Inspiring Reading and Writing With an Authentic Audience - Part 3

In this third post about this project, I'll list some resources and focus on the final steps we go through to complete the digital products. I'll conclude with a bit about the challenges we faced to bring it together. If you want to read about the background, including why I think this lesson is so valuable, see Part 1 and Part 2.

 

The Planning Sheet

Once students were given the younger students' responses from the survey, we gave them a printed copy of this planning sheet. I added the planning sheet this year, since we had seen students struggle with it in the past. Here's a breakdown of the planning sheet:

• The first seven questions ask them to simply copy down what their assigned 5th grade student had submitted on their survey. That is meant to just ensure the writer read the younger student's information.
• The next few questions take them through the process of connecting those ideas (which are sometimes very unconnected) into a simple story. Some students had trouble with this, but I was impressed how imaginative they could get with just a little prompting.
• The last question asks them to outline the story. I assured them nothing was written in stone here, but it was important to make a plan.

I and the teacher worked with students individually to get through the outline process.

My plan was to have them start typing the story after the outline was done, but the teacher wanted a first draft to be written in their notebooks. I can see this group benefitted from that, so you can decide if a handwritten draft will be better than moving right to the digital part.

Making the Digital Booklets

I refer to these as digital books, but we just build them in Google Slides. I assign this template in Google Classroom, so that they each get a copy. It has two sections on each slide, so there's a place for text and a photo, like this.

Note that the first slide of the template has a place for a title page. I don't like them to take time making that at first, so the directions (typed on the slide itself) ask them to come back to that after they've completed a few slides. I provide these examples of cover images. Normally I encourage them to use Word Art, drop shadows and a good layout. See below about some challenges we faced this time around. Eye-catching title pages were not our main concern this year!

Preparing the Files

After students work through some drafts and revisions, they submit the stories in Google Classroom. I make a copy of each one and move the copies into a new folder in Google Drive. That way the teacher can grade the originals as normal, but I can polish up the copies so they're ready for the younger readers. 

The amount it takes to "polish them up" varies quite a bit from student to student. Most times it involves some punctuation corrections and some wording changes. Over the years I've had to rewrite some or nearly all of some stories for various reasons. For example, one time a younger student stated her problem as, "Sleeping through scary nightmares." The older student tried to provide a situation about overcoming fear that, even after her revisions, would have been too intense for the young student. I get input from both teachers involved, in some cases, just to be sure sensitive cases are handled appropriately.

I also rename the file so it includes the younger student's chosen nickname. That's so they can easily identify their story, depending on how they are given to the readers.

On that note, I prefer to download PDFs of each Slides presentation, then upload them to Drive. When I have a lot of time, I then build a Google Site and link to each story. This was not a year where I could do that in a timely manner, so I just sent the 5th grade teacher the link to my Google Drive folder with all the presentations. She shared that link with her class. 

Finished Examples

This first example is a very direct imagining of a situation based on what the younger student had stated in the survey. Here's what the 5th grader submitted

Here's the final story written by the 6th grader. I really appreciated this student's concern to include so many references to the younger student's responses in his simple story. 

The second example is one of the longer stories we received. There's a lot I like about this 6th grader's writing, but the detail overshadows some of the main theme of overcoming obstacles to achieve a goal. The writer's desire to address the younger student's responses is still very evident, though, and that's one of my favorite things about this project. Here are the 5th grader's responses:

And here is the finished story.

Conclusions

The additional scaffolds we provided (through question sheets) helped a lot this time around. The 5th grade teacher didn't know much about this project when I first asked if we could use her class as our audience. She was more and more impressed with it as we went along. She said her students loved getting the stories. It was a success in many ways, and I look forward to trying it again in the upcoming semester. 

I do want to address some challenges we faced in bringing it together this time. The project started as strong as ever, but a couple days into it we had several students out due to quarantines. Since every student had to write for a younger student, this activity really needs 100% involvement to come together well. For several days only half the writers were in class! Getting the ones to work on it diligently from home was a huge challenge. Even a couple students who were in class most days were resistant to writing. This was the first time some students did not care to write for younger students. We are sure this was due to the effect the absences were having on the students in general. All their classes throughout the day were impacted by it, so by our 6th period class, productivity was way down. The teacher and I almost decided to forget the project and try again next semester. 

It ended up taking several days longer than usual, so I was not in the classroom with them the final week or two. The teacher had students help each other to complete some stories. We never did get a workable story from those two tough cases. It was unfortunate, but given the situation, we focused on what we did accomplish. Two other students volunteered to write those missing stories. Their extra work and concern for the young readers was great to see!

Boomwriter for Engaging Collaborative Writing

Boomwriter is not new, but I hadn't used it with a class until recently. I am presenting a session about collaborative storytelling at the MACUL conference this week, so I asked our middle school Creative Writing teacher if she'd be willing to let me run the activity in her class. After I explained what it is, she was excited to try it.

