Using Ted Video to Enhance Narrative Writing

I use the TED video by Chimamanda Adichie: “ The Danger of a Single Story” to teach students how to better write narrative essays and to develop voice.

Objective: Students will enhance their narrative writing skills by learning how to develop voice.

CCSS  WRITING STANDARDS:  Applies to grades 9-10 and 11-12

W.9-10.3

W.11-12.3

CCSS  SPEAKING AND LISTENING STANDARDS: Applies to grades 9-10 and 11-12

SL.9-10.5

SL 9-10.1

SL 11-12.1

SL11-12.5

Step 1

Watch the Ted Video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9Ihs241zeg

Step 2  

Students will collaborate in groups using Google Docs to discuss the video

( Here you may want to ask the students how Adichie was able to find her voice)

Step 3

Using a projector, the instructor displays the answers the groups produced

Step 4

Practice by having the students develop a brief paragraph using voice

Step 5

The instructor shows  what the students came up with and discusses their results.

Step 6

Using Google Docs students edit their classmates paragraphs. By now they should have a better idea about voice

Step 7

If students are still having difficulty with voice, I have them read and discuss  in groups the short story “ My Name” from Sandra Cisneros’s

“ The House on Mango Street.” https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-3G4XJ-lN7doAMtk8uuU2zbQLCeqsIhFPrEq3vs6DO4/pub or you can show them this brief video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9F2XB0owzAQ

Step 7

Have students write a narrative essay using as key component voice

Is the Five Paragraph Essay Overrated?

Teaching the five paragraph essay is a dilemma. One one hand, it is useful because it teaches students structure and organization, but on the other, it is too formulaic and in the real world writers do not even write this way. Imagine Malcolm Gladwell trying to write one of his famous writing pieces in a five paragraph essay. It just wouldn't work. So, as teachers, we do it because the states force us to teach it for standardized tests, but really, are we preparing our students to write well or are we just creating monotonous writers?

Click the image below for an excellent article on the five paragraph essay
 

Using Ted Talks for Class Discussion

A few years back, while I was surfing the internet, I came across something called Ted Talks or to be more precise Ted.com. As many people know by now, it is a site that invites personalities from different fields to speak on different issues such as education, technology, and others. That day, I viewed a video by Benjamin Zander, a famous orchestra conductor, and I became enthralled by his presentation. (Watch his performance) I have become a loyal follower ever since, and I not only watch the Ted videos for entertainment purposes, but I have also used them in the classroom. The great thing about Ted is the way that its videos can generate classroom conversation. A student in the Ted Blog wrote, recently, about how Ted videos can be good resources for class discussion. (Read his post)

Top twenty Ted Talks: 
Click Image below

 

Cell Phones in Class

A growing number of schools have realized the potential of technology in the classroom. With that in mind, some districts across the nation are allowing their students to use their cell phones in the classrooms. Among them are New Mildford High School in New Mildford, New Jersey, and the Westerly High School in Rhode Island.  

Here is video reporting how the Westerly District will allow cell phones in class.

Knowing the Common Core

Evernote

Imagine if you had a notebook where you could add just about anything that you wanted, like photos, files, homework, reminders and much more. Well, in Evernote, an electronic notebook this is possible. This is a free App that I love using because it keeps me organized. Evernote can also be used in the classroom, and the teacher and students can share folders and files.

Evernote Tutorial

Using Google Drive

Google Drive is one of the best technologies that a teacher can implement. It works on so many different levels. It can be a place to create and store files, you can share and edit documents in real time, and most of all, Google gives you a generous 15 GB storage in their cloud.  

Here is a quick tutorial

Google Drive

Collaborating Using Google Drive

I have to confess that putting my students in groups in order to do collaborative activities has been one of the most excruciating things for me to do in the past. Predictably, there has always been one student who has taken over the group, even when I have given specific directions and roles to each member in the group.  Eventually, he/she  monopolizes the participation of everyone, rendering the group activity useless. Well, when I found out more about Google Drive and how it can be used for collaborative purposes, my eyes lit up. What attracts me to Google Drive is its ability to share files. When you share a document in Google Drive, you can edit it in real time. I believe this can be helpful to a teacher when he/she does group activities.

The link below explains how Google Drive works sharing files

Collaborating using Google Drive

Learning How to Give Better Presentations

Nancy Duarte

Book Resonate

I think I finally got the point that my PowerPoint Presentations were not that good when I started reading Nancy Duarte's " Resonate", a great book about how to make better presentations. It put in perspective the way I was organizing my presentations. In this Ted Presentation, she gives tips on how we can make our presentations more engaging.

