Great to meet you… My name's Peter Pappas, from Rochester NY. I taught high school social studies for over 25 year, became a K-12 coordinator and then finished the last 5 years of my career as a assistant superintendent for instruction. Since then, I've been able to devote myself, full time, to expanding my role as a staff developer and consultant.
I've had the chance to work with districts across the country with a focus on literacy, technology, document-based instruction and student engagement. Staff development should model what we want to see in the classroom, so I bring an audience response system and we actually use the techniques I'm promoting!
Follow me on Twitter – hope you have a great conference!
Oh .. and … have you heard of any good sushi restaurants nearby? …..
Note: As of 4/26/09 the TwitterCloudExplorer seems to have disappeared. Here's a screen shot of what it looked like during the ASCD conference. Notice my Twitter name edteck was the 4th most Twittered word when I took the screen shot.
Technical Specs1. Hashtags are a community-driven convention for adding additional context and metadata to your tweets. They're like tags on Flickr, only added inline to your post. You create a hashtag simply by prefixing a word with a hash symbol: #hashtag. I sought out the relevant hashtags people are using for the ASCD conference. Note: It seems this year both #ASCD and #ASCD09 are being used. For more on hashtags2. I used a Twitter Search to look for people using the #ASCD OR #ASCD09 hashtags. Search results here.3. Then I sent out Tweets to people using either hashtag with a link back to this post. Hopefully their replies will follow.4. I'm a big fan of quantitative display of information, so I used one the many new Twitter visualization tools – Twitter Cloud Explorer to generate this embedded query. Note: As of 4/26/09 the TwitterCloudExplorer seems to have disappeared. There are many new Twitter visualizations coming along every day.
Teaching with Historic Photographs: The Google LIFE Photo Archive
Build Literacy Skills with Wordle
While you can directly type into the Wordle text box, I would recommend you copy and past text into it. That allows you to get text directly from online sources or your own text document. Student can either work on their individual Wordles or collaborate together on one. In the later case, it’s probably most efficient to gather all their writing into one text document before copy/pasting it into a Wordle. Use tilde sign to create phrases. Example: learning~strategies. Another tip: After you create a Wordle, right click a term to remove it from the Wordle results.
Wordle output – If you PDF generating software, you can “print” a Wordle to a PDF file. Or you can do a screen capture of the Wordle. Do live Wordles on your smartboard. For a how-to on screenshots click here.
Summarizing skills – As a pre-reading exercise – copy/paste text of reading into a Wordle and ask students to predict what the main ideas of the reading will be. Another pre-reading option – give them a Wordle of a non-fiction reading and ask them to use the Wordle to generate a title or headline before they see the real article. Post reading – ask them to reflect on the reading based on a prompt (examples – main idea, what you’ve learned, funniest element, etc). Then collect all their reflections into a Wordle.
Comparison skills – Give them two different accounts / essays on the same theme / event – let them compare the Wordles generated by each. Or you could generate Wordles for two different reading – then let student see if they can match the Wordle to it’s corresponding reading.
I’ve been collaborating with fellow educators on a Google Doc guide to using Wordle in the classroom
Is Visuality the New Literacy?
The rich databases of component images form a new grammar for moving images… After all, this is how authors work. We dip into a finite set of established words, called a dictionary, and reassemble these found words into articles, novels and poems that no one has ever seen before. The joy is recombining them. Indeed it is a rare author who is forced to invent new words. Even the greatest writers do their magic primarily by rearranging formerly used, commonly shared ones. What we do now with words, we’ll soon do with images.
Below a TimeTube mashup creates a genealogy of most popular user-generated videos tagged Global Warming.