Scriveners' Trappings

"In August of 1619, a ship appeared on this horizon, near Point Comfort, a coastal port in the British colony of Virginia. It carried more than 20 enslaved Africans, who were sold to the colonists. No aspect of the country that would be formed here has been untouched by the years of slavery that followed. On the 400th anniversary of this fateful moment, it is finally time to tell our story truthfully.

The 1619 Project

"The 1619 Project is a major initiative from The New York Times observing the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery. It aims to reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding, and placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are."

This is the beginning of The 1619 Project. We will be publishing more stories in the days and weeks to come.

"Google announced this week that it was adding a plagiarism detection feature to Classrooms, its pseudo learning management system. The company is calling this “originality reporting,” not plagiarism detection — an attempt to reframe this from being a punitive “gotcha” to a tool designed to help students understand citation practices. But let’s call “bullshit” on that. I don’t think the rebranding really means much, to be honest. It’s more a rhetorical sleight of hand, an attempt to sound “collaborative” while furthering some of the worst practices of surveillance and distrust.

"Google insists that, contrary to TurnItIn (the best known plagiarism detection software), it will not amass a database of all student work. Instead it will offer schools the ability to amass a “repository” of their students’ work. This should still prompt us to ask, of course, who really owns students' work. As creators and scholars and artists, students should. But their intellectual property rights are rarely respected — by schools or by publishers or by testing companies or by software companies. Indeed, plagiarism detection software, along with the pedagogical culture that this software emerged from decades ago, views students as cheaters and fakers and frauds."

Jim Lerman's insight:

Audrey Watters is, to me, one of our edtech digital age's profound critical thinkers. This scathing tour de force on the danger of algorithmic pedagogy lays it out for all to see. Be repulsed by her or embrace her, Watters exposes a truth that must be reckoned with.

She also has this uncommon fascination with pigeons (which she, no doubt, has explained somewhere -- but I have yet to encounter it).

Welcome to 20Time, where students spend 20 percent of their class time over a 12-week period pursuing a meaningful project of their own choosing. In this free packet of 23 PDF pages and 25 Prezi slides, you’ll find a variety of materials to help guide middle-school and high-school students through this project-based learning experience, similar in scope to other PBLs such as the 20 Percent Project and Genius Hour.

As I blogged at www.laurarandazzo.com about my recent experiences using 20Time with four sections of high school freshmen and one section of juniors, fellow teachers asked many great questions and requested that I put all of my materials together in one convenient spot. This packet is my effort to gather my 20Time blog posts and materials in one grab-and-go location.

Jim Lerman's insight:

Rich collection of resources for 20% time and "genius hour" type programs. Focused on grades 8-12, English classes.

"Our partner Student Voice is seeking high school students to join its 2019-2020 cohort of journalism fellows. The Student Voice Journalism Fellowship equips 18 high-school-aged journalists with the tools to tell their schools’ stories and leverages their voices to affect change in the broader educational dialogue. Applications are now open and close Friday, August 16, 2019. More information is available at StuVoice.org/journalism.

About Student Voice

"Student Voice is the nation’s largest by-students, for-students 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization inspired by the premise that education should work for all students. They believe that every student deserves quality civic education—and a direct platform to impact decisions that affect their lives. Through action-based civics programs, Student Voice leads and strengthens the movement of young people taking action on issues that most impact their education. For more information about Student Voice and joining the student voice movement, visit StuVoice.org and follow @Stu_Voice and #StuVoice on social media."

Smash Boom Best is a debate show for kids and families from the makers of the award-winning podcast, Brains On! Every episode takes two cool things, smashes them together and lets you decide which is best. Cats versus Dogs. Pizza versus Tacos. Super Speed versus Super Strength. Who will be crowned the Smash Boom Best? Our debaters use facts and passion to make their case... teaching listeners how to defend their own opinions along the way.

"Ending the threat of pandemic disease. That’s a moonshot. Fighting climate change with new energy and industrial systems that reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere rather than increase it. That’s a moonshot. Feeding the projected population of 10 billion people in 2050 without wrecking the planet. That’s a moonshot. Opening the way for people to live with longer healthspans — that is, longer proportions of their lifespans without arthritis, Parkinson’s disease, dementia, and other maladies of aging. That’s a moonshot.

"President Kennedy introduced his call for the origial moonshot in an address to Congress in May 1961. The United States finally pulled off his vision off 50 years ago when the country landed astronauts on the moon on July 20, 1969, and then returned them to Earth safely four days later. The moonshot-caliber challenges you will read about in The Moonshot Catalog in the coming months share the seminal feature of that decades-old mission: they are daunting, but they are doable.

