Kevin Hodgson. Kevin teaches sixth grade in Southampton, Massachusetts at the William E. Norris Elementary School, where his students use technology for publishing and creation throughout the year. He is also the technology liaison with the Western Massachusetts Writing Project and a co-editor of the book collection Teaching the New Writing: Technology, Change and Assessment in the 21st Century Classroom that examines the role of technology in the writing classroom in the age of standardized testing and assessment. In his spare time, Kevin also dabbles in the world of classroom-based humor through his Boolean Squared webcomic.
I truly believe that we learn most deeply by doing. If you want to learn how to swim or ride a bike, then you need to get into the pool or hop onto the bicycle and get started. When I thinking about how to write this guest blog post for Ruth and Stacey on the topic of guiding students to create “Make Your Own Adventure” stories with technology, it dawned on me that a traditional blog post just would not be good enough. No, I realized, I would have to create my post with choices for the reader. My blog post about “Make Your Own Adventure” stories would have to be a “Make Your Own Adventure” story (or is it, “Make Your Own Learning”?). Luckily for me, Ruth and Stacey are always game for oddball suggestions. We collectively mulled over how such a post would look at a blog. In the end, I decided that it made more sense to create a website for my post and so, I cordially invite you to join me on a little reading adventure in which I put much of the control into your hands, dear reader, as you navigate through some ideas around introducing multi-stranded writing in the classroom.
Please start the adventure by heading to the Threaded Adventures that I have set up for us. And please, don’t get lost.
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What a fun, creative “post”. I had not thought about this idea before, and I loved the voice integrating humor. Thanks for sharing such a unique guest post.
Excellent fun and engagement! Reminds me of the Choose your own adventure books my kids enjoyed when they were young. I like your suggestions about the wiki… I’d opened up one but could never figure how to use it. We are talking about using wiki spaces in the classroom and this is a great intro. Thanks!
I’m glad you enjoyed it and may find it a useful resource.
Kevin
Kevin, thank you so much for this guest blog. I appreciate your dedication to marrying technology and writing. We need to keep our kids engaged and technology does that for many kids. My first grade students spend one day per week in the computer lab using technology for their writing instead of our traditional workshop. They use three computers during literacy work stations daily. I love the idea of “choose your own story” as a technique for writing. I will pass your idea on to some upper grade teachers. Your example was perfect!
[...] to be very interesting. It was actually written by a guest named Kevin Hodgson. It is called Threaded Adventures. It is about how we learn by doing. He mentions that when you want to learn how to ride a bike, [...]