Eng 9: Speak and Little Bits

We started today with more improv.  Last week we played symphony.  Today we played machine.  We end up creating a pretty disturbing little device, but hey!  Why not?

Then we busted out the Little Bits and experimented with what we might make with them.

Next class we will get much more intentional with the Little Bits.  We will be running a design sprint to invent devices that could help Melinda, Mr. Freeman, Heather or another character in Speak.  

After working with Little Bits we focused on completing empathy maps based on the characters in Speak.  Choose Melinda, Mr. Freeman, Heather or a character of your choice.  Identify what the character says and does by providing text evidence -- be certain to include page numbers.   On the right hand side of the empathy map, connect what that character says and does to what you believe the character thinks and feels.  The goal is to try and get into that character's point of view.

Turn your empathy map into a blog post.

For next class, please read through page 85

SHOW YOUR THINKING.

Blog.  Empathy Map: Speak.

Explain your thinking.

Due. Wednesday, March 2nd.

Read.  Speak.  Up to Page 85.

Due. Wednesday, March 2nd.

Study.  Roots 6-9 Quiz.

Due. Friday, March 4th.

Get ready for No Red Ink to return at the end of the week and during next.

Humanities: Fidget Design Challenge: This Week at a Glance

Hi folks,

Here you will find the game plan for Monday through Friday, including the blog prompts for each of the days.

Monday.

Station 1. Blake Videos.  Watch the videos.  As a group, affinity map them with Post-Its. What are the common denominators across the videos?  What are the outliers?

Station 2.  Low-Rez Tinkering.  Use the materials from the maker cart to experiment with designs for fidgets.  Our finished designs will be produced on the printer.  This is a chance to experiment in a quick way.  

Station 3.  Empathy Interview & Poll Design.  Work in a group to determine Qs to ask possible users as we try to create a design that meets their needs.  Determine poll items that we might be able to email/distribute through social media.

Station 4. Tinkercad Experimenting.  Play around with Tinkercad as you explore shapes, patterns and possibilities.  Try to create different textures w the tools available to you.

Station 5. Crazy Eights.  Use the Crazy Eights method to come up with 8 ideas for fidgets in only 5 minutes.  Then take one of those ideas and expand it into a 3-stage storyboard.  

Blog Prompt:  Adventure Grid Story.  Tell the story of your Discovery process.  What did you watch, read, listen and/or do and what did you learn along the way?   Use your storytelling skills to share your journey of learning about stress, anxiety, fidgets and design.   You should have an experience from at least three quadrants of the adventure grid.  DUE TUESDAY, 3/1.

Tuesday.

Station 1. Blake Videos.  Watch the videos.  As a group, affinity map them with Post-Its. What are the common denominators across the videos?  What are the outliers?  FINISH the videos?  Move on to the blog prompt.

Station 2.  Low-Rez Tinkering.  Doodle and use the materials from the maker cart to experiment with designs for fidgets.  Our finished designs will be produced on the printer.  This is a chance to experiment in a quick way.  

Station 3.  Empathy Interviews & Polls.  Go and interview.  You have enough time to hunt down at least one person.  We may also have some online opportunities to interview people/students not in our building.

Station 4. Tinkercad Experimenting.  Play around with Tinkercad as you explore shapes, patterns and possibilities.  Try to create different textures w the tools available to you.

Station 5. Crazy Eights.  Use the Crazy Eights method to come up with 8 ideas for fidgets in only 5 minutes.  Then take one of those ideas and expand it into a 3-stage storyboard.  Did it yesterday?  AWESOME.  MORE!  

Blog Prompt:  Blake Mycoskie and Start Something That Matters.  Based on the trends and outliers of what you saw in the Mycoskie videos, what do you believe it means to "Start Something That Matters?"  What are three questions you hope Mycoskie will answer in his book?   What are three OTHER questions you would like to ask him.  DUE WEDNESDAY, 3/2

Wednesday.

Station 1. Start Something That Matters Book Orientation.  Flip through the book.  Get familiar with how it is laid out, how the sections are determined, what sort of features are in there.  Create a sketchnote of how Start Something That Matters is organized and designed.  

