AAC Awareness Poems

A few days ago, Samuel Sennott posted a request to the QIAT listserv with an idea about creating "electronic" poems in PowerPoint, IntelliTools Classroom Suite, Clicker or another similar program. The idea was to choose a public domain poem available from Project Gutenberg or Google's Public Domain books, and illustrate it using pictures from Flickr's Creative Commons.
A truly intriguing idea, at least to me... so I signed up. I created two poems, both by Robert Louis Stevenson, and from his A Child's Garden of Verses. I grew up with a battered copy of that book covered in some kind of red fabric, so reading it again to choose poems was like visiting an old friend. Here are the two I made:




And, I discovered that I liked the idea so much, I wanted to try it with my students. For those that have been reading this, you'll know that we participated in the Salute to Seuss project from Jen Wagner, and created People Poems AKA 'To Think I Met Them On Park View Street'. This project seemed a perfect way to wrap up our unit on Poetry before moving forward... We did not use public domain poetry, instead we used classic Shel Silverstein (students chose: Sick, Eighteen Flavors, and Dancing Pants), and one Robert Frost (a rather ghoulish poem about a boy who gets his hand cut off). I've posted the student checklists and rubrics on my wiki here