Cooked Texts

DMAC Day 6

I have spent the last 30 hours (when I was not enjoying the DMAC party or sleeping!) focusing my final project.  The process we have been guided through in this focusing is worth reflecting on in and of itself.

• Talking out your ideas really works.  It really does.  You may feel you already know what you are doing and can start working, but stop.  Talk it out with another person, and I bet you end up with even better ideas.

• Sketching out your plans really works.  Even with alphabetic texts, this works to be sure you have your overall direction, but with multimodal composition, it is even more important.  This breaks you away from sentences, paragraphs, pages, ...  and helps you think in the other composing modes.
• Asking people short questions as you are working opens wide rivers of new ideas.  While related to the first bullet, this comes at a different time.  After you have worked out your overall ideas and started to get down to work, don't stop talking to others.  
• Be a listener for others.  Help others with the first and third bullets.
• Stop and eat a good meal.  Or if it is not mealtime, take a good walk or sleep a good night's sleep.  Your brain will surprise you by showing you how it kept working even when you thought you were not.

None of these are earth shattering, and none are things I had never heard before.  But they are things that I, as an introvert and a nose-to-the-grindstoner, forget too often.  Because DMAC helped/made me do these things, I am heading into my final project excited, energized, and not worried.  So, about that final project ...

...Cooked Texts...

Yes, "Cooked Texts" are my final project.  What Cooked Texts are will be fully explained in my final presentation, but I promise the skills and reflection I have used to create the idea of these texts are valid and well-developed (at least 5 other DMACers have talked me through, so the ideas are definitely good!).  Here is my project plan:

• My Goal: to create a multimodal assignment for my students and to create an example text myself
• Purpose: to be an example for my students, to enhance the teaching I am doing, to take a real step into multimodal composing as a person and in my classrooms
• Audience: my main audience is my students, my secondary audience is anyone looking at me professionally
• Design Metaphor:
• Cooking: you do not know really what the recipe will make (read: the poem) is about until you examine each ingredient (read: smaller aspects of the poem) AND then put them together
• Format:
• Google Sites is my composing platform
• Multimodal poem assignment to follow up their Poetry Out Loud recitations
• Assignment page (outcomes and timeline) with subpages under it laying out these different elements so I think of how to scaffold the parts according to work flow
• Record people talking about how they respond to texts that effectively combine written words, visual, and aural elements
• Make Cooked text example in Windows Live (since that is what they have) with poem and image bits behind audio
• Make the assignment sheet with the outcomes and timeline
• Decide how to assess using articles we are reading and make the rubric
• Other things to get done at DMAC
• Record people about drama and just have those videos to use later

Stay tuned as I will be back here as I start to create each element of this overall project.  And you have to come back to at least find out why I call them Cooked Texts!


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