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.
Related posts
Twilight Zone Titles Poetry
This is the first #ds106 assignment I’ve done in a long while. The challenge is to write a poem using only the titles of Twilight Zone episodes. It’s an easy one for any English teacher to use as is or to adapt to whatever restricted set they want – chapter titles from a book, band names, Top 40 song titles, scientific names for animals etc. etc. I think more and more that a major part of English class ought to be encouraging students to play with language and then to figure out why they like what they like. Maybe that’s obvious. Thanks to Todd Conaway for the assignment (official assignment in the repository) and for the work getting the titles in one place. I also took his Word doc and put it in a Google Docs table to help me see more/most of the titles at once and because I dislike having to open programs on my computer these days. Mr. Denton On Doomsday The Fear The Fever The Last Flight The Monsters Are Due On Maple Street The Four Of Us Are Dying And When The Sky Was Opened I Shot An Arrow Into The Air The Last Flight The Purple Testament Dust Static The Silence
The Director’s Bureau Special Projects Idea Generator
So The Director’s Bureau Special Projects Idea Generator generates fairly random three word idea strings like the one above – Do-it-yourself levitating animal. This is one of those things that I’d love to use in the classroom because it’s so simple and fun. It’s also flexible in terms of how big or small you’d like it to be. It could kill 10 minutes or be part of a whole unit. This particular generator isn’t really fit for student use because it’ll throw in “erotic” and some other iffy stuff but the teacher could spin the wheel a few times and come up with a great phrase for each week. I’d probably screen grab it or make something visual for the word results- as the packaging does matter. It can then be use for a variety of things. It’d be pretty cool right off as a creative writing or journal prompt but where things would be neat would be in tweaking it to focus on what you’re covering at the time. For instance- Describe the do-it-yourself levitating animal kit using every word from this week’s vocabulary list Write an ad for the do-it-yourself levitating animal creation kit using the bandwagon technique Write two responses to seeing an ad for the do-it-yourself levitating animal kit. In the first one respond in the […]
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) […]
Trackbacks and Pingbacks on this post
No trackbacks.
- TrackBack URL
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