Blues Project IEP

In the class I have been teaching we were studying the Roaring Twenties and the Depression. During this era there were radical and interesting cultural and social changes. A big part of these changes involved music, and basically it was around this time that the white culture started to pay attention to the black music culture and began to copy and popularize it. Whites adopting black music styles has actually happened several times in the twentieth century. Think about the 60’s, and bands like the Rolling Stones, their whole music base was founded in the blues from black musicians of the 40’s and 50’s. Then there was rap which was confined to the black culture for quite a while, and lately it’s a big part of the white youth music diet. Blues started in the cotton fields with slave chants, it moved into the churches, and then into the black culture with lyrics and guitars with basic chord patterns. The roots of jazz started when the blues was played on a horn. So the blues have a strong foundation in the history of the twenties and thirties. In this unit I wanted to include a section of this blues history, and I thought a great culminating activity would be to have the students write their own blues songs, and they could perform it to music and I would record it for them. This lesson would not specifically involve the students learning the software, but I would have to learn it.

This was a very frustrating experience. From the very beginning, just trying to find the right software was difficult. This in itself took a lot of research. There is an abundance of digital recording software out there, but figuring out what would work for me was difficult. The two main things I was looking for was ease of use, and something that was not too expensive. So a lot of software was quickly eliminated because it was outrageously expensive. Some of the software had down loadable trial programs, and I could try it out, but then they never included the full package and I couldn’t do everything I needed to do, and then I couldn’t tell if the full package would be what I wanted and needed, so that was frustrating. Most of this software is so loaded with extras that it became some what mind boggling to figure out.

I finally decided on the NCH software, which fit my two requirements of being affordable and seemingly easy to use. The software came with some instructions, but it took a lot of hours of just experimenting to be able to do what I wanted to do. I kept a brief journal of my day to day wrestling match with this software, eventually I pinned it downed. Now I will be able to record my students in the classroom with some form of background music, either a student musician or a recorded basic blues track. I was never able to do this in class this year, because by the time I had it all figured out, we had been long finished with our unit. But I am really looking forward to the time I will be able to use this in the classroom. The journal of my trials and successes with this program is on Google Docs and so are the lesson plans. The lesson plans are mostly about introducing and learning about the blues in the context of history, and then moves into recording the students own songs.
I also have an instructional video using movie maker, on basic step by step recording and tracking using the NCH software.Check it out on teacher tube

Community Web Sites

I joined the Live Journal online community web site. I found it as a link on the NCTE web site, so I figured it must be okay. When you first look at it, it kind of seems like a conservative, more adult, My Space kind of thing, but it has lots of categories and you can type in teaching or your content area and get connected to blogs and comments. I have actually posted a few comments which was not all that painful, and my typing fingers are still intact.

The thing about this site is that there are quite a few beginning teachers using it and they have plenty of questions. It is somewhat comforting to see a multitude of new teachers with the same questions and apprehension as I have, kind of like the misery loves company phenomena, not that I know any thing about misery.

There are plenty of good ideas you can use, and it seems contributors are happy to share:

It gives me a warm and tingly feeling to know that there are teachers out there that understand how hard it all is, and are willing to let you take, and use, their experiences and ideas.

It’s a beautiful thing, I’m serious, it really is, and I appreciate it.

Another really fascinating thing with this site is that there are teachers from all over the country and even the world. You get to see post from teachers that work in environments that are so very different from our Alaskan experience.

• There is a post from a teacher from a school in New York City who has to deal with extreme behavior problems
• There are posts from a lot of suburban teachers.
• If you are ever thinking about moving out of Alaska and teaching, this is a good site to visit.
  

Even though this site is worth while, I have been looking around for sites more specific to the teaching community. There are several of them, but the problem is some are just too overloaded and serious, whereas some of the others don’t get used. It’s kind of hard to find something that you are comfortable with and also have the kind informative participants that you are looking for. So this site is good, because it has a little of everything.

Click here to get to Live Journal

Internet Resources

I joined the National Council for Teachers of English back in the first semester of school and I like it. It is filled with all types of information that is useful for a language arts teacher. It is a fairly easy to use web site that offers access to books, research, lesson plans and useful ideas. NCTE has research-based resources for English teachers that can be very helpful for teachers of Language Arts. This makes it a fruitful web site that helps me with student learning and achievement. The site offers an option where you can fill out information online and request consultation. I’m not sure exactly how this works, but I know it’s available and I’m sure to use it at some point in my career. I think that these kind of online resources are especially important for all of us in Alaska because of our physical separation from the rest of the country, good sites like this one offer access to issues and new ideas that affect the Language Arts world in education. And of course this site has easy access to very usable lesson plans. This is a very high quality resource.

