Presenting Profound Poetry

OVERVIEW
My project is a 6th Grade Poetry Unit. The unit takes students from an introduction to poetry all the way through their culminating activity, an online portfolio of their self written poems. I have included several links pertaining to various parts of the unit at the bottom of this presentation. The first link is to the google document for the lesson design. The google document includes numerous resources, such as links to other documents as well as websites. The second link is to a podcast that I created as an introduction to poetry. By no means is the podcast everything I hope my students gain from the unit. The last link above is to an example VoiceThread, where students will post their poetry portfolios and add audio clips of them reading thier poems.

GOALS
My goals for this unit were to create a sound unit covering the Texas learning standards for poetry. I hoped to make the unit, as a google doc, accessible to all teachers, with everything included. My results so far have not reached my expectations. I was not able to attach everything I would have liked to attach. Examples of this include my Smartboard lessons, and Classroom Jeopardy game. Eventually, I would like to have the unit totally accessible, where every resource the teacher needs is posted in one place. Also, I would like to continue to create podcasts for students and other teachers to have access to regarding poetry.

EVALUATION
I did learn a great deal from this project. Creating a unit is hard and time consuming work, but in the end it has been worth it. I have learned that there are limitless resources available to teachers on the web, you just have to dig a little to find them. I also learned that I can create a lesson, and make it available to other teachers. Creating a podcast was one of the most valuable things I have learned throughout this course. I can create podcasts, or vodcasts to make available for students when I am unable to be at school, and also for students to have access to lessons after school and on the weekends. This course has taught me that there are many different ways to teach using the Web, and Web 2.0 tools.

The Links to portions of my unit are:

Poetry Unit on Google Docs - "Presenting Profound Poetry" lesson design.

"Forms of Poetry" Podcast - An introductory lesson on forms of poetry.

VoiceThread Unit - An example of where students will post their poetry portfolios and audio clips of them reading their poetry.