Scriveners' Trappings

"Now in 2018, NWP is getting ready to launch a new youth publishing opportunity connected to the PBS documentary American Creed (broadcast nationally February 27 and streaming free of charge starting February 28 at www.pbs.org/americancreed). Through stories set in big cities, small towns, and rural areas around the country, American Creed wrestles with key challenges facing American youth today, including creating economic opportunity and finding ways to meaningfully participate in civic life. The film encourages youth to explore questions like “What should America’s national ideals be?” and “How do we close the gap between ideals and reality?” American Creed is co-produced by Citizen Film and WTTW.

"You and the youth you work with are invited to add your voice to the conversation about American Creed. Bring the film to your classroom or learning center, and support young people in responding through writing, art, and media. Teens (13+) and young adults are invited to share their responses on the National Writing Project’s American Creed youth publishing site (also coming February 27).

"How to Get Involved:" ...go to website

"There are many benefits to having a blogging program in your classroom. One advantage is that blogging can be the perfect avenue to teach digital citizenship.

"What is digital citizenship? 

"Digital citizenship is used as more of an umbrella term for our goals to help our students to be safe, happy, productive, and ethical online. These same goals that we have for our students’ online experiences also apply to their offline world.

"Common Sense Media’s curriculum identifies eight topics under the umbrella of digital citizenship including: internet safety, cyberbullying, copyright and more. They describe digital citizenship as, empowering your students with skills to think critically, behave safely, and participate responsibly online, allowing them to connect and collaborate in meaningful ways.

"But how do we teach digital citizenship?

"Let’s look at eight ways blogging can be used to teach digital citizenship."

THIS MULTIMEDIA INTERNET has been gaining on the text-based internet for years. But last year, the story accelerated sharply, and now audio and video are unstoppable. The most influential communicators online once worked on web pages and blogs. They’re now making podcasts, Netflix shows, propaganda memes, Instagram and YouTube channels, and apps like HQ Trivia.

"Consider the most compelling digital innovations now emerging: the talking assistants that were the hit of the holidays, Apple’s face-reading phone, artificial intelligence to search photos or translate spoken language, and augmented reality — which inserts any digital image into a live view of your surroundings.

"These advances are all about cameras, microphones, your voice, your ears and your eyes.

"Together, they’re all sending us the same message: Welcome to the post-text future.

"It’s not that text is going away altogether. Nothing online ever really dies, and text still has its hits — from Susan Fowler’s whistle-blowing blog post last year about harassment at Uber to #MeToo, text was at the center of the most significant recent American social movement.

"Still, we have only just begun to glimpse the deeper, more kinetic possibilities of an online culture in which text recedes to the background, and sounds and images become the universal language.

"The internet was born in text because text was once the only format computers understood. Then we started giving machines eyes and ears — that is, smartphones were invented — and now we’ve provided them brains to decipher and manipulate multimedia."

“You start when you’re young and you copy. You straight up copy.” 
—Shel Silverstein

"All artists begin by copying. (I wrote a book about it.) But what’s instructive about hanging out with kids all day is understanding on a day-to-day kid’s eye level just how natural copying comes to us.

"My kids (5 & 2) are gleeful, natural born copycats. Copying is how they wrap their hands and hearts and heads around the world. They not only copy drawings and music and recreate the world with blocks and play, they mimic their parents, they mimic each other, they mimic kids on the playground, etc. Copying and mimicry is as natural to them as breathing. There’s nobody around telling them they should do any differently, nobody saying something dumb like, “Don’t you want to do something original?” So they go about their mimicry, unfettered by any adult notions about originality."

Jim Lerman's insight:

A rich, enjoyable rumination on some of the benefits of copying. For sensitive people, please beware of the "f" word at the end.

Students love creating short films where they create the dialogue and animate the characters. Not only do students learn how to write a script, but they also have to think about the props, music, background, and other elements. Creating scenes helps learners develop a critical eye when it comes to supporting writing and plot with visual and multimedia content. This is an important skill needed for our digital producers. Below are free web tools and apps students can use to create short animated films.

Are you looking for the 12 best Free Online Bibliography And Citation Tools? Check the 12 best Free Online Bibliography And Citation Tools! 2017 Update!

A Tennessee high school student’s anti-bullying video has resulted in nearly 600,000 views on YouTube and a suspension for its creator.

"Lebanon High School student Emily Gipson said school administrators accused her of “trying to incite violence” and gave her a two-day in-school suspension for the video entitled “Welcome to Lebanon High School,” posted Jan. 22.

"In the video, prompted by a classmate’s October suicide, she asks students to treat each other better. It’s a broad indictment of campus culture, but contains neither profanity nor calls for direct action.

“Welcome to Lebanon High School, where smiles are fake and suicide prevention is something to laugh at,” she said in the video, criticizing her peers’ reaction to the Stop It app the Wilson County school had put out in response to the death."

It seems that we never have enough of it and the result is a feeling of constant pressure to do things quickly. As a result, we fall into a pattern of making quick decisions, with incomplete information and then proceed to take hasty action and seek short cuts. Our busy lives, the business of those around us, the schedules we set ourselves and the constant stream of distractions and interruptions ensure we have very little time to do things well and we never seem to get things done. 

"Could it be though that the disruptive, 24/ 7, multi-channel communications we value so much are actually eroding our ability to think clearly, creatively and expansively?” (Lewis, 2016 p1)

Against this trend towards doing more, in less time and at a faster pace is a trend towards slowing down, taking time and giving our minds time to catch up. 

