How to build a speech in 6 easy steps

Originally posted 1/18/12.

Today in class, we went over the 6 steps to building a speech, but we didn't have a chance to go over the last 2 slides. Here's the slideshow, if you want to check it out:



Also, if you want to download this as a PDF for your iPad, this link will make it happen.

"It tolls for thee!": Can you ever really be completely alone and isolated?

By popular demand, here's the Prezi from earlier today:



Again, the two assignments are:

• Write 1¶ comparing Landscape and the Fall of Icarus/"I am a rock" vs. Donne's Meditation 17.
  
  
  
  
• Fill out that Meditation 17 translation worksheet with partner. Upload it to Scribd and post it to both blogs.

Due by Monday (for the A-Day class) and Tuesday (for the B-Day class).

What was what in that Owl Creek video?

As per my Spring-ly custom, English II students _{(and some American Literature students)} fell victim were treated to a reading and a viewing of Ambrose Bierce's famous short story An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, a story about the musings of a man about to be hanged. One of the most famous things about this story is the way that Ambrose Bierce subtly switches between literary points of view in his treatment, tricking the readers into thinking fantasy is reality.

The assignment, if you remember, was to watch the video (embedded below, in case you need it again) and determine where (if anywhere) the following POVs were show:

• First person
• Third person (Limited)
• Third person (Omniscient)
• Objective (or Dramatic, as Mr. Kabel calls it)

This was supposed to be 3¶s, one for each that I saw in the film. (You might find a fourth one, but I didn't, so if you did and you can justify it, I might throw you some extra points.)

Struggling with death: Everyman and the Grieving process

Sometimes, we read literature in class that's entertaining, or funny, or famous, but sometimes, we read literature that has a meaning outside the words itself. In studying Everyman, we look into the importance of death, and, specifically, the process people go through when experiencing it.

For class, we'll be looking over the following Powerpoint presentation and watching two one videos: one about a little girl suffering through the death of a pet, and an episode of Scrubs, an American TV show.





The assignment will be to fill out this  Stages of Grief  graphic organizer, similar to how you did for the Who's Who on the Canterbury Roadtrip assignment. When you've completed the graphic organizer, you will upload it to Scribd and embed it onto your blog. Good luck!

Make your teacher proud: Create the greatest Canterbury Tales videos on YouTube

I get pretty bad envy.

Whenever I'm researching something and I find a good example online, I think to myself "Why aren't my students doing this myself?" For example, while looking up some Canterbury Tales videos, I found some pretty cool examples of videos made by students from all over the world and from different grades (from 10th grade to college). As I watched these, I sat there, salivating at the awesomeness, thinking to myself "My TAPA students are waaaay more talented than these kids! They could do, like, a million times better than this! The world must understand their genius."

Prove me right. In this project, you'll be taking one of Chaucer's tales, as a group, assigned to you, and filming a 5-10 minute video adaptation of that story. Details:

1. Read. As a group, read your assigned story. Together. They're a bit difficult to understand, so read the version I provided you, and feel free to check out a few of the other translations.
2. Brainstorm. I'd like for your version of the script to be close to the original. For example, if you were doing the Nun's Priest Tale, I don't want you to change Chanticleer from a rooster to a person; I want him to be as written. However, you may decide how you want to present the video. Maybe you make it live-action, like with costumes. Maybe it's a silent film. Maybe you create puppets to act it out. Maybe you use stop-motion animation and Legos. Maybe you use 3D animation like XtraNormal.com. I'd love for everyone to try a different method of filming!
3. Write. Develop a script. Everyone must contribute, but everyone doesn't have to type it up. However, your script should look, pretty much, like the following:
   

   [Scene: Mr. B is sitting in a chair, reading a book.]
   Mr. A: [Walks into the room and looks at Mr. B] Dude, what are you doing?
   Mr. B: [Throws his book at Mr. A] I'm throwing books at you!

   When your script is completed, one member should upload it to Scribd, and then every other member should embed it into a blog post.
4. Film/Upload. Make it awesome. When you're done, one group member should upload the video to .
5. Post. Each group member should post the video to their blog.

