Educational Video: Intro to Poetry Slam

This coming spring the seventh grade English teachers at Red Mountain Middle School are going to be attempting a new project for our poetry unit.  Each unit we teach is six weeks long.  For the first four weeks of our poetry unit, we will be teaching all of the basic knowledge students need to know for the curriculum, standards and testing, but for the last two weeks, the students are going to use all this knowledge for a creative project.  Each teacher will be teaching a workshop featuring a different creative project that students can sign up for.  I would like to do a poetry slam for my portion of the workshop project, and I would like to create a instructional video introducing poetry slam to the students attending my workshop.

The objectives of my instructional video will be to introduce the concept of poetry slam to my students who have probably never encountered it before and to give them the basic fundamentals of what a poetry slam is.  The second objective will be to show examples to model what poetry slam looks like in its true form.  The last objective will be to create excitement about the creative potential of poetry slam.

The target audience of this instructional video will be seventh graders (12 and 13-year-olds) in a language arts setting. 

Because this slam project will take place at the end of our poetry unit, students should have the necessary knowledge of poetry that they will need to take it one step further.  Other prerequisites will be a knowledge of the writing process (how to brainstorm, prewrite, and edit), a basic understanding of audience and tone and the experience or at least desire to speak in public.

I would like this video to first give a description of what poetry slam is and its brief history.  It has its roots in hip hop, so I would like to show that connection.  Then I would like to cover what the major requirements are to create and perform a poem for poetry slam: free verse, under three minutes in length, must be memorized, often about important emotions or issues.  Lastly I would like to give examples of what poetry slam looks like in practice.  I could do this one of two ways.  I would like to show an example from the Albuquerque public schools who won an award for this art, or I could film someone locally.  If I used the Albuquerque example, I would be incorporating a part of a you tube video, which may not be okay for this project.

In my classroom, I would like to use this as part of the creative poetry workshops we will be doing in the spring to introduce the poetry slam project.  It would be helpful to have as a reference video if students needed a refresher course before writing or performing their pieces.  I would like to record student creations during the workshop and maybe expand the video to include them for future classes.

Google Docs

My Google Drawing:  Doodling for Googling


My classmates and I created a collaborative drawing using Google Docs, a program that allows you to create documents, presentations, and drawings in an online space that can be viewed and edited simultaneously from several different people in different locations.  In a previous class, two students and I wrote a collaborative poem using Google Docs, and it was a great experience to be able to see your group members' thoughts and ideas when we were all in our respective homes.  In this class we created a two-voice poem to highlight the growth in a character in a book we had read.  I think I could do a similar project in my classroom.  Collaborative 2-voice poems are fun to write because they require deep thought into multi-faceted characters.  Doing one on Google Docs allows students to contribute ideas, edit each other's work and feed off of what other students are creating.

Digital Photostory

My digital photostory tells a brief history of my life thus far and how I became a teacher.  For this project, I used iMovie, importing photos, music and recording audio to create it.  This was a really fun project once I got the hang of how to use iMovie.  I think it would be useful in my class in a couple ways.  As a teacher, I could use this technology to introduce myself to the class.  If I created a class blog, I could embed a "meet your teacher" video like this one, so students and parents could get to know a little more about me.

Students could also use this technology, and I think they would really enjoy it as well.  In my class, we do an entire unit on short stories, and part of our focus is on the elements of short stories: exposition, rising action, climax, falling action and resolution.  It would be a great project if students demonstrated knowledge of these elements by writing their own short stories.  They could then present them to the class using something like iMovie or Windows MovieMaker on the school's computers.  It would be a fun and creative way to present information, but it would also show me how well they grasped these short story elements.

Web 2.0 Presentation Special Tools

Web 2.0 Presentation

Web 2.0: Specific Tools on Prezi

Wikispaces

My Wikispace


The above link is to the wikispace I created to potentially use for my classroom.  One of the main purposes of wikispaces is to create an area for students to collaborate on school projects to create the best work possible.  I started to set up this wiki with three basic areas I think would be great fodder for collaborative work: research projects, short stories, and poetry (there is also a page that describes how I could use the wikispace in my classroom).  An added benefit is that students' work is displayed for parents, administrators, peers to see as well as a global audience.  This is something I think would be very helpful in my classroom, although I am still deciding if I should create a separate space for each class or have students from all classes collaborating with each other.

Prensky's Assessment Strategies

One of the assessment strategies I am going to use in my classroom this upcoming year is ipsative assessment in the form of electronic portfolios.  I like the idea of having students continually competing against themselves to improve their writing skills especially.  I have such a wide range of skill levels when it comes to writing and reading that I don’t really like the letter grade system because I feel that it doesn’t do a good enough job rewarding students who are improving on their best.  For example, I had students this last year who came into my class not knowing how to write a sentence, and I had students who could skillfully navigate a five-paragraph essay.  I think it would be a better system to measure individual progress rather than measure the students against each other.  This year I am going to have each student keep a portfolio of their work, particularly writing assignments.  My comments and corrections will be how I grade future assignments as I judge how the student is making steps to improve his or her writing.  This way I am rewarding effort and improvement not just measuring against one standard of how it should be.

The second assessment strategy I am going to use this year is real-world assessment by having students publish their work (particularly writing assignments and projects) on blogs, wikis or some online format for the world to see (I haven’t picked one for sure yet).  I think this is an effective strategy because students will be more careful about their work if they know that their peers, parents, administrators and an global audience can view, comment and critique their work - not just their teacher.  I also like this strategy because it is a great way to get peers, parents, administrators and community members involved in what my students will be doing.  This way it will never be a secret what I am doing in my class, and students can receive instant feedback from people other than myself, which I feel is a powerful motivating factor for the best work to be created.

My Avatar

I used Voki.com to create this personalized avatar.  This website is really cool because it allows you to change every aspect of your avatar from hair and eye color to clothing to even a background location.  After you create your avatar, you have four options to record audio for it.


I think this would be a fun source of technology for students to use to represent characters in my class.  Last year we did a character monologue project; students chose a character from a book, wrote a monologue that brought that character to life, and presented these characters to the class.  They could do the same project and use an avatar for the presentation that would add the element of what that character looks like, talks like, where they live etc.  They could then present their character avatar to the class when completed.