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Animoto's video maker turns your photos and video clips into professional videos in minutes. Fast and shockingly simple - we make video creation easy.

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Picture Book Basics: Sketches and Layout

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Picture Book Basics: Sketches and Layout

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In the second part of a series for illustrators starting out in Picture Books , Words & Pictures Illustration Editor John Shelley takes a look at planning images and layout.

So you have a story, and maybe some character studies and other sketched drawings. The next stage is to plan out the book and make a dummy.

Storyboards

A common starting point for illustrators is to mark out a storyboard on a single sheet of paper, representing the whole book in small thumbnail sized squares. This allows the artist to pencil in the basic design of each page, plan how the story unfolds over the pages, divide up the text, see where the dramatic points are, and consider the rhythm of the images. As the sketches are thumbnail size and very simple it's an easy matter to rub out and redraw. Some illustrators draw tiny sketches or write the text on sticky notes which they can switch around the pages, though I find these have the annoying habit of curling up and falling off!

Sketching and Layout

Having roughly planned the book it's time to make larger sketches for each page or spread. Personally I draw pencil roughs at A5 size per page (so A4 for a double page spread) scan these to make my dummy and later enlarge for the final artwork stage, but everyone will have their own method.

All books (indeed all illustrators!) are different and the variety of style, composition and design is much too big a subject to summarise here. However here are a few commonly accepted pointers:

Boxed, Vignette, Spot and Full Bleed

(This may sound somewhat obvious, but it's worth clarifying!) In classically constructed books, a "
boxed" illustration has straight defined edges, possibly with a border or frame, and sits within the confines of the page, so there is a gap between the image and the trim (i.e. the edge of the page). The illustration might be cropped from a loose-edged original, or painted to a ruled edge. As the border encloses the scene these are particularly suited to images with a considered, balanced composition.

Vignettes are illustrations with faded or loosely defined edges. The loose edges incorporate the white of the surrounding page to give the image space, lightness and draw the viewer into the scene.

A spot illustration is a small free-floating motif, usually with no background. In picture books spots are particularly useful as visual addenda to the main narrative. Bleed refers to part of an illustration that runs off the page edges, ' full bleed' means an image that entirely fills the page and is cropped by the trim. Nowadays very many picture books are full bleed throughout, however it's particularly effective when suddenly brought into play for the most dramatic and panoramic images.

Big or Small?

A small image on a page surrounded by white space focuses on detail, so it might suggest quiet intimacy, or a key-hole view of a drama about to unfold. Some books begin with smaller images, then gradually open up to full bleed as the drama unfolds. The reverse can work too - big to small. A classic example of this approach is Sendak's
Where the Wild Things Are, where the first and last illustrations are small, with very wide white margins, while the central fantasy spreads are full bleed.

Another use of small images is to break up a series of actions into details on a page. So for example, a piece of text might describe a character putting on a coat, then shoes, then tieing on a hat... one single image would suffice to cover all these actions, but by separating each into a series of vignettes or spots on a page a sense of time and motion can be introduced.

Crescendos and Patterns

Picture books are a little like songs in that there is usually some kind of pattern or structure that the whole book follows, a regular rhythm flowing through, with choruses of loud, dynamic pages at key stages. It's equally true of both text and illustration. An image near the front of a book might be reflected with a similar design later to create a resonance.

Page Turning

A key element of picture books is the need to move the narrative forward - the reader should always be encouraged to turn the page. This can be done by building tension and expectation in the image or text, ensuring plenty of movement from left to right, and drawing the reader's attention to the page corners.

Rules are Made to be Broken!

Well, some of them perhaps. It's not necessary to mix image sizes in a book - regularity works well if the story has a strong rhythm. Full bleed images don't have to be panoramic. Within these basic patterns all kinds of fun can be had by breaking up these types and inventing ways to combine/contrast layouts. In fact this is what makes picture books so interesting. Go wild, be clever, be crazy! But remember, however mad the page layout, the narrative has to move forward, it has to be understandable as a book.

The key thing is to follow instincts suggested by the text, do what the story conjures.

Things to be careful of:
Remember the gutter (the book's hinge)! Avoid putting busy elements in the part of the book closest to the spine, they'll be lost in the final product. Be especially careful not to place key characters in the gutter!

Consider the text - where will it lie? How much space will it require? Will it run over the illustration or be separate on the page? Likewise, leave a good gap between text and the gutter and page trim.

Page design is a big topic with myriad aspects. It's a good idea to peruse a lot of picture books and examine how other artists solve the challenges of page layout. There's also a lot of inspiring stuff on the Web if you dig around - for example Design of the Picture Book is a useful resource.

Some illustrators make very elaborate dummies before submitting to publishers, but editors frequently say that a dummy that is too polished can actually make it difficult to consider the story. It's often recommended that artists sketch out spreads in simple black and white roughs, nothing too complicated, overlay the text, and draw just one or two finished images in colour to give an indication of the final look. Personally I sketch all my dummies in pencil on loose sheets, scan in to
Photoshop, adjust, then lay out using InDesign, adding the text. I might spend a long time tweaking, changing around and so on before I'm happy with the result. Finally I'll save as a lightweight .pdf which I can then either email to my agent/art director or print out, clip into a plastic file and show as a physical dummy.

He's illustrated over 40 books for children, many of them published in Japan where he lived for many years. His next title John Shelley is the Illustration Feature Editor of Words & Pictures and current Central East Network coordinator. The Stone Giant is scheduled for release by Komine Shoten in Tokyo this autumn, and Charlesbridge in the US in Spring 2014. www.jshelley.com

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Picture Book Basics - Sketches and Layout

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In the second part of a series for illustrators starting out in Picture Books , Words & Pictures Illustration Editor John Shelley takes a look at planning images and layout. So you have a story, and maybe some character studies and other sketched drawings.

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Peter Menzel and Faith D'Aluisio traveled the world documenting that most basic of human behaviors -- what we eat.

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Here’s What Lockdown Drills Are Like for Schoolchildren

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Here’s What Lockdown Drills Are Like for Schoolchildren

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Lockdown drills have become the new normal in America's schools. According to a recent survey from the Children's Defense Fund, fear of a school shooting is the second most common worry after bullying for kids between the ages of 6 and 17, and the third most common worry for parents.

Recently, I photographed and interviewed more than a dozen elementary school children, ranging from grades K-5, about what it's like for them to prepare for a potential shooting. With their parents' consent, we met at a Brooklyn branch of the New York City public library. I asked each of the children to show me what they did with their bodies during lockdown drills, what they understood these drills to be for, and how the drills made them feel. (Their responses have been lightly edited for length and clarity.)

Ella (Kindergarten)
Some people think it's a little scary. Some people wear those red headphones because it's really loud.

Ximena (Second Grade)
It's kind of like if a stranger comes in and he has a gun or something, and he wants to kill somebody, and you have to hide and lock every door so they won't come in and kill you. Because he's an assassin. In one class, we usually have space in the closet, so we hide there. We turn off all the lights, we lock the doors, and we need to hide making no noise. In our other class, we're not allowed to hide in the closet, so we just stay there on one side of the room where they won't see us.

It feels kind of scary because if someone comes into your school trying to kill you, you could actually die. But if you're safe and you do a lockdown and you stay quiet and hide, then it'll probably go ok.

Jackson (Fourth Grade)
It's so you can train to know how to hide from an intruder who came in the school. They just don't have a good life and they don't know what to do with it, or it could be their mind could act differently than other people's. A certain disorder, they don't know how to control it, or they have memory loss and they don't know what to do.

It's probably not going to happen. It could, but I'm not scared. I mean, if it was happening, I'd be panicked, but I don't think it's too scary because it's only a drill.

Anjali (Kindergarten)
I stand up and I do this and I be quiet. I feel scared. I feel like bad guys are in there. I don't know what it is, so I just think about it, why they give me a lockdown drill, and I think it's because bad guys are there. I imagine that they're downstairs in the cafeteria, and the cafeteria is really close to our class.

Rhys (First Grade)
We just turn the lights off. We go behind the bookshelf and crouch. It's for safety, like, I don't know, random people coming into the school.

Alex (Fifth Grade)
The first thing that comes to my mind is, "What if this was real? What if there is an actual person trying to hurt me?" It makes me feel a little uneasy sometimes. Over the loudspeaker they say this is a lockdown drill, everyone in the corner. But I've never really experienced what if it was real-what would they say? I've seen stuff on the news, like kids being attacked by other students. It's bizarre to think that could actually happen.

Evie (Kindergarten)
We curled up in the place in the back of the room. It was squished. Everyone was squished. We had to be squished because then if it happens for real, nothing will happen then.

Holly (Second Grade)
They close the door, then they turn off all the lights, they lock the door, then we just hide somewhere. We don't hide right in front of the door because if it was a real lockdown drill, they could see our faces through the window of the door. We hide in the closets, or under the tables, or under our desks.

It's when a person is maybe outside the building or inside the building, and they're trying to kidnap you. I still feel kind of safe because it's just a fake one, but I when I get reminded of real lockdown drills, I feel kind of scared. Also, if your teachers aren't really good teachers and they don't know how to defend their kids or keep their kids safe, then you could get maybe kidnapped easily. But sometimes I can feel safe because my teacher is right with me, and my whole class is with me.

Ella (Second Grade)
It's when a robber or something dangerous like a wild animal comes in the building or outside near the school, and we would lock the doors and stay in a corner and be quiet. My teacher sometimes says we're having a lockdown drill and that means it's just fake, to practice, if something does really happen. You have to be quiet and not have a conversation with anybody and just sit there patiently. Because maybe the robber or somebody who is in the building would hear you. You just sit there. It's boring.

Sadie (Fourth Grade)
I've done one once or twice every year. It's kinda scary because everyone is kinda like, "Oh my god, is it a real lockdown drill?" Usually I get stressed.

Julian (Fourth Grade)
You are in the middle of some random subject, and then you hear over the PA system: This is a "soft lockdown drill" or a "hard lockdown drill." You have to go somewhere out of sight, so if there was a threat they wouldn't be able to see you, and you have to be completely silent.

I try to make sure that I'm not next to any of my friends so I won't get distracted. I feel safe because I know it's not real.

I've been doing them since Pre-K.

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Related

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More than a dozen schoolchildren describe what it's like to prepare for a mass shooting

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Lockdown drills have become the new normal in America's schools. According to a recent survey from the Children's Defense Fund, fear of a school shooting is the second most common worry after bullying for kids between the ages of 6 and 17, and the third most common worry for parents.

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What Toothbrushes Tell Us about Inequality

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What Toothbrushes Tell Us about Inequality

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Anna Rosling-Rönnlund collects photographs of everyday objects from the richest to the poorest households. Even a toothbrush, she says, can reveal a world of inequalities.

Imagine if the world lived along a single street, with the richest households on one end, the poorest on the other - and every door flung open to the public. That's the vision behind Dollar Street, an online photo gallery of everyday objects from more than 200 households, representing every rung of the income ladder. The Dollar Street website will launch in January 2016, according to its project manager Anna Rosling-Rönnlund (TEDxStockholm Talk: Using photos as data to understand how people live). She hopes that visitors will browse through galleries of toothbrushes, tables, shoes and toys and see how each object is transformed by the pressures of poverty. "If we're of a certain material living standard," she says, "it's very hard for us to understand their sheer variety." Here, she shares the astounding variety of "toothbrush" photographs, which she hopes will upend our very notion of luxury.

No plastic, no bristles

A woman in Malawi answers the question, "what do you use to brush your teeth," by extending her index finger toward the camera. It's a common response among the 1.2 billion people who live on less than a $1 a day. For toothpaste, she points to the mud walls of her hut. The mud contains abrasive sediments, which she also uses to scrub dishes and clothing as well. "She scrapes some mud off the building, she mixes it with water in her hand, and then she brushes using grains of sand," Rosling-Rönnlund says.

A makeshift toothpick

A family in the west African nation of Burkina Faso puts a discarded toothbrush on display. It may appear at first glance to be an ordinary twig. Look closer, Rosling-Rönnlund says. "You can see where the branch is cut off, it's lighter and it's cut off in a way that it looks more like a toothpick." For a family that cannot afford a plastic toothbrush, a sharpened stick can serve as a handy alternative. "They are picking in between the teeth and they are also scraping on top of their teeth."

The family toothbrush

Here, a Liberian family points to a single, shared toothbrush for the household. "I was surprised that you could see the same exact plastic toothbrush going quite far down into really poor homes," says Rosling-Rönnlund. The key difference was how many toothbrushes a family could afford. "The trend among groups of homes goes from having no plastic toothbrush, to having one plastic toothbrush, to having many plastic toothbrushes, and it's quite a good way of seeing the difference in how much money you can spend."

A clever shelving system

A family in Nepal slots toothbrushes handle-first into the wall, so that the bristles dry in the air. It's a common storage system among sparsely furnished households, Rosling-Rönnlund says. "Even though the wall is not perfect, you figure out smart ways of using it to keep the toothbrushes clean. I think it's a quite clever shelf system, and we see it in all different regions except Europe actually."

A tidy stack

A family in the Philippines keeps toothbrushes strategically stacked on top of a plastic chair. The fact that they have a spare chair for storage is itself a revealing sign of prosperity, as is the cleanliness of the plastic surface. "Probably they don't have a mud floor or mud walls, because otherwise they wouldn't be able to keep their chair this clean," Rosling-Rönnlund says.

A tailor-made toothbrush

"I love it," Rosling-Rönnlund says of this toothbrush holder in a Vietnamese home. "I think that is fascinating, coming up to this top income segment, we have all these varieties of toothbrushes." One sure sign of the family's purchasing power: flashy toothbrushes, like the bright pink one above, which reveal that the family can afford a variety of designs tailored to adults, children or personal taste.

The pinnacle of privacy

"This is like the top notch for tooth-brushing," Rosling-Rönnlund says of this French household's electric toothbrushes. "Even though you can actually change the top part, the toothbrush part, and use the same handle, they have had money to buy one each, so they don't have to go through that hassle." Even more revealing is the absence of children's toothbrushes from the bathroom. "The parents are no longer brushing their teeth in the same room as the children, so they can separate and have a more elegant setting for the adults." The perfume bottle, for instance, doesn't have to be placed out of the children's reach. It's an unimaginable design decision for the 1.2 billion people who still view a single, plastic toothbrush as an unaffordable luxury.

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What toothbrushes tell us about inequality

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Imagine if the world lived along a single street, with the richest households on one end, the poorest on the other - and every door flung open to the public. That's the vision behind Dollar Street, an online photo gallery of everyday objects from more than 200 households, representing every rung of the income ladder.

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Here Are Some of the Most Powerful Protest Posters from History (BuzzFeed)

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Here Are Some of the Most Powerful Protest Posters from History (BuzzFeed)

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On Jan. 21, 2017, millions of people across the world took to the streets in the first-ever Women's March, carrying with them a colorful array of signs expressing criticisms and viewpoints on the current political landscape. As with other recent demonstrations, today's protest signs are noted for their creativity and humor, often poking fun at political leaders and utilizing the language of the internet and meme culture to help share the message via social media. While today's protest posters have indeed evolved with new media, they are by no means the first to visualize the frustrations of the masses. To illustrate how past generations have expressed their ideas through posters, Angelina Lippert, chief curator of the Poster House museum in New York City, which is expected to open to the public in 2019, has shared with BuzzFeed News some of the most iconic protest posters from history and her words on the cultural significance of these designs.

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Here Are Some Of The Most Powerful Protest Posters From History

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On Jan. 21, 2017, millions of people across the world took to the streets in the first-ever Women's March, carrying with them a colorful array of signs expressing criticisms and viewpoints on the current political landscape.

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Teaching Tolerance’s Art and Activism Unit

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Teaching Tolerance’s Art and Activism Unit

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Learning for Justice provides free resources to educators-teachers, administrators, counselors and other practitioners-who work with children from kindergarten through high school.

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In the simplest sense of the word, a map is a spatial representation of something. It provides us with a sense of context, scale and location. Maps began as 2D depictions, but technology and data enable maps to become dynamic, real-time and compelling visualizations of how we live and move.

Below, we've rounded up 21 awesome maps from around the web. Some will help you navigate your city, some show the actual mapmaking process and some are just mindblowing visualizations of people flowing throughout cities. No matter what kind of map it is though, it hammers home the exciting pulse and pace of urban life.

New York City's MTA transports approximately seven million people every day. One YouTube user (correctly) thought it would be interesting to visualize commutes throughout all five boroughs from 4 a.m. to 4 p.m.

What faster way to get from one country's metropolis to another? Flight. As of January 2012, the OpenFlights/Airline Route Mapper Route Database had information on 531 airlines flying 59,036 routes between 3,209 airports; these routes are shown in the image above. (All of the airports of the world, according to this same database, are shown in the image at the top of this article.)

The CityMaps app was founded in 2010 as a social map to help people discover the places in their city. It maps out city landmarks - shops, sites, restaurants, cafes - on a simple interface that's somewhat reminiscent of a shopping mall legend. Venue names line the map's streets, peppered in with logos of big chains like McDonald's and Starbucks.

Whether a high-speed rail system ever gets built in the United States is still up in the air, but if it is, artist and activist Alfred Twu figured out exactly where those speedy rail lines should go. Twu started working on this map in 2009, when President Obama's plan to build high-speed rail was unveiled. "There were many such maps being made by various designers," says Twu, but since then he's updated the map with labels and put it on Facebook, where it went viral.

The London Underground map was designed by Harry Beck and published in 1933. While it's streamlined and colorful and gives a bird's eye view of the system, it's not exactly geographically accurate. In fact, a lot of people end up taking a longer route than necessary because it looks like the shortest route on the map. The map above, designed by Mark Noad, shows the stations of the London Underground closer to their true geographic position; it's a compromise between the clean lines of Beck's map and the true layout of the system.

Looking for a more intimate view of an street than you can get on Google Street View? Instahood lets you zoom in on any area of the world and see Instagrams that have been geotagged to that location.

Cameron Booth is a graphic designer in Sydney, Australia. In the map above, he reimagines American cities as stops on part of an interstate subway system that's reminiscent of the London Underground.

Tokyo is home to the busiest subway system in the world, transporting 6.31 million passengers every day. Tetsudo Now is a real-time Google map of the city's public transit - subways and busses - that dynamically update so commuters know where trains and busses are at any given moment. The animated subways and busses mosey along the lines based on transit timetables.

A City's Heartbeat uses Google Maps, CartoDB and D3.js to colorfully and dynamically visualize Geneva's urban transport system over a two-day period. Filters on the interactive map let you see train activity at each station and the volume of people (shown above), so you can get a sense of the pulse of the city as its inhabitants go about their daily lives.

Oliver O'Brien is a researcher at University College London who focuses on spatial visualizations, especially in London. The video above is an animation of Oyster Card (commuter smartcard) taps in and out of London's tube and rail stations. Taps are recorded in 10-minute intervals, and red represents flow into the system, while green indicates exiting a station. Oyster Card data was provided by Transport for London, and this video is a recording of an OpenLayers map produced by O'Brien at UCL for the exhibit.

A huge component of travel is tasting the cuisine of the region you're visiting. Global standards like the Michelin Guide make it easy for tourists to know what are the best (and sometimes, the priciest) restaurants in a city. Food blog Eater mapped San Francisco's Michelin-rated restaurants on a Google map so hungry residents and visitors could put the restaurant's location into context.

Cities are congested, and it's estimated that by 2050, 6.3 billion of the world's 9.3 billion inhabitants will live in cities. That has many implications, but one major issue with this increased population density is automobile traffic. Cities around the globe are implementing smart solutions to manage traffic flow and disseminate important traffic information. The Google map above illustrates the City of Ottawa's interactive traffic map, which shows traffic conditions in real time (thanks to traffic camera), as well as accidents, construction, parking and bike routes.

Food trucks are all the rage, and the Tweat.it Google map pulls locations from food truck tweets and plots them on a map, using the truck's logo as a marker. If the truck moves or shuts down for the day, the Tweat.it map is updated.

Wandering the streets of Tel Aviv? You can pop into one of the bustling city's hustling startups by tapping into Mapped in Israel. The interactive map lets you filter the country's startup scene by accelerators, startups, investors, co-working spaces and more. (There's a similar map in New York City that lists all Made in NY startups.)

This London cycle map was designed by Simon Parker and also inspired by Harry Beck's London Underground map. As more cities implement bike-sharing programs, it's crucial for cities to create safe roads for drivers and cyclists alike.

More than 30 million people worldwide use Foursquare, and they've logged more than 3 billion check-ins to date. Because people use Foursquare in real-time, the app functions as a sort of virtual itinerary tracker and has collected a lot of data since its 2009 launch. Foursquare recently sought to visualize this data, plotting a year's worth of check-ins in New York City and Tokyo and pressing fast-forward. Each dot in the video above represents one check-in, while lines indicate sequential check-ins. Much like the Geneva heartbeat video above, this data visualization illustrates the pulse of the city.

Briton Aidan Samuel used Strava to track 201 bike journeys over four months, all transposed into a 24-hour period. The map starts pretty quietly and remains quiet until about 6 p.m., illustrating rush hour from a cyclist's point of view.