National Education Association President Dennis Van Roekel Speaks About Tenure and More

The following interview comes via USA Today

 

Who Supports the Common Core?

This Podcast from NPR discusses how people view the Common Core differently.

Click on the linkPodcast

Kelly Gallagher One of the Stars in Education

Kelly Gallagher is one of those teachers who is one step ahead of what our children need in order to become better readers and writers. I enjoy what he calls the Article of the Week. He assigns his students an article for the week. This eventually creates a foundation of their prior knowledge, since many of his students come to class with very few references about the world. “It is not enough to simply teach my students to recognize theme in a given novel; if my students are to become literate, they must broaden their reading experiences into real-world text”.  Gallagher is a teacher in California who has written many books, including "Readicide, a book about how schools are not preparing our children well to read and write. Like all of us, he is concerned that our profession, at the moment, is more focused on teaching for standardized tests and not teaching meaningful material.  Here, I have included a couple of his conversations on this topic and other issues in education.

Part 1

Kelly Gallagher Part 2

Part 2

Pairing Fiction with Non-fiction

As pointed out in the Common Core, more non-fiction text is recommended over fiction. One way of balancing both genres would be to pair a literary work with a piece of non-fiction. There are many novels that lend themselves to this arrangement. I have done it with Hansberry's " A Raisin in the Sun" and Martin Luther King's " I Have a Dream" speech.  I think our students get a deeper perspective for the literary work since the novel is put in the context of history, and it gives the student an insight as to why the author might have written his or her work.  

The following links are a suggested list of pairings for novel and non-fiction text.

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Social Influence

 R. Milian 

We like to think that we make conscious decisions as to the type of car we want to buy or the clothes we are going to wear. But, how conscious or rational are we? According to Amy Morin of Forbes Magazine that is not the case Article and two recent articles discuss this point. One is about how a sheriff in Michigan banned orange jumpsuits at the Saginaw County Jail because they have been popular at his local mall due to the influence of the show  "Orange is The New Black". Another example of social influence occurred at Starbucks when a woman ordered a drink and offered to pay for the customer behind her Drink.  Finally, there is an interesting article about how social influence  is surging Article.

Here is a video on Social Influence

Getting Savvy With Social Media

By
Matt Britland

Motivation for Technophobes

"No matter how many mistakes you make or how slow you progress, you're still way ahead of everyone who isn't trying."

~TONY ROBBINS

How a School Can Maximize Its Potential

This Presentation by Mitt Britland shows how technology if implemented in a school can make education more interesting

Connecting Dots

R. Milian

The commencement speech that Steve Jobs gave at Stanford University in 2005 has been discussed many times online and in print media. Part of its allure is the fact that Jobs, in my opinion, does not present himself in the speech like an extraordinary individual. The most  interesting part of the speech is his ability to understand how the decisions he made in the past propelled him to accomplish many of his incredible achievements at Apple later in his life. For instance Jobs says,

“Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.”

It is this idea of connecting dots that I want to focus on as regards to how we make decisions in life. There is nothing thought- provoking about the idea of understanding how to connect the dots in our life. Yet time and time again we fail to see what came before us and end up making foolish decisions. We need time to slow down to reflect on those dot connections. What Jobs mentioned in his speech about connecting the  dots reminds me of the poet William Stafford and his poem " The Way It Is".  It is a very simple poem yet so powerful. It tells us to slow down, pause and be very attentive to make life or dot connections. He uses in his poem the metaphor of a thread to accomplish this idea.

The Arrival of The New School Year

R. Milian

In a few weeks I will be making my return to school. For fifteen years, I have seen my teaching skills grow and by the same token, I feel that perhaps I have not grown enough as a teacher. Many students have passed through my classes, and I am blessed that I have helped many of them. They have arrived in the country alone or accompanied by their parents. Working with these new arrivals for an ESL teacher, who has been given the task to teach the Common Core, is, to say the least, difficult. Right now the teaching profession is at a crossroads. What to do when many of us think that technology is essential in the classroom yet not enough support is given to implement it in our jobs.  Our challenge today is not just in our classrooms, but with policies like the Common Core, reformers who prescribe solutions  for better teaching techniques  yet  lack any educational perspective,  the anti-tenure haters who think this is the only solution for better schools, and the union busters who claim that teacher unions are the root of all evil. But despite all the nonsense that is happening in our teaching profession,  I have not lost the hope that a better solution is on the way. I am the eternal optimist who feels that we are different, but in the end, we all want the best for our children. Writing this post brings me memories of the day when the Cuban-American poet, Richard Blanco,  read his poem " One Today" during President Obama's second  inaugural. As I re-read his poem again,  it gives me hope because he speaks of one nation, one hope that we all can believe in and share for a better tomorrow.

