Students in the Write

In our first published piece, students created a picture book describing a memory special to them. The class studied the author Cynthia Rylant to discover where writers get their ideas. Using our mentor author, we studied When the Relatives Came, Dog Heaven, Night in the Country, and Henry and Mudge. Once students completed their draft, students edited their pieces with guest parent editors. Finally, they visited the computer lab to publish their books using the program Storybook Weaver. Adding the oral storytelling using the ipods helped our class not only meet the New York State Standard for using language for literary response and expression in writing but for reading and speaking as well.

Click here to go to Ms. McCabe’s Class Stories

In anticipation of the new season, our class wrote winter poems. Along with Mrs. Etman our ESL teacher, our class brainstormed a list of winter words prior to writing. This mind map served as a source for inspiration and as a reference for spelling. Students edited with teachers. Afterwards, they published their poems onto winter stationary. These are currently on display in the hallway!

Everyone at Morse was very excited about our new Pod Casting website, especially the students! However, before we could introduce the website to the World Wide Web, we needed to give it a name and a tag line. Our students were asked to brainstorm titles and they didn’t let us down! When the contest was over we had eighteen entries, each of them were fantastic. The winning entry would become the Blag name and the runner up would become the tag line. Our panel of teachers had the difficult job of narrowing the list down to our five finalists and they were:

• Ms. McCabe’s Super Smart Class
• Students in the Write
• Ms. McCabe’s Sweet Angles
• Ms. McCabe’s Class Website
• Ms. McCabe’s Magical Menagerie on Magical Mountain

The students voted, and the winner was “Students in the Write” by Clair. The runner up was “Ms. McCabe’s Magical Menagerie on Magical Mountain” by Jack. The teachers at Morse school wanted to thank all of our students who participated in the contest!

A masthead is the section of a newspaper that tells the date, issue, and name of the publication. We are lucky because Ms. McCabe’s class is full of artists. They helped our Pod Casting site by creating individual mastheads. Each time you come to the site, a different masthead will appear! If you want to go through the different looks, just click on the masthead, this will refresh the page. Thank you Ms. McCabe’s class!

Tarrytown has been using a balanced literacy approach to teaching language arts for the last few years. In that time, several teachers have built a strong culture of writing and pod casting has become a powerful component of this culture. We have witnessed several positive byproducts from this addition to the traditional Writer’s Workshop model. Writing motivation has increased as students prepare writings for an authentic audience: the World Wide Web. Students reflect on their storytelling technique and improve their fluency and speaking skills with each new recording. This initiative has encouraged a culture of writing; it promotes a positive academic self-concept, while reinforcing speaking skills and reading fluency.

The program also introduces new tools that will become significant in the digital future. As technology becomes smaller and computing becomes more mobile, portable devices such as the iPod will become increasingly important. Recognizing this, we are preparing our students to be familiar with this development, placing our students ahead of the technological curve.

Pod Casting stems from the popularity of the MP3 player, particularly the Apple iPod (thus the name, Pod Casting.) The idea is simple: you can find Internet content that you want and have it “pushed” to your computer or MP3 player, like the iPod or iRiver. Many radio shows, such as NPR’s “All Thing Considered,” also feature a Pod Cast. If you miss a show of “All Things Considered” you can just visit NPR’s Podcasting site and download it. Then listen at your pleasure! True Pod Casting allows you to automatically receive programs that you want, because it is “pushed” to your computer or MP3 player. At the Morse Pod Casting Site, we are going to experiment with “pushing” content later. For now, we have created an Audio Blog (or Audio Web Log) that features the incredible writings of our students. Come and visit, listen to the wonderful stories, and download any that you would like to keep. There is also a response button; please let us know if you like our site! Our students would love to hear your feedback.