OpenStreetMap is an open-source maps API that relies on the contributions of users in a Wikipedia-style format for not only roadmaps but also hiking trails, bike paths and footpaths around the world. It was founded by Steve Coast in 2004 as a one-man project, and it boasts more than 500,000 volunteers across the globe. This video shows the process of mapping Bangalore's roads that started in 2007, driving home how much work goes into to mapping the globe's cities on the open-source platform.

If you go to the Sumus website and click on any of the green busses on the map, and you'll be able to see a video that shows public transit activities that city. The videos are created with General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS) data, and each point represents one vehicle. Each video tracks urban mobility for one weekday, letting you visualize the movements of a population on the go. Cities that have been visualized and are available on the YouTube channel include Sydney, Honolulu, Dublin and Madrid.

What cool maps have you seen? Tell us in the comments.

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In the simplest sense of the word, a map is a spatial representation of something. It provides us with a sense of context, scale and location. Maps began as 2D depictions, but technology and data enable maps to become dynamic, real-time and compelling visualizations of how we live and move.

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When the Commonwealth Club's Inforum division hosted a town hall meeting to discuss race relations in the Bay Area, the lineup of speakers included various performances by Bay Area poets. Using words, voice intonations and sheer emotion, the poets delivered verse that examined issues of race, poverty, gun violence, food, health and equality. We brought you one of those performances last year. This week, we're bringing you another: a performance by Sojari Bradley on gun violence.

Addressing issues of societal concern using the spoken word format is very appropriate considering San Francisco's history. Marc Smith founded the original International Poetry Slam movement in 1987 in Chicago. However, the first National Poetry Slam competition took place in San Francisco in 1990, featuring one team from San Francisco, one team from Chicago and an individual from New York. The 2013 National Poetry Slam competition was held in Boston last summer and the 2014 competition will be held in Oakland.

Slam poetry has been especially popular among youth as a means of expression, especially with the onset of organizations such as Youth Speaks. The organization aims to empower youth to share their thoughts using slam poetry and spoken word as a means of delivery. In an interview with The Off/Page Project, a collaboration between Youth Speaks and The Center for Investigative Reporting, Josh Healey, a poet, artist and writer who lives in Oakland said,

Creative storytelling -- whether it's spoken word, music or even your crazy little blog -- is so powerful because it flips that paradigm. By telling your own personal truth, you're able to break out of the boxes and stereotypes and show us, "Hey, this is who I really am. Take a good, hard look."

Slam poetry offers the ability for a performer to connect with his/her audience in a deeper way, and allows the performer to articulate a set of emotions and thoughts succinctly using the power of voice and words. It's also a platform that goes beyond creative expression. Just like any art form, slam poetry and spoken word allow the artist to talk about social issues and social change. As Healey noted,

...In terms of social change, storytelling can get us beyond the talking points of this or that "issue" to connect with people's deeper feelings and emotions. People don't want to hear about "health care," but they do want to hear about your aunt Stacy who had to sell her mom's wedding ring to pay for her cancer treatments. Use your story to change THE story. Boom.

Take a listen to Sojari Bradley's poetry in the video above and share your thoughts below.

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When the Commonwealth Club's Inforum division hosted a town hall meeting to discuss race relations in the Bay Area, the lineup of speakers included various performances by Bay Area poets. Using words, voice intonations and sheer emotion, the poets delivered verse that examined issues of race, poverty, gun violence, food, health and equality.

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“The Magic of One-Pagers” (Jill Yamasawa Fletcher)

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“The Magic of One-Pagers” (Jill Yamasawa Fletcher)

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One-pagers are magical in the sense that they make thinking and talking about reading fun again.

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Intro to Zines (Zine Librarians Interest Group)

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Intro to Zines (Zine Librarians Interest Group)

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So, what is a zine?? There's no official definition, but most will agree it's a self-published work that has a limited print run (which can range from ten copies to around 5,000 copies). Zines are usually created with the intention not to profit monetarily but to share one's thoughts, feelings, creativity, experience, and/or knowledge with others. Zines are part of a DIY (do it yourself) culture which often includes people from marginalized communities or those who don't have access to more mainstream publishing options.
Intro to zines workshops, books, and other resources:
Our most recommended go-to guide for all things zine is Alex Wrekk's Stolen Sharpie Revolution. Now in its fifth edition, it's an essential resource for the nitty-gritty of how to make a great-looking zine, where to find zines, zine history, and lots more.

by Davida Gypsy Breier

MetaZine: The History and a How-To of Zines presentation from Davida Gypsy Breier

History of Zines presentation by Rachael Kaun for Aunty Mabel's Zine Distro
Whatâ€™s So Great About Zines? List
Whatcha mean, what's a zine? : the art of making zines and minicomics book by Mark Todd and Esther Pearl Watson
Zine-makingÂ resources:Â
There are lots of information online about how to make a zine, but here are some of our favorites:

Guides for making single-page mini zines:

Anne Elizabeth Moore's "How to Make This Very Zine" is a single-page eight-fold set of instructions for making a single-page zine yourself. It is available in eight languages: Arabic, English, Greek, German, Georgian, Khmer, Russian and Spanish. Find the link to download all eight versions at Moore's website.

Jenna Brager's quick guide to making a one-page mini zine is available at the Sassyfrass Circus blog.

Zinester Celia PÃ©rez created a kid-friendly guide to creating a one-page mini zine for Brightly.

The Experiment With Nature project out of Oregon has a very detailed photo guide to making a one-page mini zine.

To get a little fancier with your mini zine, this photo tutorial from Anatomic Air Press is for creating a 16-page zine out of one piece of paper.

More information on creating zines:

Find adorably illustrated zine-making guides in both English and Spanish by Puerto Rican artist Rosa ColÃ³n Guerra at her Soda Pop Comics shop (and chip a few dollars to help her continue her work!).

An activist design studio, thepublicstudio.ca, put together a 17-page pdf zine on how to make a zine for further information. This tutorial goes beyond the single-sheet zine and discusses design aspects.

how to make a zine video from nicki sabalu on Vimeo

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So, what is a zine?? There's no official definition, but most will agree it's a self-published work that has a limited print run (which can range from ten copies to around 5,000 copies). Zines are usually created with the intention not to profit monetarily but to share one's thoughts, feelings, creativity, experience, and/or knowledge with others.

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The HTML5 Gendered LEGO Advertising Remixer 

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The HTML5 Gendered LEGO Advertising Remixer 

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The HTML5 Gendered LEGO Advertising Remixer

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Teaching Tools | Resources for Teachers from Scholastic

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An interactive map showing how slavery spread across the United States.

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Jarrett Lerner

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When I was a kid, I loved drawing. I loved the way it felt to make marks on a page, the sound of the graphite scratching against the paper, the feel of the pencil against my fingers.

I liked the sensation of moving my hand and arm in swooping or looping gestures. And I liked the marks left by these gestures: lines against a surface, the visual contrast and tension. With a little imagination, I could see characters who'd never existed before come to life. But drawing was also an activity that got me in trouble. At school If I had a sheet of paper in front of me, I doodled on it. I would draw in my notebook instead of work on what I was supposed to be doing. Drawing was often seen as an off-task activity. At home, my artistic endeavors were appreciated, but not regarded as something to aspire to. As the child of immigrants, I was encouraged to focus on more serious, scholarly pursuits. I grew up believing that the thing I loved and cared about didn't really matter. So eventually, I just stopped doing it.

Like me, many children use drawing as a primary way of responding to and representing experiences, ideas, and imaginings. Before we can form words, we make marks on a page to tell stories about who we are and what we care about.

We draw what frightens us, perplexes us, and excites us. Our early drawings were opportunities to examine ourselves in the world, to challenge concepts and beliefs, and to imagine who we might be in the future. As an act, drawing is deeply entangled with literacy development, but doesn't often receive the same attention or regard as language.

Drawing helps us discover what we know. It gives shape to our often divergent and nonlinear thoughts. It helps us construct new knowledge, by offering a non-verbal approach to thinking through logic and causality. But drawing is also a deeply embodied act that activates the body by privileging sensation and desire over linearity and discursiveness. Drawing emphasizes our subjective rationality, highlights our material constraints, and creates the conditions for surprise and delight. Drawing allows us to sidestep the structures of language to speak without saying, to know without articulating, and to sense without containing. Drawing cares more about how we feel than what we think.

Okay, I never really stopped drawing. I just pushed it to the margins for a long time, and hid it in places other people couldn't see. I could never really shake it. In fact, there were times when my body seemed to need it. In the darkest of times, I found that drawing in my sketchbook was the only thing that would help me feel better. It didn't matter how well I drew, and it didn't matter if anyone even saw it. Drawing helped me be present with my feelings, it helped me endure confounding thoughts, it helped me wait out the darkness for the light. And this is still how it works for me.

Not everything we feel or everything we know can be articulated through language. As a cultural-historical system, language not only gives shape to our thoughts, emotions, and beliefs, it tells us what they'll be as well. In order to share (or prove) what we know or how we feel, we necessarily have to render it in language, an act we all struggle with from time to time. Think about all those times we resort to metaphor to explain that what we mean is more than the words we're using to say it. We've been moving from thoughts to words for so long, it's easy to believe that the only way to know something, is to put it into language. It's even easy to mistake thought and language as the same thing.

Can we know something if we can't say it?

Can we think through drawing?

What are feelings before we've named them?

I'm a sucker for cartoon characters. I love how improbable they are. Their impossibility. Their absurdity. As caricatured humans, they also help reveal and uncover the limits of our humanity.

It makes sense to me that cartoon characters would emerge from drawing. It's true, of course, that drawing can be used to document and look more closely at the world around us. It can be used to uncover the depth of our thoughts, to reveal the complexity of our world. It can be used inquire. But what excites me most is drawing's ability-through the ambiguity of line-to render the unimaginable in a visible form, free from the constraints of logic or reason. Drawing offers us an opportunity to imagine new trajectories for ourselves and for the world around us. When I draw, I can act on what I sense-those vibrations and movements in my body-without having to figure out what they are or what they mean.

In a few months, my own graphic novel, Red Panda & Moon Bea r, comes out. It's a wish fulfilled for my twelve-year-old self. A book full of monsters and creatures, impossible happenings. It's also got characters who remind me a lot of myself. They're silly and irreverent. They care deeply about the people around them. They're powerful and strong. They know a lot of stuff, but they also make a ton of mistakes. They're helpful and destructive. Beings of contradiction and ambiguity. Just like all of us. The narrative in this book is itself a kind of line drawing: meandering and diverging. It splits apart, goes in separate directions, rejoins itself later. It moves in odd shapes, full of surprise. It resists logic and reason. It's motivated not by what should come next, but by what could come next.

Now I'm all grown up-a college professor-and I teach comics and cartooning in a creative writing program. I've discovered that people who like to tell stories, often (used to) like drawing as well. I've had countless adult students come to my office to confess their desire to to drawing. I get to hear stories about drawing with parents as children, making their own comics and zines, and the too-often abandonment of these activities. The older I've gotten, the more my actions have been motivated by a desire to retrieve my own past. Like my students, I'm looking for the things I love, and so many of them began in my childhood. Maybe it's because we're getting farther and farther away from it. Maybe we're worried it'll disappear entirely. Maybe we're scared to forget. But maybe you still feel that desire to draw, the tingle of excitement in your body. Maybe, when you pick up a comic or watch a cartoon, you get that rushing sensation, that urge to make something. Maybe you left drawing, but drawing never left you.

So, I'll quote the cartoonist and educator, Lynda Barry: "To all the kids who quit drawing...come back!"

Some drawing and art-making resources:

1. Marjorie & Brent Wilson's book, Teaching Children to Draw , is not just a resource for working with children, but an exploration of what it means to draw.

2. Andrea Kantrowitz's article, Drawn to Discover, details a cognitive approach to drawing. http://www.andreakantrowitz.com/drawn-to-discover.html

3. Nick Sousanis's essay in comics form, The Shape of Our Thoughts, explores the way drawing comics approximates human thought. His book, Unflattening , furthers and continues this conversation. http://spinweaveandcut.com/the-shape-of-our-thoughts/

4. Deanna Petherbridge's, The Primacy of Drawing , is an theoretical and historical text on the ways drawing helps us construct knowledge and the ways we think through drawing.

5. Elliot Eisner's The Arts and the Creation of Mind , is an argument for art-making in an educational context, and draws from a lifetime of research in art education.

6. Dave Eggers' short short story, How the Water Feels to the Fishes , is a great example of the ways we use metaphor to articulate sensations of the body.

7. Maxine Greene's collection of essays, Releasing the Imagination, approaches art-making (including writing and literacy) from a curricular and pedagogical perspective, and situates it as an imaginative endeavor that can be used to construct a more equitable future.

8. My article/comic, Drawing with Milo, documents the ways drawing is entangled in the life of a ten-year-old boy. https://educate.bankstreet.edu/occasional-paper-series/vol2013/iss30/12/

Jarod Roselló is a Cuban-American cartoonist, writer, and teacher originally from Miami, Florida. He is the author/artist of the middle grade graphic novel, Red Panda & Moon Bear, and the forthcoming (adult) graphic novel, Those Bears. He teaches fiction and comics in the creative writing program at University of South Florida. You can find him at www.jarodrosello.com and on Twitter and Instagram at @jarodrosello.

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When I was a kid, I loved drawing. I loved the way it felt to make marks on a page, the sound of the graphite scratching against the paper, the feel of the pencil against my fingers. I liked the se...

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GO! A Kidd's Guide to Graphic Design by Chip Kidd

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GO! A Kidd's Guide to Graphic Design by Chip Kidd

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art: general interest (children's / teenage)

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graphic design; introduction; children; teen; type; font; design; computer; technology; principles; concepts; art; projects; hands on; skills; learning; school; high school; typography

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"An excellent introduction to graphic design through [the author's] own excellent work. Anyone interested in the subject, including most practitioners, will find it delightful."-Milton Glaser Kids love to express themselves, and are designers by nature-whether making...

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About the Story I had illustrated several books and was working on The Grey Lady and the Strawberry Snatcher. A mathematician friend would occasionally come by to look, and we'd talk about pictures. One afternoon I was sketching some objects around the house when he encouraged me to make a whole picture: include some background, some foreground.

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Accessibility Statement

youthspeaks.org

November 27, 2022

Compliance status

We firmly believe that the internet should be available and accessible to anyone, and are committed to providing a website that is accessible to the widest possible audience, regardless of circumstance and ability.

To fulfill this, we aim to adhere as strictly as possible to the World Wide Web Consortium's (W3C) Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.1 (WCAG 2.1) at the AA level. These guidelines explain how to make web content accessible to people with a wide array of disabilities. Complying with those guidelines helps us ensure that the website is accessible to all people: blind people, people with motor impairments, visual impairment, cognitive disabilities, and more.

This website utilizes various technologies that are meant to make it as accessible as possible at all times. We utilize an accessibility interface that allows persons with specific disabilities to adjust the website's UI (user interface) and design it to their personal needs.

Additionally, the website utilizes an AI-based application that runs in the background and optimizes its accessibility level constantly. This application remediates the website's HTML, adapts Its functionality and behavior for screen-readers used by the blind users, and for keyboard functions used by individuals with motor impairments.

If you've found a malfunction or have ideas for improvement, we'll be happy to hear from you. You can reach out to the website's operators by using the following email

Screen-reader and keyboard navigation

Our website implements the ARIA attributes (Accessible Rich Internet Applications) technique, alongside various different behavioral changes, to ensure blind users visiting with screen-readers are able to read, comprehend, and enjoy the website's functions. As soon as a user with a screen-reader enters your site, they immediately receive a prompt to enter the Screen-Reader Profile so they can browse and operate your site effectively. Here's how our website covers some of the most important screen-reader requirements, alongside console screenshots of code examples:

1. Screen-reader optimization: we run a background process that learns the website's components from top to bottom, to ensure ongoing compliance even when updating the website. In this process, we provide screen-readers with meaningful data using the ARIA set of attributes. For example, we provide accurate form labels; descriptions for actionable icons (social media icons, search icons, cart icons, etc.); validation guidance for form inputs; element roles such as buttons, menus, modal dialogues (popups), and others. Additionally, the background process scans all of the website's images and provides an accurate and meaningful image-object-recognition-based description as an ALT (alternate text) tag for images that are not described. It will also extract texts that are embedded within the image, using an OCR (optical character recognition) technology. To turn on screen-reader adjustments at any time, users need only to press the Alt+1 keyboard combination. Screen-reader users also get automatic announcements to turn the Screen-reader mode on as soon as they enter the website.

These adjustments are compatible with all popular screen readers, including JAWS and NVDA.

2. Keyboard navigation optimization: The background process also adjusts the website's HTML, and adds various behaviors using JavaScript code to make the website operable by the keyboard. This includes the ability to navigate the website using the Tab and Shift+Tab keys, operate dropdowns with the arrow keys, close them with Esc, trigger buttons and links using the Enter key, navigate between radio and checkbox elements using the arrow keys, and fill them in with the Spacebar or Enter key.Additionally, keyboard users will find quick-navigation and content-skip menus, available at any time by clicking Alt+1, or as the first elements of the site while navigating with the keyboard. The background process also handles triggered popups by moving the keyboard focus towards them as soon as they appear, and not allow the focus drift outside of it.

Users can also use shortcuts such as "M" (menus), "H" (headings), "F" (forms), "B" (buttons), and "G" (graphics) to jump to specific elements.

Disability profiles supported in our website

Epilepsy Safe Mode: this profile enables people with epilepsy to use the website safely by eliminating the risk of seizures that result from flashing or blinking animations and risky color combinations.

Visually Impaired Mode: this mode adjusts the website for the convenience of users with visual impairments such as Degrading Eyesight, Tunnel Vision, Cataract, Glaucoma, and others.

Cognitive Disability Mode: this mode provides different assistive options to help users with cognitive impairments such as Dyslexia, Autism, CVA, and others, to focus on the essential elements of the website more easily.

ADHD Friendly Mode: this mode helps users with ADHD and Neurodevelopmental disorders to read, browse, and focus on the main website elements more easily while significantly reducing distractions.

Blindness Mode: this mode configures the website to be compatible with screen-readers such as JAWS, NVDA, VoiceOver, and TalkBack. A screen-reader is software for blind users that is installed on a computer and smartphone, and websites must be compatible with it.

Keyboard Navigation Profile (Motor-Impaired): this profile enables motor-impaired persons to operate the website using the keyboard Tab, Shift+Tab, and the Enter keys. Users can also use shortcuts such as "M" (menus), "H" (headings), "F" (forms), "B" (buttons), and "G" (graphics) to jump to specific elements.

Additional UI, design, and readability adjustments

1. Font adjustments - users, can increase and decrease its size, change its family (type), adjust the spacing, alignment, line height, and more.

2. Color adjustments - users can select various color contrast profiles such as light, dark, inverted, and monochrome. Additionally, users can swap color schemes of titles, texts, and backgrounds, with over 7 different coloring options.

3. Animations - epileptic users can stop all running animations with the click of a button. Animations controlled by the interface include videos, GIFs, and CSS flashing transitions.

4. Content highlighting - users can choose to emphasize important elements such as links and titles. They can also choose to highlight focused or hovered elements only.

5. Audio muting - users with hearing devices may experience headaches or other issues due to automatic audio playing. This option lets users mute the entire website instantly.

6. Cognitive disorders - we utilize a search engine that is linked to Wikipedia and Wiktionary, allowing people with cognitive disorders to decipher meanings of phrases, initials, slang, and others.

7. Additional functions - we provide users the option to change cursor color and size, use a printing mode, enable a virtual keyboard, and many other functions.

Browser and assistive technology compatibility

We aim to support the widest array of browsers and assistive technologies as possible, so our users can choose the best fitting tools for them, with as few limitations as possible. Therefore, we have worked very hard to be able to support all major systems that comprise over 95% of the user market share including Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, Opera and Microsoft Edge, JAWS and NVDA (screen readers), both for Windows and for MAC users.

Notes, comments, and feedback

Despite our very best efforts to allow anybody to adjust the website to their needs, there may still be pages or sections that are not fully accessible, are in the process of becoming accessible, or are lacking an adequate technological solution to make them accessible. Still, we are continually improving our accessibility, adding, updating and improving its options and features, and developing and adopting new technologies. All this is meant to reach the optimal level of accessibility, following technological advancements. For any assistance, please reach out to

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Founded in 1996 in San Francisco, Youth Speaks is a pioneering presenter of Spoken Word performance, education, and youth development programs in the country. The Voices of Youth Matter. We create spaces that challenge youth to develop and amplify their voices as creators of societal change.

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The Roots of Rap: 16 Bars on the 4 Pillars of 

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The Roots of Rap: 16 Bars on the 4 Pillars of 

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the roots of rap: 16 bars on the 4 pillars of hip-hop

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juvenile nonfiction / music / rap & hip hop

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juvenile nonfiction / people & places / united states / african american

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juvenile nonfiction / performing arts / general

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The Roots of Rap: 16 Bars on the 4 Pillars of Hip-Hop

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Explore the roots of rap in this stunning, rhyming, triple-timing picture book!A generation voicing stories, hopes, and fearsfounds a hip-hop nation.Say holler if you hear.The roots of rap and the history of hip-hop have origins that precede DJ Kool Herc and Grandmaster Flash. Kids will learn abo...

