Yesterday I had the opportunity to show some Scratch projects my students have been working on to our area enrichment person. This person is someone I highly respect and actually sort of owe my job to. A few years back I supply taught in her room and she passed my name around. Not before long I was assigned an LTO contract in her school.
Now I have since changed schools and she is no longer in the classroom but our relationship is much the same; very techie, geeky, and for the most part – online.
My students loved bragging about their homemade video games and the response was positive. Scratch will now be used at the final core enrichment workshop in March. It is very high order thinking and very much procedural writing.
On a side note, and interesting idea was suggested that I brushed off until my drive home yesterday. Why CAT test when the DRA is a focus for instruction. I was left thinking about this one…..
admin General DRA, procedural writing, Scratch
Well, its goodbye to Narrative writing and hello to Procedural. I have decided that my intermediate students are beyond the “make a sandwich and write a how-to” so we are going to use Scratch and Animoto.
However, before anything gets published I may have them copy their text into Wordle and print some fancy art in white and black. Next I may have them colour all the nouns red, verbs blue etc. I would use this as a diagnostic piece. We don’t do much in terms of word study with our writing framework so it would be nice to see some grammar pieces. We may also do it as a class on the SMART Board
How do you use Wordle?
admin General procedural writing, SMARTBoard, wordle
Dictionary.com has a great app which can be used offline. Many Ipod apps require a wifi connection to be used properly, but not this one. It saves the dictionary and thesaurus collection right to your Ipod.
Now that we have finished narrative writing, its time to think about procedural. Once a day for the duration of our unit, I am going to show a HowCast video directly from my Ipod. I have an app to download youtube videos to watch them offline. Simply search for the HowCast procedural video you would like to watch, save it, plug the Ipod into the projector (if you have one) or a TV and voila.
If you don’t have an Ipod Touch, you can simply go to HowCast.com and show videos there. Another great way to model writing for students.
Be careful though, some of the content may contain adult humour. Always preview the video first or be prepared to give a mini lesson on internet content to your students!
admin General dictionary, ipod, procedural writing
I have decided that for procedural writing, it might be better to have my students write computer algorithms instead of step by step instructions on how to do something like make a sandwich. They understand that a procedure is a series of finite steps used to complete a task. Well, so is an algorithm. The only key differences might be that there are rules at each step in the series. Maybe there is a loop and you can’t leave step 4 until a condition is true or false. Maybe step 7 tells you to repeat step 4 until another condition occurs.
I think computer algorithms are the perfect next steps for any kid who really gets procedural writing. This is where Scratch comes in from MIT. Using the software, students can drag code snippets into linking blocks to create algorithms. Each sprite on the screen can have an algorithm applied to it to animate. I’ve seen High School students re-create the first level of the NES version of Mario Bros. from 1985. It was very well done.
Now my students are not senior computer science majors so I am going to have them create a Pong-like game of table tennis. This game will also include a huge math component with angles etc. Some of the stronger kids will create 2 player versions with loading screens while other modified kids might just create 1 player versions without any loaders.
You don’t have to use Scratch to create games, it can also be used to create video animations or stories, which might also be useful for narrative writing. Heck, kids could event recount or persuade their audiences through Scratch animations.
Link: http://scratch.mit.edu/
admin General Explanation Writing, narrative writing, persuasive writing, procedural writing, recount writing
