Writing to Your Future Self
Future Me allows you to write yourself and email and have it sent at a time of your choosing (dramatic music) in the future. While you may not have a flux capacitor you can get your students emailing themselves up to 30 years into the future (you can do much less).
Whether the site, the student email address, email as communication or the earth itself will still be around is uncertain but I am certain you could get some really interesting work out of students using this site.
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Google Zeitgeist as a Writing Prompt
So the folks over at Google Blogoscoped had a great idea. Use Google trends as a writing prompt. For instance, if the top queries are … 1. subaru impreza 2. priyanka chopra 3. build a bear … and so on … … then your narrative may go like this, to quote from Simon’s try: I went out and bought a brand new Subaru Impreza last week, which was very scary as I have only just passed my test. I took Priyanka Chopra, the Indian film star, with me to keep an eye on me and exert a calming influence as I was pretty nervous because the Impreza is wild beast of car. “Let’s go build a bear”, I shrieked as we weaved through traffic, “an actual live bear that will do our bidding”. “Good idea,” agreed Priyanka, “This bear could drive us around too, anything would (and so on) … Morphs pretty well into a fun writing prompt that uses subjects that are, by definition, things people are interested in. Ways to take it to the next level- write the zeitgeist as a character or historical figure use the words to take the pass the sentence game to the next level see who can make the longest sensible sentence with the fewest additional words (not listed in the trends list) […]
Rap for English
I’ve been playing around with the idea of doing a blog for my middle school focusing on using rap lyrics to get at daily oral language and to build vocabulary. I think the potential is definitely there. I’m worried about two things. Can I come up with material consistently enough to make it worthwhile for the students? Secondly, can/should I use an appropriate portion from an inappropriate song? These are middle school students so it gets a little iffy and the county I’m in is pretty conservative. That being said they are having a Souljah Boy dance party at our school and played a clip from the song today on the intercom. So maybe I could pull this off. I’d love to use lyrics like the ones below from TI’s “You Don’t Know Me” You gone make me bring da chevy to a real slow creep My Partner hangin out the window, mouth fulla gold teeth When the guns start poppin, wonder when its gonna cease choppa hitchu on the side and create a slow leak We can end the speculation cuz today we gone see What’s the future of a sucka who be hatin on me i don’t care about the feds investigation on me I don’t care they at my shows and they waitin on me Ima keep […]
Onomatopoeia- A Hook
The following post is my attempt to clarify how I go about conceiving and constructing lessons. If you’d just like the source files and could care less how I think (which I imagine is the majority), they are linked at the bottom of the page. This is how I ended up with this fairly interesting introduction to onomatopoeia. Yesterday, I found a tutorial on how to make cartoon style lettering for comics using Photoshop at EEight.com. It looked like fun and I figured since Jim was going to be hitting poetry pretty soon, and I had some time during Spring Break to try things, I’d give it a shot. I think I found it using StumbleUpon which is a great site that lets you find some really odd things and that in turn tends to inspire me to make some interesting lesson. I try to keep the question “Can I use this to teach something?” in the back of my head at all times. http://www.flickr.com/photos/46555636@N00/398812150 The first thing I did was brainstorm all the onomatopoeia words I could think of. The main one that kept coming to mind was crash and that led to the association with crash course- finally! an excuse to use the crash sound in a presentation. With that title, “A Crash Course in Onomatopoeia” in mind […]
Comments on this post
I ran across this site awhile back, but didn’t think much of it as I rarely listen to notes I leave myself, however, it would be quite useful for students to set up reminders for tests and/or exams.
Nice new theme by the way.
Ben,
My basic thought was it didn’t really matter if they ever read what they wrote to themselves but more that they wrote something and thought about their future. Plus, the whole ego centric nature of it would be a motivating factor for most teens. It’d be interesting as well to have them write two letters to the future- one to themselves and one to a stranger. Then you can look at how the audience impacts the writing.
I didn’t even think of using it for something practical. 🙂
Thanks, I like the new theme as well. It’s pretty fancy. There are things in the php I’ve never seen before. Not that that’s very hard to do but I have seen a fair number of WordPress themes.
Tom
And here I was all focused on the simple aspect of it, I hadn’t even considered the bigger picture. I love the idea of using this as a way to get students thinking about the future. Looking forward is something I severely lacked in high school, and it’s an great habit to promote.
What a great writing tool! I could see students writing about what they want to learn or goals they want to achieve by the end of the school year. Your blog is fantastic btw, and I sent your video “Shake It Up” to all the teachers in my building. Keep up the good work!
Eska,
It’s amazing what’s out there for free, isn’t it?
Thanks for the encouragement.
Tom