To add to the fun, I’ve been spreading all the maple leaf flags that I can, as well as giving out red and white candy (cinnamon hearts and scotch mints) to whoever is willing to take them. I’ve been wishing everyone a Happy Flag Day! (or should that be Merry Flag Day?) and telling anyone who doesn’t know that the flag turns 46 today.

I have a feeling the kids may remember Flag Day this way far better than if I’d spent a week of class on lessons about the 1964 flag debates, Lester Pearson, John Diefenbaker and all the other personalities involved in supporting or opposing a new flag.

A little personal enthusiasm and some candy can go a long ways.

1. If you’re going to alter people’s voices to make girls sound like guys and guys sound like girls, subtle changes are best. If the changes are too dramatic, they just sound silly. Don’t change the pitch of the voice too much.
2. Subtle changes in the speed someone talks at change how you perceive their voice. A slighter faster voice sounds higher (and more feminine) and a slightly slower one sounds lower (and more masculine).
3. Audacity is limited in how many different tracks you can have in use at once. It seems to handle ten to 20 just fine, but some kids had more and we had to trim that down. If we didn’t the program would crash repeatedly. That was quite frustrating until I figured it out. None the less, considering the software is free and pretty easy to learn (and also comes in a portable version you can take with you) it’s pretty hard to complain.
4. This assignment was fun. Though it took a few weeks from beginning to end, the kids were usually pretty motivated. Even the kids who are often unmotivated didn’t complain. I either have an unusually eager bunch of kids this year, or researching and “interviewing” famous late, great Canadians is actually something that Grade 9 students enjoy.

Overall it was a great project and it will be repeated next year.

The last part is proving the hardest. Prior to my class, citations haven’t been emphasized so the students thought they only needed a bibliography or works cited and that was good enough. I’ve been pushing that to give credit for all direct quotes, borrowed ideas, or obscure facts by citing specific sources for specific facts.

Maybe we history teachers are a little more picky than language arts teachers, I don’t know, but I feel very uncomfortable if the kids don’t use citations. Is Grade 9 too early to teach them that?

Other than that, the project is proceding well. A few students are starting to record and are quite enthusiastic about everything. This is really great.

We installed the software and then took it for a spin. Since the students haven’t yet written the scripts that they’re going to record, they simply had conversations and recorded them with Audacity. On the theory that it’s best to get the silliness out of their systems right at the beginning, I then encouraged the kids to play with all the settings in Audacity that let you speed up, slow down, change the pitch and otherwise alter the recording.

It was auditory chaos, as you could probably predict. But besides giving the students an introduction to a program they’re going to need, it gave them a continued sense of excitement about the project. In addition to the work involved, they can see there’s a potential for fun. Making history fun is a big part of the reason I run this project.

The first couple of days are simply a chance for the kids to find a topic that interests them. The real goal of this project is affective, and that is to build an appreciation, admiration and even a love of Canadian history. Consequently, this part of the project may actually be the most critical. To help them along, this year I’ve supplied the kids with several of my own books that relate the tales of great and often quirky Canadians ranging from Louis Cyr to Ethel Cathrwood. I’ve tried to provide suggestions to the students that tie famous Canadians into their own areas of interest. For example, to a basketball loving student I suggested J. Percy Page, coach of the Edmonton Grads.

We’re on the verge of some fun with this project. Stay tuned for updates in the days ahead.

In other words, instead of separately writing down the websites and their URLs for my assignment on Sir John A Macdonald, and having the kids punch them into their browsers (and make lots of errors in the process) I can simply give them my Deliious link http://delicious.com/mrpuffin/sirjohna which has all the various sites listed.

Social bookmarking is handy on its own, but Diigo allows you to share bookmarks in a cool way. A group of people (students in my case) can share a common area to post their bookmarks. They can edit each other’s work and leave comments for each other.

This is really very cool for students collaborating on research projects. Yesterday I had students researching historical Canadian human rights issues pool their bookmarks in a Diigo group so they could each use the best of the material that the others had found. The login of the person who posted the link is put beside the posted link so you, as teacher, can easily see who’s contributing and who’s not. It’s quite easy to hold people accountable.

You also have an ability to edit most things. I haven’t checked out everything yet, but I think you can edit almost anything potentially offensive that your students could post.

There is an educator version of Diigo, as well, which allows you to create users (without them having to submit e-mail addresses) and create groups for your users to work in. Understandably, that’s incredibly useful in a classroom setting.

The only downside I’ve seen so far was the length of time it took Diigo to process my application for an educator account. I first applied last May and it seems to have been approved last week. Admittedly, all of this service is free (including the education upgrade) so I can’t really complain, but with the lagtime involved I wouldn’t plan on using Diigo really soon after you apply for it.

