Who's on board - Natalie's out. What's up with Justin, Grant
Who are the "Coming Every Day" core? - Hilary, Corrina, Nate?
Corrina - let's make sure we are clear about keeping kids who can't come everyday up to speed on what they've missed
Mark - how many days a week do we want to insist that kids MUST come to be involved
Jeff - we really need to focus on the particular, be precise about what the goals/projects/objectives are for each day, more precise ahead of time than we were last term
use wiki spaces or google docs or whatever, but pick one, and use it.
Becca's not on the email list.
Mark - we need shorter, more coherent projects
Corrina - there are some little projects that we got to at the end last term that would be good for using sooner - as instructional moments, and practical application of concepts and skills EX: the "I am" exercise with different camera shots, repeating the same sentence
Nate - the angles: close, far away, from the side with subject not looking at the camera, from above or below, and make your own camera shot
Jeff - were there some of those activities with sound too?
Nate - speaking close to the microphone, speaking from far away - to get at the
Mark - were there any quickfire activities with the sequencer
Emiliano - we did a lot of impromptu beat-making and never got to use them. these could be ...
Corrina - another one was getting an emotion, an action, and a something else
Mark - so what if you did a language arts thing - like using sentences to write and then turn it into a rhythm
Daisy - described the I AM collage thing - (see link on Daisy page)
Corrina - that seems like it would be a good thing to build after doing the thing Mark is talking about
Emiliano - would you guys think it's a good idea to start with the same sentence, just to have some simplicity and direction
Mark - you could even have them take the sentence, assign a rhythm to it, and then assign new words to the same rhythm
Mark - I think the verbal part of this is really important. Reading out loud is really important - to speak it, hear the rhythm, helps make the connection to music. We're talking about rhythm, but most people don't really know what that means, related to music. The basics are the hardest stuff to explain.
Mark - I'm on this iterative kick. We really need to build in some repeated experience and activities.
Mark - We have three concepts: repetition, layering, and sequencing. We only need two more to have one concept/week. Each week should have one little project to emphasize the concept. As we progress, we re-iterate and build on the concepts from the weeks before.
Corrina - there's a theater exercise - person A and person B has a very short script. Everyone in the room stands up and reads the script differently.
Mark - I think we should be really radically minimal
Nate - (to Jeff) when you say "collapsing language arts and video" what do you mean by that?
Jeff - just that you don't have to think about the two being different. That if it helps to think of video as one expression of language arts, you should. That you don't have to think of language arts as writing something down on paper
Ryan - I was thinking about that over break. I would like to see them do some writing poems/songs or whatever that gets made into a video or a song, or whatever, so they get to more of an expression
Jeff - quoting someone else "we don't write writing"
Corrina - there was an activity we planned about cutting words out of magazines and arranging them on a piece of paper, and then transcribing that to MS Word. We didn't get to that last time, I didn't know if that was something that was still important, or something we want to do.
Emiliano - if we wanted to do a digital document - well, are we still following through with the portfolio thing? - maybe we could assign a laptop to each student, and they could use those for their journals
Ryan - I like that idea of them keeping their journals on the laptops. That way they can get more use with the laptops
Mark - let's make working on the computer a cool thing
Jeff - let's manage it so that every student has a number, and that number corresponds to a laptop and a camera. And keeping a portfolio on those laptops is kind of a big deal (from a research standpoint)
Corrina - Mark said maybe we could have a game that everyone has to play together. The INK program is exactly that - it's a language arts game where the players have to make a space by describing it in words. It's designed for middle schoolers. INK is looking for a one-day play test, too.
Mark - there's another game that's not only language arts, but can also incorporate sound and images - Exquisite Corpse. It could be really cool and exciting or it could be boring
Becca - What if we gave someone a camera and they shot a scene, and then pass the camera on to someone else to create the music, and then pass it on to someone else to narrate
Jeff - this could be a really great way to transition from working individually to working in groups.
Emiliano - we could use that for songs too.
Jeff - this is kind of a medium size project
Mark - but the steps, the steps could be broken down and worked through
Mark - we could use cellphones - the more times we can use technology that's often seen as a nuisance as something creative, and active in the work/play that we're doing, the better. Like their cellphones, we could have them txt each other, and do an exquisite corpse that way
Jeff - we have a way of creating a network and capturing/recording all this stuff.
Mark - Cindy Taggart's ideas about acquisition of musical knowledge - similar to Chomsky's ideas of language acquisition. Call and response activities to do every day, short, over and over again. I'd like to get at some way of experiential learning of these concepts. Everybody should be able to do these things - minimal essential skill -
Corrina - we need to be clear that we're all using the language precisely - beats for example.
