Exploring Curriki

Anna at Literacy is Priceless is urging her readers to try out the Curriki Scavenger Hunt.
That's a little too structured for me, but I have been meaning for some time to check this site out, so I thought I'd poke around the site for a few minutes and share what I found.

About Curriki
Curriki derives its name from the words "curriculum" and "wiki," the latter being the software that is changing the way the internet is used by allowing more "readers" to become "writers." Wikipedia is perhaps the archetypal wiki site. Curriki is a non-profit corporation started by Sun Microsystems with a stated goal of supporting "the development and free distribution of world-class educational materials to anyone who needs them."

My Mission
My goal is to find an activity I can use during my next lesson with Alexi, a strikingly bright and entirely uninterested student that I work with two days a week. I've been working with him on recognizing main ideas in pieces of writing. He will talk to me without end about how little he cares for school; I figure he might as well be able to construct a proper argument for it. (Alexi is pseudonym).

Results
It takes me less than five minutes to create a free account. I click the "Find" link on the left sidebar and choose the Advanced Search option, which allows you to specify the subject, grade level, language, etc. I type in "main idea" and check a few boxes and, within seconds, I am looking at this big unit on persuasive writing contributed by Andrea Chen.

On her profile page, I learn that Ms. Chen is a High School English teacher at the New Orleans Charter for Science and Math High School. This looks like a well-thought out unit plan. The massive block of text is a little daunting, though that isn't Ms. Chen's fault. Curriki ought to allow contributors to split these up into smaller segments.

But I have already found plenty of things I can use, such the "Vocabulary: Discussing the Art of Persuasion" lesson plan, which you can find by scrolling down about two screens into the unit. I can download the whole document and use it as I see fit. Thanks, Andrea!

Featured Resources
Curriki submissions can be rated and commented on by users, and some of the top rated materials are featured here. Just glancing at these, I find the following:

• A great little poem to help students remember subtraction rules. By April Eckert
• Mr. Harpine's Article Reaction Assignment. This looks like a good way to get students used to the process of writing about what they read. I might change a few things, so I download it to modify later.
• A very thoughtfully-designed unit on Teaching Satire in High School designed by Sarah Lorntson from Mahtomedi, Minnesota.

Conclusion
I get the feeling I could get delightfully lost looking through Curriki lesson plans and units. This is already a phenomenal resource, and I am very hopeful about what sites like this will do for education as they evolve. Not long ago, lesson plans were shared only in books and seminars and by word of mouth. Curriki allows teachers to conduct searches for resources, keep and modify them, discuss them with others, and add their own. Hallelujah!

I will keep you posted on my use of Curriki as I learn more. Please let me know if you have had success with Curriki or another site of its kind.

If you like this, check out Read Write Think, another great online lesson plan finder.

Web Resource: Word Sift

Word Sift (wordsift.com) is a web resource designed to help students interact with texts. In the words of its creators, Kenji Hakuta and Greg Wientjes, it is "a toy in a linguistic playground that is available to instantly capture and display the vocabulary structure of texts, and to help create an opportunity to talk and play with language."

The folks at Word Sift have combined the magic of word clouds with search engines and an online thesaurus. A student can enter a piece of text and instantly see the most frequently used words in a word cloud. Then, they can use an interactive dictionary/thesaurus (from Visual Thesaurus) to explore the meaning of those words. They can also see pictures generated by Google's image search engine and find out where the words are located in their text.

For example, let's say we want our students to analyze President Obama's Inaugural Address. We paste the text into Word Sift and we see a word cloud like this:



As in most word clouds, the bigger the word, the more times it was used in the text. We can click on any word to explore it further. Let's try "people." Below the word cloud, we see Google image search results like this:



To the right, we see an interactive thesaurus/dictionary with connections to related concepts:



And finally, we see our word in the context of our original text. We can click on any of these sentences to see where they are located in the text.



This site could be useful to teachers in lots of ways. I will let you know how it works when I try it out. For the time being, Word Sift's demo page has some ideas. Let me know if you do too!

More Fun With Wordle - Submissions Needed!

Wordle.net is place where users can create free, eye-catching word clouds. On Feb. 11, I wrote about how word clouds could be used as a literacy aid. I'd love to hear your ideas on how Wordle could be used in the classroom!

I recently introduced Literacy Log to a class full of future ESL teachers, and word clouds seemed to generate the most excitement. I thought it might be a good idea to feature them once again. So, here are some word clouds depicting documents in a few different languages.

Literacy Log officially guarantees that you will enjoy playing around on Wordle. Send me a link you your creation and I'll feature it here!

• A speech by Eva Peron on May 4, 1950. (Original Document)
  

• The Beginning of Voltaire's "Candide." (Original Document)

• Chapter 1 of Marx's "Communist Manifesto." (Original Document)
  

• Story about a bombing (I think) on Al Jazeera. (Original Document)
  

• The Gettysburg Address (Original Document)
  

• All of Literacy Log's February Content (Original Document)
  

4/5/09 Update: Wade Roush at Xconomy interviews the creator of Wordle, John Feinberg.

...you get not only a picture of the relative frequency of words but you can get happy random juxtapositions of words that are conducive to associative thinking. It's generating ideas about something that otherwise wouldn't have occured to you. It's like a data toy. -John Feinberg


Brenda Dyck at Education World writes about potential classroom uses for Wordle. Highly recommended!

Web Resource: Word Clouds

A word cloud is a visual depiction of the main words and ideas of a text. Word clouds evolved from Tag Clouds, which are commonly used to depict the content of websites.

Wordle.net is a free (and addictive) way to create Word Clouds. A teacher or student simply needs to copy and paste text, select font and display preferences, and Wordle generates a word cloud. Here are some examples:

• The Declaration of Independence
• NCSS's National Standards for Social Studies Teachers
• This blog entry

This fantastic interactive page from The New York Times uses world clouds to guide readers through every inaugural address by a U.S. President.

Word clouds are no substitute for the actual reading of a text, but they can provide a powerful visual preview of text and aid students in making predictions and forming questions.

Strategy: Mad Libs Debate

Mad Libs were first published in 1958 and have been popular with children ever since. Prompted by parts of speech, players fill in a template with words of their choosing and plug them into blanks in a story. The results are often humorous, and kids have a laugh while learning about parts of speech.

This activity can be altered to help students understand many aspects of literacy. This variation is intended to help students learn how to structure an argument and cite sources to support it. If desired, a teacher could provide students with editorials or opinion columns on two sides of one issue and stage a “debate” with the results.

Start by finding opinion pieces on two different sides of an important issue, such as American Idol. In this commentary , the author argues that the popular television talent show is an "integral part of the American landscape." Here, an author contends that Idol is a grotesque freak show.

Students will read one opinion or the other and, in groups, identify items A-F on our Answer Sheet. In order to do this, they will need to know how to identify an author's main argument, understand how that argument is supported, and be able to cogently offer their own opinion on the matter.

Once the answer sheet is completed, students need only plug items A-F into their corresponding spaces on the Argument Template.

A full answer sheet might look something like this. If you put those answers into the template, you have a rudimentary persuasive argument.

As you'll see, the activity did not create a perfectly-written argument. It does not flow all that well, and it is a bit redundant. But for our purposes, that might be a good thing. This activity gives students practice in identifying authors' key arguments and forming their own. Most importantly, it gives them an introduction to how those skills can be used to cite examples in persuasive writing.