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Hip Hop Speaks to Children: A Celebration of Poetry with a Beat by Nikki Giovanni, Alicia Vergel de Dios, Damian Ward, Kristen Balouch, Jeremy Tugeau, & Michele Noiset

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Hip Hop Speaks to Children: A Celebration of Poetry with a Beat by Nikki Giovanni, Alicia Vergel de Dios, Damian Ward, Kristen Balouch, Jeremy Tugeau, & Michele Noiset

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A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER AND INCLUDED IN THE BOOKLIST TOP 10 ART BOOKS FOR YOUTH! Perfect for fans of A B to Jay-Z and Nikki Giovanni who are seeking modern hip hop poetry books for kids.
Our consensus is Hip Hop Speaks to Children is the most essential poetry purchase to make this year.
The poetry is enough.
The illustrations are enough.
The CD is enough.
Together, this book is a treasure of which you cannot get enough.
We shall accomplish much this year. Children will be encouraged to put their words to poetry and beats. Teachers will be encouraged to allow the artists to speak to children.
―Diane Chen, School Library Journal blog "Practically Paradise"
Hip Hop Speaks to Children is a celebration of poetry with a beat.
Poetry can have both a rhyme and a rhythm. Sometimes it is obvious; sometimes it is hidden. But either way, make no mistake, poetry is as vibrant and exciting as it gets. And when you find yourself clapping your hands or tapping your feet, you know you've found poetry with a beat!

Like Poetry Speaks to Children, the New York Times Bestselling classic poetry book and CD that started it all, Hip Hop Speaks to Children is meant to be the beginning of a journey of discovery.

READ more than 50 remarkable poems and songs!

HEAR poetry's rhymes and rhythms from Queen Latifah to Gwendolyn Brooks, Langston Hughes to A Tribe Called Quest and more! * Also hear part of Martin Luther Kind's original "I Have a Dream" speech, followed by the remarkable live performance of the speech by Nikki Giovanni, Oni Lasana and Val Gray Ward. * The Hip Hop Speaks to Children CD contains more than 30 performances, either by the artists who created them, or as unique interpretations by admiring poets and artists.

DISCOVER Langston Hughes's elegant gospel "The Negro Speaks of Rivers," A Tribe Called Quest's playful "Ham 'N' Eggs," Sterling A. Brown's hard-luck "Long Track Blues," Gwendolyn Brooks's wake-up call "We Real Cool," Kanye West's lovely "Hey Mama," and Martin Luther King Jr.'s awe-inspiring "I Have a Dream."

This is a collection of rhymes and rhythms unlike any other poetry book!

Celebrate with remarkable poets, including:
Eloise Greenfield
Mos Def
Lucille Clifton
Oscar Brown Jr.
Tupac Shakur
Maya Angelou
Queen Latifah
Nikki Grimes
Walter Dean Myers
Common
and, of course, Nikki Giovanni

Poems Include:
Ego Tripping
Rapper's Delight
The Negro Speaks of Rivers
Hey Mama
Ham 'N' Eggs
Everything Is Everything
Ladies First
MORE PRAISE FOR HIP HOP SPEAKS TO CHILDREN
"With its archival recordings of poems read by the poets themselves, [ Hip Hop] reminds everyone that poetry springs from an oral tradition."― Publishers Weekly

"This is the way to get children interested in reading and loving poetry. ... A great book for both teachers and parents." ― Valerie Lewis, owner of Hicklebee's children's bookstore

"The poems, the artwork, the CD...all complement each other to create a wonderful experience." ―Becky Laney, Becky Laney's Books blog

"Love this book. I think it is a K-8 must-have for classrooms and libraries. Like I said it is packed and it may be (at first) intimidating to young readers. But, once they hear some of the audio, spend time with the illustrations, and experience some of the poetry, I think it will become a favorite." ―Franki Sibberson, A Year of Reading blog

"Hip Hop Speaks to Children is a wonderfully composed collection of poems from writers like Eloise Greenfield to late rapper and poet, Tupac Shakur. ... Whether you read poetry or you hear it in a rap song, Giovanni's genius endeavor will inspire children of all ages to have fun while listening to poetry. Rap is poetry, right?" ―Amy Bowllan, Amy Bowllan's Blog (a School Library Journal Blog)

" I highly recommend this one for all collections. If the title didn't include the word "children" it'd be an excellent book all the way to high school. My coworkers and I are already talking about doing a Hip Hop poetry story time for our elementary school kids." ―Jennifer Rothschild, Biblio File blog

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hip hop speaks to children: 50 inspiring poems with a beat (a poetry speaks experience for kids

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american poetry - african american authors

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american poetry - african american authors

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juvenile nonfiction / music / rap & hip hop

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juvenile nonfiction/music - rap & hip hop

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poetry; for; children; kids; ages; 5-7; collection; dance; african american; picture book; rhythm; black; culture; history; music; rhyme; gift; boys; girls; grade; third; fourth; fifth; sixth; middle grade

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juvenile nonfiction / music / rap & hip hop

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juvenile nonfiction/music - rap & hip hop

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Hip Hop Speaks to Children: 50 Inspiring Poems with a Beat (A Poetry Speaks Experience for Kids, From Tupac to Jay-Z, Queen Latifah to Maya Angelou, Includes CD)

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Amazon.com: Hip Hop Speaks to Children: 50 Inspiring Poems with a Beat (A Poetry Speaks Experience for Kids, From Tupac to Jay-Z, Queen Latifah to Maya Angelou, Includes CD) (9781402210488): Giovanni, Nikki, Vergel de Dios, Alicia, Ward, Damian, Balouch, Kristen, Tugeau, Noiset, Michele: Books

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“4 Benefits of Classroom Podcasting and 4 Ideas to Try Today” by Meredith Allen

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“4 Benefits of Classroom Podcasting and 4 Ideas to Try Today” by Meredith Allen

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"In humans, as in songbirds, the sounds produced by the individuals are essential for normal vocal development." - Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 2000
Podcasts...the not-so-latest buzzword going around in education circles. This is an exciting medium for adding to our teaching toolkit but, as educators, we of course benefit from taking a thoughtful approach. There are many rich reasons why we should integrate audio recording, including podcasts, into the classroom. My suggestion? Get some great implementation ideas from your peers and then, by all means, JUMP!

4 Student Benefits to Understand

When you understand some of the powerful ways audio recording in the classroom can benefit student learning, it will be easy to make a strong case to your administrators, your peers, and, not least of all, to yourself! There are numerous tools that make podcasting and media-making simple for teacher and student alike, but using technology without understanding the specific student needs in play, and why it effectively addresses them, isn't strategic. Here are some of the important student benefits that are helpful for each of us to understand, to look out for when evaluating our use of recorded audio in the classroom, and to be able to explain to others:

1. Clarification and Confidence - As your learners listen closely to their tone, learn to include appropriate pauses, and master their speaking through repetition, they will clarify their personal voice and become more confident speakers.

2. Reflection and Discussion - Working with recorded audio offers students an alternative place and space to reflect on their thinking and engage in candid discussions about their work. These discussions lead students toward the opportunity to construct new and improved ideas.

3. Read, Revise, Practice, and Present - When your learners record themselves reading their writing, it gives them a new perspective on the written word and an alternative method for revision. Further, as students read and revise their writing, they are engaging in much-needed practice before making the oral presentation to peers. The combination of writing and presenting is authentic practice for what students will have to master when they enter higher education and the workforce.

4. Assessment Minus Anxiety - If the task at hand is to assess our learners' understanding, rather than their writing, we can now lower their blood pressure by giving them an alternative space to explain themselves that doesn't include worrying about spelling errors or sentence structure.

6 Phases of Incorporating Audio Recording

A while back I came across integration coach Corey Holmer's presentation " Broadcasting Your Story: Podcasting with Chromebooks " and was immediately a) inspired, b) grateful for the work he had already done, and c) excited to share with my teaching peers. He very simply breaks down the podcasting process into six phases for teachers who are interested in incorporating audio recording in the classroom:

1. Goal Determination

2. Scripting

3. Software Acclimation

4. Planning & Implementing Recording

5. Editing

6. Publishing

In addition to explaining each of the steps in detail, Holmer also provided his audience a Podcasting Project Guide. Although this was originally created for a workshop session of educators, it can be easily adapted for any classroom. Even if you have little or no personal experience with podcast creation in the classroom, no problem - I find Mr. Holmer's explanation easy to understand and a fantastic place to start!

4 Ideas (And Many More) to Try Now!

Need more inspiration on audio recording ideas? Check out the classroom projects, lesson plans and ideas I have compiled here from various educators across the globe. Here are just some of my favorites:

1. Use podcasts in conjunction with Google Tour Builder to create virtual field trips with student recorded tour guide voice overs.

2. Build an original soundtrack that compliments the rising action, climax, and resolution of a novel.

3. Create a "day in the life" documentary that describes the sights, sounds and activities in an ancient metropolis.

4. On a field trip, students use a voice recorder, such as the one available through the Soundtrap app, to take notes and a digital camera to take photos.

Meredith Allen (@msmeredithallen) is an educator and an international presenter. She currently works as an Instructional Technology Consultant, Education Ambassador and Account Manager for Soundtrap. Meredith taught instrumental music, K-7 technology and virtual reality at a rural school in Iowa. She has a Master's of Science in Technology for Education and Training.

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4 Benefits of Classroom Podcasting and 4 Ideas to Try Today - ASCD Inservice

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"In humans, as in songbirds, the sounds produced by the individuals are essential for normal vocal development." - Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 2000 Podcasts...the not-so-latest buzzword going around in education circles. This is an exciting medium for adding to our teaching toolkit but, as educators, we of course benefit from taking a thoughtful approach.

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Teaching Podcasting: A Curriculum Guide for Educators (NPR)

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Teaching Podcasting: A Curriculum Guide for Educators (NPR)

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Teaching Podcasting: A Curriculum Guide for Educators

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Guidance on planning classroom instruction.

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Project Audio: Teaching Students How to Produce Their Own Podcasts (NY Times)

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Project Audio: Teaching Students How to Produce Their Own Podcasts (NY Times)

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An Eleanor & Park annotated playlist by Lemmel Overton

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An Eleanor & Park annotated playlist by Lemmel Overton

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Hayley Kiyoko Creates the Soundtrack to Her Life (Teen Vogue)

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Hayley Kiyoko Creates the Soundtrack to Her Life (Teen Vogue)

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Hayley Kiyoko creates the ultimate soundtrack to her life. From the angsty pop rock tunes of Avril Lavigne and The All-American Rejects to the soothing melodies of Michelle Branch and vulnerable lyrics of P!nk, Hayley Kiyoko shares the songs that inspire her.

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Hayley Kiyoko Creates The Playlist of Her Life

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Hayley Kiyoko creates the ultimate soundtrack to her life. From the angsty pop rock tunes of Avril Lavigne and The All-American Rejects to the soothing melodies of Michelle Branch and vulnerable lyrics of P!nk, Hayley Kiyoko shares the songs that inspire her.

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Super Graphic: A Visual Guide to the Comic Book Universe by Tim Leong

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Super Graphic: A Visual Guide to the Comic Book Universe by Tim Leong

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I'm happy to announce that my first book, Super Graphic: A Visual Guide to the Comic Book Universe, was named THE BEST BOOK OF 2013: ART & DESIGN by Amazon! The comic book universe is adventurous, mystifying, and filled with heroes, villains,...

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A 215-page comic book about comics that explains the inner workings of the medium and examines many aspects of visual communication. Understanding Comics has been translated into 16 languages, excerpted in textbooks, and its ideas applied in other fields such as game design, animation, web development, and interface design.

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Drawing Words and Writing Pictures: Making Comics, Manga, Graphic Novels, and Beyond by Jessica Abel

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Drawing Words and Writing Pictures: Making Comics, Manga, Graphic Novels, and Beyond by Jessica Abel

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Drawing Words and Writing Pictures: Making Comics: Manga, Graphic Novels, and Beyond | IndieBound.org

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"A gold mine of essential information for every aspiring comics artist. Highly recommended." --Scott McCloud Drawing Words and Writing Pictures is a course on comic creation - for college classes or for independent study - that centers on storytelling and concludes with making a finished comic.

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Whatcha Mean, What’s a Zine? By Esther Watson & Mark Todd 

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Whatcha Mean, What’s a Zine? By Esther Watson & Mark Todd 

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by Whatcha Mean, What's a Zine? : The Art of Making Zines and Mini Comics
Esther Watson and Mark Todd

More About Whatcha Mean, What's a Zine? by Esther Watson; Mark Todd

A zine is a handmade magazine or mini-comic about anything you can imagine: favorite bands, personal stories, subcultures, or collections. They contain diary entries, rants, interviews, and stories. They can be by one person or many, found in stores, traded at comic conventions, exchanged with friends, or given away for free. Zines are not a new idea: they've been around for years under various names (chapbooks, flyers, pamphlets). People with independent ideas have been getting their word out since before there were printing presses.
This book is for anyone who wants to create their own zine. It's for learning tips and tricks from contributors who have been at the fore front of the zine movement. It's for getting inspired to put thoughts and ideas down on paper. It's for learning how to design and print your own zine so you can put it in others' hands. Whatcha Mean, What's a Zine? is for anyone who has something to say.

Related Categories
Books > Young Adult Nonfiction > Social Science - Sociology

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Whatcha Mean, What's a Zine?: Esther Watson: 9780618563159

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by Whatcha Mean, What's a Zine? : The Art of Making Zines and Mini Comics Esther Watson and Mark Todd More About Whatcha Mean, What's a Zine? by Esther Watson; Mark Todd A zine is a handmade magazine or mini-comic about anything you can imagine: favorite bands, personal stories, subcultures, or collections.

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Write and Draw Your Own Comics by Howard Hughes

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Write and Draw Your Own Comics by Howard Hughes

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Find out more about "Write and draw your own comics", write a review or buy online.

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“The Power of Digital Story” by Bob Dillon

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“The Power of Digital Story” by Bob Dillon

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Digital stories, now both easy to produce and simple to publish, are an ideal way to energize learning and engage students at a deeper level. Digital storytelling creates space for students to pursue topics about which they are passionate, grows their learning around assigned topics, and showcases their learning for peers, teachers, and audiences beyond the schoolhouse, all of whom are able to interact with the storyteller. To allow the power of story to blossom in learning spaces, it is necessary to focus on a few factors that can maximize its effect.

Create Space for Listening

The world is full of story -- just look at the fire-hose blast of Snapchat images, YouTube videos, and those moments of binge-watching Netflix. The noise of this digital information can be overwhelming. It can create a numbness to the outside world and limit the ability to retain and reflect on essential learning. Because of this, places of learning must be places of listening that allow time and space for the speed of life to be digested in a meaningful way. How have you practiced listening to story as a teacher, and how have you created this space for students? The power of digital story comes from the power of the audience that is genuinely engaged in listening to its message.

Persuade with the Head and the Heart

Digital story works because it fills our heads with engaging emotional rhetoric and paves a compelling reason to act or think differently. Emotion alone doesn't make digital story, as the names, faces, and numbers of the situation round out the message. Without the intellectual hook, the emotional plea can sound hollow and appear to be built on a flimsy foundation. The unique nature of digital story -- with its quick visual displays of information coupled with its engaging images of people, place, and planet -- provides the ideal media for amplifying the impact that comes from seamlessly weaving together these areas.

Lead with the Narrative

Great digital stories are rooted in their narrative. The beauty of digital story is that the narrative follows the same story arc that has always been a part of oral and written story. Helping kids become great presenters and great writers will support their proficiency as digital story creators.

Amplify with Images

A thousand words isn't the true power of images. Great images link story elements, humanize the abstract, and force the audience to see invisible people and places. Images are a gateway into the soul of stories. Digital story creators need to select each image with the same intentionality that each word is chosen for the narrative. Beautiful images allow digital stories to be remembered by more people in a deeper way.

Nurture the Process

Classrooms, schools, and districts that are rich in story will better support the learning of students who are already living in a culture of digital storytelling. Teachers, students, and community members need to feel an environment for learning that promotes voice, shares best practices, and celebrates the best of learning. In addition, the best of digital storytelling comes from the art of iteration. Success comes from publishing, revising, editing, analyzing, and tinkering with the craft. Allow time for adults and students to be a part of this powerful practice.

Understand the Tools

The quality and quantity of web-based tools for creating, designing, and making incredible digital story continues to grow. It is important for classrooms and schools to choose a few tools that work for them based on ease, accessibility, and cost, and take the time to really understand those tools both with and without content wrapped around their use. Currently, there are excellent stories being created using online tools like WeVideo and the editing tools within YouTube. Others are using iPhoto, Garageband, and iMovie to craft stunning digital stories that elicit strong emotion from audiences around the globe. In this process, students also have a chance to learn about the importance of using Creative Commons videos and properly crediting artists for their intellectual property. Some excellent student examples of these tools in action can be seen in Emma Bright's "My Defining Moment", MRH Middle School's "Dauphin Island Reflection", and Ollie J.'s "Eleven by Sandra Cisnaros".

Today's best tools for digital story will quickly become relics, so it is also essential to stay in the conversation, listen to what other educators are doing, and see what kids are using in their own creation space, so that the tools and features being used to create story will stay fresh.

Finally, it is essential to share story, personal and professional, successes and failures, because story inspires story. As we see through the beauty of digital story, idea generation, inspiration, and collaboration can only grow. And, in a larger sense, best practices in education will grow and scale whenever we all release trapped or siloed wisdom into the system.

How are you using the power of digital story in your classroom or school?

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Digital stories, now both easy to produce and simple to publish, are an ideal way to energize learning and engage students at a deeper level. Digital storytelling creates space for students to pursue topics about which they are passionate, grows their learning around assigned topics, and showcases their learning for peers, teachers, and audiences beyond the schoolhouse, all of whom are able to interact with the storyteller.

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© Copyright 2018 Kids Discover. All Rights Reserved.

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“Using Infographics in the Classroom” by Will Fanguy

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“Using Infographics in the Classroom” by Will Fanguy

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How to Use Infographics in the Classroom (Plus Templates)

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Keep reading to learn 10 different ways to use infographics in the classroom. You’ll also find infographic templates and video tutorials that you can use.

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W.E.B. Du Bois’ Visionary Infographics Come Together for the First Time in Full Color

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W.E.B. Du Bois’ Visionary Infographics Come Together for the First Time in Full Color

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His pioneering team of black sociologists created data visualizations that explained institutionalized racism to the world

smithsonian.com

After three decades of emancipation, the gains made by African-Americans, those that existed at all, presented a decidedly mixed picture about the state of racial progress in the country. The political obstacles were voluminous, with the failure of Reconstruction still lingering, and Jim Crow institutional racism ascendant. In 1897, the United States Supreme Court would rule in Plessy v. Ferguson that separate was indeed equal. All the while, new generations of African-Americans found ways to uplift themselves, despite discrimination, through grassroots efforts in education, work and community building.

After graduating with a Ph.D. in history from Harvard University, W.E.B. Du Bois, the prominent African-American intellectual, sought a way to process all this information showing why the African disapora in America was being held back in a tangible, contextualized form. "It is not one problem," as Du Bois wrote in 1898, "but rather a plexus of social problems, some new, some old, some simple, some complex; and these problems have their one bond of unity in the act that they group themselves above those Africans whom two centuries of slave-trading brought into the land."

To accomplish this goal, Du Bois turned to the burgeoning field of sociology. Sociology's scope in history, statistics, and demographics held the potential to quantifiably reveal "life within the Veil," as Du Bois called the structural forces of oppressions that separated black and white populations, whether that came to educational attainment, voting rights or land ownership.

And so, almost two decades before Robert E. Park and the Chicago school were conducting ethnographic field work and statistical analysis, Du Bois pioneered a new way to use sociology: to use those methodologies to contextualize the historical realities resonating among African-Americans.

After embarking on a sprawling sociological study of African-Americans living in Philadelphia, he was hired as a professor at the historically black Atlanta University in 1897. There, he established a sociology program, now recognized as the first school of American sociology. It was in this capacity that a former classmate of Du Bois, Thomas Junius Calloway, approached Du Bois to ask if his old friend would contribute a social study about African-American life to the Exposition Universelle, the Paris World Fair of 1900.

Calloway, an educator, journalist and lawyer, had petitioned the U.S. government for space to display the progress made by African-Americans since slavery in the American display. The federal government's department of education and social economy agreed to sponsor the exhibit, and in January 1899, it appointed Calloway a special agent to complete the task. With a short window of time before the fair, Calloway approached the leading African-American thinkers of the day to include their work in the upcoming exhibit, which was called "The American Negro."

For Du Bois, the show presented both an opportunity and a challenge. Part of his contribution was carefully curating 500 photographs to show a nuanced snapshot of what life was like for black Americans. While he wanted to use the photographs to undercut racist stereotypes about African-Americans, the images alone did not relay the underlining ways that the institution of slavery continued to impact African-American progress in the country. So he set about making approximately 60 carefully handmade data visualizations, to dictate, in full, vibrant color, the reasons why black America was being held back.

