Friday, August 28, 2020
Friday Film Festival: The Lord of the Flies - Modern Classics Summarized
Thursday, August 20, 2020
Mythic Monday: The Hero Journey's Guidebook
I learned about Zak Hamby back when I was doing a mythology based blog many years ago and he was known as Mr. Mythology. His work he gave away on his site back then was awesome and I enjoyed our email chats about this god or that monster.
Since then he has moved on to open up a site and store called Creative English Teacher. He doles out helpful advice, shares materials, and offers up books and units for sale from time to time.
He is best known for his reader's theater. I have used some of his plays for my mythology class and have yet to be disappointed in a purchase. I see he has a new book out and thought I would throw a little advertisement his way.
The Hero’s Journey Guidebook is a great resource for middle and high school literature and mythology classes as an explanation of Campbell’s Hero’s Quest and as a guidebook to help students write their own hero’s journey in an English or a creative writing class. This is not a textbook, it is a guidebook engages students (it did me!) to think about the hero’s journey with characters they know, characters they create, and their own lives.
Here is what you get in
this guidebook:
- Examples for each stage of the journey from mythology, classic stories, and modern pop culture that will make it easy for students to grasp. In fact, on one page, there are allusions to Aladdin, Hercules, Star Wars, Cinderella, Norse mythology, The Little Mermaid, and Harry Potter.
- Guiding questions for each section that encourage students to think about where they have noticed this element before in movies, games, and books. The questions are centered around a hero of the student’s choosing so that they will be invested even more.
- Writing tips for every stage and section of the journey so that students can apply what they are learning in their own stories. A teacher could easily build a whole creative writing unit around the hero’s journey using this book’s writing tips.
- Original illustrations by Hamby that are pleasing to look at and make the overall feel of the book fun and inviting.
You can buy it off of Amazon or cut out the middle man and go straight to the source at his store.
Tuesday, August 18, 2020
Tech Tuesday: Playing a Video Clip on Zoom without the Lag
You are an extreme teacher and as an extreme teacher, you know that sometimes the literature is meant to be seen! Shakespeare was meant to be experienced! Grammar is more interesting with cartoon characters! You can't teach 'plethora' as a vocabulary word without using the clip from The Three Amigos!
Alas, you are teaching remotely and video clips on Zoom are laggy and frustrating to watch. So, guess you'll just have to forego the clip.
Not so! There are three things you need to do.
1. Get some decent Internet - Easier said than done in my neck of the woods. I have such poor service (on a rare good day, I'll have 3 mbps) that I can't always watch Netflix. When my two kids and wife are also online and all of us are streaming our lessons, it is impossible. But, if you can work from your school or you have good service at home, you're golden. You will need a recommended 1.5 Mbps upload speed. You can test your computer's speed by typing SPEED TEST into Google and clicking the first link.
2. Click the box - When you go to SHARE SCREEN, make sure to click the box below for OPTIMIZE SCREEN SHARING FOR VIDEO CLIP
3. Ignore Zoom's Advice and only share a portion of your screen - Zoom tells you to make your video full screen, but in my tests, there was still a small lag happening after I optimized it. Click the ADVANCE tab top middle of your share screen.
When you get to that screen, click PORTION OF SCREEN
See that green box? Anything that is in that green box will show to the students. It will make it full screen on their computer. Once we did that, we had no lag at all.
Now, only use the optimize button for when you show video clips. If you are like me and you have two monitors, when you optimize, you will stop seeing the gallery view, chat, participants, etc. on your first monitor.
And there you go. If you have another Zoom tip or you just want to talk about how awesome The Three Amigos is, then leave a comment!
Friday, August 14, 2020
It's that time of year again
It's that time of year again when district takes up all of your workdays with important workshops and meetings so they can help us be the best teachers ever!