What a trip! Some of the journey was rewarding and fun, but I often questioned if the destination was worth the trouble. Yes, I took the tour, but it felt like too much information to process at the time; the map was confounding. I found myself floundering around the rest-stop instead of hitting the road; the road looked too scary to travel alone. And then my guide arrived. I'm talking about you, Rhonda! It was nice to travel in the footsteps of someone who has been there and done that. Rhonda helped me navigate the cumbersome process of avoiding obstacles like forgetting to give an author attribution or leaving off the URL address. And then there were KITTIES (thanks, c0simba2)! I am creating a brief story of my new kitten, Toby, and illustrating his bigger-than-life personality. It was pretty cool to find pictures that seemed to capture what I was thinking and envisioning for my tale. I can imagine students creating mini biographies using images from Flickr, and subsequently, presenting these stories to the class as an example of amazing creativity and a way to view themselves and their world. What a wonderful starting point for a student journey through a myriad of topics and issues. They could even follow this personal pictorial with a character pictorial from the text they are exploring. Now that's a destination I would like to visit.
I love the idea of the kids creating a biography. They could do this for literary characters, which could be a cool way to stretch out the idea of character development. You could have a whole gallery of these, or turn them into a kind of City Confidential of the people involved in the work. Someone could even do a show on the setting. . . My brain is working. . .
ReplyDeleteI guess Rhonda goes in your toolbox! :-)
ReplyDeleteI don't think I'd fit in your toolbox. Maybe the trunk of your car...don't get any ideas, now.
ReplyDeleteI, too, love the idea of a mini-biography. I wish I had done something like that with my slide show (is this one word or two?) instead of the mystery slides I did. It'd be fairly easy to do (well, maybe not so easy through flickr); plus, we'd learn a little something about ourselves along the way.