Station 2. Empathy Interviews.  Go.  Interview.  Engage.

Station 3. Empathy Interviews.  Go.  Interview.  Engage.  More.  

Station 4. Low-Rez, Doodling and Tinkercad experimenting.

Station 5. Low-Rez, Doodling and Tinkercard experimenting.

Blog:  Empathy Interview and Empathy Map.  Document the results of your empathy interview and a complete an Empathy Map for at least one of your interviewees.  DUE THURSDAY, 3/3

Thursday.

1. Roots Quiz 9.  

2. Empathy Sorts.  What are the trends and outliers we are discovering in our interviews and our polls? 

What do we have to keep in mind with our experiments and our prototypes? Identify 3 big takeaways to inform our work. 

 

3. Tinkercad designing and printing.

Blog:  Connect the Dots.  Explain through sketchnotes, writing, audio and/or video how your current design for a fidget has been informed by your adventure grid work, your empathy interviews, crazy eights and/or any other process this week.  

Friday.

1. Experiment & print. 

2. Complete all blogs. 

3.  Group Share Out.  5 minutes per group.  Design so far.  Four corners critique sessions.

Pop Culture: Design a Band

We start today with this "How Might We . . . ?"

How might we create an intentional band out of random elements?  

This will be run similar to a DEEPdt  flash lab.

DISCOVER.

Make a list of bands and artists that you believe have really great names. Even if you don't love the music or consider them a favorite, you hear the name and think, "that's a great name."  Throw in good names of movies, good names of books, TV series, while you are at it.  

Put three of your favorite names -- music or not -- and put each on a sticky note and up the marker board.

I notice.  I wish.  I wonder.  We'll look at those band names up on the board and discuss using only those stems to start our thinking.

EMPATHY.

3x3 Interviews.  Three questions.  Three subjects.

1. What sorts of fonts appeal to you?  Handwriting? Block? Serif? San Serif?

by mostash.

2. What colors appeal to you?

by Dehahs.

3. Do you prefer realistic or abstract images?

Realistic To Abstract from kyoung

Collect your responses and include them on your blog post when you discuss the album art you create.  Use what you know appeals to others visually to inform your choices.

EXPERIMENT.

Create-A-Band Process 

I'd Give Credit to the Creator of this Process  But It's From a While Back & I Can't Recall the Link! #arghface.

1. Go to the Random Article link on the Wikipedia front page. (You can find it in the top left navigation menu.) The title of the random article is your new band/artist's name.

2. Go to the Random Quote link on the Quotations Page front page. (You can find it in the left side navigation menu.) You will get a list of random quotes. Pull either a full or partial quote from that page. That is the album title for your band's latest release. (You might also find some song titles this way as well.)

3. Go to Flickr and click on the 'Interesting Uploads from the Last 7 Days' link. (You can find it by scrolling down and looking beside the 'Take the Tour' link.)

4. Pull that information together and then use an app like Pages, Google Draw or Google Docs, a photo editor like iPhoto or Gimp, or any other application that lets you manipulate words and images, and create your album cover.  Export your finished work as a .JPG and post it or  PDF and screenshot it and post it on your blog.

PRODUCE.

5.  On your blog, create a context for your band.  Who are the members?  How did they form and when?  What genre(s) do they play?  What was the gig that led to them making this album?  Where do they play? In other words, what is the story behind the band?  

Here's the big huge giant challenge of this creative endeavor: take those random elements from above and make them all seem intentional.  How might you create sense out of what might be nonsense by applying the filter of music to it?  What does this say about the power of music?

6. In a separate blog post, choose an artist or band you enjoy.  Select an album by that performer. Explore the relationship between the artist's name, the album's name, and the cover art for that album.  To what extent do they align?  Where do you see a clear relationship between the visuals and the music?  Where do you see it not working out?  What about the band's logo or the font used on the album cover?

One to two descriptive paragraphs with visuals to illustrate.

Extra helpful?  Embed some Vimeo links or Spotify links or other ways of proving your point through the music.

