New Tool

Identity Tool:
Toon Doo

Identify Strategy in DZS:
Pg 53: “Kids enjoy making cartoons to represent a historical situation or event, a conflict, or a controversy.”
Pg 54: “And they permit students to inject a sense of play or personal ownership into an idea that is otherwise pretty dry in the textbook.”

Identify Content:
Current Events: political or opinion cartoons
OR
Mythology: to tell the story through a comic strip
Gilgamesh
Iliad
Aeneid
Odyssey
Romulus and Remus Myth
King Arthur

How will it be better:
Overcome the “…but I can’t draw Mr. Franzen.”
Allows them to change without having to do draft after draft
Can be a quick or long process
Easy access to text on the internet at the computer station
Easy access to visual images
Does not use class resources: paper, markers, pencils
Allows more permanent medium that does not fade, become torn, or is drawn upon.
Can be worked on outside of school by numerous people.
Allow students to facilitate script writing
Encourage interpretation of the text

This I believe.....

I believe that writing is the only way of preserving humanity. Through written word, the soul of humanity is held for the future. The emotions, brillance, rational, logic, pain and mistakes of past explain themselves through this medium.
A statue in the desert can show you a great egyptian pharoah, translate the features of the man into the godlike image. The epitaph tells you who he is and what he did. The hieroglyphics in his correlating tomb tells of what he did. Without the latter two, you lose the significance of the man, who he was, why the statue exists and inly left with a large stone statue.
In history, fossils, pictures, artifacts, buildings, weapons all tell stories of their own, but only through writing can we explore the soft tissue of the brain that has long since rotted away (unless your name is Otzi) and explore the actual person.
The students need to know the value of writing. They need to be able to do it effectivily as defined as communicating clearly with the reader.
In my classroom, writing will become more of a focus, beginning at the basic levels of scaffolding and product construction. This will paraelle the reading work as the year progresses.

Podcasts and Vocab

I really enjoyed the voacab podcasts. I think that format would tie into my Reader/Write project which deals with teaching vocab through etymology using ELL teachign strategies. The podcasts about words could be an effective way to document our progress and make a a class project. It would also allow students, who have difficulty pronouncing the words, practice hearing and speaking the words. A negative of this process is that not all students would be able to access these words from home on account of not having the technology. We could have a couple of small and cheap MP3 players that i could check out. Maybe?

Script for Book Trailer

Gates of Fire by Steven Pressfield

Dramatic Dark Music

• (spartan lambda shield)
• You have been bored by old manuscipts...... (picture of Herodotus' Persian Wars)
• You have been lied to by hollywood..... (Movie Poster for the 300.....blah)
• Leonidas, the proud king of the Spartans, would spit in the eys of your boredom and your lies..... (picture or carving of spartans)
• Live the glory.... (Picture of themopolyea)
• Experience the pain....
• Fight alongside the greatest warriors ever known.....
• .... and bask in their noble deaths.
• Gates of Fire! (Picture of book)

Reader Writer Project

Etymology:
Digital Movie:
Resources: http://www.krysstal.com/english.html (good resource for history fo language) http://www.etymonline.com/ (online etymology dictionary) http://www.etymologic.com/ (etymology game)
http://vnweb.hwwilsonweb.com/hww/shared/shared_main.jhtml?_requestid=14160 Foreign Language Techniques in Teaching Etymology John W. BurkeThe Classical Journal, Vol. 93, No. 3 (Feb. - Mar., 1998), pp. 275-283This article consists of 9 page(s).
Ayers' English Words from Latin and Greek Elements
Language Musketeer Puppets: http://www.daniellesplace.com/HTML/puppets.html (to make a sock puppet)
PAT: http://www.webenglishteacher.com/etymology.html


Excerpt (Burke):Since the students' prejudices about English are so strong, in order to implement my approach I have found it important initially to address their preconceptions about the course material. The first demonstration that the students speak English at an intuitive rather than analytical level (and for the sake of argument I assume that all are native speakers) is to provide them a few sample words with which they are likely to be familiar, asking their meaning in the abstract (dictionary definition), and then providing the word in context; and then I show how those words can be analyzed into constituent elements which themselves have meaning (e.g. abhorrent, adventure, circumvent, concrete, precise, provide, etc.). I impress upon the students that in fact they are familiar with the subject matter, by virtue of being English speakers, but that there are other levels of comprehension.

PBR Chap 4 and 15

Classroom Management. The chapters focused on what it means to understand and inquiry but what they really wanted to say was classroom management. As i read those chapters, those two words flashed in my mind.
Over my past year, the days that I had the least discipline problems were those days with genuine class discussions about genuine topics (What is faith, reality, homosexual marraige, male and female equality), had discovery activities and when the students were creating something based on their prioor learning. The two chapters stressed the need for true understanding, not just for a test, but in a larger sense where it is internalized, contextualized and intergrated into their world view. In order to achieve this is true inquiry must be made not only into outside sources, but within the individual to see what the concepts or learning actually means in the relative reality.
If both of these processes are occuring, students will be so focused on their own growth and thought that the rest of the world melts away, as noted on pg 231 in reference to the "flow." By having these two processes occuring, many of the issues facing classroom teachers become null and void and the true job of an educator can be realized.
It is not an easy task to do this. I did it few time during the school year but I realized when it happened. I felt like an actual teache. I wasn't tired of managinf kids. Most importantly class didn't end when the bell rang. Students continued to talk into the hall and ask me questions in the following days.
One of the most frustrating days of my schooling was the day I was introduced to the socratic method by Dr. Garretson in my high school theology class. He asked " What does it mean to know." I struggled with this for years. I forgave him for my frustration and now use that with my students, offering a constant opportunity to look deeper into that topic, continuing the inquiry and reaching new understandings that we don't understand much at all.

Script for Movie

• Good Morning Class, today we will begin our adventure into learning as many dates and names of old dead people as possible. World History 2008: A Journey into the Known?
• That's history, right? Memorizing names, dates and the "great things" flawless men have done in the past. Timeline with major dates and pictures of heros
• Many people see history as boring, dry, dead, covered in dust that when you blow it off..... tombstone with a sneeze sound at the end.
• History is not an old dude with glasses and a pipe in an overstuffed leather bound chair. Picture of old dude
• History is alive..... Frankenstein, flowers, baby
• It is about emotion.....
• Love romeo and juliet, mother teresa, Selma March., marylyn monroe Love me tender: elvis
• Hate Swastika, lynching, detention camps, jails, tourture devices heavy metal song
• Courage Tieneman Square, ghandi, female activists of 60's, Simon Bolivar, Che
• Fear holocaust, atomic bomb, berlin wall, slavery
• A place where no one is perfect......... picture of Mr. Franzen
• ...but are just like us. picture of west, america, shelbyville
• There are......
• Heros Patton, Castro, Jane Adams, Elenor Roosevelt, John Muir, john Sinclair, geronimo
• Villans hitler, nixon, slavedriver, conquistadors, mengel, kkk, bin laden
• Victims holocaust victims, mass graves, refugee camps, gitmo
• Saviors confucious, budda, muhamed, moses, sitting bull, socrates, Freud, jesus
• It is about the masses of people, not the one man....... masses of people from all over
• ....society has discovered, invented, explored, created, thought.... printing press, atomic energy, space ship, great wall, statue of liberty, mayan pyramids, egyptian pyramids,
• History is alive, living in everyone of us. Globe
• Let's go. Phone Booth from Bill and Ted