For those unfamiliar with it, Boomwriter is more or less a game where students write stories one chapter at a time. Everyone writes, then everyone votes on the submissions. The winning submission becomes the official next chapter. The process continues until the story is done.

Overall Thoughts

If this sounds at all interesting, definitely try it out. The students really enjoyed the activity. Due to a number of circumstances, the teacher and I had to rush much of the activity. I'm not thrilled with the quality of the writing that came out of it, but I am looking forward to trying it again. So are the students!

What We Did

Our class had 27 students in it, mostly seventh graders. I divided them randomly into groups of 5 or 6 students. The site allows students to dress up their "Boomer" avatar using Boomer Bucks. More Bucks are earned through writing and winning the votes. I wasn't sure how seventh graders would take to this, but our group was definitely into this feature.

With five groups, that means we had five stories. I provided a single sentence as a story starter. Boomwriter has several initial chapters to choose from and, judging by the ones I saw, they expect the first chapter to provide a lot of detail. I didn't want to give them a long passage to read, so my first "chapter" was just one sentence. For example, one of them was The main character is trapped in a video game. I wanted the students' imagination to drive the direction as much as possible.

I set the length of our stories to five chapters, so that meant we had four rounds of writing and voting. The teacher and I were very impressed with how the students were engaged by the activity. Almost all the chapters they submitted were fairly short, but the teacher provided some feedback on the second round of writing and I saw an improvement.

We had many snow days this semester, so we have been pressed for time in all classes. For this activity we really rushed a few rounds. In a couple class periods we just rapidly went through as many rounds as possible (usually two writings and a vote). This amounted to a lot of frantic clicking on my part as I approved chapters, called for some revisions and moved stories along to the voting stage.

When the stories were almost done, we gave the class a survey about the experience. When asked how they liked Boomwriter for collaborative stories, 68% gave it five stars and 20% gave it four stars. Some were disappointed when we didn't immediately start a second story!

Before we did the activity, I wondered if the voting process would discourage students who didn't get picked. Well I did see some sign of this, only 12% said on the survey that it affected them in this way.

Be aware that Boomwriter hopes you and the students' parents will buy the stories as books when they are done. Because of this, I didn't find any way to view the complete stories. Maybe I missed it, but the only solution I came up with to see the whole story was to copy and paste each winning entry into a single document. (While I'm not against them selling a product and I would consider buying one in the future, this time around our stories were not good enough for that.)

What I'd Do Differently Next Time

We plan to use the activity again next marking period. If we do, I will have larger groups and fewer stories. I was hoping to keep the number of submitted chapters down, so students didn't get tired of reading several. Since there was very little sign of that problem in our class, I am going to aim for about 10 students per group in the future, which means three stories.

This should help with what I considered to be the biggest negative on the site. The students' submissions were organized by story, so I was constantly clicking on a story, then clicking through the submissions to approve them. I had to keep going out of one story and into another to find the students who were ready to be moved along. It would have been much easier if there was another view where I could just approve any student regardless of the story he or she worked on. Having fewer stories will at least make this a little less frantic.

And along those lines, I also hope we will have a lot more time to work on each chapter. My plan would be to use the activity along with other things we are doing in the class. After several days of having the chapter open for writing, we would close it then vote. That way I could send back revisions and raise expectations on what they are submitting (in content, spelling, grammar, etc.).

I'm looking forward to our second attempt with Boomwriter and I hope to share some of the stories next time around!

Reflective writing for the end of the school year - What matters most in school?

Here's a reflective writing assignment I have for the end of the school year.  This also could be a great activity for professional development with teachers if you've got one last meeting this year.

It involves two resources. First is my randomizer for drawing 5 "cards" which students rank in order of importance. It's a good intro activity to talk about what matters most. All the information about ways to use this is on that page and there are links to other ways to use the resource.

Also, here's a TED Talk by Seth Godin in which he raises some great questions related to what school should be about. By no means do I agree with everything he says, but that's what makes it so good for thought and discussion.  

So for the reflective writing, after some discussion the students should reflect on these questions:

• Looking over the past year or semester, what stands out as most important for your learning and your future?
• If you had to do it over, what would you do differently?  Why?
• If you were running the class or the school what would you do differently?  Why?

Free online version of What's It to Ya? - A critical thinking and writing lesson

There is great value in the workplace and in our society in general to be able to express and discuss one's values in a clear, logical manner.  It is also important to be able to communicate effectively with others with whom we differ in opinions.  What's It to Ya? (and the newer version, Oh, Really!) is a game I created that provides a fun, non-threatening way for students to practice this deep level of critical thinking and discussion.

There are card versions of the game available as well as several free activities that I made based on the game.  This lesson plan below uses a free computer version of the game as an introduction to the thinking, writing and discussion that can emerge while playing.

Lesson Overview

Using the online version of What's It to Ya?, students will rank random items in order of importance and try to guess each other's rankings.  In playing the game and writing about the activity they will consider their own values and opinions as well as explore those of their classmates.  For information on further thoughts and additional activities based on this game, see this mini-series of posts.

