Bob

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=[|My Edublog for the Class]= http://sprankleblog.edublogs.org

= = =[|My Regular Blog]= http://bobsprankle.com/bitbybit_wordpress/

=Articles and Books Mentioned=

//__Here are the Articles I mentioned:__//

[|The Power of Pow! Wham!: Children, Digital Media and Our Nation's Future by Dr. Shore]

and:

[|Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century] by Henry Jenkins, et al.

Here are the books I mentioned: [|Everything is Miscellaneous] by David Weinberger ([|http://www.everythingismiscellaneous.com/)]

=[|My Library Thing]= = = http://www.librarything.com/home/sprankle

=My Presentation= The Power of Tags, The Power of Words

[|Newsmap] http://marumushi.com/apps/newsmap/newsmap.cfm

[|Wordle] http://wordle.net/

Google News: media type="custom" key="1093141" Things to Examine/Things to consider/Media Literacy skills (following up on tags with sources)
 * Some words could be misinterpreted or a combination of meanings. (i.e., Bloomberg: Michael or news site?)
 * Students are sent back to Google to find out why certain words are at the top, examining multiple news sources (especially other than their own country) and perspectives.
 * A word like "suspected" will bring up many different stories... interesting to examine the amount of stories involving 'suspicion'
 * Looking at words like "Arizona" or "Texas" begs the question: what's happening there? Why are they getting a lot of coverage.
 * As an exercise, students could highlight all the words that would have some relationship. For instance, "Obama" is connected to "Berlin" because he just had his big rally there. Students would have to go research the connections using Google News and then can report out to the class on news topic. If students end up following the same stories, have them get into groups before the presentations so they can come to consensus on the main points of the story (probably requiring more research).
 * Another fun exercise (connected to the above idea): have students construct sentences using only words from the Wordle (allow students to add articles, conjunctions, prepositions).

Library Thing : [|Number the Stars by Lois Lowery]



Common Sense by Thomas Paine: media type="custom" key="1080043"

What is this text? media type="custom" key="1080413" Or... analyze the story of Metamorphosis after reading it: media type="custom" key="1080521" Or... Dante's Divine Comedy media type="custom" key="1080465"

Imagine the uses for literature:
 * 1) Using major concept words to connect with previous experience.
 * 2) Previewing major concepts in books.
 * 3) Using the words to write about the major themes in a book after reading.
 * 4) Analyze why certain words are larger (i.e., Why Romeo is larger than Juliet).
 * 5) Go back and search for themes missed (i.e., why is Mother and Father so large in Metamorphosis?)

What we've been writing about this week:

Using [|Yahoo!Pipes, I "mixed"] our RSS feeds and used that text to create a Wordle. media type="custom" key="1092275"

media type="custom" key="1076659"

My Own Blog (past 50 posts) media type="custom" key="1076903"

My ENTIRE Blog posts media type="custom" key="1092233" 100 Top Words media type="custom" key="1092241" 250 Words media type="custom" key="1092243" 500 Words

So, you could in effect do this with your students' blogs and periodically analyze the words. Imagine the following scenarios:
 * 1) Students' daily Current Event blogs and comparing that Wordle to Google News Wordle
 * 2) Using Student Scribe posts (like [|Darren Kuropatwa]) take the words to review concepts, analyze what's been covered most in the curriculum that year, etc.
 * 3) Students take their own Wordle analysis to use as an idea generator to create an essay about their year, about who they are, in preparation for College Admission essays.

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