"screencast" it refers to) are worth your time. Some interesting
thinking about the uses of laptops in the classroom--particularly
tablet PCs, but a good idea sparker no matter what laptop you're
packing. (The screencast link may not work on Macs. Mac users
may, in retaliation, make your most vexed and disapproving teache
face as you think about Bill Gates.)
****
Also, a quick note for the Mac folks, while I'm thinking about it;
plus a side-note for PC folks. All inspired by this post.
Macs: Tucked into your Applications folder, you'll find two nice
little applications: the basic versions of Omnigraffle and
Omnioutliner that come free with OSX. The first lets you create
graphical representations of processes, flow charts, etc. The second
is a very nice little outlining tool that lets you easily create
outlines with nested items and checklists. The free versions on your
Macs are stripped down a bit, but they still work very well, and, I
think, intuitively: it won't take you long to figure them out.
I used Omnigraffle yesterday to plot a short article by Hank Stuever
for my 103s. It looked like this (only bigger).

Each major chunk has details radiating out from it. The story is
simple and interesting enough that we could then talk about how
Stuever arranged his ideas and what would have happened if he had,
say, switched the beginning and the end, or left out certain parts,
or started with one of the middle pieces. So we got to consider, as
a class, revision scenarios for Stuever's piece. And they'll be
doing this with their own literacy narratives on Wednesday.
For PC folks, this can be done in MS Word. It's a little less slick,
but it works. Just turn on the "drawing" toolbar and play. You may
need to format the "layout" of each image so that it is "in front of
text" or "behind text"; that arrangement gives you the most freedom
to slide stuff around.
Absent computers, this can be done with scraps of paper, of course.
In fact I did do it with scraps of paper in my 3rd 103 of the day,
which has an Elmo but isn't in a laptop classroom. And that is a
great illustration of how handy it is to be able to have our own
laptops with us. If I coulda plugged in my own laptop, I wouldn't
have had to tweak my approach the 3rd time around. On the other
hand, it was fun to challenge myself with cutting apart paper while
talking about arrangement (seriously)
****
Elmore Leonard on rules for writing, featuring humor, good advice,
and thoughts on hooptedoodle.
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