The project presented Du Bois with a way to further test the possibilities of visualizing the empirical data he and his Atlanta University students and alumni were collecting, says Britt Rusert, associate professor in the W. E. B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Rusert and Whitney Battle-Baptiste, associate professor of anthropology at U-Mass and director of its W.E.B. Du Bois Center, are the editors of a newly published book, W.E.B. Du Bois's Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America. It is, somehow, the first time that Du Bois' groundbreaking data visualizations from the Paris World Fair have been collected together in color in a book format.

While they are known as Du Bois' infographics, he wasn't working alone; it took an interdisciplinary team of black students and alumni spread across the South to create them. Likewise, Rusert, Battle-Baptiste and book designer Silas Munro combined their areas of expertise to tease out just what made these works such a landmark achievement of their day.

"[Du Bois and his team] had a set of questions, and they knew they needed to use different tools and different methods in order to represent the data and to grapple with those questions," Rusert says.

While Aldon Morris, professor of sociology at Northwestern University-who resurrected Du Bois' rightful place at the birth of sociology in his 2015 text, The Scholar Denied (and also contributed a chapter for W.E.B. Du Bois's Data Portraits)-detailed how the black students of Du Bois' program were practicing and engaging in sociological work decades before their counterparts in the Chicago school, much remains to be learned about the work being done in Du Bois' sociology laboratory.

"The more that you look at the [visualizations], you start to see more and more hands," Rusert says. Correspondences suggest, for instance, that William Andrew Rogers, an alumnus of Atlanta University who had a degree in sociology, played a major role in creating the infographics. "At least once Du Bois identifies him as being the point person, or the sort of lead person in this project," says Rusert.

But Du Bois wasn't just using his own students in the sociology lab at Atlanta University; he was also drawing data and relying on surveys, which were "conducted by a sort of extended network of field researchers across the South," according to Rusert. That included students who graduated from Atlanta University and moved elsewhere, showing evidence of a network of black sociologists throughout the region.

One set of infographics explored life for African-Americans in Georgia-which at the time had the largest black population in the U.S.-breaking down the number of black children enrolled in public schools, family budgets, income and expenditure, occupations, and even the value of household and kitchen furniture owned. The second set of infographics had a more expansive purview, comparing national and international data sets, such as examining the literary rate of black Americans in comparison to other nations, as well as looking at what the occupations of black Americans were, where they lived in the U.S., and how much land they held.

The way DuBois wielded this data to convey these realities was pioneering, but so, too, were the visual aesthetics of the infographics. Munro, who wrote the captions for each of the plates, came to see Du Bois as an innovator in design. In the book, he positions the data visualizations as "infographic activism" in their ability to get to the heart of inequities of the day. But he also points out that the compelling art, which was done in ink, gouache watercolor, graphite and photographic prints, deserves to be considered in its own right. The team's Modernist use of shape, color and structure, created just before the rise of Europe's avant-garde movements, he argues, makes the work nothing less than visionary.

For Rusert's part, as she worked through the archival history, she saw Du Bois as a curator, observing his intentionality of detail, which included carefully positioning the large-scale color data visualizations on the walls of the exhibit hall. "He clearly had these ideas about how and where he wanted these images to be installed, and how he wanted them to be presented," she says. Du Bois was so determined to travel to Paris and install the works himself, she says, that he scrounged up the money to pay for passage in steerage. It was a degrading means of travel that he could not have taken without some irony, knowing he was on his way to extrapolate why African-Americans continued to be treated as second-class citizens in the U.S.

The data graphics were designed to appeal to both an international and stateside audience. They included French typography and writing to reach Europeans, says Rusert. However, she adds, the team also had an eye to U.S. audiences when they worked, as they knew the exhibit would eventually travel back home, going on view at Buffalo's Pan-Am Exposition, along with other stops around the country.

When the tour of the exhibit was finally finished, all of the materials-photographs, essays, research, the data visualizations, and more-were packed up and sent to the Library of Congress. There, they've stayed for decades. It wasn't until the Library digitized the holdings that the vibrant, bold historical visualizations of Du Bois and his Atlanta team became widely available for view. With their dissemination came renewed interest in their work.

"It really speaks to our own moment in which people are thinking about race and data and thinking about visual design and thinking about data visualization," says Rusert. Today's technological advancements opens up a bold new frontier for the possibilities of using data visualization to demonstrate inequities embedded in today's society. Take, for instance, MacArthur genius grant award-winner Nikole Hannah-Jones' work utilizing data to reveal the rampant school segregation in play today. Or the Los Angeles Times' thought-provoking " Mapping L.A." project. In an especially out-of-the-box example, Jillian Crandall, an architect and researcher, uses data visualization in a video game format.

Certainly, the means of collecting and displaying information today far surpass what Du Bois and his Atlanta University team were working with in 1900. Yet their findings remain compelling today. Just last year, the 's data editor was inspired to recreate the visualizations to reflect the realities of inequality in today's world.

W.E.B. Du Bois's Data Portraits was published on the sesquicentennial year of the Du Bois' birth, and it further reaffirms the scholar's place as a founding figure in American sociology. The recirculation of Du Bois' data portraits offer a new opportunity to marvel at the forward-thinking work being done at Atlanta University.

It seems safe to say Du Bois would have been happy to see his work retain such relevance. Even in 1900, it appears he had other plans for his data visualizations than being quietly stored away in the Library of Congress. When Rusert and Battle-Baptiste were working on the book, they found Du Bois had written a letter to Callaway requesting whether it was possible for him to get the images back. Callaway, in turn, told Du Bois to write directly to the Library of Congress. As the infographics never left the Library, it appears he was not successful.

What was he hoping to do with them? Rusert believes there's definitely a possibility he was interested in using them to teach his disciples at Atlanta University. "If so," she says, "we can think about them as sort of like visual aids for classroom learning."

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W.E.B. Du Bois' Visionary Infographics Come Together for the First Time in Full Color

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smithsonian.com After three decades of emancipation, the gains made by African-Americans, those that existed at all, presented a decidedly mixed picture about the state of racial progress in the country. The political obstacles were voluminous, with the failure of Reconstruction still lingering, and Jim Crow institutional racism ascendant.

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Defacing INSIDE of Books: Blackout Poetry

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Defacing INSIDE of Books: Blackout Poetry

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Defacing INSIDE of books/ Blackout poetry

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“How Remix Culture Informs Student Writing & Creativity” by Antero Garcia

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“How Remix Culture Informs Student Writing & Creativity” by Antero Garcia

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How Remix Culture Informs Student Writing & Creativity

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Artistic remix influences kids' creativity on almost every level. Here's how, and why you need to understand it.

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“Everything is a Remix” by Kirby Ferguson

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“Everything is a Remix” by Kirby Ferguson

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Everything is a Remix Remastered (2015 HD)

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The Painter Who Remixes Classical European Art with Black Urban Youth

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The Painter Who Remixes Classical European Art with Black Urban Youth

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LL Cool J à la John Singer Sargent. Ice T as Napoleon by David. A black man in a green hoodie with Hanes tighty-whities peeking, posing like that scandalous languorous marble sculpture at the Musée D'Orsay. On the surface, Kehinde Wiley 's work may seem like familiar pastiche, or the art world's best efforts at an internet meme.

The 37-year old portrait painter, who was awarded the US State Department Medal of Arts in January and whose retrospective recently opened at the Brooklyn Museum (paywall), is best known for recasting European masterpieces with African American subjects.

Napoleon Crossing the Alps, by Jacques-Louis David

The artist conducts "street casting" in places like Harlem in New York City, Port-au-Prince in Haiti, New Delhi and Mumbai in India, and South Central, Los Angeles where he grew up. Wiley recruits subjects, mostly strangers, to select a pose from a book of European Old Masters and reenact it for a portrait.

Born to a Nigerian father and an African American mother, the background of his paintings reference African cloth patterns, snaking through the composition to give further clues on his subject. For example, in this reinterpretation of David's Napoleon, Wiley embeds tiny swimming sperm in the red background, as a reference to African male virility, or potentially, promiscuity.

Cribbing from titans of Western art like Jacques-Louis David, Édouard Manet, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres and Titian, Wiley creates hyper-realistic portraits, imbuing his subjects with the similar air of dignity or vainglory found in old paintings. "I use French Rococo influences, with its garishness and vulgarity, to complement the flashy attire and display of 'material consumption' evident in hip-hop culture," he has said.

The formula is not new. Old/new, high/low juxtapositions are au courant in contemporary art (examples: Kara Walker's race commentary via graphic silhouettes, the self-portraits of Senegalese photographer Omar Victor Diop or even the COLORS magazine cover featuring a black Queen Elizabeth from 1993), as well as on social media.

Unlike the internet meme designed to be consumed in one-calorie visual bites, his work rewards the attentive viewer on several levels.

But unlike the internet meme designed to be consumed in one-calorie visual bites, his work rewards the attentive viewer on several levels. Wiley, who has a master's degree from Yale University, actually upends several traditions in the art canon.

In addition to swapping out traditional portraiture subjects (read: established white aristocrats) with contemporary African Americans, the artist also overturns the relationship between the court portrait painter and sitter, conflating the power and cachet of the client and creator. Contrast that with works executed under, say, Henry VIII, who relied on Hans Holbein to mask his corpulent, aging image with a commanding portrait.

Wiley's work has been exhibited all over the world, and has even made appearance in the popular TV series "Empire." But also unlike a meme, his impeccable larger-than-life portraiture is best encountered in person. A retrospective of Wiley's work is currently on exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum in New York and will be traveling around the US.

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This painter remixes classical European art with black urban youth

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LL Cool J à la John Singer Sargent. Ice T as Napoleon by David. A black man in a green hoodie with Hanes tighty-whities peeking, posing like that scandalous languorous marble sculpture at the Musée D'Orsay. On the surface, Kehinde Wiley 's work may seem like familiar pastiche, or the art world's best efforts at an internet meme.

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How to Make a Blackout Poem on the iPad (Austin Kleon)

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How to Make a Blackout Poem on the iPad (Austin Kleon)

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Note: this post has been updated since 2010.
People always ask me when I'm going to develop an iPad app for Newspaper Blackout. I've always told them that I don't want to because I think there's something magic about feeling the newsprint in your hands, smelling the marker fumes as you make your poem.

Even though I still prefer the old analog way, there are times (mostly on the bus or out on the porch or lying in bed) when I don't have a newspaper and a marker in front of me, so I've been experimenting with making them on my iPad.

Here's how I do it, if you want to play along...

Tools

Method

1. I find an article in the NYTimes and take a screenshot of it. (How to take a screenshot: press the power button in the upper right-hand corner and the home button simultaneously.)

2. I make a new painting in Brushes.

3. I add the screenshot of the article to the Brushes painting.

4. I make a new layer above the screenshot in the painting so that if I make mistakes I can erase them. (+/-1 for digital - you can fix your "mistakes." Both a good and a bad thing.)

5. I use the black paintbrush to make the poem like I normally would. (In this video I play around a bit, cover the whole article in black, and then use the eraser to randomly uncover words...) When I have something I like, I erase the rest of the article to clean it up.
Watch the video on Flickr →
6. I use the "Add To Photos" function to export the painting to my photos.

7. I go into Instagram and share it like I would any other photo - I use the "Move and Scale" function to position the poem just so, select a filter, give it a title, etc. (Sometimes I won't use a filter.)

And that's it! Here's what the final poem looks like:

As always, you can send me anything you come up with at http://newspaperblackout.com.
See all my iPad poems →

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HOW TO MAKE A NEWSPAPER BLACKOUT POEM ON THE IPAD

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Even though I still prefer the old analog way, there are times (mostly on the bus or out on the porch or lying in bed) when I don't have a newspaper and a marker in front of me, so I've been experimenting with making them on my iPad.

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Hi! I am an educator with two decades of experience teaching children as young as five, adults with three or more decades of teaching experience, and every age learner in between. The majority of my professional life has been spent teaching literacy to middle school-age children as well as serving as a literacy specialist/coach in a K-6 school.

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#TheEdCollabGathering session with Tracey Flores

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#TheEdCollabGathering session with Tracey Flores

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Somos Escritores: "Redefining" Writing for Greater Inclusion, Authenticity, and Engagement

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RENEW! Become a Better--and More Authentic--Writing Teacher

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RENEW! Become a Better--and More Authentic--Writing Teacher

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When was the last time you shook up your writing instruction? Shawna Coppola's new book is built on the premise that our students are ever-changing, and so is our global landscape. While there's nothing inherently wrong with relying on instructional strategies that have worked in the past, Shawna challenges writing teachers to rethink and revise their practice regularly-leading to the renewal of their professional lives.

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All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling.-Wilde

To have great poets, there must be great audiences.-Whitman

A poet can survive everything but a misprint.-Wilde

Do anything, but let it produce joy.―Whitman

Illusion is the first of all pleasures.-Wilde

And your very flesh shall be a great poem.―Whitman

All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling.-Wilde

To have great poets, there must be great audiences.-Whitman

A poet can survive everything but a misprint.-Wilde

Do anything, but let it produce joy.―Whitman

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All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling.-Wilde To have great poets, there must be great audiences.-Whitman A poet can survive everything but a misprint.-Wilde Do anything, but let it produce joy.―Whitman Illusion is the first of all pleasures.-Wilde And your very flesh shall be a great poem.―Whitman All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling.-Wilde To have great poets, there must be great audiences.-Whitman A poet can survive everything but a misprint.-Wilde Do anything, but let it produce joy.―Whitman

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Infographic: Genres and Forms and Modes (Oh, My

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Infographic: Genres and Forms and Modes (Oh, My

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Animoto's video maker turns your photos and video clips into professional videos in minutes. Fast and shockingly simple - we make video creation easy.

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Meg & Gabi

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Will & Carrington

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Annikah & Lily

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Animoto's video maker turns your photos and video clips into professional videos in minutes. Fast and shockingly simple - we make video creation easy.

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Animoto's video maker turns your photos and video clips into professional videos in minutes. Fast and shockingly simple - we make video creation easy.

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Discourse: Math, Literacy, and the Need for More Blank Paper

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Discourse: Math, Literacy, and the Need for More Blank Paper

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The Educator Collaborative community blog

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Blog | The Educator Collaborative Community

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by Shawna Coppola (@shawnacoppola)

Lately, when my mind is not being consumed by thoughts about what I'm going to make for dinner, where I have to drive the kids to and from after school, and how many episodes of Judge Judy I have left on my DVR, I've been thinking a lot about the ways math and literacy are related, how they can be more effectively integrated, and all that jazz.

Often, when I'm in my math/literacy mode, I find myself re-reading and thinking about this fantastic blog post by author-educator Tracy Zager called "A Brief Ode to Blank Paper" and how what she says about math learning can also apply to literacy learning-specifically, to how we teach kids about composing. Of the math curriculum used in her daughter's school, she writes:

[One of my] problems with this curriculum is: they never use blank paper. They never write 209 + 376 at the top of a big piece of paper and let kids have at it. The kids never get a chance to wrestle with keeping track of their thinking or figure out organizational strategies. All math problems are either on worksheets or educational technology. The kids just don't write enough.

"The kids just don't write enough." Sound familiar? Donald Graves, a mere seven lines into the preface to the 20th anniversary edition of his 1983 book Writing: Teachers & Children at Work writes that "time [for students to write] is in short supply." A recent online chat with Kelly Gallagher led to this tweet:

Non-negotiables: Volume. Choice. I will read and write alongside my students. Book flood. They read/write every single day. #bestinterest

- Kelly Gallagher (@KellyGToGo) April 8, 2015

And Penny Kittle, in her March 2014 piece in the Adolescent Literacy in Perspective journal ("What We Learn When We Free Writers"), writes that "students need time to think about what to write and time to follow ideas and images in free writing, building the independence and confidence that we want them to have as writers."

Not only do our students need time to write; they need freedom to write. When her students begin kindergarten at the start of each September, my colleague Becky Wright gives them both. From Day 1, students compose books of their own choosing. What does Becky give them for materials? Blank paper and a cup full of crayons. Almost without exception, the students dive into the joy and the hard work of making books. Few of them-one, maybe two students each year- question why or how they are going to make a book. They just do it. They compose books that are interesting and meaningful to them: books about their family, about their pet cat, about Darth Vader.

They compose like this all year, studying mentors, talking about what they notice these mentors do, trying them out in their own work, and sharing their challenges and successes. When they need lines on their paper to help them write the words they want to write, they draw them. When they need help understanding how to write a book about how to play soccer, they read piles and piles of informational books and talk about what they notice. These children are as young as five and six years old, and yet they are trusted with blank paper and extended pockets of time in which to compose. They are trusted with freedom.

What happens the older these students get? Are they trusted as much? Are they given as much freedom to write and illustrate as they please-enough "blank paper," so to speak?

While there are exceptions (and thank you, teachers, for developing classroom communities where this is the exception), the general answer is no. Ironically, the older students get, the less freedom they usually have in the classroom-particularly with regard to their writing. As a new teacher, I contributed to this problem. (I have binders full of evidence to prove this.) I "helpfully" created a variety of organizers for my students and compiled lists upon lists of writing prompts that I thought would effectively teach them to write essays, to develop stories, to create compelling and powerful speeches. But for most students, I failed miserably in this regard. I taught them to write the essays that I wanted them to write, to compose stories that were organized by a plot trajectory that I had demanded...if my students were able to transfer the knowledge I had taught them to their next piece of writing, they did so in spite of, not because of, me.

Like a good number of my own former students, most students beyond the primary grades-and even within them-are not given enough "blank paper" with which to compose. I mean this, of course, both literally and figuratively. Not only is most of the paper that students use to compose-writers' notebooks included-already lined, leaving no room for innovation (or even the occasional doodle), but most writers' workshops are painfully structured in ways that leave students dependent on us to compose just about anything. This is doubly true when it comes to teaching students about grammar and mechanics, if Pinterest and Teachers Pay Teachers are any indication.

Part of the reason for this, perhaps, may be due to the fact that this is how many of us were taught to write. We were given an assignment, we were taught how to organize it, we were given a rubric to tell us exactly how it should be, and we wrote it. Or, perhaps, our writing teachers gave us too much freedom as students, and we recognize how unhelpful that was, too. Equally likely is the fact that most teachers of writing do not write for themselves as a regular practice and therefore have lost sight of both the joys and the challenges that writing without too many restrictions can bring.

Whatever the reason, I would invite us to consider modeling our writing workshop on the "blank paper" concept that Tracy suggested for teachers of mathematics. This doesn't mean taking away all instruction or guidance; rather, it means structuring our teaching so that students spend more time writing connected text than they do filling in graphic organizers. It means directing students' attention to all of the possibilities there are when it comes to composing-and how our choices among those possibilities can affect topic, audience, and engagement- rather than, say, assigning them to compose "narrative essays" in September and "persuasive speeches" in May. It means using mentors to hone our writing and illustrating craft as well as to explore the ways in which we use punctuation (and the ways in which we don't). It means helping students find authentic purposes to write for authentic audiences so that they have the opportunity to "wrestle with" and "figure out" how to effectively communicate the stories that they've decided need telling.

It means giving them more blank paper.

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Discourse: Math, Literacy, and the Need for More Blank Paper - Blog | The Educator Collaborative Community

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by Shawna Coppola (@shawnacoppola) Lately, when my mind is not being consumed by thoughts about what I'm going to make for dinner, where I have to drive the kids to and from after school, and how many episodes of Judge Judy I have left on my DVR, I've been thinking a lot about the ways math and literacy are related, how they can be more effectively integrated, and all that jazz.

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Annotated playlist

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In this excerpt from his upcoming memoir, Mo' Meta Blues, the Roots drummer and Jimmy Fallon's bandleader shares the albums that defined him, from his years growing up in a musical-and increasingly religious-family, to the day he landed his first record deal.

1973:
Sly and the Family Stone,Fresh
I loved Fresh, but I especially loved side one. I treated it like a full song suite. I never really played side two until I was an adult.

1974:
Bill Withers, +'Justments / Rufus, Rags to Rufus
When my parents were going away on tour, they would wait until Sunday to tell me and my sister. +'Justments was on during one of those Sundays. "Sideways," on Rags to Rufus, is like a jam session. Evidently no one stopped the tape, because you hear Chaka Khan say, "The food is here?"

1975:
Ohio Players, Honey
My parents got me this record for my 5th birthday. Later on, I asked my mother, "Come on! How did you approve of that cover?" She explained that their eyes weren't open to the evils of the world until years later, when Prince came along.

1979:
Stevie Wonder, Journey Through the Secret Life of Plants
Whenever I hear "Seasons," I'm right there all over again, with my sister walking home from Broad Street in Philadelphia. There is snow on the ground, and posters for Steve Martin's The Jerk, which is coming in Christmas.

1980:
Diana Ross, Diana / The Commodores, Heroes
I spent the entire summer of 1980 living in a vacation resort called Frenchman's Reef in the Virgin Islands. The Diana record was the only contemporary record that I heard, because the owner of the nightclub where my parents were playing had it on continuously as filler music between my father's shows. I liked the Commodores record because of the consistency of the logo. I was always liking records for the wrong reasons.

