Paul Allison's Blog (8)

Go to this VoiceThread Continue

Yesterday I posted these four messages: paulallison @voicethread If you were introducing VoiceThread to a middle school English teacher where would you point first (after the tutorials)? paulallison @voicethread If you were introducing VoiceThread to a guidance counselor whose native language is Mandarin where would you point first? paulallison @voicethread If you were introducing high school librarians to VoiceThread where would point them first? paulallison @voicethread If you were… Continue

Julie M. told me that I'm not a nerd just because I played chess, using Postcards. Continue

Hypertext literature hightens our awareness of the rhetorical choices that readers and writers make when they use links. Here's a place to start in thinking about how hypertext stories are different than printed stories: Lies Continue

This morning I wrote, "Writing with Hypertextopia brings with it a web of past teaching and learning experiences and imagined future conversations all circling around digital storytelling and links and hypertext, and a new form of literacy that transforms the space of our reading experience." Let me try to tease out what I mean by that mess of words. "Writing with Hypertextopia..." In this phrase I was trying to capture Julie and my sense that we want the experience of writing to be central, a… Continue

No seriously, I had a lot of good teaching and learning with this little piece of online software this Spring. Writing with Hypertextopia brings with it a web of past teaching and learning experiences and imagined future conversations all circling around digital storytelling and links and hypertext, and a new form of literacy that transforms the space of our reading experience. (I'm worried that this sentence is one that I'll go back to later, and wonder what the heck I was trying to say.) So I… Continue

I've been impresses recently with how our plans for the NYCWP's 2008 Technology Institute include both learning about new literacies that technology have brought us, but also reflect back on the work we've been doing around writing and the teaching of writing in the NYCWP for 30 years. Julie and I listed the "tools, strategies or concepts we will be discussing" in the first week: Social Networks, Discussion Forums, Blogs, Tagging, Linking, Generating Writing, Peer Response, Revising, Publishin… Continue

A ning is a social network. By participating in a social network such as this one, we begin to understand some of the online, networking skills that many of our students have from being participants in social networks like MySpace and FaceBook. In school-based social networks we can build on these skills, and introduce students to more academic conversations when they sit down at a computer. This is a two-way street, lowering the wall between life in school and life outside of school. Continue