Richard Blanco

Experiencing the Native in You

R. Milian

The New York Times did a video on Germany and its fascination with Native Americans. The video details how Germans feel about Native American values and  specifically about the Native American character Winnetou who was created by the famous German author Karl May. May has sold the most books in Germany, including those of Goethe, the great German poet. His stories of Native Americans have penetrated the German psyche. In May's stories all his Native American characters are the good guys as opposed to the way they have been presented in American Cowboy films. May never actually experienced many of the events that he wrote in his stories, although he claimed that he did. The idea one gets of Karl May is that  he was a clever salesman. Even though the German fascination with Native Americans is well-intentioned, It is difficult to accept what they have created in their imaginations as the definition of  Native American culture. When a dominant society redefines a foreign culture, it is very selective in what it adopts. It acts like a shopper at a supermarket only choosing what they favor. For instance, the Germans in this video identify with the connection that Native Americans have to Mother Earth. Cultures are complex and cannot be reduced to what we like.  This video is reminiscent of the Europeans that colonized other continent, describing the inhabitants of those cultures, not on what was real but on their fictionalized accounts.

Words that comfort me

R. Milian

When education reformers put my profession down, these words comfort me

The State of Our Profession

R. Milian

Instants

How to Persuade People

Authors Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner of "Think Like A Freak" write about the idea of persuasion in their book and discuss how difficult it is to convince people. One of the reasons for this is that people already possess a predisposed mentality to their own opinions. Even the famous basketball legend Kareem Abdul -Jabbar once said, " It's easier to jump out of a plane -hopefully with a parachute- than it is to change your mind about your opinions." One of the tips that the authors recommend for persuading others is to admit your argument is not perfect. This got me thinking about argumentative essays and their importance in making students understand that the opposite view is just as important as their own argument.

Listen to their interview 

21st-Century Learner

Mark Stevens of NEA wrote this article discussing how education is quickly changing and what we need to do to catch up.


No one sees more clearly than educators how the technologies we use in our daily lives influence how students learn. Students have changed, educators have changed, learning itself has changed. And learning tools have evolved accordingly.

Yet the typical physical building where all that learning takes place has remained largely the same over the last 100 years. We live with the reality that the same structures of brick, mortar, and steel will continue to greet us each morning. The great news is that 21st-century learning can take place in every school.

Read More

Using Ted Talks to Enhance Narrative Writing

R. Milian

One of the most difficult things for students to assimilate is Voice. I have lost count on the number of essays that are just too numbing to read. They lack voice and as a result what appears on paper is nothing more than empty platitudes that, honestly, I can't bear to read. Ted is one of my favorites places to watch educational videos, and I came across one by the African writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie that discusses the dangers that writers tend to make when they view the world from a single perspective. It is a thought-provoking video that also discusses how she found her voice in writing and how she expanded her literary world. For this writing activity, I will use her Ted Presentation as a way to teach students what it means to use Voice when we write. 

Objective: Students will enhance their narrative writing skills by learning how to develop voice by watching a Ted video

CCSS  WRITING STANDARDS:  Applies to grades 9-10 and 11-12

W.9-10.3

W.11-12.3

CCSS  SPEAKING AND LISTENING STANDARDS: Applies to grades 9-10 and 11-12

SL.9-10.5

SL 9-10.1

SL 11-12.1

SL11-12.5

Step One: Watch the video

Step 2  

Students will collaborate in groups using Google Docs to discuss the video

( Here you may want to ask the students how Adichie was able to find her voice)

Step 3

Using a projector, the instructor displays the answers the groups produced

Step 4

Practice by having  students develop a brief paragraph using voice

Step 5

The instructor shows  what the students came up with and discusses their results.

Step 6

Using Google Docs students edit their classmates paragraphs. 

Step 7

If students are still having difficulty with voice, I have them read and discuss  in groups the short story “ My Name” from Sandra Cisneros’s

“ The House on Mango Street.” https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-3G4XJ-lN7doAMtk8uuU2zbQLCeqsIhFPrEq3vs6DO4/pub 

Step 7

Have students write a narrative essay using as key component voice