1981:
The Time, The Time / The Jacksons, The Jacksons: Live
There was a kid in sixth grade whose mom allowed him to bring his boom box to the cafeteria. When "After Hi School" came on, I tripped over the cord and knocked his boom box over. "You owe me money," he said. I knew that my dad kept at least $4,000 hidden in the library. I figured I'm just going to take a twenty. I took $25 instead. I had gotten whippings throughout my life, but when he found out I had taken the money, it was that and then some. That set the course for our relationship. If Joe [Jackson] hadn't given his kids all those whippings, then they never would have made the record, and I never would have gotten my whipping.

1985:
Jesse Johnson, Jesse Johnson's Revue
Prince wanted to beat the Beatles at their own game. Around the World in a Day was his bid. I dug it. I loved it. But I also missed the straight, stripped-down Minneapolis funk, and that's why I gravitated toward [Prince's guitarist] Jesse Johnson's first record.

1986:
Janet Jackson, Control
I D.J.-ed for Janet three times, and she just shit when I put on "He Doesn't Know I'm Alive," which is one of the few songs from that record that didn't become a hit. I wanted to show her that she was important to me, that I remember when she sang "The Magic Is Working" on Diff'rent Strokes.

1987:
Prince, Sign 'O' the Times
When I first heard "Housequake," I was at a local laundromat, and when the song came on, with the Camille voice saying, "Shut up already ... damn!," I just freaked out. I ran right home to get my hands on a cassette player so I could tape it. I made it in time for Prince to say, "A groove this funky is on the run."

1993:
A Tribe Called Quest, Midnight Marauders / Wu-Tang Clan, Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers)
There have been plenty of classic records. But these were the end of the innocence, and they came at such a great moment for me. [My bassist] Hub and I were freezing in a van with a gospel group that we didn't particularly like. Our minds were back in Philly and New York, wondering if we were going to sign a record deal or not. When we got word that the record deal was coming through, we just quit. We left them high and dry, no drummer, no bass player. When the band picked me up in the van the next day to drive to New York and sign our contract, they had both cassettes. It was the greatest day ever.

From the book Mo' Meta Blues, by Ahmir "Questlove" Thompson and Ben Greenman. © 2013 by Ahmir Thompson. Reprinted by permission of Grand Central Publishing. All rights reserved.

*This article originally appeared in the June 17, 2013 issue of New York Magazine.

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In this excerpt from his upcoming memoir, Mo' Meta Blues, the Roots drummer and Jimmy Fallon's bandleader shares the albums that defined him, from his years growing up in a musical-and increasingly religious-family, to the day he landed his first record deal. 1973: Sly and the Family Stone,Fresh I loved Fresh, but I especially loved side one.

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“El Sueño Americano / The American Dream: Photographs by Tom Kiefer"

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“El Sueño Americano / The American Dream: Photographs by Tom Kiefer"

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From a distance, it's hard to make out the details of a bright yellow photograph that seems like a piece of Pop art. But up close, the carefully arranged assortment of objects - colorful pills, wrappers and ointments for treating ailments like heartburn, diarrhea, and headaches - come into full view. There's even insulin among the ordered chaos.

These items were all seized from migrants and asylum seekers trekking through the desert in an attempt to cross the U.S.-Mexico border. Deemed potentially lethal or nonessential by border officials, the medications were thrown away, along with other personal belongings, during the first stages of processing at a U.S. Customs and Border Protection facility in southern Arizona.

While working as a janitor at the same facility from 2003 to 2014, photographer Tom Kiefer secretly collected the belongings and later began shooting them.

More than 100 of his photos make up the exhibition "El Sueño Americano / The American Dream: Photographs by Tom Kiefer" on view at the Skirball Cultural Center until March 8.

Some photos are large. One features 15 heavy-duty, black plastic bottles wrapped in remnants of clothing or blanket. In another, 32 CDs labeled with titles including "Super Sappy Songs for Issa 2," "Brown Pride" and "Boogie Nights" have been evenly spaced on top of a bubble-gum-pink background.

Smaller photos - of a love letter, pieces of jewelry, a rabbit's foot keychain - show individual items seized and discarded by border officials.

Throwing away the personal belongings "underscores the cruelty of the tentative punishment that the government feels the need to levy against these people," Kiefer said. "It's clear the majority of which are decent, contributing and who want nothing more than a better life for themselves or for their family."

Kiefer moved to Ajo, Ariz., in 2001 after 20 years of working as a graphic designer and later an antique store owner in L.A. In search of more affordable living, he bought a home and began traveling the country to photograph buildings, landscapes and cultural markers, "the things that make America, America," he said.

In 2003, he took a part-time job as a janitor at a U.S. Customs and Border Protection facility near Ajo to help sustain his creative practice.

One of his first vivid memories from the job was seeing the canned food that the migrants carried. In his first two years on the job, agents collected the cans and brought them to a local food bank. But under new leadership, they were told to stop donating the food.

"For the next two years, I witnessed all this food being needlessly thrown out," Kiefer said.

After asking for permission to collect the food again, he came into contact with other belongings.

The first items to pull Kiefer's attention were 15 to 20 toothbrushes. At the time, he didn't think about photographing them. He just felt compelled to remove them from the trash. "When I started seeing a rosary, or a Bible, or a wallet, I realized that no one would believe me if I had not collected these items."
<<< 'SLAVE PLAY': Writer Jeremy O. Harris has arrived. Why Broadway may never be the same >>>
It took about six years of collecting - blankets, cellphones, toilet paper, depression medication, shoelaces - before Kiefer began photographing.

The first subject was a mountainous pile of water bottles. About 10 images into the documentation, something clicked. He assembled brushes and combs over a black background. "After I shot it and looked at it, it was like, 'Oh my God, this is it,'" Kiefer said.

Color is an essential component of the photos, a way to inject humanity into each personal belonging, Kiefer said. Shooting the items on the same background "wouldn't feel right, it would it would feel like it was a scientific observation of something."

The color and composition of the everyday objects in the photographs draw people in, said Skirball curator Laura Mart. But it's also "like a knife to the gut, and that's precisely something that I think gives this work its power - that it draws you in with its beauty and then it has this really profoundly sad backstory."

One of the show's biggest tragedies, Mart said, "is that we have no way of knowing really who these people are, who carried these things, what happened to them, and what they're doing now."

Kiefer estimates he has more than 100,000 items collected and stored in his studio and other spaces around Ajo. The word he uses to describe how he copes with the magnitude of his collection: compartmentalize.

"There's definitely a psychological and emotional weight to all this," he said. "But because I ... saved them from the landfill, I have a personal connection to them."

About 90% of the belongings have not been photographed. "El Sueño Americano" is an ongoing project Kiefer plans to continue for a long time.

"It's not physically possible," the photographer, 60, said. "And to do it in the manner in which I'm doing, these objects are sacred and I come from a place of deep reverence and respect. ... I'd have to live to be 100."

Kiefer plans to donate the items to an institution or university so they can live on as historical documents of how the government has treated migrants. He hopes the exhibition will educate viewers and possibly inspire them to action.

"Our government is actually taking away a Bible or rosary," he said. "I mean, how twisted is that?"

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Border Patrol threw away migrants' belongings. A janitor saved and photographed them

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From a distance, it's hard to make out the details of a bright yellow photograph that seems like a piece of Pop art. But up close, the carefully arranged assortment of objects - colorful pills, wrappers and ointments for treating ailments like heartburn, diarrhea, and headaches - come into full view.

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Cartoonist Lynda Barry: Drawing 'Has To Come Out Of Your Body'

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Cartoonist Lynda Barry: Drawing 'Has To Come Out Of Your Body'

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It's always a surprise to see whom the MacArthur Foundation selects to receive its annual fellowships - the six-figure awards known as Genius Grants - but one of this year's picks was particularly exhilarating: comic artist Lynda Barry. For anyone who read alternative weeklies from the '80s through the '00s, she was the eternally wise and strange mind behind Ernie Pook's Comeek. She has also penned several graphic novels and three books about the creative process, adapted an award-winning off-Broadway play, and taught art, most recently at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Her most recent book is Making Comics, out this month. I spoke to her about the drawing process and how we learn - and unlearn - it.
Congratulations, first of all, on winning a MacArthur Fellowship! What did you do when you found out?
After we hung up?
So that's how they tell you - they call?
But in my case, I hardly ever use the phone. So I kept getting these calls. I think I hung up on them around seven times because I thought it was a robocall. And then I just turned off my phone because I was really irritated - "Who keeps trying to call me?" ... I found out a while later, from somebody who I know very well, that somebody really needed me to call them.
It's kind of funny that the award is known as the Genius Grant, considering that in your new book, you tell people they don't need to be artistic geniuses to create great comics.
That's true.
What do you think about the idea of genius?
I don't know. You know, it's like the term "fresh bread," right? It could mean anything. ... I guess what I mean by that would be that they're able to do stuff in a way that I can't track back to how they were able to do that thing. Sometimes that even applies to 4-year-olds that I work with.
The specialness of really young kids' drawing is something you circle back to several times in your new book, Making Comics. You suggest that something happens around age 4 or 5 that shuts down that magical way of seeing. How would you characterize the impressive 4-year-old artists you've seen? What assumptions are those?
Via language, the only thing 4-year-olds can't do is write rapidly. They can do everything else. And so, what happens at about the age of 5, when people enter the school system, is that drawing and writing become split. That's when there's some idea that those two things need to be moved away from each other. Even to the point, you know, where we start looking at books that have more words than pictures.

Their drawings seem to come from the movement of their hands, rather than an intention. ... That's why I think that when kids [are] tested - to see if they're smart enough to go to some cool kindergarten or whatever - and they'll tell kids to do things like draw a circle, draw a triangle ... those ways of testing kids' aptitude are sort of false. And again, based on assumptions that people who quit drawing a long time ago make up about drawing.

That you know what you're going to draw before you draw. That's one of the things I've seen when people instruct kids to draw. ... They start by telling them how important the paper is. You don't want to waste paper. So, you want to sit and think carefully about what it is you're going to draw before you draw it. ... That's not how drawing works at all. I'm sure there is some kind of drawing that works that way, but mostly it doesn't. ...
That makes me think about what you said in the book about how drawing taps into stuff that maybe we didn't imagine we were going to tap into when we started. And how some people have an urge to cover up their drawings or destroy them completely.
When I'm making a comic, the drawing itself has a huge part in what happens with the [story]. Say I'm drawing a character, and I think maybe they're surprised. And when I go to draw their eyebrow, maybe my pen slips a little and it points down instead of up. So now the character looks angry. But [with] that expression of anger on their face, the story takes a different tack that I didn't expect. I've really learned to follow that - to follow what my hand is doing.
There are different goals.
One of the things you'll hear people say, when they tell me they wish they could draw, is, "I see it in my head, but I can't get it onto the page." And then I have to remind them that what they're seeing in their head is not a drawing. Drawing is something that has to come out of your body. And that horror they have is the same horror they might have if a bodily fluid was suddenly released, like suddenly they got a bloody nose or started drooling. It's that same shame about this thing that's out of their control that seems to be coming from them.

My task - and it can be done within 30 minutes - is to get them past that. ... The easiest way to do that is to have them close their eyes and draw. ... The trick is to show them that there's another kind of drawing that is very different than representational drawing.

Sometimes the drawing that's left over is not as important as the fact that it can transform your mood. You can transform the way that you feel about something. You can crack you up. I mean, you can crack yourself up with an index card and a letter pen. I think it's pretty interesting.

Etelka Lehoczky has written about books for The Atlantic, The Los Angeles Review of Books and The New York Times. She tweets: @EtelkaL.

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Cartoonist Lynda Barry: Drawing 'Has To Come Out Of Your Body'

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It's always a surprise to see whom the MacArthur Foundation selects to receive its annual fellowships - the six-figure awards known as Genius Grants - but one of this year's picks was particularly exhilarating: comic artist Lynda Barry. For anyone who read alternative weeklies from the '80s through the '00s, she was the eternally wise and strange mind behind Ernie Pook's Comeek.

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A student of @kegancunningham’s recently created some blackout poetry from my recent @VoicesNCTE  piece on #WritingRedefined and...😭😍🤗 (shared w/ permission)

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A student of @kegancunningham’s recently created some blackout poetry from my recent @VoicesNCTE  piece on #WritingRedefined and...😭😍🤗 (shared w/ permission) https://t.co/DYPDkCt2Ma

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A student of @kegancunningham’s recently created some blackout poetry from my recent @VoicesNCTE piece on #WritingRedefined and...😭😍🤗 (shared w/ permission) pic.twitter.com/DYPDkCt2Ma
— Shawna Coppola (@ShawnaCoppola) November 27, 2019

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A student of @kegancunningham’s recently created some blackout poetry from my recent @VoicesNCTE  piece on #WritingRedefined and...😭😍🤗 (shared w/ permission) https://t.co/DYPDkCt2Ma

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.original_text
A student of @kegancunningham’s recently created some blackout poetry from my recent @VoicesNCTE  piece on #WritingRedefined and...😭😍🤗 (shared w/ permission) https://t.co/DYPDkCt2Ma

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A student of @kegancunningham’s recently created some blackout poetry from my recent @VoicesNCTE  piece on #WritingRedefined and...😭😍🤗 (shared w/ permission)

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Netflix series mock-ups from books students love

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Netflix series mock-ups from books students love

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Had my students make Netflix book series based on a book they love. Gave minimal direction and said the one that looked the most like Netflix in each class would win. Here are a few to show off what they accomplished in just two classes the last week of school!! @BAM_MS_Official

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Had my students make Netflix book series based on a book they love. Gave minimal direction and said the one that looked the most like Netflix in each class would win. Here are a few to show off what they accomplished in just two classes the last week of school!! @BAM_MS_Official https://t.co/IXkj6Mnwzb

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Had my students make Netflix book series based on a book they love. Gave minimal direction and said the one that looked the most like Netflix in each class would win. Here are a few to show off what they accomplished in just two classes the last week of school!! @BAM_MS_Official pic.twitter.com/IXkj6Mnwzb
— Jen Cherry (@CherryReads) June 9, 2019

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Had my students make Netflix book series based on a book they love. Gave minimal direction and said the one that looked the most like Netflix in each class would win. Here are a few to show off what they accomplished in just two classes the last week of school!! @BAM_MS_Official https://t.co/IXkj6Mnwzb

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.original_text
Had my students make Netflix book series based on a book they love. Gave minimal direction and said the one that looked the most like Netflix in each class would win. Here are a few to show off what they accomplished in just two classes the last week of school!! @BAM_MS_Official https://t.co/IXkj6Mnwzb

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Had my students make Netflix book series based on a book they love. Gave minimal direction and said the one that looked the most like Netflix in each class would win. Here are a few to show off what they accomplished in just two classes the last week of school!! @BAM_MS_Official

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"Writing, Redefined" (Voices from the Middle)

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"Writing, Redefined" (Voices from the Middle)

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The Opening of A Tale of Two Cities--with a Twist

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The Opening of A Tale of Two Cities--with a Twist

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The New York Times

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An artist illuminates the opening to Charles Dickens's "A Tale of Two Cities" - with a modern twist.

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Photo Essay: Weeknight Dinner Around the World

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Photo Essay: Weeknight Dinner Around the World

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The New York Times

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We asked 18 families to show us what they have for dinner on a typical weeknight.

Credit... Lauren DeCicca for The New York Times

Wasa Khuhaprema, center, prepares dinner for her family, including her parents, with help from her two young sons; the boys cook at least one night a week. This night, they ate an omelet with carrots, stir-fried minced pork and eggplant, and southern Thai sour curry with cauliflower. Family members are expected to clean up after themselves.

Image

Credit... Saumya Khandelwal for The New York Times

The Osans - from left, Radha, Tara, Gurinder and Shikha - get dinner on the table at their home in Gurgaon, southwest of New Delhi, with help from a cook. The family eats around 9 p.m., and on this night, the meal consisted of palak paneer (spinach with cheese), raita, kadai aloo (potatoes with onions and spices), cucumber salad and roasted chapatis.

Claudia Bellucci, left, with her daughter, Fiamma, does most of the cooking for her family in Rome. For this meal, she picked herbs from her terrace for saltimbocca alla Romana (veal rolled with ham and sage). She also served homemade pesto with trofie pasta, a salad and baked tomatoes au gratin.

From left, Basmah, Mazin, Abdulmalik and Abdulrahman Khojandi eat their meals - a mix of prepared and homemade foods - at home most nights during the week. Dinner on this evening was smashed beans, shakshuka and masoob, a mixture of banana, bread, dates, cream and honey.

While many Haitian families eat their main meal at midday, the Charles family takes theirs in the evening, usually around 7 p.m. Youvelyne Rosier Charles, top left, prepares the meal: On this night, she made lalo with sos pwa nwa, a black bean sauce served with rice. Oranges and limes from the yard were used to marinate the meat and crab for the lalo. Ms. Charles' 4-year-old daughter, Meghan, wearing barrettes, led the family in a short prayer.

Marina Pajovic Devouge prepares an early meal for her two children, Klara and Maxime, in the family's apartment in Paris before her husband gets home. That night, the children ate some leftover roasted chicken from the butcher around the corner, paired with couscous from Picard Surgelés, a frozen-food store popular in France. They finished their meals with a Petit Suisse cheese and two slices of Comté for Maxime, and a slice each of Comté and Emmental for Klara.

Jarrod and Susie Opie and their three children live in Yallingup, on the Indian Ocean. On weeknights like this one, she cleans and he cooks: pan-fried nannygai, a local red snapper, with broccolini and sweet potato fries. The kids got extra fruits and vegetables.

Fleure Henket, left, cooks for her family four nights a week, limiting meat consumption to two nights a week. This evening, she served salmon with basmati rice and broccoli; dessert was a homemade custard with fresh raspberries and berry jam.

The Garzas get weeknight dinner on their table in Laredo with help from an Instant Pot. On this evening, they ate spaghetti with meat sauce, along with a green salad and garlic bread. They eat at home six nights a week; they'll sometimes order takeout if they have prayer group or baseball practice for Grayson, 4, in foreground.

Wednesday nights are for wraps at the Sokoh home in Lagos. Ozoz Sokoh, right, a food writer, with her daughter Riobo, flipped freshly made plantain flatbreads, which were served with chicken suya, lime-pickled onions and a tomato and eggplant salsa thawed from the freezer. Dinner included condiments galore, including peanut butter sauce, papaya chutney, hibiscus green chile sauce, mint and spring onion oil, tamarind ginger sauce, and beet and carrot sauerkraut.

Yasuko Iguchi picked okra from her garden to cook for her son, Masahiro Iguchi, a divorced father of three who comes with his children to eat dinner a few nights a week. On this evening they ate mebaru, a rockfish, with rice, miso soup and fresh fruit for dessert.

Carmem Massad Curi, bottom right, made picadinho, a traditional Brazilian stew made with beef, carrots and potatoes, which they ate with rice and a salad as they watched TV. Her husband, Luis Felippe, sets the table, and her children, Lucas and Giovanna, clear the plates.

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We asked 18 families to show us what they have for dinner on a typical weeknight. Credit... Lauren DeCicca for The New York Times Wasa Khuhaprema, center, prepares dinner for her family, including her parents, with help from her two young sons; the boys cook at least one night a week.

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Starting Your Podcast: A Guide for Students

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Starting Your Podcast: A Guide for Students

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We don't expect you to be experts. In fact, we expect that most of you are putting a podcast together for the first time.

And even though this is a contest, it's also about learning new skills in a fun way. We want to make that learning easier - so we've put together a guide to help you along the way.
Getting Started Your Toolbox Podcast Examples Planning Your Podcast Getting Your Ideas Together Brainstorming Sounds Podcast Structure Podcast Production What Makes A Good Interview? Preparing For Field Recording Scripting Your Podcast Voicing The Podcast Production Tips Before we get started, we know you might have a few questions. Let's talk about a few basics. What's a podcast?
Podcasts come in all shapes and sizes. That's good news for you, because it means that you have lots of room to be creative and make something you're excited about. Some podcasts, like This American Life, are long - sometimes an hour or more. Others, like Kind World, a podcast from WBUR, are less than 10 minutes. Some podcasts, like NPR's Up First, are about news. Up First comes out every morning, and the hosts talk about the news and feature stories from guests reporting on the news. Other podcasts tell stories. Lots are funny. Some feature people having conversations. Many are educational: They teach listeners about a specific topic. NPR's Hidden Brain is about science and human behavior. And there's Planet Money, a podcast all about money and life.

Think about sound. We're challenging you to work with sounds - interviews, narration and recorded sounds from the world around you.
Don't I need fancy equipment to make a podcast?
Nope! There are ways to make a podcast without buying expensive microphones and recorders. We're writing this guide with the idea that you can make a podcast with two tools: a smartphone and a computer.
How many people do we need, and what roles are involved?
There isn't a set number of people needed to create a podcast, but it helps to have a team of people who work in different roles.

The role of producers frequently varies between podcasts and radio shows. Often, producers are in charge of the sound: They record the sound and edit it to put the podcast together. You'll also need writers to write out questions for interviews or the script. (Sometimes, producers or hosts pitch in to help write for podcasts.) Hosts also "voice" the podcast by acting as the narrator and conducting interviews with subjects. Depending on the size of your class or group, some team members may work as researchers or spend time organizing interviews. After you record the conversations or interviews, your team will want to make sure you talk about what you want to cut out and keep in - that's all part of the editing process. You might choose to have editors on your team or assign editing duties to teammates who have pitched in in other ways.