You might get some inspiration for your album covers here

10 Iconic Album Covers (Yahoo) Here

99 Well Designed Album Covers (Inspiredology) Here

21 Great Albums with Not So Great Art (AV Club) Here

Lego'd Album Covers Here

Show Your Learning.

Blog. 3+ Posts.

Creative Blog Post. Create a 5 Card Flickr where each image you choose becomes either a) an alternative album cover for an album that already exists or b) a new album by an artist/band that already exists.  Explain your thinking in a few sentences for each new cover.

Due. Friday, Sept 18. 

Other Posts?  

5.  On your blog, create a context for your band.  Who are the members?  How did they form and when?  What genre(s) do they play?  What was the gig that led to them making this album?  Where do they play? In other words, what is the story behind the band?  

Here's the big huge giant challenge of this creative endeavor: take those random elements from above and make them all seem intentional.  How might you create sense out of what might be nonsense by applying the filter of music to it?  What does this say about the power of music?

Eng 9: Speak Begins

We're continuing with our Power of One unit with our next whole class reading: Speak.  This isn't a difficult book to read, but it can be a difficult one to discuss.

Over the next several weeks we are going to go into some pretty intense places and this will require tremendous empathy and our three core principles of this classroom -- something we need to review and dig into more here in the middle of the year -- acceptance, communication, and trust.

• We have to accept that we are all heading into this book from different points of view and different experiences.
• We have to communicate our ideas and thoughts clearly and effectively and remember that our actions speak as loudly as our words.  That communication is as much about listening as it is speaking.
• We have to trust that we will be heard and that we can trust the ideas and feelings shared here during our class time can be honored with respect and dignity.  We also have to trust ourselves to try things and take big risks.

We'll be doing some activities in class to help us work on accepting, communicating, and trusting -- each of those being one word.  In fact, I think I'd like us to do some self assessment in those areas and choose the one -- the one word -- on which we'd each like to work over the next several weeks.

For Tuesday, we'll start with our new vocab: Roots 9.   (9! This is a big deal folks!).  We'll take 10 minutes with Quizlet to get accustomed to the new words.

From there, we will spend ten minutes on No Red Ink.  If you did well on your Commonly Confused Words 2 Quiz, you have ten minutes of free time or time to explore other aspects of No Red Ink including getting ahead on our next section -- complete sentences.   If not, do some Commonly Confused Words 2 practice and get ready to retake the quiz.

Then we go on a field trip down to the front of the building.   We'll be doing some work on recapturing what it was like to be entering school on the first day as we try to empathize with Melinda, the protagonist (main character) of Speak.

From there we will start reading Speak and comparing our experiences to Melinda's.

SHOW YOUR WORK.

Read.  TBA.

Blog.  The 10 Lies They Tell You in High School.

In a blog post, list the ten lies you believe you were told on the first day of school at Mt. Blue. Then compare and contrast your list to Melinda's in Speak.  Where are there commonalities and differences?

Due.  Thursday.  Feb 25.

AP Lit: Back from Break

Contrary to Flight307, we did quite a bit of things before break.  Got off my blogging game there . . .

Monday and Tuesday of this week we will discuss Act V and Hamlet as a whole, exploring the idea of tragedy, the tragic flaw, and the trajectories of these characters.

Wednesday and Thursday of this week, we bust out Little Bits electronics as we examine the power structures of Hamlet.  

Friday and next Monday we explore the design of Hamlet and try to reverse engineer Shakespeare's intentions.

For tonight . . .

SHOW YOUR THINKING.

Read.  How to Read Lit: When In Doubt, It's Shakespeare.

Blog.  Discuss the extent to which you see Foster's assertions surfacing in the storytelling you encounter today.  (Let that idea of storytelling take you into whatever creative mediums your brain takes you.)

Use text evidence from Foster and specifics from your contemporary examples to prove your point.

Blog. SUPER IMPORTANT.  Submit your best  evidence from the past three weeks of blogging into STANDARDS EVIDENCE 1 on the blog tracker. 

Anticipate.  Blog post related to vocabulary for next class.  