Learning to play

The game is located here.  Try a sample game by entering two player names just to see how it works.  The directions are explained as the game progresses.

You can teach students how to play by demonstrating a two-player game at the front of the class.  Alternatively students can just get in groups as described below and play a couple practice games before they play the one that they will write about.

The activity

Have students sit in groups of three or four.  If they have laptops or netbooks, they will pass them around the group as they play the game.  If they are seated at computers, they will move from one computer to another as they take their turns.

Each student will go to the game's page. The game will load on that page.

Each student should enter his or her first name (or initials) as the Boss for the game that he or she is starting.  Then the student will enter the other group members' names as the additional players.  It helps if they list the students in clockwise order around the group, but it's not required as long as they include all other group members.

From there, the students can play the game.  It will direct them as to who the active player is (the Boss always goes first) and at that time the computer can be passed to that student or the student can sit at the computer.

Keep in mind that in a group of four students, for example, each student will be involved in four games.  Each student will be the Boss in one of those games. 

Important rules and steps:

• Students should not discuss the items or their rankings as they play.  
• Students may not observe another student's computer when items are being ranked.  This is especially important when the Bosses rank the items.
• When the game is over the Results page will appear.  Do not click Next on that page until a screen capture has been made.  See below.
• When the game ends, all students can look at the results and discuss who won.  Eventually the student who was the Boss for that game (computer) needs to be at that computer for the written part of the activity.

The writing assignment

Display these steps for the assignment or print this pdf version.

1)  Grab a screen capture of the Results page for the game in which you were the Boss.

On a Windows system you can do this by simply pressing the Print Screen key (usually located in the upper right of the keyboard).  On a Mac, press  Command-Control-Shift-3. That puts a copy of the screen in the clipboard.

2)  Paste the screen capture into the document file you're writing your assignment in.  Use ctrl-v on a Windows system or command-v on a Mac to paste the image of your screen.  You can change the size or crop it to make it easier to see the results of the game.

(If you forget to take a screen capture before you click the Next button your group will have to play the game again.  Please capture and paste that screen as soon as possible after the game ends so you don't lose the information!

3)  Now write a few paragraphs about the game you played.  In those paragraphs, address the questions below.  Your writing should flow like a written summary, not a list of answers.  You can address these in any order you like as long as all answers are apparent in your writing.

• List the items you had to rank in your game in the order you chose to rank them.  Briefly explain why you chose the order that you did.
• Were some items harder to rank than others?  Explain.
• Look at the rankings that the other students in your group chose.  Pick the student's ranking that had the highest score (as long as it wasn't a perfect match worth 10 points).  Explain how that student's ranking differed from yours.
• Imagine you had to convince that person that your ranking was correct or most accurate.  What would you say to change his or her mind?  What do you think that student would say to make you think his or her ranking was best?  
• If any rankings in your group stand out as particularly surprising, describe them.
• As you were playing or after reflecting on the game, what are two things you learned or hadn't thought of before?

See this blog post which contains several free classroom activities and insights based on the What's It to Ya? (Oh, Really!) game.  Depending on your subject or the purpose of the lesson you might use those thoughts to change the list of questions above to meet your needs.

Classroom Game Lesson - Critical Thinking and Writing

I dug up a lesson this week that I used to use in my Pre-Calculus classes. The seniors would graduate a few weeks before school was out, so for those remaining juniors I would set them loose on this very popular lesson where I attempted to teach critical thinking using a variety of board and card games. It would last about five class periods.

Here's a PDF of the last version of this assignment that I used. (It was about this time that I left the math classroom to work as the Instructional Technology Coordinator.)

While the students loved these days and we all had fun, I worked each year to improve the focus so that they were objectively thinking about the games and what they were doing. You'll note in the handout above that I continually emphasize thinking, clear communication and analysis of what was going on in the game. I have to admit, though, that I never got very far in that endeavor. Even with the excellent students that ended up in that class, the fun got most of the attention.

This served to alert me to the importance of setting game lessons in context. Now when I introduce a game design lesson (usually involving computer games) I start by downplaying the games and emphasizing the knowledge and skills that we want the students to leave with.

Here are the games that I used in this lesson, with links to their pages on the Boardgame Geek. I'm sure a lot of other games that would be perfect for this lesson have come out since 2008 when I last assigned it, but reading up on these pages will certainly draw your attention to additional options. (Some titles have different names at BGG than the editions I used on the worksheet. They are essentially the same games.)

Deduction

Coda
Clue Card Game
Top Secret Spies

What's That On My Head?

Strategy
Hey! That's My Fish!
Loco
Ingenious
Durch die Wuste (Through the Desert)

Probability
Fill or Bust
Double or Nothing
No Thanks
Last Chance

Party/Social Games
What's It To Ya? (Oh, Really!)
Thingamajig
What Were You Thinking?
Balderdash