You can divide up these duties in a way that makes sense for the size of your team. You might decide to have multiple people host and multiple people work as producers.
What does it mean to mix audio?
Mixing is the process of editing and arranging audio clips in a way that sounds seamless and natural to a listener. After you and your team record sounds from interviews, events or other sources, you'll need to arrange them in a sound-editing software, like Audacity, which you can download online free of charge.
I've been reading lots of training guides that use tons of words I don't know. Help!
This glossary from NPR's training site has lots of words that you might come across if you're reading up on podcasting.

Your Toolbox

Before you think too much about your podcast, you're going to want to think about how, exactly, you'll record the sounds you need.

Here at NPR, we use lots of equipment when we leave the office to record interviews or sounds for our stories and podcasts. But we don't expect you to have all that equipment - and you can make a podcast with a few basic tools that you already have.
1. A phone
If you carry a cellphone with you, chances are, you've got a recording device in your pocket. And if you use it the right way, you can record high-quality sounds that work just fine for your podcast.

You can record sounds, conversations or interviews with sound recording apps on your smartphone.

You can also use your phone's built-in recording app. If you've got an iPhone, go to your "utilities" folder and click on "voice memos" to begin recording.

You'll want to make sure you have enough storage on your phone to do this and that you can either email the sound file to yourself or plug your phone into the computer to upload the recording.

If you're recording a person speaking, hold the phone a few inches from his or her mouth. Not too close, but not more than a few inches away, either.
2. A computer with sound editing software
Once you've recorded your interviews or the sounds you want to use, you'll need to put them all together into your podcast. To do this, you need to use audio editing software to "mix" the sound files together. The good news is that there are lots of software options out there.

If your school already provides editing software on the computers, feel free to use that. If not, we recommend Audacity, which is a free software download available online. You can download it here. As you learn to use it, lots of tutorials are available from Audacity.

If your school or podcasting team has other tools available to use, it's important that you use them correctly to create the best product that you can.

Listening

Have you ever listened to a podcast or radio show before?

If you've listened to podcasts before - take a minute to think about them. What keeps you listening? What bores you?

Let's take a few minutes to hear a few examples. As you listen, think about the different ways that these segments are structured. Is there a host? Is it an interview style - or is a narrator telling a story, with clips of interviews in between?
Morning Edition: Hidden Brain: Hidden Brain: How Labels Can Affect People's Personalities and Potential The Haunting Effects of Going Days Without Sleep Reporting Live From Miami: A Bunch Of Fourth-Graders Tell Their Teacher's Story
How I Built This: Instagram: Kevin Systrom & Mike Krieger

Getting Your Ideas Together

Now that you've listened to a few examples, start to gather ideas. We've given you a few prompts to get you thinking. They aren't required, but you may choose to use them.

Here they are again:
Before you settle on one idea for your podcast, ask yourself:

1. Tell us a story about your school or community: about something that happened there - recently or in the past - that your audience should know about.

2. What is a moment in history that all students should learn about?

3. Show us both sides of a debate about an issue that's important to you.

4. What do you want to change about the world? What's a big change that students today will make in the future?

5. Explain something to us that kids understand and grown-ups don't.

Before you settle on one idea, take a few minutes to brainstorm. Try to come up with an idea that might work for each of these prompts. Be sure to think about how you might structure your podcast.

Would it be an interview with someone? Would one host narrate the podcast, using clips of interviews to tell a story? What sound would you use to give listeners a full idea of the story you're telling?

Is this podcast idea realistic?

If the idea involves traveling somewhere far away or interviewing someone famous, it might be difficult. Make sure you can do it before you settle on one idea.

Our friends at YR Media have a handy list of sounds that all podcasters should consider recording while planning their podcast. Scroll down to "what sounds to gather" on this page to find that list.

Does the timeline work? Can you complete your interviews or record other sounds well before the podcasts are due - so that you have time to edit the audio and submit it?

Sounds Like You're Making a Podcast

OK, so you've settled on a topic or idea for your podcast.

Now it's time to start thinking about the sounds that you'll use. Regardless of how your project is structured, it helps to feature a variety of sounds.
Here are a couple of examples of radio pieces that use sounds to add to the story.
Try to record sounds relevant to your story. If I'm telling a story about the mayor of my town, I'll try to go record him leading a town hall meeting, talking to his constituents, and even doing day-to-day activities, that I can play during my podcast.

Let's say you're heading to a protest in front of my local town hall. You're heading into a "scene" that you might want to describe - and include sound from - in your podcast. What sounds should you include?

Compile a list of sounds you'd like to record - and bring that list with you when you go into the field.

Listen to this "Radio Field Trip" from New Hampshire Public Radio. What sounds do you hear? There's narration from the show's host, Rick Ganley - but there's a lot more than that.

And here's this one, from Radio Rookies, a series from WNYC. Listen to the sounds that Radio Rookie Edward uses and weaves between his narration.

Let's Talk Structure

Now that you know what your podcast is going to be about, and you've got an idea of the sounds you want to use, it's time to think about structure.

Before we start planning the podcast - before we get to scheduling interviews or scripting pieces - let's ask a few basic questions. Head to this link, from NPR's training site, and think about your answers.
Before you get there ...
Of course, the structure of your podcast will depend on the idea you've chosen. Will hosts from your class narrate the podcast? Then you'll start differently from the way you would have a conversation on tape.

What Makes A Good Interview?

There's a good chance that you're interviewing someone for your podcast. Maybe you're even talking to lots of different people. It's important to make the most out of the time you take to record them.

Do your research.

Make sure you understand why you're interviewing this person. Read up on who the person is, what he or she does, and the subject you're making a podcast about.

Prepare questions.
When you arrive ...

Come up with a list of open-ended questions you'd like to ask during your interview. It's OK to veer off course and good to ask follow-up questions that you haven't planned. But a list will help get things started.

Clarify the terms of the interview.
When you start recording ...

Make sure your interviewee knows you're talking to him or her for the NPR Student Podcast Challenge. The person should understand that you're recording audio.

Meet somewhere quiet (unless you want to record the noise!).

Don't choose to meet for an interview in a busy mall or a windy park. If you're indoors, head to a quiet room and close the door. If you're interviewing someone at an event, it's OK if there's some noise in the background - as long as it's the sound you want to have in the background. But try to avoid recording when there's music in the background - it's hard to edit around that sound.

Ask the interviewee to introduce himself or herself on tape.

The person should give his or her name and job title (what he or she does). A student should give his or her age and grade.

Record your own questions.

You'll want to hear these questions when you listen back to the tape later on.

Be curious.

You'll have some questions prepared - but that doesn't mean you're following a script. If the person says something you're interested in, ask questions. That's why you're there.

Remember: It's normal to be nervous. The person you're interviewing is probably nervous, too. It helps to be prepared. The better you know your questions and the better you know your equipment, the better you'll feel.

Before You Record Sound ...

Make sure you set aside time to:

Whether this is your first podcast or you're an audio pro, some basic tips can make your project a lot easier.

Test your equipment before you start.

Don't get stuck in an interview with a phone that doesn't have any storage or a microphone with no batteries.

Bring a teammate along to help when you're going to an interview or to record sounds.

Ask this person to time the interview and make a note of the interesting or compelling moments. Make a note of the time at these moments. This will help when you're cutting the audio and looking for these moments later.

Listen to the audio soon after you record it.

Save it somewhere you'll remember, and label it so you know exactly what your recording includes.

Checklist For Field Recording

Before you head out for an interview or sounds for your podcast, make sure you've got everything you need.

Download a checklist for field recording here to take with you when you're getting ready to head out to record.
Starting the story
Scripting Your Podcast

At NPR, some podcasts are scripted. That means that we plan the order that everything will be in before the host gets into the recording studio and records the narration. That can happen only after getting "tape" - sound from lots of interviews and audio from other recordings.

Let's take a look at the script of an audio segment. Here's one from the NPR Training team featuring a story from NPR's Ailsa Chang. There's not one correct way to write a script for a podcast - but it helps to indicate where your narrators will speak, and where you'll be using sounds or interview clips recorded beforehand, and how long these clips last.

First things first. So, you've figured out how you want your podcast to be structured and you've gathered the sound you need. Whether you're scripting the entire podcast or not, you probably need to write out at least one part: the very beginning.

Here's a post from NPR Training with some ideas about how to start, no matter how you're structuring your podcast.

Voicing The Podcast

After you've scripted the podcast, it's time to record the narration from the host or hosts from your group or class.

If you're hosting or narrating the podcast, you might be a little nervous about recording your voice. But here's something important to remember: Your voice is what makes you - and your podcast - sound unique. You want to sound natural, alert and energetic. You want to sound like you - the real you. Everyone stumbles over their words. And when that happens here at NPR, we often go back to the script and write shorter sentences that are easier to read and won't leave you feeling out of breathe. The key is to try to sound how you would if you were talking to a friend.
Some tips:
Here's another tip: Keep the frogs out of your throat by keeping a glass of water next to you while you're recording.

Production

Mixing is the process of editing and arranging audio clips in a way that sounds seamless and natural to a listener. After you and your podcasting team record sounds from interviews, events or other sources, you'll need to arrange them in sound-editing software, like Audacity, which is available online as a free download.

Don't leave audio mixing until the last minute. Mixing is time-consuming, especially if you're using new software or listening to long recordings. It can take many hours just to edit a few minutes of a podcast. Give yourself sufficient time to mix audio before you need to submit the podcast. Remember, the deadline for this contest is March 24.

Take the mixing process step by step. Prioritize things you need to do to make your podcast sound the best it can. Before you can do anything else, you need to cut your sound down to the clips you need, get them in order and adjust their volume levels so they're not too loud or too soft in a listener's ears. These are all things you can do in any audio editing software.

If you're already an audio mixing pro and you want some more guidance, check out this guide put together by Rob Byers of Minnesota Public Radio and NPR's training team.

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Starting Your Podcast: A Guide For Students

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Our Students Need a New Definition of Writing

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By Shawna Coppola
I identified as a writer early on in life, spending my afternoons reading books like Beverly Cleary's Beezus and Ramona (1955) and Henry and the Clubhouse (1962) and attempting to write my own chapter books about gangly, endearing boys and girls who - try as they might - cannot help but get into trouble with meddling grown-ups.

Later on, I earnestly filled notebook and computer paper with short horror stories and wry commentaries in the style of Stephen King, Dave Barry, and Erma Bombeck.

My teachers and other adults said I had an unarticulated and vague "talent" for writing that closely matched the kind of writing most privileged in school spaces - personal essays and literary analyses and (largely) feeble attempts at creative fiction. I say all this not to brag, but to be transparent about the positionality I take when speaking or writing about...well, about writing.

It's not an exaggeration to say that my schooling experiences contributed to a severely limited view of what "writing" was. The vast majority of the writing that I read in school as well as that which I composed was alphabetic. I rarely had the opportunity to compose visually, aurally, or multimodally.

Outside of school spaces, my reading life was much more broad and included such multimodal and visually heavy texts as Mad magazine, Archie comics, and popular feminist zines of the 1990s. Even so, it seldom crossed my mind to consider these forms as writing. It wasn't until my late 30s and early 40s that I realized these alternative modes and forms of composition - comics, infographics, photo essays, etc. - could offer me the kind of joy and rigor that I had felt throughout my childhood while composing in more "dominant" forms.

However, even throughout my graduate school years (which began approximately twenty years ago and have continued on and off ever since), I have only been afforded the choice to compose using something other than the exclusively alphabetic mode a handful of times.

These moments while occupying school spaces have been so few and far between that I can name them here: the digital poem remix (posted here), the annotated bibliography (which included photos of book covers), the illustrated book of original poetry. Even then, I wasn't taught how to write these forms of composition, but was merely assigned them for various classes. Everything I know about composing in modes other than that which relies almost exclusively on words to convey meaning has been largely self-taught.

Broadening Our Ideas about "Writing"

When we think about the kinds of students who typically identify (or who educators identify) as writers, whom do we think of? In my twenty years of teaching and coaching, this group, this "writing club," has felt far too exclusive. Several years ago as my repertoire of composition broadened far beyond by my youthful conceptions, I began to wonder what would happen when educators began to consider "writing" more broadly.

After all, if we think about the kinds of decisions we make as writers, we make almost all of the same kinds of decisions - about audience, content, organization, craft, even motor planning - whether we are composing a typical personal essay or a wordless picture book.

The mode, the materials, and the kind of text (e.g., alphabetic, visual, etc.) we use to convey meaning may differ, but we are still composing. We are still "writing." Unfortunately, the stories educators tell about what writing "is," and about what kinds of writing are most privileged in school spaces, do not reflect this reality.
The reality that these stories and practices do reflect is one that disproportionately dismisses and disengages - among others - those children and youth who experience difficulty learning written language, who identify as members of cultures and communities with strong oral histories, and whose home languages do not always echo what we call "standard" English.

This reality also actively disengages youth who simply prefer to compose using forms that incorporate visual, aural, and multimodal texts as a way to make or enhance meaning - forms such as podcasts, zines, and others I've already mentioned.

Just because educators have traditionally served as gatekeepers of the kinds of writing that "count" or are privileged in school spaces doesn't mean we can't also actively work to change this - thus making writing more inclusive, more engaging, and more likely to reflect the larger world outside of school.

"Redefining Writing" in Practice

In my book Writing, Redefined I offer practitioners a wide variety of ways to subvert the dominant narrative of what writing "is" in school spaces. These include incorporating visual, aural, and multimodal modes of composition in our practice in ways that will not only enhance more dominant modes and forms of writing, but are meaningful and engaging ends in themselves.

In addition, I explore the age-old concept of "remixing" - of taking existing content, such as a book review or a piece of poetry, and playing around with form, genre, and mode in order to create something entirely new.

For example, in Chapter 2, "Writing Is...Visual Composition," I explain how composing something with visual text, such as a wordless picture book, is just as complex and demanding (if not more so!) as composing something using exclusively alphabetic text, such as a short fiction story.

I then compare it to existing writing standards to demonstrate its complexity. Throughout the book are woven both student and non-student examples of mentors that folks might use as they engage in this work with children and youth.

The truth is, if we take inventory of the forms and mode(s) of writing we assign and teach in school spaces - including those I assigned and taught my first few years as a classroom teacher - and compare it with the much wider array of forms and modes of writing that children and youth are engaged with outside of school spaces, we will quickly realize unintended consequences.

Instead of opening the doorway to a much larger set of students to identify as writers in a general sense, our instructional practices are narrowing the definition with every passing grade level, while we are simultaneously shutting out many who possess incredible gifts for storytelling, for persuading an audience, and for sharing their own important lived experiences.

Over fifty years ago, in their book Teaching as a Subversive Activity (1969), Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner echoed the words of American sociologist David Riesman when they argued for a broader definition of literacy due to the fact that "print no longer 'monopolizes man's symbolic environment'" (165).

As we head into the third decade of the 21st century, this sentiment is as undeniable as ever. It's past time to ensure that our practices around writing instruction reflect this reality - for our students' sake as well as our own.
References
Coppola, Shawna. 2015. "Digital Poem: Georgia Heard's 'Straight Line'." My So-Called Literacy Life (blog). https://shawnacoppola.wordpress.com/2015/03/24/digital-poem-straight-line/

Coppola, Shawna. 2017. Renew! Become a Better - and More Authentic - Writing Teacher. Portland, ME: Stenhouse.

Postman, Neil & Charles Weingartner. 1969. Teaching as a Subversive Activity. New York: Dell Publishing Co., Inc.
Shawna Coppola (@shawnacoppola) has been teaching for over two decades. She has worked as a middle school language arts teacher, a literacy specialist for grades K-6, and an educational consultant for learners of all ages. Her color-filled book Writing, Redefined: Broadening Our Ideas of What It Means to Compose has just been published by Stenhouse.
Shawna teaches seminars through the University of New Hampshire's Professional Development & Training program and has contributed to a variety of educational blogs, including The Educator Collaborative's Community Blog. She is also the author of RENEW! Become a Better - and More Authentic - Writing Teacher (2017). Shawna and her family live in New Hampshire.

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Our Students Need a New Definition of Writing

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By Shawna Coppola I identified as a writer early on in life, spending my afternoons reading books like Beverly Cleary's Beezus and Ramona (1955) and Henry and the Clubhouse (1962) and attempting to write my own chapter books about gangly, endearing boys and girls who - try as they might - cannot help but get into trouble with meddling grown-ups.

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Sophie Yanow

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A comic about climate change, grief, endings and beginnings. Scroll to read. You can buy the beautifully printed offset version of this comic from the publisher for $6. Until May 22, half of the pr...

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from The Atlantic

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During these anxious times, we constantly check our hand computers for the latest updates, which make us still more anxious. Before technology allowed us to alarm ourselves with up-to-the-minute information, public-health messages were communicated using a fundamental graphic medium: the poster. Produced and displayed on a massive scale, these posters used a variety of cultural, political, and psychological strategies to steer public behavior with eye-catching and sometimes shocking visuals. And while today's medium provides options via Instagram that you can print yourself, the message for fighting disease remains uncomfortably the same: Cover your mouth when coughing, stay home when you're sick, avoid crowds, and don't poop in the communal stream. Timeless advice, indeed.

We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.

Alicia Yin Cheng is a partner at MGMT. design, a graphic design studio based in Brooklyn.

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courtesy of the national library of medicine

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courtesy of the virginia commonwealth university libraries

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weekly bulletin of the department of health

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courtesy of the department of special collections

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Don't Spit! Pandemic Posters Through the Years

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During these anxious times, we constantly check our hand computers for the latest updates, which make us still more anxious. Before technology allowed us to alarm ourselves with up-to-the-minute information, public-health messages were communicated using a fundamental graphic medium: the poster.

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Long Story Short: 100 Classic Books in 3 Panels

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Long Story Short: 100 Classic Books in 3 Panels

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Lisa Brown

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Literature is long. Comics are short.

Does Proust get you down? Do you find The Unbearable Lightness of Being simply unbearable? Is The Inferno your own private hell? Do you long to be conversant about classics like Moby Dick, the Bhagavad Gita, Madame Bovary, and, um, Twilight?

Bestselling illustrator Lisa Brown ( The Airport Book; Baby, Mix Me a Drink) did her homework. Long Story Short offers 100 pithy and skewering three-panel literary summaries, from curriculum classics like Don Quixote, Lord of the Flies, and Jane Eyre to modern favorites like Beloved, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, and Atonement, conveniently organized by subjects including "Love," "Sex," "Death," and "Female Trouble." Lisa Brown's Long Story Short is the perfect way to turn a traipse through what your English teacher called "the canon" into a frolic-or to happily cram for the next occasion that requires you to appear bookish and well-read.

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Literature is long. Comics are short. Does Proust get you down? Do you find The Unbearable Lightness of Being simply unbearable? Is The Inferno your own private hell? Do you long to be conversant about classics like Moby Dick, the Bhagavad Gita, Madame Bovary, and, um, Twilight?

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breakyourownnews.com

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The Breaking News Generator - Today's top story... you! Or, whatever you want. Add your pic, write the headline and we'll go live to the scene. Sort of.

Your browser does not support HTML5 Canvas.

No images are saved to the servers of Break Your Own News.

By @JonathanEx. Find out more.

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Break Your Own News - The Breaking News Generator

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Today's top story... you! Or, whatever you want. Add your pic, write the headline and we'll go live to the scene. Sort of.

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This activity builds off of various line drawings exercises I do in class, including Grids & Gestures, along with the use of lines from Tristram Shandy & Vonnegut's Shape of Stories (see the video of Vonnegut online). For your "story line", think of an arc of your life - either recent months or your whole life, and make a line that represents your experiences. Interpret as you wish. See my main Education page here.

I put a few excerpts from my slides here - but the more full explanation can be found here storyline activity instructions

My sample slides are here - can see a little bit of how I set it up and student examples on PDF here storyline activity instructions

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This activity builds off of various line drawings exercises I do in class, including Grids & Gestures, along with the use of lines from Tristram Shandy & Vonnegut's Shape of Stories (see the video of Vonnegut online).

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A Photo Essay

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Photographer Chris de Bode, working with Save the Children, decided to try to capture a dream in a photo

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Teen Vogue

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Coverage of the 2020 campaign is laser-focused on the candidates. While Americans are asking themselves who will be the next president, the press has not left one stone unturned about the people running: the speeches, the foibles, the missed handshakes, even the memes.

But what about the issues? Sure, they aren't as sexy as the drama, but ultimately it's the candidates' stances and commitments to different policy issues that will make their time in the White House impactful to us, the voting public. That's why we asked you, the young voters we write for, what matters as we head into a presidential election year.

Since the last election, we've covered the notable rise in youth activism and political engagement. We know that you're politically engaged as a generation, invested in the issues that matter to your communities, and ready to speak truth to power. What we don't know is how all this energy might influence your views on electoral politics, the biggest issues our country is facing, and the policies 2020 candidates stand for.

