“The Mysteries of Harris Burdick” Web 2.0 Project
One of my favorite children’s books, and one of the best books for motivating kids to write is “The Mysteries Of Harris Burdick” by Chris Van Allsburg. We recently began a collaborative writing project designed by Lisa Parisi and me - Lisa gets the credit for doing the bulk of the set-up work. She set-up the Google Docs the participants will use, and the wiki page that explains the project. We also met a couple of times over Skype on weekends to pull it together along with numerous Twits and emails.
Students will write stories inspired by the drawings and captions from the book collaboratively. Members of each classroom are grouped in 3’s and 4’s (1 or 2 members from each class), to write about one of the illustrations. They will share ideas via Google Docs and video-conferencing on Skype to brainstorm, discuss and finally author their stories … all the time discussing where it should go next and helping each other proofread. The finished stories will be posted for all to see. Our first Skype session will be Thursday so that both classes can meet.
To prepare my students I had them write “Pass-It On” stories. They were given the beginning of a story:
Each student then took over the story and wrote for 10 minutes … after that they passed their story to the person next to them who then had to continue the story. We continued to pass them around their group, about every 5 minutes, until they got their own story back which they then had to bring to an end. We started to post some of the finished stories on our blogs, all should be posted by week’s end. This doesn’t mimic exactly how the project will work, but I wanted my students to have experience working on a piece of writing that wasn’t all their own.
Learning is messy!
Tags: collaboration, skype, video-conferencing, Google Docs
March 25th, 2008 at 7:27 pm
Fantastic!
Can’t wait to see what two great 5th grade teachers facilitate with their students in a collaborative world!
March 25th, 2008 at 8:09 pm
This is a great idea! That book is excellent for getting kids writing and I bet it will be interesting what the kids come up with. I think that environment has so much to do with thinking. The “Pass-It-On” story is great too. I use it, but I encounter some problems: messy handwriting, things not making sense. Do you see those problems and if so, how do you handle them? I guess I only give shorter time periods. Maybe 5-10 minutes would be more effective. Is there a way my students can leave comments for your students stories?
March 25th, 2008 at 9:09 pm
Steven - My students’ blogs: http://classblogmeister.com/blog.php?blogger_id=65078
March 26th, 2008 at 6:38 am
Here is a link to my creative writing blog. http://mrccreativewriting.blogspot.com/ My students have written stories based on the book. I find it really inspires them to write. I never have trouble getting them to write fiction when I start with it.
March 27th, 2008 at 8:15 pm
[...] Today we experienced the best collaborative writing experience I’ve ever been part of. Lisa Parisi and Christine Southard’s 5th grade class in New York is involved with my class and a group of other teachers around the country in a writing project using the book “The Mysteries of Harris Burdick.” I blogged about it the other day. Lisa’s class and mine are paired up for this project and today we had our classes collaborating in two inovative ways. [...]
March 30th, 2008 at 11:40 am
[...] This week the clock ticked slowly at my school in Mount Vernon, WA. It was the week before a much needed Spring Break. Our whole school was entrenched in WASL Practice for the upcoming state test. Even though the calendar said Spring, it was blustery outside, keeping my “too big for their britches” 6th graders cooped up in my basement room for painstaking amounts of time. I was doing my best to engage students. We were creating Science Investigation Photo Stories, for our online Science Journals, we were creating a podcast about “Surviving the WASL” but everyone knew, we were just marking time until Friday and Spring Break. On top of all this, this was conference week so report cards were due and I was at school well past dark most of the week. I was just infected as any of my students with a huge case of Spring Fever. In the midst of my struggle to hang on to Spring Break was a bright ray of light coming from a DEN Star Educator on the other side of the country. Lisa Parisi, a STAR from New York is teaming with Brian Crosby from Nevada on a collaborative writing project with Chris Van Allsburg’s book “The Mysteries of Harris Burdick”. Classes are teamed together to create collaborative stories based on the imaginative pictures in the book. My class is teamed with another STAR, Shannon Smith’s class from Illinois. So far, we have assigned the pictures and done some brainstorming. Lisa and Brian’s classes are paired for this project. On Thursday, Lisa and Brian planned to Skype so that their students could brainstorm “face to face”. That evening, Lisa and Brian both reported that this was a huge success and very powerful for both students and teachers. Both teachers shared pictures and blogged about their experience. Lisa bubbled in Twitter that this was the BEST technology day of her career. [...]
March 30th, 2008 at 1:12 pm
This sounds like a really good idea. I am a student in a master’s program for Teacher-Librarian. I would really like to use this concept to adopt a book club for students to read certain books and share thir comments. Do you think this would be a good idea? Please send your comments.
March 30th, 2008 at 7:24 pm
Helping students to be more creative when writing is great. Students can learn how to collaborate with each other. Students will have an opportunity to see someone else’s viewpoint. Being able to see your work in print makes you appreciate the books that you have read and makes you want to write even more for someone else to enjoy.
The students would understand the job of the author much better. The author of a book sometimes pulls some of what they’re writing about from life experience or what they’re dreaming about in life. When authors pull things from their life experiences they draw you in and helps you relate and better understand what the writer is talking about. By the authors pulling you in this makes you want to have a voice and have people enjoy your writings as well.
When dealing with literacy this program is very important. It helps to put an end to this very serious issue if illiteracy. It gives students a chance to see just how important it is to learn how to read, as well as, read books that they can relate to. This program also helps teachers learn how to approach this in their classrooms.
Do you think this is good way to have students interacting?