This year I’m teaching a class in Spoken Word in addition to
my duties in the library. I am using the
curriculum from Young Chicago Authors and techniques from Spoken Word for Educators, a course I am taking at Concordia
University.
For my class the students have to both write and perform. We
had an Open Mic on Halloween that was so cool! Students performed both
individual and group pieces. It was their summative assessment for the quarter.
I created a Gmail account for the class and the students use
the Chromebooks on a regular basis to compose work and to save and share their
work on Google Drive. The Drive has been an indispensible part of the process
for us. It gives us the ability to share and edit collaboratively.
Additionally I wanted a creative way to archive their work
and show growth in their writing over time. So we created Weebly websites. Each
site should now feature at least 8 poems including: a List poem, a Shout Out or
Invocation, a take on “We Real Cool”, a personal statement about Ferguson, a
Vignette and their group and duet poems. The List poem describes how the
students see themselves. The Shout Out or Invocation is either sincere or
sarcastic. The Vignette should to focus on an event and use personification.
The group poem is a poem in 3 voices. Each team member contributes a piece on a
common topic or theme, then edits them as a group to produce one poem.
The site will be a yearlong project with students adding
written work, audio and video as the work progresses. We are spread out around
the library so the Chromebooks are an essential part of the class allowing the
students to work in small groups or individually. Now that we have the ability
to print from the Chromebooks, I can easily add hard copies of their work to my
paper portfolios of their work and compare changes and edits in the digital
portfolio over time.
You can check out their work at brooksspokenword.weebly.com.
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