So we partnered with IPSOS, one of the world's largest market research companies, to conduct an in-depth survey of 2,206 people, ages 18-34, on what issues are most important to you, how you identify politically, and what is going to motivate you to vote. What we found surprised us: Topics we assumed would be major concerns actually weren't, and as a generation, you're more unified on priorities across party lines than we anticipated.

These are our findings.

There's a lot more overlap on issues among young people (18-34) across different political affiliations than you might think.

Respondents agree that the top three most important issues for American political leaders to address are health care, the economy, and education, even if they disagree on the specific policy proposals that best address those issues.

According to 73% of respondents, our future is at risk because of climate change, and 69% say the government won't act quickly enough to stop it; 72% support providing government subsidies to clean energy providers; and 66% percent support placing a tax on carbon pollution.

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8 Things to Know About Young Voters and 2020

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Coverage of the 2020 campaign is laser-focused on the candidates. While Americans are asking themselves who will be the next president, the press has not left one stone unturned about the people running: the speeches, the foibles, the missed handshakes, even the memes. But what about the issues?

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Mental Floss

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Test your knowledge with amazing and interesting facts, trivia, quizzes, and brain teaser games on MentalFloss.com.

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NPR

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When Raisha Doumbia, a 20-year-old swimming instructor in Roswell, Ga., first downloaded the video-sharing app TikTok, she made lighthearted posts, like her lip-syncing and dancing to a song by the British girl group Little Mix.

But Doumbia paused the playful routines after George Floyd was killed by police in Minneapolis. Now she is using her TikTok feed to urge followers to march for racial justice.

"I was just so disgusted that I felt like I needed to say something, so I started to speak out, even though I had like 13 followers," she said.

Soon, she had more than 60,000 followers as her videos in support of the protests gained traction.

"So many had a blind eye to racial injustice, especially young people who aren't even being taught about it and their parents aren't talking about it," Doumbia said. "So it's really beneficial for the next generation to be experiencing it on TikTok."
Advocating for racial justice, 30 seconds at a time
Doumbia is far from alone. Videos with the #blacklivesmatter hashtag have skyrocketed to a top spot on TikTok, accruing more than 6 billion views in recent days. Other popular hashtags include #blackvoices and #blackmusic.

Some prominent white TikTok users are contributing to the movement, like Charli D'Amelio, a 16-year-old TikTok superstar who lives in Norwalk, Conn. She normally posts dance videos. But in the wake of George Floyd's death, she told her 60 million fans that she was having a somber moment of reflection.

"As a person who has been given the platform to be an influencer, I realized that with that title, I have a job to inform people about the racial inequalities in the world right now," she said in a recent video.

Analyst Deborah Aho Williamson of eMarketer, who studies social media trends, said many TikTok users are so young that they have yet to reckon with weighty issues like police brutality and racial bias.

"For the first time, they might be exploring how they feel about these issues and being able to do that on TikTok and see other young people who are expressing similar things, I think it's really valid and valuable," she said.

Teens and 20-somethings have flocked to TikTok in the two years that it has been available in the U.S. It gained an even bigger following as many people stayed at home because of the coronavirus pandemic. In recent months, TikTok has emerged as the most-downloaded app in the world, outpacing Zoom, WhatsApp and Facebook.

Something can go viral nearly instantaneously on many social media platforms, but TikTok stands out for how rapidly a user can acquire a large following after sharing just a single video that strikes a chord, Aho Williamson noted.

Short and breezy videos that are funny or feature animals or cooking trends typically dominate TikTok, yet national upheaval over systemic racism has tapped into raw emotion that is also deeply resonating.

All of a sudden, TikTok has become the go-to forum for burgeoning youth activism.

"Anger, dismay, disgust and unhappiness are all feelings that can be easily transmitted on a video on Tik Tok," Aho Williamson said.
Black creators accuse TikTok of suppression
Activism arrived on TikTok just as scrutiny of its parent company, the Chinese-owned ByteDance, intensified.

As protests began to sweep the nation, black creators noticed that videos tagged #GeorgeFloyd or #BlackLivesMatter were hard to find, or looked as though no one had watched them despite a torrent of views.

To some users, it was a suspicious development, considering that ByteDance has been accused of censoring videos of anti-Beijing protestsin Hong Kong, in addition to having been exposed for previously suppressing posts from users deemed too unattractive or undesirable for the platform.

TikTok insists that is not what happened in posts related to Black Lives Matter. In an about-face, the company apologized and blamed the problem on a "technical glitch."

"Nevertheless, we understand that many assumed this bug to be an intentional act to suppress the experiences and invalidate the emotions felt by the black community. And we know we have work to do to regain and repair that trust," said Vanessa Pappas, TikTok's general manager for the U.S.

Many black TikTok users still remain skeptical of the company's intentions, said Kadisha Phillips, a social media strategist with Carbon Clutch, Inc.

"This caused some real reputational damage in the black TikTok creator community," Phillips said. "And making matters worse is that users are still reporting that videos are being removed or suppressed."

Doumbia said she is good exapmle of this. She had gained a sizable following from her videos related to the George Floyd protests, although many of her recent posts about police brutality and street demonstrators are being seen by just a sliver of her audience.

It's a practice that has become known as shadow banning, when TikTok quietly demotes someone's videos, and black creators like Doumbia feel like the app is targeting them. It is an accusation that has been lodged by many on TikTok, with the hashtag #shadowbanned having received more than 127 million views on the platform.

"It just doesn't make sense that I have tens of thousands of new followers who came to me for videos about the protests, but I only get like 500 views on the posts," she said. "It just doesn't make any sense to me."

Doumbia also points to the main feed on the app, known as the For You page. It's a personalized mix of accounts that a user chooses to follow and videos TikTok thinks they will enjoy based on other videos they've liked or watched.

Lately, though, Doumbia said a curious thing has been happening.

"I only like Black Lives Matter posts, but I don't see any posts on my For You about Black Lives Matter, so it seems like they are still covering it up because it's too political for them," Doumbia said.

She has begun doing videos explaining why she distrusts the app.

A TikTok spokesperson denied to NPR that the company engages in shadow banning.

"Like virtually all social platforms, our recommendations take into account users' preferences based on things like the creators they follow and the videos they engage with," the TikTok spokesperson said. "TikTok's systems also work to intersperse recommendations that might fall outside these expressed preferences to give an opportunity to discover new categories of content."
Black creators face racism on TikTok
For some black creators, TikTok is not problem, but rather other users, as unwelcome comments have at times greeted videos about racial inequality and police brutality.

When 17-year-old Kai Harris of Mount Laurel, N.J. posted a video about going to a Black Lives Matter protest, some viewers responded with racist and other offensive comments.

"They're like, 'I came here for a good time. I came here to laugh and dance, and you're bringing me down with all this stuff,'" Harris said. "And I'm like, 'The fact that this is happening is bringing me down.'"

Harris, whos is active in high school theater and has grown her TikTok following of more than 260,000, cannot imagine going back to only making dance videos now. George Floyd's death has her thinking nonstop about the way police treat black people.

"I do not want to grow up in a world where this keeps happening, so I decided, 'You know what? I've been silent on these issues sometimes. I don't share my opinions, but I need to share them now,'" she said.

Harris said she remembers when Trayvon Martin was killed in 2012. But back then, she did not grasp the full weight of that moment because she was just 10 years old. Now that she is 17, she's ready to change some minds - one 30-second TikTok video at a time.

"People are telling me that they're talking to and calling out their relatives and friends on these issues," Harris said. "And that's what I want: for people to understand our emotions and why this is a movement, because we want change and we want the harm to stop."

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TikTok Pivots From Dance Moves To A Racial Justice Movement

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When Raisha Doumbia, a 20-year-old swimming instructor in Roswell, Ga., first downloaded the video-sharing app TikTok, she made lighthearted posts, like her lip-syncing and dancing to a song by the British girl group Little Mix. But Doumbia paused the playful routines after George Floyd was killed by police in Minneapolis.

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BBC

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Why some teens are using short, shareable social media videos to deal with the big issues affecting them.

Hannah Price

"My uncle died due to knife crime in 2015... he was 19."

"My brother's friend died as well a week ago :("

"I've been there too and I'm only 11... sorry for your loss."

These comments were posted underneath a recent TikTok video made by 17-year-old Rhea.

She knew Ben Gillham-Rice - one of two boys stabbed to death at a house party in Milton Keynes on 19 October.

Three days later Rhea made her video, with the aim of making other teens understand the real impact of knife crime.

"It's only just hit me properly that they are actually gone forever," she says in the clip.

The video quickly had more than 100,000 views and hundreds of comments on TikTok, starting a viral conversation about a huge issue.

Serious subjects on a 'jokey' platform

In case you haven't heard of it, TikTok is a video-sharing app that lets users create and share 15 - 60-second clips set to music or sound bites. Most of its users are reportedly under the age of 30.

Unlike Snapchat and Instagram, on TikTok's main feed you see content from people you don't know as well as from friends and family - meaning anyone on the app has a potentially huge platform (otherwise known as clout).

The app - owned by Chinese company ByteDance - isn't without controversy. Recently it has been accused of censoring content that the Chinese government doesn't like, including the Hong Kong protests.

But the company denies this, telling the BBC: "TikTok does not remove content based on sensitivities related to China. We have never been asked by the Chinese government to remove any content and we would not do so if asked."

Go onto TikTok and you'll find a world of lip syncing videos, trending dance moves and reimagined memes.

So while it might not seem like the most obvious place to try to bring about social change, some say the lighthearted nature of the app allows them to be activists without feeling the full weight of activism.

It's not just knife crime videos. Teens are using TikTok to talk to each other about other topical issues, from wealth inequality to racism.

'Political statements and goofy videos'

Nicole, 18 - Pennsylvania, USA

After taking a shot at wealth inequality armed with a pad of lined paper, a permanent marker and her phone - Nicole spoke to us about why she started making satirical videos on TikTok.

"I live in a small town with a lot of close-minded people, and my political views differ a lot from my family and friends.

"Social media helped to influence my opinions and I want to be able to do that for other young people."

'I turned TikTok activism into real-life action'

Gillian, 16 - Nevada, USA

Gillian used TikTok to organise a student strike over teachers' pay. She was moved to do it because her mum is a teacher. As a result of the strike, Gillian's mum and her colleagues got their pay rise, as did other teachers across America.

Gillian told the BBC: "The way they treated the teachers at the school board meeting I went to was absolutely disgusting.... [Changing things] was probably the best feeling I've ever had."

'The support I got changed my world'

Two weeks after Leah was diagnosed with rare cancer Ewing's sarcoma, and started documenting her treatment, she was receiving over 2,000 messages on TikTok.

She told the BBC she wanted to share her eight months of treatment on a social media app that allowed her to be open and real about everything: "The side effects are really hard with vomiting, nausea and a lot more. It's all very scary... but I wouldn't have such good days or be this positive without the support I am getting on my social media, it's so amazing."

'Educating people about Aboriginal culture'

Eshia, 20 - Adelaide, Australia

Eshia was frustrated with how Aboriginal teenagers like herself were treated. So she started sharing her experiences of racism on TikTok.

"I have faced racist comments my whole life, just for the colour of my skin... In primary school if Aboriginal kids [like me] did not sing the national anthem because of our culture, we were sent to the principal's office," she tells the BBC.

'10 minutes to make videos that can help people'

Jaden, 18 - California, USA

When the beat dropped in Jaden's first hit 15-second video, he came out to his followers as transgender. The overwhelming reaction, and "dumb and hurtful" comments he says he has received in his life, encouraged him to keep using the app to raise awareness.

"I used to see the app as a joke but now I get DMs every day, telling me that I'm encouraging young trans people, and that I've helped them come out with their family," he says.

'I raise awareness, then go back to being a normal teen'

Luiza, 16 - Staines-upon-Thames, UK

After Luiza and her friends saw TikTok videos about the Global Climate Strike in September - they decided to protest - then use the app to do the same.

"Climate change is a very real thing that impacts my generation's future directly.

"I didn't want to limit the protest to being strictly on the streets, I wanted our voices to be heard and did it the best way I know how - through the internet."

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TikTok activism: 'We're changing the world in 15 seconds' - BBC Three

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N/A Why some teens are using short, shareable social media videos to deal with the big issues affecting them. Hannah Price "My uncle died due to knife crime in 2015... he was 19." "My brother's friend died as well a week ago :(" "I've been there too and I'm only 11...

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Teens are making historical events go viral on TikTok

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Teens are making historical events go viral on TikTok

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The Guardian

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There is a long-held stereotype that teenagers spend a lot of time online, uninterested in real life events.

People who say that clearly haven't seen them on TikTok, where they are engaging in the unexpected: teaching history lessons.

Nadia Jaferey, a former staffer for Kirsten Gillibrand, drew attention to the phenomenon in October, when she tweeted out a thread of her favorite TikTok history re-enactments. She linked to several short videos where teenagers played out key points in history, with special effects and audio to boot.

nadia jaferey (@nadiajaferey)
literally obsessed with teens posting history tiktoks so here's a thread:

I asked a history expert to watch the videos and comment: my old history teacher, Izzy Jones, who is now vice-principal at my old high school in London.

She is delighted to see teenagers use the platform this way. "The ones that I really liked were the ones on the international relations in the 20th century," says Jones, adding: "I'd use some of those videos in class."

She explains how the most powerful videos use human beings to personify world actors - such as countries - in major historical events.

In one video, a TikTok user called @Dontkickphilip personifies the German empire in 1914, aggressively telling Belgium: "I didn't push you, I moved you out of the way because you wouldn't move when I asked you to move three times. So I walked through you." It sums up the military invasion of Belgium by Germany, after Belgium refused Germany passage through the country.

nadia jaferey (@nadiajaferey)
german occupation of belgium, 1914 pic.twitter.com/nPmuUjCSk4

In another, a user called @frontierland re-enacts the European expansion into the Americas through a video showing her as a native woman, plaiting her hair and minding her own business. Then all of a sudden, thousands of European settlers are muscling their way in, to the lyrics: "Walking through your neighborhood, spreading all my fleas."

nadia jaferey (@nadiajaferey)
european age of exploration/invasion, 1405 - present pic.twitter.com/A5CSjv9Sph

Jones explains that the personification of countries in historical events is helpful in understanding intention and gives a boring textbook subject some personality.

Crucially, these videos are providing an interpretation of the past. Both are making an implicit comment on the behavior of those actors.

The teens "have used technology really effectively but they've also used it appropriately ... Sometimes, someone will write an essay which is really lyrical and uses really complex grammar and high-level vocabulary but actually they are talking nonsense. This is not that," says Jones.

The videos are, of course, incomplete - it would be hard to expect more from a 15-second clip. Take a clip by @slaviccaesar, who sums up the American role in the creation of the League of Nations and its retreat from the organization. In the video, she dances towards the camera and then backs away when France and Britain expect the US to join the League.

nadia jaferey (@nadiajaferey)
the establishment of the league of nations, 1919 pic.twitter.com/9m4c3hUi4F

America didn't just suddenly make a U-turn out of the League of Nations: Woodrow Wilson met with congressional resistance and his successor, Warren Harding, opposed the organization. But as long as we understand that the videos are just a snapshot of a moment in time, they are effective.

"A 15-second video is probably most effective in getting across one key point. Of course it's not the whole story - but I thought that was a pretty good summation of what happened in 1929 and 1920," says Jones.

She says that the videos are largely historically accurate, but even if they weren't, they work as a useful historical tool.

To make this point, she takes a video about the plague. In it, @youalreadyknowbb portrays the plague as a plot between rats and the plague to kill half of Europe and become superstars in history.

nadia jaferey (@nadiajaferey)
the black death, 1347-1351 pic.twitter.com/uN6EabK9Qd

If interpreted literally, it doesn't explain the whole story: if rats were the only reason for the plague, London would be full of plague victims right now. Lack of hospitals and bad hygiene practices were also likely contributors to its spread.

But if you taught students about the different factors that contributed to the plague, showed them the video, and then got them to critique it, you would be helping them to understand one of the most important skills in history: how to understand the limitations of any account of a historical event.

"Everything you interact with that's written after an event - whether it's five minutes after or 500 years after the event - is an interpretation of the past. This is a great way to help people appreciate that," says Jones.

She says that if the students were in her history class, they would be getting an A+ for their history TikToks.

Asked how she'd feel if she found out this is what her students were getting up to while her head was turned, she says: "I would be absolutely ecstatic. There are few things that would excite me more."
Topics

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Teens are making historical events go viral on TikTok - what does a history teacher think?

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There is a long-held stereotype that teenagers spend a lot of time online, uninterested in real life events. People who say that clearly haven't seen them on TikTok, where they are engaging in the unexpected: teaching history lessons.

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Meet the Artists Behind Some of the Most Widespread Images Amid George Floyd Protests

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Meet the Artists Behind Some of the Most Widespread Images Amid George Floyd Protests

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Time Magazine

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'Art Can Touch Our Emotional Core.' Meet the Artists Behind Some of the Most Widespread Images Amid George Floyd Protests

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How sharing portraits and illustrations on social media is impacrting the wave of George Floyd protests in the U.S. Meet the artists.

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The Cut

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"There's a special bravery and courageousness in the air, and I think it is present in and among artists as well," says Rujeko Hockley, the Whitney Museum of American Art's assistant curator. Last Friday for Juneteenth - which commemorates the official end of slavery in the United States - Hockley partnered with Instagram to put on a virtual show of Black protest art.

The show featured exclusive posters and illustrations, both historical and new, that tell the story of Black protest art and design over time from artists like Nina Abney, Alexandra Bowman, Melissa Koby, Temi Coker, and Nikkolas Smith. Instagram shared the images across its @ Instagram and @design pages, making them accessible to over 350 million people.

Hockley wanted the show to speak to this truly unprecedented moment, when the inequalities revealed during quarantine have combined with a global Black Lives Matter movement for social change. "I think we are seeing folks take to the streets with this changed outlook. Art takes time, and sometimes you need that time to reflect," says Hockley.

According to Hockley, art extends our vision, literally and figuratively, allowing us to see our society and culture - past, present, and future - in a new light and through new eyes. "Protest operates similarly, albeit more emphatically," she told the Cut. "Both force us to think expansively, beyond pure logic or past precedent. As the rallying cry goes, another world is possible; we only need imagine it. Art and protest, both, help us do this 'freedom dreaming.'"

You can follow the exhibit on the #DesignforBlackLives hashtag; Instagram has also created #ShareBlackStories to center Black perspectives year-round. See some of the works below.

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See Powerful Images of Black Protest Art

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"There's a special bravery and courageousness in the air, and I think it is present in and among artists as well," says Rujeko Hockley, the Whitney Museum of American Art's assistant curator. Last Friday for Juneteenth - which commemorates the official end of slavery in the United States - Hockley partnered with Instagram to put on a virtual show of Black protest art.

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Ariel Bissett: How to Make Blackout Poetry

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Ariel Bissett: How to Make Blackout Poetry

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Digital Poetry: I, Too, Sing America (William Sexton)

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Digital Poetry: I, Too, Sing America (William Sexton)

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I Too Sing America By Langston Hughes: Visual Representation

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This is a project I made for my 9th Grade English class. It is a visual representation of Langston Hughes' "I, Too, Sing America." narrated by Denzel Washington. Hope you enjoy! Rate, Comment and Subscribe, thanks!

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Digital Poetry: Georgia Heard's "Straight Line"

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Digital Poetry: Georgia Heard's "Straight Line"

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Refugee Children Share Their Keepsakes

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Many of us have a cherished childhood object. A keepsake. A reminder of something or someone we love. Even as violence continued to rage around them, Syrian children fleeing for safety found space among the necessities they carried for their own such items.

For many of the nearly 44,000 Syrian children under age 5 at the Za'atari Refugee Camp in Jordan, these precious objects provide a connection to their past and bring comfort in a turbulent world. Each item comes with a story.

Nine refugee children share these stories - about their uprooted lives, their keepsakes, and the powerful memories that these precious objects represent.

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Hope in their hands: Refugee children share their keepsakes

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Many of us have a cherished childhood object. A keepsake. A reminder of something or someone we love. Even as violence continued to rage around them, Syrian children fleeing for safety found space among the necessities they carried for their own such items. For many of the nearly 44,000 Syrian children under age 5 at the Za'atari Refugee Camp in Jordan, these precious objects provide a connection to their past and bring comfort in a turbulent world.

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From sweatpants to rubber bullets, a year in culture told through the artifacts we'll never forget

This is the year that's felt like a decade. Maybe that's because 2020 so often seemed like a never-ending series of tests: for individuals, for businesses, for society. You can tell the story of a year in the culture through a list of books or songs or prestige TV shows. But my tradition is to tell it through objects - commercial stuff, material things, designed goods, products and artifacts large and small.

What follows is not a set ofendorsements: Some of these objects are troubling, a few are ridiculous, many are ambiguous (though some, to be sure, are delightful). These are the objects that caused us to see the world in a new way this year - or the objects that this singular year forced us to consider anew. From heat lamps to Zoom book shelves, these objects will be the souvenirs seared into our collective memory.