"They are daunting in that each one requires a unique, creative, and sustained synthesis of science, engineering, entrepreneurship, collective will, and resources to pull off. They are doable in that researchers, innovators, entrepreneurs, governments, and other stakeholders have taken real initial steps toward the moonshots’ must-go destinations. Each moonshot that humanity can pull off will yield a world of good, both for the planet and for all of us. Each success will contribute to our sense of promise about the future and fight a corrosive sense of cynicism.

"These challenges are at the heart of The Moonshot Catalog, a communications project funded by the philanthropic organization Schmidt Futures in collaboration with the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). We want to highlight opportunities to:

Set more ambitious goals: We want to highlight that recent scientific and technological advances may make it possible to “dream bigger.” What might have been impossible 5–10 years ago may now be within reach, allowing us to accelerate progress on some of our toughest challenges. By calling attention to these goals and the advances that make them possible, we hope to create positive, self-fulfilling prophecies.

Build a moonshot culture: We want to call attention to opportunities for leaders in business, government, academia, and philanthropy to pursue these moonshots. 

"Join the conversation: We hope that you, our readers, will provide suggestions for additional moonshots, as well as alternative paths to achieving some of the goals that will be described in the catalog.

"Every few weeks or so following the rollout, we will add another moonshot article or two to the catalog. We invite you to come back again and again to read these articles. We also invite you to engage us with your reactions to the articles and your own ideas for moonshots. You can contribute to the conversation by using the comments boxes at the end of each article."

Jim Lerman's insight:

Interesting initiative. Inspiring creativity. It might be cool to follow this with your students over the course of the year. If this gives you an idea, please share here!

You’ve taught students to read closely, to annotate, to discuss—now what? How can we get kids to interact with texts in creative ways that require an even higher level of understanding? Here, I’ll share five of my favorite post-reading reader-response activities

"Teachers are leveraging the power of gaming to turn even reluctant student writers into enthusiastic storytellers...

When ninth graders arrived for their language arts class earlier this year, they were in for a surprise. With only a brief introduction, teacher Philip Bird and student teacher Evan Manconi invited the students into a futuristic, magical world called Cataclysm where they would spend the next several weeks in a role-playing game.

“Students took to it almost immediately,” Manconi says, using creativity and collaboration to develop characters, generate dialogue, and negotiate plot twists.

Six weeks later, the students had written some 729,500 words—nearly the equivalent of the first six books of the Harry Potter series. “They have written and written and written,” Bird says, “and all the chatter in the classroom has been focused on what their characters are doing. If writing is a muscle, I’ve gotten some incredibly muscular students out of this experience.”

n 2010, shame and empathy researcher Dr. Brené Brown gave us the wonderful and culturally necessary The Gifts of Imperfection, exploring the uncomfortable vulnerability and self-acceptance required in order to truly connect with others. In this charming short film, the folks of the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce, better-known as the RSA, put a twist on their usual live-illustrated gems and take a page out of the TED-Ed book, teaming up with animator Katy Davis to bring to life an excerpt from Brown’s longer talk on the power of vulnerability and the difference between empathy and sympathy, based on her most recent self-helpy-sounding but enormously insightful and rigorously researched book, Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead

"No being of a social nature can be entirely beyond the tendency to fall to the level of his associates."

"The antidote to stagnation, therefore, lies in surrounding oneself with people of creative vitality. The pioneering astronomer Maria Mitchell — a contemporary of Peabody’s and a key figure in Figuring — would articulate this beautifully two decades later in contemplating how we co-create one another and recreate ourselves through friendship: “Whatever our degree of friends may be, we come more under their influence than we are aware.”

Jim Lerman's insight:

Somewhere around one's 10th year as an educator, many of us begin to question whether our chosen position, or even profession, continues to fill our need for growth and variety. Some keep at what we're doing with renewed vigor, others strike out in new directions, and of course, sadly, some give up or burn out.

This brief and marvelous post by Popova offers sage advice, and from a 19th century educator no less.

A good read.

"A First-Of-Its-Kind Comprehensive Package Designed For Educators Working With Young People Ages 13-18

"The lessons and actions fully connect media-making with our democracy, elections, and voting. The Youth Media-Making Toolkit promotes youth voice, voting, and democratic participation through media creation. Lessons guide teens to plan, make, and share diverse media about voting and civic engagement: short videos, photos, Internet memes, animated GIFs, and persuasive images for social media.

