Teens 6 Magazine Project

Making writing exciting

Whenever I get to a writing lesson, I picture my students complaining and moaning about having to write anything. It’s almost as if they had a radar that indicated “boring activity ahead”. These are, thus, the lessons that intrigue me the most just for the challenge of changing that regular pattern.

To do so, I am always reflecting on how relevant and interesting the writing can be for my young teenage students. The formula is not so hard: just take the genre of the piece of writing into account and think about how it could be applied to their realities. That is basically what I did for my Teens 6 group. Writing news reports was the goal, so I decided to take my students from the role of students to the role of reporters.

The students were obviously excited with the idea of becoming reporters and writing a story. The idea was that they would gather in pairs or trios and would each be assigned a certain page of our class magazine. Once I had a Google slide template of the magazine prepared and ready to be accessed through a shortened link (bit.ly/teens6magazine), I instructed my students and took them to the Resource Centre to make it happen.

I had to do it in two classes. The first attempt wasn’t so good because some of my students messed around and interfered in other students’ slides. In the following class, I told them off and told them that they would be given a last chance to finish their reports. I also said that those who didn’t finish would have their pages taken out of the magazine. That gave them some encouragement. On the second day, then, they worked a lot better and behaved as expected.

After joining forces with the Resource Centre at the Main Branch, the magazine was printed out and the students were able to have their own copies. The gleam in my students’ eyes when they saw the magazines I had brought paid off all the effort and struggle I described in the previous paragraph.

Maybe a magazine project cannot be carried out every semester, but something we can definitely do is plan our lessons every day wondering whether they will bore our students or excite them. Bearing that in mind and having some deal of willingness, we will be able to come up with many other ideas that can surprise our students and make a difference in their lives.

Lucas G. Silva

Fun Photo Editing Sites

This directory of amazing sites for photo editing - 28 Online Photo Editing Websites to Have Fun With - was shared with me by a dear online friend who lives in Argentina. First, it shows the power of our online communities. Jennifer Verschoor has kindly shared this link because she knew I was into working with images.

I just picked one of the sites, befunky, and tested it. What I loved about befunky is the fact that no logins are required and the effects are really cool. Teens would love to play around with their photos in this photo editing space.

Then, if you explore it, you'll see that you can make fun editing in your own photos to add them to your school digital resources, to enliven classes. Most important of all, you could try out some of those sites to make your classes even more student-centered by

• encouraging your students to remix their photos and tell a story.


• sharing their best remixes and have a class vote


• having students choose a topic, take a photo and edit the photo with text
  


• students sharing their photos remix and the others asking questions about them.
  


• encouraging students to remix a photo to match with a reading


• encouraging a photo remix plus poetry (like in this haiku project)

Another interesting resource for image editing,yearbookyourself, is the one Nik Peachey points out in his blog . Really fun to play around with.

Which tool from these resources would you give it a try and what kind of activities do you picture doing with your students?