify our individual understanding.

If learning is better collectively, however, then how much more extensive could it be if we extended our community beyond the walls of our classroom? This is the advantage of using technology in our learning: when we blog, when we share our learning on social media, when we create videos and podcasts – all of these things allow us not only to share our learning with a wider, authentic audience but also reach out to others to develop our understanding and skills to the next level.

The Student Blogging Challenge will allow us to connect with people all over the world while we develop our writing skills and our learning. We’ll have the opportunity to explore digital citizenship, communication, and critical and creative thinking with a variety of different learning experiences. The challenge starts on October 7, and we hope you’ll join us!

Community, connection and comprehension

The goal of pretty much any teacher is to encourage learning in her students, though teachers may disagree about what type of learning and how it should be encouraged in their students. Personally, I believe that no learning can occur without an environment of community and connection. I’m not saying that everyone needs to be best friends with everyone else, but I strongly believe that we can’t learn unless we feel safe, unless we feel like we can take risks and be wrong without someone judging or making fun of us.

This is why I spend so much time at the beginning of the year trying to build a sense of understanding and respect between us all – and I include myself in this. I am a part of the learning community of our classroom as much as my students. I was reading a book by Dr. Brene Brown called Daring Greatly, and she talks about how when people are at a distance, it’s easy to judge them or stereotype them, but when we come closer, when we get to know people, that prejudice falls away. Once we get to know people, once we try to understand them, we are much less likely to bully or hurt them. It’s not that we necessarily want to be great friends with them, but we can understand why they do the things we do and have more patience.

Most of the time, I feel like I do a pretty good job creating a sense of community in the classroom – helping students feel safe enough to take the risk of being wrong when they share ideas, opening up space where students will reach out to help each other rather than sit back and watch them struggle, making it possible for students to guide their own learning without a fear of failure, etc. Sometimes, though, something happens in the class that makes me wonder if the sense of community that I have been seeing actually wasn’t that. I wonder if the part of the class that I don’t see or hear includes the safety that I so want for my students.

Honestly, I don’t know that there is any way for me to find this out for certain. All I can do is ask my students: Do you feel safe enough in this classroom (with me? with your peers?) to be willing to take risks and try new things?

In short, is our environment a learning community, or a classroom?

Exploring Blogging

We’re starting to write blogs regularly in our class right now, and I wanted to provide some examples of various different types of entries you could do. Blogging, as you will read on this page, is about prompting conversation. It is an interaction between you and your audience in a way that Writers’ Workshop can’t be, because with a blog, your audience can respond and make comments or ask questions.

So here are some examples of different types of blog posts written by past students. All of them have areas of strength and areas for growth, but they can provide ideas for you as you are beginning your first blogs. After you read the page above, check these out – and feel free to take a wander through other bloggers from previous classes, or from our Writing class blog.

Grade Eight Posts

Brooklyn on Self-Assessment
Jaxon on why Chefs should be paid more
Luke on the NFL Playoffs
Owen on whether music affects us
Hannah talks about the street on which she grew up

Looking for examples of excellent bloggers? Check out these ones from previous writing classes here at LTS!

Grade 9

Arianna
Megan
Mansi
Kyra

Grade 10

Fiona
Christina
Kendra
Ireland

Grade 11 & 12

Morgan
Ashley
Michael
Kassidy
Mariah
Lily

Visual Literacy: Class-created Success Criteria

After analysing the best visual literacy comments from the past several assignments, our class has come up with success criteria. Each group’s criteria is posted in the comments below; our consolidated criteria are in this post.

Learning Intentions

  • I can use various strategies to understand visual text.
  • I can think critically and reflectively to explore ideas within and beyond texts.
  • I can identify the elements of visual texts.

Success Criteria

Block D

  • I can describe a visual text fully and completely, including the background, shapes and expressions and other smaller details, using descriptive language.
  • I can explain what I think is going on in the text and support my explanation with specific details from the text.
  • I can identify parts of the text that confuse me or for which I don’t have an explanation and share my thoughts on them.
  • I can write carefully, checking my spelling and grammar.

    From this point on, when you’ve posted your visual literacy comment, you need to self-assess it according to this criteria – either by posting your self-assessment as a comment to your V.L. one, or by writing down your self-assessment and handing it in, if you’re not comfortable with other people seeing it. Use the following template and write a comment assessing yourself on each of the required criteria:

    1. (detailed description)
    2. (what’s going on)
    3. (confusions or questions)
    4. (spelling and grammar)

    Block A

    • I can describe a visual text fully and completely, including the background and smaller details, using descriptive language.
    • I can explain what is going on in the text, making sense of it in a way that considers most, if not all, of the details in the image and hypothesizing logical explanations for those details that don’t fit my explanation.
    • I can make connections between the image and my prior knowledge to help make sense of the image.
    • If I want to go further, I can do research on elements of the picture to help me create a more accurate explanation of what is going on in it.