"Every lesson includes a resource-rich lesson plan and activity sheet. Sign up via the form on this page to receive access to the Toolkit—for FREE!"

Screenwriting is the act of writing what's known as a script or screenplay for film, television and webseries. It involves a special set of rules that makes it different from a book or play.

Writing the script is part of the pre-production process. Once it is written, it will be edited (often several times) and passed on to the director.

Scripts include all essential information such as: the setting of each scene, character details, dialogue and behaviour. But there’s a lot more in a script than these things.

Jim Lerman's insight:

An excellent, quite short, free, online course on screenwriting (but not only screenwriting) for beginning-level storytellers from about 9 or 10 years old to any age. Outstanding resource for teachers.

The first part centers on the elements of story and how they work together. This is essential for telling as well as viewing, reading, writing, or otherwise constructing stories for any type of media -- including live media. Creating a story in any of these forms, using the activities and understandings put forward here, will make nearly anyone a more aware, engaged, and knowledgeable consumer of all media. Great job and fine resource.

"When my daughter was younger we used to do poetry nights where we would use a website (Watch Out for Snakes) that would randomly create titles for us by putting together adjectives and nouns. We would then challenge each other to write a poem based on one of the prompts, followed by reading our new creations. Yes, I have always been a nerd.

"Just like those random titles inspired me to compose poems, such tools can help our students when they need to write a journal entry, short story, essay, article, poem, or such. Thankfully there are many resources available to use for writing prompts, story starters, and other writing inspiration. In this blog post we will take a look at 10 example tools to use in your class."

"Last month, I teamed up with Bonnie Hamer from Presto Plans to develop two resources to spark creativity during the first week of school. These resources connect to the standards while also inspiring creativity, problem-solving, and inquiry.

Each resource has:

• Teacher handouts to walk you step-by-step through the resource
• Student handouts to help structure the learning for students
• A sketch video to ignite student passion for the creative thinking
• PowerPoint presentations to guide your students along the way
• Rubrics to assess the learning

"The first resource is a set of creative thinking team-building activities. This is a set of five separate team-builder mini-projects that each last one class period.  The second resource is a set of creative thinking writing prompts that cover multiple genres. These tap into student interests and passions while also encouraging inquiry and creative thinking."

Jim Lerman's insight:

Fantastic resources for doing just what the title says -- start the school year off with creative projects and activities.                                           Do not miss this terrific post.

Podcasting for education has become increasingly popular in the past decade. This article explores four genres of podcast and how they can be used in online courses. The genres include: The Chat Show, The Narrative, The Tutorial and The Quick Burst. Each genre has its own strengths and weaknesses for supporting student learning, but each can also be employed for different learning tasks. Educators can seek out podcasts from each genre to incorporate in their teaching, or similarly inspire students to create their own podcasts after exploring the features of each genre.

"So many Monroes in rural Albemarle County remember the moment they asked a parent or grandparent if they were somehow connected to the nation’s fifth president, James Monroe.

"The telltale entrance sign to Monroe’s plantation estate, now a museum, had been a fixture of their childhoods, part of the landscape on the route back and forth between Charlottesville and the small, predominantly African-American community they called Monroetown.

"Ada Monroe Saylor, 79, was riding in her father’s green Chevrolet on the way to the grocery store in the early 1950s when he confirmed her suspicions.

"George Monroe Jr., a cousin of Ms. Saylor’s, spent much of his childhood at the homestead built by his great-great grandfather, Edward Monroe, known as Ned, whose parents were believed to be enslaved by the president and were among the first known to carry his name. For slaves whose African heritage had long been stolen or lost, this was not uncommon.

"Mr. Monroe, 45, was about 8 years old when he posed the question to his father, after driving by the plantation, known as Highland.

“I had been seeing that entrance sign all my life,” Mr. Monroe said. “We were riding, and I asked my dad if we were the same Monroes, and he said yes, but he wouldn’t say much more. We didn’t talk about it.

“It was just understood that we were connected to the president, not by blood but by slavery.”

"For seven generations, members of the Monroetown descendant community have lived less than 10 miles away from Highland, yet until three years ago there had never been a conversation between them and the museum. Now, they are working together to change the way slavery is presented at the former presidential plantation."

A simple strategy encourages students to give their full attention when listening to others.

“Polish your grammar, rate your readability, train yourself to write every day, and more.”