Design.  HMW 2BN2B.

Due. Next Thursday/Friday.

Humanities: Stations and To Kill a Mockingbird

Here are the stations we are working during To Kill a Mockingbird week.

Station 1.  No Red Ink. Sentence Fragments.  Quiz coming next week.

Station 2.  Roots 6-8.  Quizlet.  Quiz coming on Friday.  Should've been today.

Station 3.  P/P/O Personal Narrative Essay story map.

Station 4.  P/P/O Personal Narrative essay Storyboard.

Station 5.  LNG/Blog/Graphic Organizers.

We've spent most of our class time this week watching the film.  This way we can invest a great deal of time next week into unpacking and uncovering the film.  Big, big thinking ahead.

SHOW YOUR THINKING.

Blog Post.

Req'd Post.  P/P/O Pre-Writing.

Post on your blog your story map and your storyboard, explaining your thinking and where you are headed with your essay as well -- either through video, audio, or written commentary.

Due.  Friday, Feb 5.

Compose.  P/P/O Personal Narrative Essay.

Working draft. (Beginning, middle and end. 

Due. Monday.

Eng 9: One Word Unit Continues: Person, Place, Object of Significance Personal Narrative Essay

On Tuesday, we have focused on the power of one word and how much it can represent about us and our lives.

We started with our Roots 6-8 Quiz.  Results will be posted shortly.

In 15 minutes, we created physical and digital representations of the one word that captures our lives right now.

Then we took 15 minutes to turn those images into blog posts and put them on our blog trackers.

From there, we took another 15 minutes -- notice a theme here -- created story webs based on a single person, place or object of significance in our lives. Those story webs are the basis of Thursday's work.

Thursday starts with a scheduling meeting with Guidance.  After they are done, we'll get calibrated quickly and do a practice on No Red Ink.  There is a quiz next class over Commonly Confused Words 2.  Be prepared.  Practice.  There's a pretty clear correlation between higher quiz scores and amount of practice.

Then we'll take out our P/P/O of Significance story webs.  We're going to turn those into storyboards on Post-Its.  5 Post-Its -- the first is a doodle of your P/P/O.   The following four Post-Its are scenes from one story involving your P/P/O.

Here's a link to some examples.

I'll be capturing your storyboard with a Post-It app on the iPad.  This will let us play around with remixing the stories and combining one another's -- either now or in the near future.

Before class ends today, you need to take a pic of your storyboard, put it on your blog, and explain each of the pics.

SHOW YOUR THINKING.

Blog.  Post-It Storyboard of P/P/O Personal Narrative.

Due.  Today. Thursday.  Feb 4. 2016

No Red Ink Quiz.

Commonly Confused Words 2.

Next CLASS.

AP Lit: Hamlet Begins and So Much More . . .

Monday and Tuesday we start our work with Hamlet.  What I'm hoping you'll find is that we've actually been working toward Hamlet all year long.  

These next two weeks are going to be action packed to the gills with thinking, reflection, reading, analyzing and creating.

Both classes will follow the same basic outline for these next two weeks.   I'm posting the complete plan overview here and we'll get more details as we encounter the days.

HAMLET READING.  Starting Monday and Tuesday, an act per class.  Our goal is to get almost a full read in before break and then give us plenty of time in March to dig deeper.  Hamlet plus shorter supplemental readings is pretty much our 3rd Quarter text.

We will read through the play in the space of two weeks so that we may re-visit and unpack more after break.

TRACKING SHAKESPEARE's QUESTIONs.  Hamlet raises all sort of big questions.  I typically choose a theme or idea for AP Lit students to tackle via Hamlet.  How do we acquire and sustain power? How does status influence our decision making?  When do we complete the journey from adolescence to adulthood?  We're going to try something different this year.  (Haven't heard that before, have you?) 

Starting with Act I, identify the questions Shakespeare raises throughout the text.  Rather than typical annotations -- lines of significance, apparently allusions, insights of interpretation -- consider what question a passage asks the audience to consider.  For example, 

"Before my God, I might not this believe/ Without the sensible and true avouch/ Of mine own eyes." -- Horatio, I.1.66-68.