    From this point on, when you’ve posted your visual literacy comment, you need to self-assess it according to this criteria – either by posting your self-assessment as a comment to your V.L. one, or by writing down your self-assessment and handing it in, if you’re not comfortable with other people seeing it. Use the following template and write a comment assessing yourself on each of the required criteria:

    1. (detailed description)
    2. (what’s going on)
    3. (connections)
    [and, if done]
    4. (research)

Typical only equals boring when you make it so

Ms Rizzo spent a couple of weeks working with our students on how to write good poetry. From the beginning, they were told that their final project would be to write a poem about themselves. One student, however, recently described this assignment as “a bit typical.”

Yet a poet – or a writer, or an artist, student or not – must be able to turn the typical into something incredible. Invariably, teachers will assign you topics throughout your entire scholastic career – some of those will speak to you, some will not. No matter what the topic, however, your writing should be exceptional. You are learning the skills in this class to make it so.

Continue reading Typical only equals boring when you make it so

To blog or not to blog

In the end, it’s all about connection. Learning is being able to connect with ideas, with people, with new places and new situations, with yourself, with the world around us. Students learn better if their teacher can build a connection with them. We all learn better if we connect socially. Collectively, (connectively?) we are infinitely smarter than any one of us are individually.

Ultimately, that’s what blogging is for. Blogs allow you to connect with a community – sometimes small, sometimes encompassing people all over the world. They allow you to interact with your audience, and allow your audience to interact with you. They allow you to ask questions, to consider different viewpoints, to challenge your thinking.

Continue reading To blog or not to blog

Blogging Our Genius

Having gone through and read all of the genius hour blogs (the third ones, the ones where you chose what to write about), I’m realizing that students are struggling with how to write an interesting, informative Genius Hour post. Blogging is a different kind of communication, so the types of writing that we normally do may not always work. However, every type of writing should be interesting and engaging for your audience.

So let’s take a look at some of the common blogfails:

The This Then Blog Post

Today our teacher put us into groups according to what we were planning on doing for genius hour. My group and I all talked about our plans, but decided we were doing things that are different. When we were done, I went on my phone and looked at different websites about how to ask good questions. Then I watched a video. I think that next time I might try writing out some different questions.

The problem with this type of blog post is that there’s no real information there. When I read it, I have a vague idea of what the writer is planning on doing, a very long list of what she did during the period, and absolutely no interest in every reading another of her posts.

The Vague but Positive Blog Post

I was working with a group that Ms Smith created for us today. It was really fascinating to learn what people were doing! I enjoyed hearing Nikki talk about saving the whales. She was so passionate, and it made me think that she might be successful. She’s going to create a website with interviews with whales on it. Darren’s genius hour plan is equally incredible. He’s really passionate about stopping the deforestation happening in the Amazonian rainforest, so he’s going to raise money to send to the Amazonian Rainforest Preservation Society by selling wooden pencils. I talked a little bit about my plans too, but I was really amazed by how wonderful everyone else’s ideas were.

This person is really enthusiastic, and has at least provided some information in her blog post, but she’s completely failed to mention much about what she’s doing. We know more about Nikki and Darren’s plans than we know about hers.

The Hands In the Air Blog Post

I didn’t really get what we were supposed to be doing today. My teacher put us in groups, but everyone in my group was doing something different, so while it was interesting to hear, it didn’t really help me figure out what I’m going to do. I’d like to look at how to get more books in school, but I’m not really sure how I can do that. This is just too big of a problem. Maybe I should choose something else.

We know what this person wants to do, but we have absolutely no confidence in his ability to do it. For whatever reason, he didn’t decide to talk to his teacher about not knowing what to do when he was in class, and now he’s posting about it so the entire world can see, as if we are expected to come up with his ideas for him.

Most of the blogs that struggled in our last round of posting fell into one or more of these categories. What you need to remember is that we are writing for an audience, that we need to engage that audience, and that we’re not required to have all of the answers right now. We’re not even required to have all of the questions.

What we are required to do is write about our learning, our thoughts, our struggles, our interests, our questions, our answers, our process, our plans – all of these things and more – in a way that provides our readers with information that is interesting and prompts conversation.

I did an example blog post in my fake-blog as an example. It’s not perfect (it’s not meant to be), but it does provide an example of what I’m looking for in blog posts. Read it, and comment on that post about what you notice. What makes it different from the examples above?

Poetry Posts on the New York Times

Those Guys and the Super Smith Smurfs are in the midst of our poetry units – at the same time as the New York Times is having its Seventh Annual Found Poetry contest. Naturally, we decided to enter. There are almost six hundred comments on the blog post at last count, so for ease of locating ours, here they are. (This entry will be updated as students add their poems to the comments.)

Those Guys

“Goodbye Old House” by Asia
untitled by Isaac

Super Smith Smurfs

“Spooked Horse Throws Officer and Runs Loose Through Midtown Manhattan” by Alexa
“Why do girls tend to have more anxiety than boys?” by Taya
“Never too old to hurt from a parents’ divorce” by Jaylin