HC English Department

Given the recent rise in podcast popularity, it's no surprise that audio narratives are making their way into the classroom. They offer an engaging way for teachers to merge project-based learning with digital media analysis and production skills. That's why we're announcing our first-ever Student Podcast Contest, in which we invite students to submit original podcasts, five minutes long or less, inspired by one of our 1,000-plus writing prompts. The contest will run from April 26 to May 25, so stay tuned for our official contest announcement next week In anticipation of that contest, the mini-unit below walks students through the process of analyzing the techniques that make for good storytelling, interviewing and podcasting. The activities culminate in students producing their own original podcasts.

VIDEO: "Robert Frost's poem "The Road Not Taken" is often interpreted as an anthem of individualism and nonconformity, seemingly encouraging readers to take the road less traveled. This interpretation has long been propagated through countless song lyrics, newspaper columns, and graduation speeches. But as Frost liked to warn his listeners, "You have to be careful of that one; it's a tricky poem-very tricky." In actuality, the two roads diverging in a yellow wood are "really about the same," according to Frost, and are equally traveled and quite interchangeable. In fact, the critic David Orr deemed Frost's work "the most misread poem in America," writing in The Paris Review: "This is the kind of claim we make when we want to comfort or blame ourselves by assuming that our current position is the product of our own choices… The poem isn't a salute to can-do individualism. It's a commentary on the self-deception we practice when constructing the story of our own lives.""

Interesting ideas here about how best to improve writing that might be useful to apply to our struggling writers.

"This Blended Learning Toolkit is a free, open resource for educational institutions interested in developing or expanding their blended learning initiatives."

"How to make conferencing on essays with 30 students manageable and effective-and the unexpected benefit conferences can bring."

For Woods and any other anti-huggers: "America today is a nation of huggers, clutching each other every chance we get. We hug to say hello, hug to say goodbye. Presidents hug. Total strangers hug. It's harmless, right? More than that - it's a sign that we're open. That we're caring. But now we have #MeToo. And it turns out that not everyone needs a hug. The Girl Scout dust-up exposed a deep national division - and not about the future of the republic. On one side of the gulf stand those who wonder why it has suddenly become so wrong to wrap your arms around another person - like, say, a co-worker - and hold them in a warm embrace. On the other are those who want to know: Why in the world did anyone ever think it was right?"

"Over the next several weeks, we're going to do a series of posts that looks at the 7 Types of Stories and breaks down each one in great detail. Up first-The Origin Story. The origin story-the story of how a business, idea, product, or service came to be-is one of the most common, and most powerful, types of stories we can tell."

Mistakes are from data collected by noredink.com. The article incorporates all 10 mistakes. Might be fun to see if students can identify them all.

"So here they are: 15 formats for structuring a class discussion to make it more engaging, more organized, more equitable, and more academically challenging. If you've struggled to find effective ways to develop students' speaking and listening skills, this is your lucky day. I've separated the strategies into three groups. The first batch contains the higher-prep strategies, formats that require teachers to do some planning or gathering of materials ahead of time. Next come the low-prep strategies, which can be used on the fly when you have a few extra minutes or just want your students to get more active. Note that these are not strict categories; it's certainly possible to simplify or add more meat to any of these structures and still make them work. The last group is the ongoing strategies. These are smaller techniques that can be integrated with other instructional strategies and don't really stand alone. For each strategy, you'll find a list of other names it sometimes goes by, a description of its basic structure, and an explanation of variations that exist, if any. To watch each strategy in action, click on its name and a new window will open with a video that demonstrates it."

"Research and insights from Robinson and educational psychologist Hunter Gehlbach of the University of California, Santa Barbara, show how schools can get the most out of student feedback, and how principals can help teachers get on board with using it - creating a more communicative school culture for all."

"Our year-end collection includes guest story picks for crime reporting, science, sports, essays, and more."

Nonfiction - essays and narratives from 2,500 to 7,00 words.

""Everyone on this planet is hard-wired to learn, extremely, all the time. The first advice I give to any learner today is: You must take control over your own learning. The good news is, it's easier today than it's ever been." As a group, our extreme learners did not fit conventional definitions of "best and brightest," as defined by high GPAs or test scores. Instead, they were opportunistic in finding places and people to learn with, using not only formal schooling but also informal learning centers, such as maker spaces and science centers. They engaged in authentic, experiential, project-based learning. These extreme learners shared five habits, which can prove instructive as we look to prepare students for an unpredictable future:"

"In August of 2017, we had a 2-day Storytelling Summit here in our Portland studio. Each of the attendees created their own story, and we filmed each of them at the end of the workshop. To help them make the most of the opportunity, and so that they could decide which one story they wanted to tell, we started by breaking things down into the 7 types of stories. What many of the attendees noticed, and what you'll likely realize as well, is that there are many more ways to use stories than you'd once thought."

In a connected world, information comes at us constantly, whether we choose it or not, and we must each figure out a way to navigate it. Not for a school assignment, but for our real lives. So we've proposed an experiment. We're running a challenge that invites students to think deeply about their own relationships with news, and devise personal "news diets" that work for them. It runs from Nov. 2 to Dec. 22, 2017, and any teenager anywhere in the world can participate. The challenge has three steps: 1. Do a personal "news audit" to observe the role of news in their lives right now. 2. Experiment with their "news diets" in some way to find new sources that address any lacks they found. 3. Write a short essay or produce a short video that reflects on the process and what they learned. What did they discover about their news habits before and after they did the challenge - and what can they say about the role of news in their lives in general?

"Sometimes there's nothing more inspiring to aspiring authors than seeing their names in print. The following list of organizations that publish youth work was curated and developed by Lizzy Lemieux, herself a young writer. It was originally published by The Telling Room, which has generously shared it with EdSurge. If you're looking for even more motivation to get your students started, check out The Telling Room's list of 30 books penned by kids"

"Start with simple assignments that are an easy transition from what you and your students are already familiar with. Try blogging, then build to more complex projects like podcasting or video storytelling. In addition to concentrating on the ideas and the writing itself, try to create situations where the students' writing takes advantage of the medium and the connectedness of the internet. Some criteria I use to develop assignments include: student agency engagement and passion audience impact beyond the classroom authoring skills and experiences needed for success outside of academia collaboration and connectivity with other authors and audience members experiences authoring in a variety of media other than text When we develop our writing assignments, we must ultimately come back to one main concern: purpose. Why are we giving specific types of writing assignments and how do they help our students convey their ideas in ways that resonate with their audience?"

"The debate about mis- and dis-information has intensified, but, as our report argues, we're still failing to appreciate the complexity of the phenomenon at hand. The report refrains from using the term 'fake news' and urges journalists, academics and policy-makers to do the same. This is for two reasons. First, the term is woefully inadequate to describe the complexities of information disorder. Second, it has been appropriated by politicians worldwide to describe news organizations whose coverage they find disagreeable, and, in this way, has become a mechanism by which the powerful clamp down upon, restrict, undermine and circumvent the free press. Our new definitional framework introduces three types, elements and phases of information disorder. We describe the differences between the three types of information using dimensions of harm and falseness: Mis-information is when false information is shared, but no harm is meant. Dis-information is when false information is knowingly shared to cause harm. Mal-information is when genuine information is shared to cause harm, often by moving private information into the public sphere."

"Educators have responded to one of the alarms raised by fake news: the relatively easy problem of how to teach students to find the fakes. We have, however, largely ignored the more important and more difficult problem caused by fake news: how to limit skepticism of the media. For every person fooled by a fake story, there may be many more whose trust in the media in general is diminished. Discounting all news means discounting true news, too. And overwhelmingly, most news is true."