Yeah--I did these out of order so Chapter 8 came before Chapter 7. Sue me--I teach ELA not math.
There are lots of possibilities for using visuals in ELA. I have already posted some student drawings using photopeach as a mini-writing prompt. The kids enjoyed the "celebrating" of student work, as Richardson puts it. We stress the need for good writers to create pictures with words, so pictoral writing prompts give students the chance to zoom in and out and take time to really examine a prompt and find interesting details before writing.
Kids have already also used photo sites to find connections to help illustrate vocabulary words. A caution I would issue kids, however, is that just because Flickr is free, kids may still post photos that have inappropriate content. I also fear kids spending an inappropriate amount of time wading through photos and missing the point of the assignment. Again, the time-sucking addictive factor could work against education and not for it. The idea of Flickr having more than one million photos of clouds alone, which Richardson sees as a positive, I find a little too much like the Imelda Marcos Shoe closet-
(younger readers may not get the allusion--think about a rapper adding to his collection of bling just because he can.)
Find out about Imelda Marcos's shoes!
It was enough for Joni Mitchel to "look at clouds from BOTH sides" now. Sometimes it is easier to focus and more instructive to limit the options.
The issues concerning rights to photos had frustrated me. I will check into Flickr. I found another site, http://www.morguefile.com which also has free photos and you don't need to belong to anything just to grab photos. Prezi took me hours to get right. Photopeach was much simpler to use.
I never understood why someone didn't open a shoe store and name it after Imelda--see you can count on someone likeme who is definately not young but likes to act that way. It's itneresting that she (Mrs. Marcos) would come to mind given that she was such an extremist, and the author appears to position himself that way in many of his chapters. The facebook "thing" he recommends is just absurd. You do not have to take up residency in a looney bin to udnerstnad what it is and whom it services. I don't mean to be petty aboout this, but lets be serious about FACEBOOK and what a techer would be doing (to his reputation alone)friending his students. He is saying that isn't he-- Richardson? Or something like that?
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