Genius Hour Agenda, part 2: Research
Once basic project-specific vocabulary is established, students can dig into the research, into some authentic resources about their passion. Now remember, our job is to modify the task, not the text, so if we start students off with some low-intensity texts like Pinterest pins and tweets to ease them into productive approaches to interpreting broader authentic texts.
I like to start with Pinterest because of the natural brevity of the text in a pin plus the added visual context. I’ll have students create a board of probably 20 pins in Spanish (not Portuguese, not Italian), at least 10 of which need to have links in Spanish attached (the pictures were nice, but left some kids high and dry come interpretation time). They’re doing simple interpretation tasks just by selecting their pins!
I’ve already had Spanish I set up their class Twitter accounts so they can search key terms again, this time with less assistance from visuals, though the texts themselves will still be short enough for novice consumption. Again, by just selecting tweets they can understand that align with their interests, they’re interpreting text. What’s more, they’re finding potential contacts for later because of the social side of this particular resource. I’m having them collect these retweets with Storify to post to the class blog, too.
Pinterest and Twitter are not 100% guaranteed founts of knowledge, but Google will almost never fail you, at least in Spanish. They’ve done some simple curation with the Pinterest boards and Storify stories, but with Diigo they can branch out into a wider variety of sources, things that aren’t supremely pinnable or able to be captured in 140 characters. Still, when they google, I’m advising my novices to add “infografia” to half of their searches so they have the benefit of visual clues with fewer words. For the rest of their searches, we’ve discussed finding texts with familiar words, cognates, visuals, familiar formats, and fewer words.
Diigo gathers all of these onto their list for them! Choosing what to highlight is a valuable interpretation step because they have to cut out the stuff they don’t get and focus on what they do get. Putting it in their own words is tricky–as it has always been in my English classes too–but it’s something they HAVE to grasp for ALL subjects. With Diigo, they have the added benefit of having the important parts separated out and right next to their own paraphrasing for comparison!
For the novices, the emphasis is on simply picking out main ideas, maybe the author’s attitude toward the topic, if only +/- (intermediates will have to add a supporting detail or two). Students can add notes to the overall sources instead of just highlighted portions, once again, adding to the one-stop value of their lists and making finding what they want to use later that much easier!
Repeats
I want to encourage students to return to any of the strategies that A) they liked or B) need more work on. They could possibly add 10 pins, find 10 more tweets, Google 10 more articles or 3 more videos or podcasts. Or they could make 5 more highlights on any of the articles or 3 more summaries.
After they’ve attempted each of the other approaches, of course.