My eighth graders and I started Avi’s Nothing But the Truth today. (Aside: I’m really going to be getting into this for a while, so you might as well go read the book, if you haven’t already. It’ll only take you an hour or two.) And this morning, I thought of a last minute mutation for my “Facebooking” it real time experiment. The notebooks were going to be awkward for sharing, which is sort of the whole idea, so I was trying to think of an alternative that didn’t involve our IST department. Then I thought of an old web article I read about teaching kids about webpages and hypertext without using a computer. It involved putting an essay on the bulletin board (written rather larger than life), and then underlining the words that would be “links” and then running a string or whatever from each of those underlined words to another short piece of writing that explicated/expanded on the link word. And then those could be connected (literally) to other such pieces of writing or pictures or other materials. It was a very groovy way to illustrate the power of hypertext. (That’s what the ht in http stands for.) Since my
Middle school teaching: Five shows a day, 180 days a year.
That reminds me of those great SNL skits about the Sofa King. You know, how the prices are "Sofa King" low, the deals are "Sofa King" great, etc. (You obviously have to say those phrases out loud to get the joke.)