Information Overloaded

I was on del.icio.us last week and stumbled upon a very cool site by Austin Kleon where people have been posting newspaper blackout poems. Click here for one of my favorite examples from his site.

This type of poetry is created by taking a black marker and making poetry by coloring around the words in a newspaper article. The video below shows some grade 8 students trying it out! Very cool.

I have been working with a teacher at one of our schools with 1:1 laptop program and we were trying to come up with ways the students could use screencasts in Language Arts. Screencasting is all about showing, not just telling. This medium allows students to quickly produce a video of what they know.

So, I put my thinking cap on, and here are some ideas I came up with:

1) Students could brainstorm ideas during the pre-writing process using Smart notebook and record themselves explaining their thoughts as they write them down. This would give teachers insight into how students are organizing their thoughts and writing.

2) During a poetry unit, teachers could make quick screencasts of the structure of various poems and students could use them as a reference. For example, if you are teaching students how to write a haiku, you could explain, through the screencast, the poem’s structure and rhyme scheme.

3) Teachers could create screencasts to model reading comprehension strategies; the teacher could bring up a piece of text on the computer and record themselves reading and talking about the strategies they are using to understand the piece they are reading.

4) Teachers and students could screencasts on grammar rules and ways to punctuate. They could record themselves annotating sentences in a word document or in Smart Notebook.

5) Teachers could screencast themselves marking student writing. Students could watch the screencast in order to understand how they were evaluated and why. This type of evaluation would be very comprehensive, but would be somewhat time consuming.

Can anybody else think of ways teachers and students could use screencasting in Language Arts classes? I would love to hear from you!