Once we realise that as described by Chris Lewis we are moving too fast to think, we can start looking for an alternate course of action. The obvious answer is to slow down, to pause, switch off and take the time we need to reset but doing this requires deliberate action. We begin the process by recognising that taking our time, slowing down and being deliberate in the processes of thinking is a pathway towards becoming more productive, more creative and more attuned to the world around us. In what seems like a contradiction in terms, the best strategy for coping with the rapid pace of our lives is not to speed up but to slow down. 

Jim Lerman's insight:

Excellent, meaningful ideas; well presented.

Imagine Forest makes writing stories easy and fun. Never again will you be lost for inspiration or story ideas. Improve your creative writing skills and imagination through completing quick and fun activities.

"Do you know a budding young builder, maker or scientist? Encourage them to submit their best and brightest ideas for this year’s Inventor’s Challenge. The month-long challenge is underway and closes February 28.

The Inventor’s Challenge is designed to provide an opportunity for kids, both in and outside of school, to engage in a creative process that both fosters 21st century skills and is rewarding and fun.

Through the Inventor’s Challenge, we’ve watched children make their vision come to life and embrace their entrepreneurial side. Kids are challenged to find a problem they want to solve in their home, school, or community, invent something to solve it, and make a video sharing their invention with the world!

Students can submit videos demonstrating and explaining their invention for the contest portion of the Challenge, which will award prizes in four age categories to the inventions demonstrating the most originality, usefulness, and creativity of design and presentation."

Via The Scout Project

"Hosted by Scholastic, this project is dedicated to the world of folklore and fairy tales and would be a valuable resource for teachers of creative writing or those who want to implement this genre into their lesson plans for grades K-12. Myths, Folktales & Fairy Tales contains sections dedicated to each of the three categories and provides advice by and online workshops with published writers. For example, the myth section offers "Myth writing with Jane Yolen," which explores the path of writing one's own myth story in addition to Yolen's biography. Users have the option to explore folklore from around the world and the site contains a wealth of material with a heavy emphasis on strategies for students who are writing their own stories. The homepage contains a link to a teacher's guide and a related booklist, which provides teachers with additional book titles to supplement subject-specific lessons."

"It is not uncommon to see Middle Schoolers with earbuds in their ears, but how many of them have been encouraged to explore the podcasting genre?

"For the past few years, teachers Ceci Gomez-Galvez and Nathan Lill at Shekou International School in China, have implemented a podcast project with their Grade 8 students based on the popular NPR podcast series “This I Believe.”

"Students listen and respond to a range of “This I believe” examples – both from the original podcast and samples from previous students – and then undertake the process of creating their own.

"Attending a workshop with the pair last year, I couldn’t help but feed off their passion and excitement for the project. Listening to some of the finished student samples gave me chills. What phenomenal work students produce when given a platform to (literally!) share their own voice with the world.

"Ceci and Nathan have shared all of their resources (linked here with permission), so I encourage you to check out the vast array of material they have shared and get this project started in your school community.

"In addition, why not incorporate podcasts into your regular literacy programme? Below are a few of my favourites, which I hope you will explore with your Middle Schoolers."

I was very fortunate in that when I was about 11 years old a little girl from Japan started writing to me. Her English was amazing which astounded me as I could barely speak French. We wrote to each other for a couple of years before we decided to meet up. She was 2 years older than me and she asked if she could come and stay with my family. The parents discussed this and it was agreed she would fly over and stay with us. We had a wonderful time and did all the tourist stuff that you would expect.

The following year I went over to stay with her family in Japan, I flew alone for the first time at 15 and I loved every minute of it. It was one of the most amazing experiences of my life and encouraged me to travel (which I have done plenty of since) and also made me aware of different cultures. 

Free webinar with Nicholas Kristof on Oct. 10. Will be archived after the live session.

"How can writing change people’s understanding of the world? How can it influence public opinion? How can it lead to meaningful action?

In this post, which accompanies our Oct. 10 webinar, Write to Change the World: Crafting Persuasive Pieces With Help from Nicholas Kristof and the Times Op-Ed Page, we round up the best pieces we’ve published over the years about how to use the riches of The Times’s Opinion section to teach and learn.

We’ve sorted the ideas — many of them from teachers — into two sections. The first helps students do close-readings of editorials and Op-Eds, as well as Times Op-Docs, Op-Art and editorial cartoons. The second suggests ways for students to discover their own voices on the issues they care about. We believe they, too, can “write to change the world.”

Join our webinar (live on Oct. 10 or on-demand after) to learn more, and let us know in the comments how you teach these important skills."

"...it can be awkward for everyone if the teacher simply calls on a quiet student out of the blue, and the student either hasn’t done the reading or can’t answer the question. I dislike unpleasantness. Therefore, in recent years, in an effort to get everyone involved in a class discussion, I use “Heads-up Questions.” These are reading-related questions that I create—sometimes just a few, sometimes a dozen or so. I post them for students via Blackboard a couple of days before our class meeting.

"Here’s what makes the discussion of the “Heads-up Questions” different from other discussions and other questions. Everyone understands that in the next class I will directly call on students to respond to those questions. No volunteers or raising of hands. I call on students, but it’s not out of the blue because they have a chance to prepare a response, and they know there’s a pretty good chance they’ll get called on during that portion of class. (They also understand that I won’t call on them directly to answer questions I haven’t let them prepare for.)

"Here’s how I use Heads-up Questions in class:"