When do our eyes fail to reveal the truth?  What conditions must exist for us to believe what we see?  To what extent does spirituality filter our beliefs and capacity for observation?

You don't need to include three questions.  I did because one bred another, bred another.

We'll be using a tool called hypothes.is to mark up the text.  We'll do our first in class to get a sense of the tool and make sure we are connected. Feel free to use them as the launchpad for a blog post as well.

BLOGGING.  There are two blog posts to complete during this week into the first of next.

      BARD-CABULARY.
      1.  Identify an unfamiliar or unique word from your reading in Hamlet.  (You may want to note several as you read.)
      2.  Identify the context in which the word is used, quoting the act, scene and line number as well as the text itself.  Note the speaker of the text.
      3.  Determine the denotative meaning of the word, specifically as it relates to the use in the text.  (There are lots of definitions for some words.  You may want to identify more than one.)
      4.  Determine the connotations typically associated with the word.
      5.  Use Unsplash, your own photography or your art skills to identify an image that you feel accomplishes two tasks:  illustrates the meaning of the word AND illustrates the meaning of the word as it relates to the context of Hamlet.   In other words, how can one found image enhance the understanding of both the word AND the play.
      Bonus Extra Super Credit Time:  Fuse  the image and the quote into a well-designed visual that accomplishes the two tasks in an aesthetic and meaningful way.

      PROJECT EXPLODER.
     1.  Take a listen to any of the episodes of the "Song Exploder" podcast.   Note the format of the show, the tone, the emphasis on process and context, philosophy and intention.
     2.  Record a "Project Exploder" podcast about your Indie Book project.  You can use any audio or video recording tool to do so.
     3.  Add background music that heightens your overall podcast, fusing your words, your documentation of your project (photos, footage and/or excerpts), and sound into an overall experience.
     4.  Post your Project Exploder on your blog.

And just to keep things always interesting . . .

Remember that we have No Red Ink quizzes on Wednesday/Thursday this week over parallel structure.

And we will have a multiple choice test prep next week.  Maybe even a timed writing over structure and rhyme scheme, too.  WHAT?  Yup.  It's possible.

SHOW YOUR THINKING.

Blog. Req'd Post.

Bard-Cabulary.

Due. Next class.

Project Exploder.

Due. First class next week.

Study.  No Red Ink Quiz.

Parallel structure.  Next class.

Humanities: LNG and To Kill a Mockingbird

Today we'll start off with an LNG.  Our goal with these are to provide faster, more useful feedback -- just like the blog.  We've got a plan on the teacher side of things to make this happen.

We need you to create great content for us to look at and comment upon.

Here are the links you will find on Google Classroom along with our LNG form.

• Newsela | Federal government sues North Carolina over new voting law
  tags: LNG civil rights humanities
• Denmark's Far-Right Party Argues Migrants Should Help Pay for Their Stay : NPR
  tags: LNG civil rights humanities
• Newsela | John Legend, Juanes visit jail, sing out against immigration laws
  tags: LNG civil rights humanities
• 7 voices sound off on NC's controversial voter ID law | PBS NewsHour
  tags: LNG civil rights voting humanities

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

From here we will dig further into our To a Mockingbird film study.  We'll have a nice chunk of time to progress into the story and per your feedback, we'll watch the whole film before focusing on the analysis.  We'll take in the story.

We'll end class with some work on our Person, Place, Object of Significance essay pre-writing.  What are stories you have of that person, place or object of significance in your life?  It might be an actual experience you had or it may be an experience you know was influenced by the person, place or object.  Our goal here is to capture our memories quickly.

And we'll sketchnoting to do it.

SHOW YOUR THINKING.

LNG. Voting Rights.

Due. Tuesday. Feb 2.

Roots Quiz. 6-8.

Due. Thursday.  Feb 4.

Blogs.

Three Req'd Posts Due Last Week.

Check the Q3 Blog Tracker.

Expect 2 Req'd Posts This Week.

Person/Place/Object of Significance Essay.
Coming up.  Get ready.