Digital Tools HLP
In our third block class, we have begun our creative writing unit. For this unit, students are expected to complete a final summative in the form of a creative writing portfolio. The portfolio is meant to showcase their engagement and production of various forms of creative writing (prose, script, and poetry). In this video, my co-presenter (one of the students in our class and the editor-in-chief of the school’s literary magazine) and I give a presentation on poetry, which highlights different forms of poetry the students could explore. We use Google Slides to present this information, and I also included various online tools the students could use to help develop their writing. For the sake of this assignment, I wanted to err on the side of caution of giving them tools that could help them generate ideas for poetry, out of fear that they might abuse these tools and generate entire poems on their behalf. Instead, I focused on tools that could provide them with generative words that could serve as springboards for poem ideas.
Student Work
With permission, I’ve collected some pieces that my students have developed. For the sake of student privacy I have removed names, but I want to credit them as best I can. These poems hail from a 12th grade boy (“questions for silence”), a 12th grade girl (“Gaia // a limerick”), and an 11th grade girl (“An Ode to Math Class; An eavesdropping poem”). I was pleased to hear from some of them that the resources I shared with them did help in their writing process. Many of them are in the midst of peer-editing on Google Classroom (hence the highlighted sections).
Since the fall, I’ve been able to teach this unit to my 9th graders in the spring term. Once again, I’ve gathered some artifacts with their permission, and again have made the material anonymous. As far as the authors go, one of my students surprised me with her intense imagery of insects (left). Another chose to use haikus to evoke imagery of fire and ash (right). A third still chose to go for a harsh monologue about the meaning of friendship (bottom). I was so proud of my students for creating such honest and powerful pieces, and while some students decided to play it safe, it still filled me with joy to see all of them willingly venture into the world of creative writing.