Here are the groups:

• The Knight's Tale
  Group: Enoch, Jonathan, Nadia, Yalisa
  | Harvard's Summary/Translation | eChaucer |
• The Wife of Bath's Tale
  Group: Esther, Linda, Sean
  | Harvard's Summary/Translation | eChaucer |
• The Friar's Tale
  Group: Angel, Angela, Tristan
  | Eleusinianm.co.uk | eChaucer |
• The Summoner's Tale
  Group: Emily, Ivy, Jason
  | Harvard's Summary/Translation | eChaucer |
• The Clerk's Tale
  Group: Emmanuel, Jane, Vivien
  | Harvard's Summary/Translation | eChaucer |
• The Merchant's Tale
  Group: Elaina Elaine, Justin, Kotomi, Tim
  | Harvard's Summary/Translation | eChaucer |
• The Franklin's Tale
  Group: Kevin, Michael, WinWin
  | Harvard's Summary/Translation | eChaucer |
• The Physician's Tale
  Group: Beverly, Sky, Timmy
  | Harvard's Summary/Translation | eChaucer |
• The Shipman's Tale
  Group: Andrew, Cynthia, Florence
  | Harvard's Summary/Translation | eChaucer |

Any other questions? I didn't think so.

Road Trippin' on the way to Canterbury

I don't know if you thought last week was nuts, but I sure did! I haven't even done any blogging for over a week! To punish myself (and my students) for that, we'll be embarking on a new project.

So far, in studying the Middle Ages, we've talked about the background of the times, ballads, and King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table (specifically Sir Gawain and the Green Knight). Now, we'll move to arguably the single-most famous piece of the time period: Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales.

The Canterbury Tales is basically the Medieval period's Inception: It's a fictional story that has under-layers of other fictional stories. The basic plot is of a few dozen strangers, from different backgrounds, jobs, and levels of society, traveling to Canterbury on a religious pilgrimage. As they are on the way, they tell stories to make the time go past. Each story in The Canterbury Tales, then, is titled after the person who is telling the story.

Before this even starts, though, Chaucer sets the mood in a prologue, where we find out what kinds of people are on their way to Canterbury. Often times, he'll tell us about the person's reputation or beliefs; other times, he'll describe their visible, superficial details, leaving us, as readers, clues to who they really are. Even though Chaucer might not spell out "HE IS GOOD" or "SHE IS BAD", we can usually figure out a lot about the person from the few details he provides.

The assignment, then, is to fill out this graphic organizer about all the characters on the road trip. Usually, I give this assignment out to students to do individually; however, this year, I'll allow students to team up in pairs (only!) to complete the assignment. The twist, though, is that the entire assignment must be completed digitally. The instructions are as follows:

1. Download the worksheet. Click on this link (or on the QR code to the right) to get the Who's Who on the Canterbury Roadtrip Worksheet. Make sure you open it in GoodReader.
2. Team up on filling out both pages. Partner A should have GoodReader open to pages 115-136 of the British Literature textbook. Partner B should have GoodReader open to the worksheet. As Partner A looks for answers, Partner B should be filling in answers. To do this:
• Hold down on the Job Description square for The Knight. A popup will appear. On that popup, you'll want to click on the little icon (below in blue) that says  abc| .
  
  
  
  
  
• GoodReader will ask you if you want to save any changes you make either a) to the file or b) to a new file. Either is fine, but I'd suggest you do this first option.
  
  
  
  
  
• Now, the program will let you start to enter in text. I suggest you type in the answer right now. You can edit it later—add stuff, delete stuff, reword stuff—but just start putting in the information. When you're done, you can click  Save  on the top right.*
  
  
  
  
  
• Now comes the fun part—editing. When you click on the text you just typed, there will be all kinds of options for how to change the way the entered text looks. You can play around with it any way you want, but I want NO BORDER, NO FILL, and NO CALLOUT. Change the color to whatever you want, but make sure I can read it. Finally, change the font size to, at the largest, size 10pt. (When I put it into my own iPad, I still clicked  -1pt  twice because size  10pt  was way to big.)
  
  
  
  
  
• Finally, click on  Move  to adjust the text box size. Fit it inside my little graph squares.
  
  
  
  
  
You'll do this process for each square. Once, you've formatted the type style, by the way, it will usually default back to that (so you don't have to set it again and again every time).
3. Flatten. Once you have completed the worksheet 100%, you need to make sure that those changes you have made will stay permanent. On the bottom right, when you click on the second icon from the right (  ), a popup will give you the option to Flatten Copy. Do that.
   
   
   
4. Upload to Scribd. Sound familiar? Just as we did a long time ago, we'll upload these documents to Scribd. For a step-by-step process reminder, you can go back to that old blog post. There are two basic ways to do this: The all-iPad way and the iPad + Computer way.
   
