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

To Think I Met Them On...

Well... we've posted the first short video for our Salute to Seuss project. These projects are tied to the book, "To Think I Saw It On Mulberry Street", and became "To Think I Met Them On Park View Street". The students have, for the most part, done a quality job with these. I'm pretty impressed since this is the first time that we've gone through the whole process at all... Last year, I did a lot of the editing and putting things into PowerPoint for them, but this year, they're doing it. And not badly. I just wish we had more than 2 computers that could really run the projects. My old laptop is just so slow at this point that the student that is using that one gets frustrated and winds up just waiting for one of the desktops to be available.
Oh well, I can wish... its a practical wish since we're working on a grant for more hardware to do this kind of activity.

Information About Me

As a part of one of my graduate classes from this past summer, I learned how to use various tools for multimedia presentations. Like many graduate classes, you're required to develop a project that proves you've learned the material (Lovers of standardized tests take note: requiring people to show you that they've learned something is a higher order thinking skill than just bubbling in a test sheet).
I decided to create a project for my students to do that was tied to our history and English units. We were going to do this at the beginning of the year, but then I remembered that I really wanted to sign my class up for Salute to Seuss from Jennifer Wagner. We did the Lucky Charms graphing last year, and I know that my students learned a whole lot about data collection and graphing from the project. I know it because they were able to use the skills from the project later, and talk about data collection via Lucky Charms in a logical fashion. So... we'll likely get to this second quarter, because we'll be doing a similar project for Seuss. And that might be a good thing, because we can do a group project for Seuss and have everybody learn what to do, then do this one.
I also want to point out that this didn't start as a video. It started in PowerPoint. I exported the slides using 'save as picture' (PPT 2003 and above), then dropped them in PhotoStory 3 (free software for XP from Microsoft). That was the easy part. The soundtrack was a lot harder and not entirely what I was looking for. I'll have to find a better way to retain the sounds in a PowerPoint or just remember to record the sounds directly into the slide show software.
Here's the video...


I'll put the supporting materials here: All About Me Materials
The checklist that is on the page is adapted from one created by Attainment Publications, and can be found the 'Building Life Skills Portfolios' book.

Enjoy!