I have also been using the Teacher Vision web site. This is a nice general site that has something for all teachers. Since I have been teaching a block History/ English class, I can go to Teacher Vision and find lesson plan ideas as well as strategies and general teaching plan ideas. I have found a lot of good lesson plan ideas. Many web sites that deal with teachers and teaching have a lot of unusable plans and ideas, at least for me, but this one has things that are useful and workable in the class room. I know because I have used some of them. Of course I usually just pick out what I think I can use, and leave the rest, like right now I am looking at some sections of a blues lesson plan that I can use as part of my to Kill A Mockingbird unit. I haven’t joined Teacher Vision yet, but I have been able to access a lot of information without joining. With a membership fee of about forty dollars a year, I might wait until I get a job.

Since History is the larger section of what I have been teaching, I have also been using the Digital History website. I like this site because it has loads of links. There are links to PBS as well the National Archives. The links are substantial and worthwhile; this site is mostly links, which I like because it takes you to what you are specifically looking for instead of having to search a specific item on a website. It also has a myriad of primary source documents which is invaluable for teaching History. There is a problem though; many of the links do not link to anything, which can be quite disappointing. But I really enjoy browsing around on this site. It’s fun to read Red Horse’s version of the Battle of Little Bighorn, or look at Abraham Lincoln’s second inaugural address. The site also has time lines to all different periods in history. I find these very helpful for students to get an idea of place in time, as well as historical chronology. I have used these by accessing them on my classroom computer, which is connected to an overhead projector, and then I just put it up on the big screen and go over with students. I usually have them copy it and keep it for a reference.

Assistive Technologies

This could be the first article in the Educational Leadership magazine where I only have good things to say. The idea of being able to use technology that is very specific to helping students with learning disabilities is a fantastic one. I am enthusiastically for anything that can help students develop grade level reading and writing skills.

• The ultimate beauty of this technology is that many students can read grade level text without a teacher
• It gives students the wonderful feeling of independent accomplishment

Read & Write Gold sounds like some good software with the text to speech that students can listen to at their own pace. The writing software that instantaneously gives students a choice of words that they may be trying to use, can only be positive because the student still has to figure out what the correct word would be. The software does not do all of the thinking for the student.

Believe it or not Sitka High has some type of related technology. I have several students who use it, but I don’t know exactly what it is, and I would guess that there are a lot of teachers that don’t know about it. I am now feeling rather ridiculous not having experienced it with one of my students. I will do this soon.

The Over Dominance of Computers

I have a small problem with the analogies at the beginning of this article that are not analogous to the author’s argument. Comparing youthful computer use to alcohol use or driving a car as a youth is too much of a stretch. This sort of thing makes me leery as to how much hyperbole I’m going to have to swallow, and it makes me mentally discount any statement that is vague or is not backed up by reasonable studies or statistics.

His suggestion that since we are teaching computer literacy to students we are not teaching certain values like, “commitment, loyalty and tradition” is an argument that could be made for just about any subject.

However, just because his argument process is weak, it doesn’t mean that the essence of what he is saying is wrong. The article has a solid core of truth; we don’t need to be pushing major computer literacy on young children and there are more important things to be teaching.

The main ideas that can be lost in this rambling article are:

• Students still need to be prepared for the world of technology
• The authentic world, and worldly values, are critical parts of student growth
• Parents and teachers need to recognize and secure a balance between both worlds

short fiction

I will have students write a work of short fiction using the story map as a guide, once they start writing the actual story they must stay very close to the original story map.The reason is that beginning writers of short fiction usually have problems with randomly straying from the main point.The other main aspect of this is that the core of the story should be at least loosely based on some real experience, and then fiction can be added on, like frosting and colorful little burning candles on a birthday cake.
I decided to go with just one image on this video because I thought it would go along with the idea of singleness of effect, which is one of the main points of this writing lesson along with staying focused on the core of the story. I chose one image
that I thought generally expressed the idea. This is not at all necessary, in fact I originally had a whole group of images picked out to use, but then decided to do it this way simply to emphasize the point.

The lesson for creative writing students is to use the story map as the core and then once the core is established the writer can expand using:

• dialogue
• description
• character development

But not:
• additional characters
• extra plot development

The story I posted on Teacher Tube follows these rules, it has a core of real experience and then just story telling all around the core. I think that using movie maker with its time limit along with a story map will be an excellent tool for short fiction and non -fiction writers. It really works by forcing a writer to stay within the story.
You can find my story example by going to teacher tube.




A rubric for the digital story can be found at
Google Docs

story map

This project is going to be about students learning how to take something from their life experiences and use it as the core for a piece of fiction. Staying with the general idea that you should write what you know. It will be okay,in fact necessary to add fiction to this core of fact. One of the biggest problems all writers and especially novice writers have with short fiction is keeping the story line focused. Since this is a piece of short fiction it is critical for writers to keep focused on the main story details. The story map will work to help develop plot and keep writers focused on a central idea. My story map takes an actual experience I had, and then quickly expands into fiction. This story map will be used an example for students on how to do this, as well as showing students some basic elements of short fiction.