   
   • all-iPad way: From this view, click on Open In... and get that document into QuickOffice. (They might ask you to flatten again. It's fine—you can.)
     
     
     
     
     
     Then, from here, drag the document to Scribd on the bottom of the page (as we did before) and upload it.
   • iPad + Computer way: Just E-Mail File to yourself and upload it (on a computer) to Scribd.
     
     
5. Embed it into your blog. Again, as we did before. 

And that's all! (I feel like I always give a million instructions and say "That's it!" like it was really easy. Sorry.) This project will be due by next class, so get started!

*By the way, you should do this process, as well, for putting your name on the top of the paper!

For formal docs (like the Beowulf essay), use Scribd.

When you're writing an analysis about your personality, composing kenning-filled poems about your epicness, or showing video of the important elements of your life, a blog post is a great format for sharing your work. However, if you're doing something a bit more formal, a blog post just isn't the right format. This is where Scribd comes in. It's a website that allows you to display PDFs, Word docs, Powerpoint presentations, and a variety of other documents with a more professional feel to it. For these Beowulf essays, Scribd is a great place to store these papers. There are three parts to this process: the initial signup, an on-iPad part and an on-a-real-computer part:

1. Sign up for Scribd. You can sign up by connecting to your Facebook account, if you want, or you can just sign up separately without Facebook. However, if you sign up with Facebook, I've found that your password acts a bit funny, so you'll have to add in a separate one. To do this, at the top of the page, click, underneath your name, on Settings.
   
   
   
   
   A bit below on that page, you'll have the option to add or change a password. Click on that and change the password to whatever you want. Even if you just change it to what your Facebook password is, that's ok—you just have to change/add/re-add the password to the account.
   
2. Write the essay. Obviously. Hopefully, you've already connected your Quickoffice App to your Dropbox account. Either way, make sure you, somehow, add your completed, finalized essay to your Quickoffice app.
3. Upload to Scribd. Drag your essay to the Document icon (to the right of the Trashcan and the Email icons) the bottom of the page.
   
   
   
   
   Once you do that, it'll pop up an option to upload it to Slideshare, Scribd, and .docstoc. Obviously, you'll go for the middle option.
   
   
   
   
   Add in a description of what you're uploading to Comments and then click  Upload . It'll then tell you once it has it uploaded. From here, you'll need to go to a real computer.
4. Get that Scribd document.  Now that you're logged into Scribd on your computer, go to your document Shelf. Your recently-uploaded document should now appear on the screen. Click on that document.
   
   
   
   
   Your document will show up now in the middle of the screen, but at the bottom of the screen, there will be a black bar. To the right of the bar will be an icon that looks like < / >, for Share and Embed. Click on that, and then, on the popup, press Embed >>.
   
   
   
   
   The screen above will pop up. Make sure, under Embed this document (in the middle) that Auto is checked for Width. Then, where it says Copy, click that to automatically copy down the HTML code for your document into your computer's clipboard.
5. Add it into your blog post. Now, create a New Post in your Blogger. I'd write a short introduction to what the paper is supposed to be about, etc, and then click on Edit HTML. Then, towards the bottom, paste in your code. It'll be awfully long and will look like this:
   

   <a title="View Test Document on Scribd" href="http://www.scribd.com/doc/63726099/Test-Document" style="margin: 12px auto 6px auto; font-family: Helvetica,Arial,Sans-serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; -x-system-font: none; display: block; text-decoration: underline;">Test Document</a><iframe class="scribd_iframe_embed" src="http://www.scribd.com/embeds/63726099/content?start_page=1&view_mode=list&access_key=key-qvz5w4c4vy6yvv6c7tk" data-auto-height="true" data-aspect-ratio="0.772727272727273" scrolling="no" id="doc_44069" width="100%" height="600" frameborder="0"></iframe><script type="text/javascript">(function() { var scribd = document.createElement("script"); scribd.type = "text/javascript"; scribd.async = true; scribd.src = "http://www.scribd.com/javascripts/embed_code/inject.js"; var s = document.getElementsByTagName("script")[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(scribd, s); })();</script>

   Finally, publish your post. 

Embedded into your blog will be a little something like this:

Test Document

Pretty cool, right? And so much more professional. Now, when you're trying to share formal documents or Powerpoint presentations, use this little trick, and it'll be perfect!