Emiliano - using handouts with the terminology/concepts and screenshots from the software we're using to make sure we and they all know
What are the terms we want them to know:
Repetition
Beats
Layer
Pattern
Sequence (this was easier to get at in image/video because of the software perhaps. Corrina's idea to use Do-Do as a sequence that many of the kids already know - give each one note a number 1-7. Now, what if your sequence is 1,4,5, instead. What does that sound like? And, what if you play 1,4,5 all on top of each other - for layering -
Hilary - is there any reason we're not using Audacity? it's visual, has a timeline.
Nate - yeah - let's use it
Bobby McFerrin's Pentatonic Scale
Hilary - I find that students get really engaged with Audacity, it's a little easier. Frooty Loops requires a certain knowledge.
Pros for Audacity - opens up a lot of things, voiceovers, extracting audio, singing, more possibility than FL makes easy
Mark - what about still photography? Can we just use cell phones? Can we use the flipcams? What about kids without phones? Maybe we can "cannibalize" a bunch of phones to use the cameras? Do we use phones, cameras, how do we do that? Mark will do some research on cameras. There's a benefit to having to get singular, still shots, and choose moments. Narrative structure
Jeff - Let me move us toward EXECUTION. I love the notion of beginning the semester with small activities and projects that teach some particular concepts and skills.
What time do we have?
5 weeks for the big group movie, and 2 weeks to gear up for presentation - so that's 7 weeks. How many other weeks do we have?
Start 25th of January, and we run it as 14 week project? Where does that take us to?
Last 2 weeks is sacred time. NO BLEEDING INTO THAT TIME
Gives us 7 weeks prior to making the big movie - we need big decisions about what to teach in these early weeks:
1. Do we want a middle range project? - something that takes a couple of weeks to complete. There's one project in here that can be either a little project, or a medium project - I AM project. Do we want to do a series of these as little projects to build one larger poem? Also, the Exq. Corpse project - in groups of three?
2. What's the experience do we want them to have just prior to the big group movie?
Nate - they have to have finished a bunch of little things and be able to share them. An individual thing and at least a group thing.
Ryan - I think that the Exq. Corpse project would be a really good lead-in here - they'd all have done different skills, and they'd all have worked in groups at least once
Mark - why are we not sharing their works before the very end?
Rough Time line:
Week 13/14 Practice/Rehearsal Weeks Weeks 8-12 Group Movie Weeks 6/7 Exquisite Corpse: Telephone Project
Weeks 3-5 - What of the smaller projects do we want to do? Week 3: Foundations: Emphasis - verbal, image, sound; Pattern Week 4:The 5's/Variations:: Corrina - 5 interesting angles and splicing them together. Mark - Generalize them to other areas - 5 ways for distributing single beats in different combos of sounds - 5 ways of saying the same sentence. Week 5: Hold for other stuff, bleed over, etc. May be a collection/delivery moment Weeks 1/2 Introduction - have exposed everyone to some amount of all the different modes we're working in
Mark: What are my three things? Repetition, Layer, Sequence. Add Pattern.
Jeff: Let's just have three. Repetition can go into Pattern and Sequence. Make it Pattern, Layer, Sequence.
Nate: There's also translation. I don't know if this would be a core "trinity" thing.
Mark - I think the thing with translation is it's something for teachers to be aware of, but it pre-supposes that there's a certain knowledge.
Jeff - isn't the group project the place where we want to do the translation stuff? (That's a real quesiton. He doesn't know the answer)
Other exercises - go out and find letters in the environment.
Jeff's Execution Questions - We need to develop in good detail the first seven weeks of the term. Who wants to take the lead on which weeks?
Mark - as you think of constructing these activities, consider what process you want the students to have in the course of working on the activities?
Corrina - what about all the remix stuff that we thought about last semester? Do we still want to do that stuff?
Jeff - I don't think there's time for it.
Mark - I think remix figures into the foundational stuff, a grounding concept for small exercises
Jeff - Also, as you think about planning these weeks, consider Knowledge, Skills, Attitudes as categories to be articulated in the lesson plans
What are the Foundational Skills we want them to know:
Music: Picking Instruments, Beats, Meter, Rhythm,
Video: What is a Shot? Understand narrative as time sequence, staging, What is an angle? Transitions? Coordination and Dissection, Directing
Language Arts: Elements of narrative - time?
WHO WANTS WHAT WEEK?
Hillary - Week 5 Variations/5's
Daisy - Telephone Project
Emiliano and Mark - Foundations: Layering
Becca - Telephone Project
Ryan - Telephone Project
Corrina - Variations
Nate and Jeff 1st two weeks
Who's on board - Natalie's out. What's up with Justin, Grant
Who are the "Coming Every Day" core? - Hilary, Corrina, Nate?