1. For a project like this set very specific requirements.
   •  How many lines long should it be?
   • Should your song rhyme?
   • What will the teacher tolerate in terms of choice of melody for the song? (Can it be copyrighted? Can it be rock, country or a nursery rhyme? Two girls took the tune of a popular hymn, much to my surprise.)
   • Without specific requirements, it’s really hard to tell if the kids’ are reaching your objectives or not.
2. There’s a certain amount of chaos to be expected with a project like this
   • You can try to keep it quiet all you like, but when the kids need to find music they can remember, or when they have to sing it will be noisy, like it not. Get ready for it.
   • Noise can be good. You need to figure out the difference between good noise and bad and that’s a fine line with something like this.
3. As much as some kids do horrible songs, some do wonderful ones.
   • Most kids used the recording software to disguise their voices. I have quite a few kids who apparently sound like chipmunks.
   • Some kids picked well known songs and adapted them in creative ways. The most interesting song was probably “Why can’t we be Prime Ministers?”
   • Other students actually created their own music. It wasn’t brilliant, but it gave them an opportunity to express themselves they wouldn’t normally have.
4. Giving kids new opportunities is worth it.
   • Not all kids excel at essays, or projects, or PowerPoints, or drawings, or whatever you can dream up.
   • This project gave other kids an opportunity.

I’ve spent much of the past few hours on this prep day trying to dream up and put together an assignment for my Grade 9s for later this week or early next week. Though I teach them Social Studies, I still think knowing some basic history (which isn’t necessarily part of Social Studies) is pretty important.

I’d like it if all of my students would at least be able to recognize the names of all 22 Canadian prime ministers. To that end, I’m going to tell them a little bit about each, and then have them get together in small groups and write songs about the PMs. Music seems to be a great learning tool, so I figure that if I can get the kids to write a song summarizing all 22 of the prime ministers, then it will help them keep track of them.

We’re not looking for brilliance in the writing (though we have a strong music program at this school, so I may be surprised). All I really want is a bit of rhythm and rhyme sung to a recognizable tune whether that’s something complex and funky, or something simple like Frere Jacques. (I guess we can’t use Happy Birthday to You since that’s under copyright.)

I hope to record the songs using Audacity and then play them back for the class.  It should be an interesting experience. I hope it works.

I finally had an idea. My students have been looking at human rights issues for their Social Studies course, things like women’s suffrage, the Japanese Internment, and the Chinese Head Tax. What I did was challenge my students to reduce one of these issues to six key moments. Then they’re to act out these six key moments, and take pictures of them.

They have to select the best shot of each moment, cropping, brightening, and otherwise editing the photos as necessary. From there they have to log on to Big Huge Labs. (Big Huge Labs has an educator option where you register and then generate IDs for your students. They don’t need e-mail addresses to log on, and you get to see their projects as they work on them, if you choose.) Big Huge Labs’ Mosaic Maker lets the kids upload the photos and set them up in a nice 3 by 2 grid (which is just the right proportions to print off as a 4 by 6 print).

Once the kids save their mosaic on my flash drive (I keep a separate drive for just these sorts of occasions. I ‘m not getting my important school stuff accidentally ruined by one careless student), I’ll get them developped. Hopefully, we’ll have neat pictorial summaries of the particular human rights incident each group did brought together in a postcard like format.

This is the theory. In the next few days I’ll see how it turns out.

So – lucky me – last week while hanging out in a book store I stumbled across Chester Brown’s Louis Riel: A Comic-Strip Biography.  Brown has a very simple style of line drawings, nothing dramatic or overly ornate. The characature style employed on the characters in the story keeps them easily recognizable: You can always tell who Sir John A. Macdonald is by his bulbous nose, likely as much a comment on his looks as his drinking.

Like any author, Brown has a perspective. He’s sympathetic to Riel though he does deal with the madness many historians attribute to him. He makes Macdonald seems like a conniving louse who deliberately incited the Metis to rebellion. Is either viewpoint fair? You be the judge.

I think the book will capture students’ attention. It’s easier to read than a standard biography, and the pictures are fun at times. You’ll want to keep the kids aware of the book’s biases, of course, and for a research paper this may fall short if you want an extra source. Yet as a tool to stimulate general interest or encourage weaker students Brown’s book is a good choice.

According to Chester Brown’s Wikipedia page, the author of Louis Riel has been involved in some odd projects. For example, he created a character whose adventures “include being chased by cannibalistic pygmies and having the tip of his penis replaced by the head of a miniature Ronald Reagan from another universe.” However odd some of his other projects were, this one’s a good one and worth a closer look.