Future historians will surely study the evolving presence of face masks in visual imagery of 2020 - its rapid appearance, its stunning variety, even its curious absence from some contexts (Trump rallies, let's say). This is the year we learned the difference between the N95 masks that medical professionals need but never seem to have enough of, and the cloth versions that became an overnight fashion accessory. From high-end designers to the countless crafters of Etsy, the fashion and apparel business responded with head-snapping alacrity: It was only mid-March when New York Times fashion critic Vanessa Friedman recognized the face mask had become the definitive material "symbol of the current confusion and fear."This would only accelerate, as this basic medical precaution somehow became an ideological flash point. But the new vibrant marketplace, ranging "from the $1 cotton mask from Hanes to a $1,000 gold-studded face shield by Louis Vuitton," as Adam Bluestein put it for Marker, helped normalize the mask, making it another wearable tool of self-expression that happens to blend vital function into its variable form. That said, this is one fashion trend we'd all like to see end.

As the reality of the pandemic and its consequences sank in, there was, let's face it, some panic - and panic-shopping - in the air. Among other things, the media went crazy with pictures and footage of empty store shelves - especially the toilet paper aisle. In reality, as Will Oremus explained in what proved to be Marker 's most popular story of the year, the great toilet paper shortage of Spring 2020 was simply a function of that industry being split into consumer and commercial sectors with distinct supply and distribution setups, and a huge chunk of demand shifting from the former to the latter almost overnight. Even so, toilet paper turned into the ultimate symbol of the goods we couldn't get - hand sanitizer, Clorox wipes, Lysol. The most important objects in our lives became the ones that seemed scarce.

Working, cooking, caring for kids, or just trying to stay busy, the homebound population had little reason to dress up. By May, it became clear that comfy pants had become "the pandemic uniform" for this cohort, with giants like Nike and the Gap as well as a swarm of indie brands scrambling for market share. In a related triumph of comfort over aesthetics, Crocs recently reported that its sales are up more than 15% over last year - and unveiled an instant-sellout collaboration with Bad Bunny, part of a string of such team-ups. Of course the casualization of the professional wardrobe has been going on for decades, but as Amanda Mull wrote in The Atlantic, sartorial "scolds" have long had it in for sweatpants in particular, labeling them a sign of personal defeat, an admission that if you can't succeed, you can at least be comfortable. So it's remarkable that the garment made a comeback, but many would clearly be happy to see the sweats-and-Crocs era wane, and give people an excuse to dress up again.

In the before world, the only time we encountered plexiglass was at a sketchy liquor store or in a taxi. But when businesses were forced to close, "essential" ones such as supermarkets and drugstores scrambled to figure out how to protect employees and keep customers coming in safely. One answer was installing plexiglass barriers at every turn; by April, plexiglass makers were straining to meet demand - a new breed of plexiglass consultants had emerged - and it was clear that, as Marker reported, "transparent partitions will soon become as ubiquitous as trash bins." And let's face it: Do you even notice plexiglass anymore? What seemed like barriers between us had suddenly become the enabler of bringing people together again.

So-called "rubber" bullets are actually made of plastic or hardened foam, sometimes with a metal core. They can be about the size of an extra-large marshmallow, and fired at a velocity comparable to that of traditional ammunition. Most of us never thought much about these objects until this summer, when protests in the wake of George Floyd's killing captured the nation's attention in unprecedented ways. As Morgan Baskin reported for Genin early June, this "tool to quell peaceful demonstrations and protests against police brutality," used this year with a frequency greater than any time since police departments began adopting in in the 1990s, is much more dangerous than commonly assumed. Though often described as "nonlethal" options, along with tear gas and flash-bang grenades, rubber bullets caused multiple hospitalizations in 2020, and can kill. According to a report in Forbes, British colonial forces pioneered their use going back to the 1960s, and by the mid 1980s rubber bullets caused at least 17 deaths during protests connected to "the troubles" in Northern Ireland. Their use by law enforcement this summer added another layer to the national conversation about whether American police culture had become alarmingly militarized and needed to be rethought, or even defunded.

A surprising example of cleverly repurposing an object to serve a different function than the one it was designed for popped during protests in Portland in late July. The Washington Post described the scene: Police fired tear gas at a crowd, and "as if on cue, a brigade of orange-shirted men with leaf blowers descended on the cloud, revved their engines and blew the tear gas away," the Post reported. "'Thank you leaf-blower dads!' shouted a young woman." Thus a bland symbol of suburban life becomes a tool of dissent. Crucially, this was not a one-off incident: The same tactic was used in Hong Kong protests last year. Similar examples have echoed from France to Chile to Lebanon: protesters repurposing tennis rackets to swat back tear-gas canisters and traffic cones to smother them, or using umbrellas as a crude defense against projectiles. Sometimes these ideas spread through direct communication, but often it's simply a result of protestors in one place seeing social media clips of protesters in another.

Apparently even a global pandemic can't stop the emergence of a trendy summer frock. The pink tulle Strawberry Dress, with a plunging-V neckline, short ruffled sleeves, and a pattern of sequined strawberries, dominated fashion TikTok, Instagram, and Twitter over the summer. The look is almost shockingly playful and carefree, given the tenor of the times - "a dress that Cinderella, a toddler, and a A-list celebrity would all happily wear," Vogue judged. Or maybe, as The New York Times suggested, people fell for a sweet dress because of, not despite, the grim backdrop: "The sheer horror of 2020 demands an incredulous level of mythical escapism." The $490 original from designer Lirika Matoshi actually debuted last year, and model Tess Holliday wore a version to the pre-pandemic Grammys. But instead of taking a hit when the coronavirus rewrote the year, orders spiked over the summer, as online influencers made it the season's It Dress - inspiring quite a few imitators. Matoshi seems to be taking it all in stride, offering a $50 sequined strawberry facemask as the ultimate complement.

What started out as a symbol of extending a staycation summer turned into a linchpin for restaurants slogging through multiple shutdowns, and trying to survive through winter. With restaurants dying at a record record rate, Moe Tkacik wrote for Marker, and nothing in the way of a coherent government response to help, restaurateurs have responded with incredible creativity: "They overhauled their menus, designed meal kits, branded face masks, experimented with grocery programs, and sold gift cards and sent the proceeds to undocumented workers who couldn't qualify for unemployment." Many also added safer outdoor-dining options. But inevitably, chillier weather in much of the country would curb diners' appetites for the al fresco experience, and as Zara Stone reported, that led to sizzling demand for outdoor heaters as early as August. By the time fall faded into winter, that demand was reportedly outstripping supply, and lately some eateries have experimented with tents, yurts, and plastic "igloos." The stakes are even higher for these businesses as a third wave of the virus is closing off indoor dining in some regions. Show some warmth toward your favorite local restaurant with a takeout order and a generous tip.

If there is a convincing explanation for the popularity of Home Depot's $300 plastic skeleton Halloween yard decoration - other than " because 2020" - then it must be a secret. The mystifying object was completely sold out by mid-October, and Home Depot wouldn't say much more than that it wished the company had placed a bigger manufacturing order. The bone giants took off as meme bait, possibly because they seemed not merely absurd, but almost inappropriate, like some kind of design/production malfunction, or a glitch in the matrix. "It was a year everybody needed a really good smile, and we were able to be that," the Home Depot rep told Slate. Sure. And what does one do with a 12-foot plastic skeleton after Halloween? Dress it up in Christmas gear, obviously.

A billion-dollar, 180,000-ton, 18-deck cruise ship boasting the world's first at-sea roller coaster, the Mardi Gras was supposed to debut in November. While that has been postponed, along with the re-opening of the cruise business in general, this grandiose testament to the engineering of leisure now seems like a perfect artifact of the "before times," as people like to say: that carefree world where packing together with more than 6,000 strangers in the bars, restaurants, performance spaces of a cruise ship was a thing people did to relax. That of course was before a Covid-19 outbreak on another Carnival-owned vessel, Diamond Princess, infected hundreds and killed more than a dozen, making cruise ships synonymous to many with grim contagion scenarios. But now, perhaps, a gigantic and luxurious cruise ship may also be the ultimate emblem of the world we want back. Investors in Carnival and other cruise lines are betting that's the case.

It's hard to say how the unexplained appearance of a 10-foot steel monolith in a remote patch of Utah desert would have been received in a more normal year. There were amused references to aliens, and to the similar object in 2001: A Space Odyssey, but really people seemed to just accept it, or even enjoy it; some traveled to see it in person. Soon there were copycats in Romania and on Pine Mountain in Atascadero, California. And then, in a development that somehow seems very 2020, an unknown group removed the original monolith. (Men who later took credit for the dismantling complained of its environmental impact.) Then the California monolith was destroyed, this time by men shouting "Christ is king!" and making references to QAnon and President Trump - proving that not even a monolith can escape controversy this year. But the creators of that specific object soon stepped forward and announced its replacement, and soon new monoliths appeared, in Las Vegas, in California's Los Padres National Forest, in Michigan, in Australia, and elsewhere. As 2020 winds to a close, people are literally doping out how to build their own monoliths, too, in what may be the ultimate pandemic DIY home project.

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This is the year that's felt like a decade. Maybe that's because 2020 so often seemed like a never-ending series of tests: for individuals, for businesses, for society. You can tell the story of a year in the culture through a list of books or songs or prestige TV shows.

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More Instructions:

If this is your first time making a zine, folding it can sound confusing. Luckily, there are lots of great tutorials to show you how to fold one. Sarah Mirk, and Austin Kleon both have great tutorials, but here's my favorite:

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Make a Mini Memoir Zine - Kirk Reedstrom

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If this is your first time making a zine, folding it can sound confusing. Luckily, there are lots of great tutorials to show you how to fold one. Sarah Mirk, and Austin Kleon both have great tutorials, but here's my favorite:

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Hidden in Plain Sight: The Ghosts of Segregation

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Hidden in Plain Sight: The Ghosts of Segregation

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Photo Essay

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The Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala. Named after a former Confederate general and Ku Klux Klan leader, the bridge was the site of a brutal attack on protesters marching for Black voting rights in 1965, an event later known as Bloody Sunday.

The World Through a Lens

Vestiges of racism and oppression, from bricked-over segregated entrances to the forgotten sites of racial violence, still permeate much of America's built environment.

The Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala. Named after a former Confederate general and Ku Klux Klan leader, the bridge was the site of a brutal attack on protesters marching for Black voting rights in 1965, an event later known as Bloody Sunday. Credit...

The six faded letters are all that remain, and few people notice them. I would never have seen them if a friend hadn't pointed them out to me while we walked through New Orleans's French Quarter. I certainly wouldn't have realized their significance.

On Chartres Street, above a beautifully arched doorway, is a curious and enigmatic inscription: "CHANGE." Now part of the facade of the Omni Royal Orleans Hotel, the letters mark the onetime site of the St. Louis Hotel & Exchange, where, under the building's famed rotunda, enslaved people were once sold.

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The onetime site of New Orleans's St. Louis Hotel & Exchange, where enslaved people were once sold.

Several years ago, I began to photographically document vestiges of racism, oppression and segregation in America's built and natural environments - lingering traces that were hidden in plain sight behind a veil of banality.

Some of the sites I found were unmarked, overlooked and largely forgotten: bricked-over "Colored" entrances to movie theaters, or walls built inside restaurants to separate nonwhite customers. Other photographs capture the Black institutions that arose in response to racial segregation: a Negro league stadium in Michigan, a hotel for Black travelers in Mississippi. And a handful of the photographs depict the sites where Black people were attacked, killed or abducted - some marked and widely known, some not.

The small side window at Edd's Drive-In, for example, a restaurant in Pascagoula, Miss., appears to be a drive-up. It was actually a segregated window used in the Jim Crow-era to serve Black customers.

The locked black double doors aside Seattle's Moore Theatre might be mistaken for a service entrance. In fact, this was once the "Colored" entrance used by nonwhite moviegoers to access the theater's second balcony.

These sites surround us, but finding and verifying them requires months of due diligence.

Many of the places I've photographed were found after conducting research online, in person and on location. I have reached out to scholars, historians and ordinary people who might share their insights, experiences and suggestions. Local libraries and museums often guide me to forgotten places. Historical preservation websites and publications such as The Oxford American, The Clarion-Ledger and many other news sources add immeasurably to my understanding.

Formerly a Tastee-Freez, this site in Meadville, Miss., was the last place Charles Eddie Moore and Henry Hezekiah Dee were seen alive. The two Black men, both 19, were abducted by Ku Klux Klan members, tortured and drowned in the Mississippi River in 1964.

After being tipped off by a contributor to a website called Preservation in Mississippi, I verified the history of the window at Edd's Drive-In with the manager, Becky Hasty, who told me that the owners had retained it as a reminder of the past. "If we don't remember where we've been," she said, "we might get lost again."

Slavery is often referred to as America's " original sin." Its demons still haunt us in the form of segregated housing, education, health care, employment. Through these photographs, I'm trying to preserve the physical evidence of that sin - because, when the telling traces are erased, the lessons risk being lost.

The photographs are also a testament to the endurance of the racial inequalities that have plagued American society, projected backward and forward in time.

The deaths this year of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery, among many other Black Americans, prompted a long-overdue national reckoning, spurring one of the largest movements in U.S. history.

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Hidden in Plain Sight: The Ghosts of Segregation

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The World Through a Lens Vestiges of racism and oppression, from bricked-over segregated entrances to the forgotten sites of racial violence, still permeate much of America's built environment. The Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala.

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Multimodal Story Map

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This story map was created with the Story Map Cascade application in ArcGIS Online.

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A Simple Trick for Success with One-Pagers

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A Simple Trick for Success with One-Pagers

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Cult of Pedagogy

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Sponsored by Chill Expeditions and Kiddom

Have you heard the whispers about one-pagers in the online teacher hallways? The concept of a one-pager, in which students share their most important takeaways on a single piece of blank paper, has really taken off recently.

The one-pagers I see on Instagram draw me in like a slice of double chocolate mousse cake. The artistry students bring to representing their texts on a single piece of paper, blending images and ideas in creative color, is almost hypnotizing for me. Perhaps you've had the same experience.

But it's the very beauty of the models that get posted that can drive students and teachers away from the one-pager activity. Sure, it's great for super artistic students, we tend to think, but what about everyone else?

Turns out it CAN be great for everyone. As long as you know how to structure it.

What Is a One-Pager?

Let's backtrack a bit and talk more about what a one-pager is. It's pretty simple, really. Students take what they've learned-from a history textbook, a novel, a poem, a podcast, a Ted Talk, a guest speaker, a film-and put the highlights onto a single piece of paper. AVID first developed this strategy, but now it's widely used in and out of AVID classrooms.

But why is this seemingly simple assignment so powerful?

As students create one-pagers, the information they put down becomes more memorable to them as they mix images and information. According to Allan Paivio's dual coding theory, the brain has two ways of processing: the visual and the verbal. The combination of the two leads to the most powerful results. Students will remember more when they've mixed language and imagery.

Plus, one-pagers provide variety, a way for them to share what they've learned that goes beyond the usual written options. Students tend to surprise themselves with what they come up with, and their work makes for powerful displays of learning. Plus, they're fun to make. Let's not pretend that doesn't matter.

So, assuming you're sold on trying this out, you're probably wondering what exactly goes into a one-pager?

Students might include quotations, ideas, images, analysis, key names and dates, and more. They might use their one-pagers to make connections to their own lives, to art or films, to pop culture, to what they're learning in their other classes. They might even do it all. You'd be amazed at how much can fit on a single piece of paper.

Many teachers create lists of what students should put inside their one-pagers. Knowing they need two quotations, several symbolic images, one key theme, etc., helps guide students in their work.

The Art Problem

When creating one-pagers, artistic students tend to feature more sketches, doodles, icons and lettering. Students wary of art tend to feature more text, and can be reluctant to engage with the visual part of the assignment at all.

It was this issue-the issue of the art-haters-that first drew me into one-pagers two years ago. I had seen some stunning one-pagers posted in my Facebook group, Creative High School English. But the comments that followed were always the same. "That's amazing work! But so many of my students don't like art...."

Those comments struck a chord with me. For years I had dealt with comments from some of my own students about their distaste for artistic materials when I would introduce creative projects. No matter how much I explained that it was the intention behind their choices that mattered, I always got some pushback if there were any artistic elements involved in a project.

Was there a way to tweak the one-pager assignment so every student would feel confident in their success?

Another problem was one of overall design: Though they knew they needed to hit all the requirements their teachers listed, students still seemed to be overwhelmed by that huge blank page. What should go where? Did colored pencils really have to be involved?

A Simple Solution: Templates

As I thought about the problem, I wondered if students would feel less overwhelmed if they knew what needed to go where. If the quotations had to be in the middle, the themes in the upper left, the images across the bottom, etc. I began to play around with the shapes tool in PowerPoint, creating different one-pager templates.

Then I began shaping my requirements, correlating each element with a space on the paper. Maybe the border could be the key quotations. The center would feature an important symbol. The themes could go in circles around the center. I developed a bunch of different templates for varied ways to respond to novels. Then I tried podcasts. Films. Poetry.

As I shared these templates with other teachers, I kept getting the same feedback: "It's working!"

That little bit of creative constraint actually frees students to use their imagination to represent what they have learned on the page without fear. They know what they need to put down, and where, but they are also free to expand and add to the template. To choose their own colors. To bring out what is most important to them through their creativity and artistry. And those super artistic students? They can just flip the template over and use the blank page on the back.

Beyond Novels

There are so many ways to integrate this creative strategy into your classroom. While one-pagers lend themselves beautifully to final assessments after reading independent novels, literature circle selections, or whole class novels, that's really just the beginning.

You can use them to get to know students better, as with a name tent or "about me" one-pager at the beginning of the year. One school used templates to have every student create a one-pager about their own lives, collecting them all into hallway displays as part of a project they called "Tell your Story."

You can also use them to help students focus in on the most important information in nonfiction articles and books. One EFL teacher in Croatia used the templates to have students share key takeaways from articles they read about social media. Not only did students have to analyze the text deeply to figure out what was most important, but the dual-coding theory suggests the process of creating the one-pagers will help them remember the information better.

Another great use for one-pagers is to keep students focused while absorbing media. When students are watching a film, listening to a podcast, or even attending an assembly with a guest speaker, they can be creating one-pagers as they listen, a kind of formalized version of sketchnotes.

Simple Steps for One-Pager Success

Whenever you're considering your options for assessment, throw one-pagers into the mix. The steps below should help you in creating an assignment for which every student has a roadmap to success.

1. Choose the elements you want your students to put onto their one-pagers. For example, quotations, key themes, literary elements, discussion of style, important characters or dates, connections to other disciplines, connections to their lives, connections to modern culture.

2. Create a layout using the shapes tool in PowerPoint or something similar (or grab a free set of templates here or here).

3. Connect your instructions to your layout. Make it clear which elements should go in which area of your template.

4. Create a simple rubric with the key categories you want your students to succeed with. With literary one-pagers, I use "Textual Analysis," "Required Elements," and "Thoroughness."

5. As you introduce the assignment, show students some examples of one-pagers to give them a sense for how they might proceed.

6. Give students time to work on their one-pagers in class so they can ask you questions. Consider providing some artistic materials if you can, or inviting students to bring them in. You can always let them complete the work at home if necessary.

7. Do a gallery walk of the one-pagers before you collect them, or have them present to each other in small groups. The students will learn a lot from seeing each other's representations.

8. Create a display after you grade the one-pagers with your rubric.

You can find more of Betsy's great ideas on her website, Spark Creativity.

Come back for more.
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A Simple Trick for Success with One-Pagers

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These visual tools allow students to synthesize learning, but some kids don't think they're talented enough to make them. A bit of creative constraint helps.

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NCTE

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Tweet by @KarinaYanGlaser

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My 12yo had a homework assignment to create a timeline of the influential books in her life. I LOVED what she did (and the books she chose!). Inside the books she wrote a blurb about how the book impacted her. ❤️

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My 12yo had a homework assignment to create a timeline of the influential books in her life. I LOVED what she did (and the books she chose!). Inside the books she wrote a blurb about how the book impacted her. ❤️ https://t.co/R3g90urz7q

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My 12yo had a homework assignment to create a timeline of the influential books in her life. I LOVED what she did (and the books she chose!). Inside the books she wrote a blurb about how the book impacted her. ❤️ pic.twitter.com/R3g90urz7q
— Karina Yan Glaser (@KarinaYanGlaser) September 22, 2020

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My 12yo had a homework assignment to create a timeline of the influential books in her life. I LOVED what she did (and the books she chose!). Inside the books she wrote a blurb about how the book impacted her. ❤️ https://t.co/R3g90urz7q

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.original_text
My 12yo had a homework assignment to create a timeline of the influential books in her life. I LOVED what she did (and the books she chose!). Inside the books she wrote a blurb about how the book impacted her. ❤️ https://t.co/R3g90urz7q

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.text
My 12yo had a homework assignment to create a timeline of the influential books in her life. I LOVED what she did (and the books she chose!). Inside the books she wrote a blurb about how the book impacted her. ❤️

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Creative Writing for Kids: Making Zines!

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Creative Writing for Kids: Making Zines!

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Creative Writing For Kids: Making Zines!

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A 30-second video spot (Public Service Ad) produced to promote the quitline 800 try-to-stop and the online quitting resource Smokefree.gov.

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Home of Peptoc, a public art hotline project to uplift the world.