Corrina - let's make sure we are clear about keeping kids who can't come everyday up to speed on what they've missed
Mark - how many days a week do we want to insist that kids MUST come to be involved
Jeff - we really need to focus on the particular, be precise about what the goals/projects/objectives are for each day, more precise ahead of time than we were last term
use wiki spaces or google docs or whatever, but pick one, and use it.
Becca's not on the email list.
Mark - we need shorter, more coherent projects
Corrina - there are some little projects that we got to at the end last term that would be good for using sooner - as instructional moments, and practical application of concepts and skills EX: the "I am" exercise with different camera shots, repeating the same sentence
Nate - the angles: close, far away, from the side with subject not looking at the camera, from above or below, and make your own camera shot
Jeff - were there some of those activities with sound too?
Nate - speaking close to the microphone, speaking from far away - to get at the
Mark - were there any quickfire activities with the sequencer
Emiliano - we did a lot of impromptu beat-making and never got to use them. these could be ...
Corrina - another one was getting an emotion, an action, and a something else
Mark - so what if you did a language arts thing - like using sentences to write and then turn it into a rhythm
Daisy - described the I AM collage thing - (see link on Daisy page)
Corrina - that seems like it would be a good thing to build after doing the thing Mark is talking about
Emiliano - would you guys think it's a good idea to start with the same sentence, just to have some simplicity and direction
Mark - you could even have them take the sentence, assign a rhythm to it, and then assign new words to the same rhythm
Mark - I think the verbal part of this is really important. Reading out loud is really important - to speak it, hear the rhythm, helps make the connection to music. We're talking about rhythm, but most people don't really know what that means, related to music. The basics are the hardest stuff to explain.
Mark - I'm on this iterative kick. We really need to build in some repeated experience and activities.
Mark - We have three concepts: repetition, layering, and sequencing. We only need two more to have one concept/week. Each week should have one little project to emphasize the concept. As we progress, we re-iterate and build on the concepts from the weeks before.
Corrina - there's a theater exercise - person A and person B has a very short script. Everyone in the room stands up and reads the script differently.
Mark - I think we should be really radically minimal
Nate - (to Jeff) when you say "collapsing language arts and video" what do you mean by that?
Jeff - just that you don't have to think about the two being different. That if it helps to think of video as one expression of language arts, you should. That you don't have to think of language arts as writing something down on paper
Ryan - I was thinking about that over break. I would like to see them do some writing poems/songs or whatever that gets made into a video or a song, or whatever, so they get to more of an expression
Jeff - quoting someone else "we don't write writing"
Corrina - there was an activity we planned about cutting words out of magazines and arranging them on a piece of paper, and then transcribing that to MS Word. We didn't get to that last time, I didn't know if that was something that was still important, or something we want to do.
Emiliano - if we wanted to do a digital document - well, are we still following through with the portfolio thing? - maybe we could assign a laptop to each student, and they could use those for their journals
Ryan - I like that idea of them keeping their journals on the laptops. That way they can get more use with the laptops
Mark - let's make working on the computer a cool thing
Jeff - let's manage it so that every student has a number, and that number corresponds to a laptop and a camera. And keeping a portfolio on those laptops is kind of a big deal (from a research standpoint)
Corrina - Mark said maybe we could have a game that everyone has to play together. The INK program is exactly that - it's a language arts game where the players have to make a space by describing it in words. It's designed for middle schoolers. INK is looking for a one-day play test, too.
Mark - there's another game that's not only language arts, but can also incorporate sound and images - Exquisite Corpse. It could be really cool and exciting or it could be boring
Becca - What if we gave someone a camera and they shot a scene, and then pass the camera on to someone else to create the music, and then pass it on to someone else to narrate
Jeff - this could be a really great way to transition from working individually to working in groups.
Emiliano - we could use that for songs too.
Jeff - this is kind of a medium size project
Mark - but the steps, the steps could be broken down and worked through
Mark - we could use cellphones - the more times we can use technology that's often seen as a nuisance as something creative, and active in the work/play that we're doing, the better. Like their cellphones, we could have them txt each other, and do an exquisite corpse that way
Jeff - we have a way of creating a network and capturing/recording all this stuff.
Mark - Cindy Taggart's ideas about acquisition of musical knowledge - similar to Chomsky's ideas of language acquisition. Call and response activities to do every day, short, over and over again. I'd like to get at some way of experiential learning of these concepts. Everybody should be able to do these things - minimal essential skill -
Corrina - we need to be clear that we're all using the language precisely - beats for example.
Emiliano - using handouts with the terminology/concepts and screenshots from the software we're using to make sure we and they all know
What are the terms we want them to know:
Repetition
Beats
Layer
Pattern
Sequence (this was easier to get at in image/video because of the software perhaps. Corrina's idea to use Do-Do as a sequence that many of the kids already know - give each one note a number 1-7. Now, what if your sequence is 1,4,5, instead. What does that sound like? And, what if you play 1,4,5 all on top of each other - for layering -
Hilary - is there any reason we're not using Audacity? it's visual, has a timeline.
Nate - yeah - let's use it
Bobby McFerrin's Pentatonic Scale
Hilary - I find that students get really engaged with Audacity, it's a little easier. Frooty Loops requires a certain knowledge.
Pros for Audacity - opens up a lot of things, voiceovers, extracting audio, singing, more possibility than FL makes easy
Mark - what about still photography? Can we just use cell phones? Can we use the flipcams? What about kids without phones? Maybe we can "cannibalize" a bunch of phones to use the cameras? Do we use phones, cameras, how do we do that? Mark will do some research on cameras. There's a benefit to having to get singular, still shots, and choose moments. Narrative structure
Jeff - Let me move us toward EXECUTION. I love the notion of beginning the semester with small activities and projects that teach some particular concepts and skills.
What time do we have?
5 weeks for the big group movie, and 2 weeks to gear up for presentation - so that's 7 weeks. How many other weeks do we have?
Start 25th of January, and we run it as 14 week project? Where does that take us to?
Last 2 weeks is sacred time. NO BLEEDING INTO THAT TIME
Gives us 7 weeks prior to making the big movie - we need big decisions about what to teach in these early weeks:
1. Do we want a middle range project? - something that takes a couple of weeks to complete. There's one project in here that can be either a little project, or a medium project - I AM project. Do we want to do a series of these as little projects to build one larger poem? Also, the Exq. Corpse project - in groups of three?
2. What's the experience do we want them to have just prior to the big group movie?
Nate - they have to have finished a bunch of little things and be able to share them. An individual thing and at least a group thing.
Ryan - I think that the Exq. Corpse project would be a really good lead-in here - they'd all have done different skills, and they'd all have worked in groups at least once
Mark - why are we not sharing their works before the very end?
Rough Time line:
Week 13/14 Practice/Rehearsal WeeksWeeks 8-12 Group Movie
Weeks 6/7 Exquisite Corpse: Telephone Project
Weeks 3-5 - What of the smaller projects do we want to do?
Week 3: Foundations: Emphasis - verbal, image, sound; Pattern
Week 4:The 5's/Variations:: Corrina - 5 interesting angles and splicing them together. Mark - Generalize them to other areas - 5 ways for distributing single beats in different combos of sounds - 5 ways of saying the same sentence.
Week 5: Hold for other stuff, bleed over, etc. May be a collection/delivery moment
Weeks 1/2 Introduction - have exposed everyone to some amount of all the different modes we're working in
Mark: What are my three things? Repetition, Layer, Sequence. Add Pattern.
Jeff: Let's just have three. Repetition can go into Pattern and Sequence. Make it Pattern, Layer, Sequence.
Nate: There's also translation. I don't know if this would be a core "trinity" thing.
Mark - I think the thing with translation is it's something for teachers to be aware of, but it pre-supposes that there's a certain knowledge.
Jeff - isn't the group project the place where we want to do the translation stuff? (That's a real quesiton. He doesn't know the answer)
Other exercises - go out and find letters in the environment.
Jeff's Execution Questions - We need to develop in good detail the first seven weeks of the term. Who wants to take the lead on which weeks?
Mark - as you think of constructing these activities, consider what process you want the students to have in the course of working on the activities?
Corrina - what about all the remix stuff that we thought about last semester? Do we still want to do that stuff?
Jeff - I don't think there's time for it.
Mark - I think remix figures into the foundational stuff, a grounding concept for small exercises
Jeff - Also, as you think about planning these weeks, consider Knowledge, Skills, Attitudes as categories to be articulated in the lesson plans
What are the Foundational Skills we want them to know:
Music: Picking Instruments, Beats, Meter, Rhythm,
Video: What is a Shot? Understand narrative as time sequence, staging, What is an angle? Transitions? Coordination and Dissection, Directing
Language Arts: Elements of narrative - time?
WHO WANTS WHAT WEEK?
Hillary - Week 5 Variations/5's
Daisy - Telephone Project
Emiliano and Mark - Foundations: Layering
Becca - Telephone Project
Ryan - Telephone Project
Corrina - Variations
Nate and Jeff 1st two weeks