Chris Sloan Mr. Sloan has been teaching at Judge since 1986. He currently teaches AP English Language and Composition, freshmen English, and Digital Arts. He advises the school newspaper, The Bulldog Press, and is also the webmaster for the school's web site. He is the technology liaison for the Utah Writing Project and has conducted various workshops for both the UWP and the National Writing Project. From 1998-2005 he was the Utah state director for the Journalism Education Association. In his spare time, he coaches youth sports, and enjoys photography and playing music with his friends. He has written articles that have appeared in publications like Sports Illustrated for Kids, The Salt Lake Tribune, The Journal of Reading, the Intermountain Catholic, and Black Coffee magazine. He has also presented workshops for the Journalism Education Association, the Utah Writers and Photographers Clinic, the National Council of Teachers of English, the Utah Council of Teachers of English, and the International Reading Association. He has a B.A. from Carroll College in Helena, Montana and a M.Ed. from the University of Utah. As an undergraduate he also attended University-College in Galway, Ireland. He has been designated a Master Journalism Educator by the JEA, and also serves on their Certification Committee. He is married with four children, two of whom have graduated from Judge. His other children attend Our Lady of Lourdes elementary school in Salt Lake. He serves on the board of Ulster Project-Utah.

COURSES TAUGHT AP English Journalistic Writing Bulldog Press New Media

Who am I?

Chris Sloan has been teaching at Judge since 1986. He currently teaches AP English Language and Composition, freshmen English, and New Media. He advises the school newspaper, The Bulldog Press, and is also the webmaster for the school's web site. He is the technology liaison for the Utah Writing Project and has conducted various workshops for both the UWP and the National Writing Project. From 1998-2005 he was the Utah state director for the Journalism Education Association.

In his spare time, he coaches youth sports, and enjoys photography and playing music with his friends. He has written articles that have appeared in publications like Sports Illustrated for Kids, The Salt Lake Tribune, The Journal of Reading, the Intermountain Catholic, and Black Coffee magazine. He has also presented workshops for the Journalism Education Association, the Utah Writers and Photographers Clinic, the National Council of Teachers of English, the Utah Council of Teachers of English, and the International Reading Association. He has a B.A. from Carroll College in Helena, Montana and a M.Ed. from the University of Utah. As an undergraduate he also attended University-College in Galway, Ireland. He has been designated a Master Journalism Educator by the JEA, and also serves on their Certification Committee.

Brief description

I'm a teacher, a musician (of sorts), a bit of a podcaster, someone who likes to dabble in flash animation, and by the way, here's My Entry Point: Red Butte in Utah

Thursday, January 18, 2007

AP audit

The folks at College Board are conducting an audit to make sure that's what being labeled as AP in high schools meets their criteria. Here's a link to a Google Doc of my AP English Language and Composition curriculum. Feel free to give me any input.

Labels: AP, AP audit, AP English Language and Composition, college board

posted by chris sloan @ 1:49 PM

Friday, January 12, 2007

Google Apps in my classroom

A quick overview of some of the Google applications I've been using in my classroom this semester.

Labels: collaborative software, Google for Educators

UEN PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT HIGHLIGHTS

Chris Sloan: New Media in the Classroom Nov 13 2006 Long time Judge Memorial journalism and English teacher Chris Sloan uses technology to tell the story of the school and engage students in collaborative writing projects. By using a monthly printed newspaper and an online blog Chris's New Media (journalism) students are able to effectively tell the story of the school by using the delivery mode that best suits the story. The newspaper staff publish a monthly printed paper as well as maintain a public blog. In his words: "I have this group of really good students who can get the information and get the media. It is just up to our class to present it in different ways and probably the most appropriate way. Some stories are meant to be seen, some stories are meant to be heard, and some stories are meant to be read." Chris's English classes are participating in Google's Global Warming Speak Out. By using Google Docs and other Google tools students are collaborating in research and writing about ways to combat global warming. Judge is one of 80 schools participating nationally. "The way the software works seems to mirror the way they [students] think and the way the conversation flows, so them having the immediacy of the information and the flexability of a lot of different information to flow with the conversation seems to be different to me from how I used to do it." Youth Voices is another collaborative writing project Chris and his students are involved in. In this project, students work with other students from around the country and the globe instead of being limited to their own classrooms. Students post their writing in an ELGG (think educational blog) and students from other schools read and comment on their work. "Kids are going to do MySpace or whatever social networking software they want. You can do whatever you want to try and have them stop, but our thinking is maybe we should actually be doing that in the classroom and talking about what makes a good comment. For us a good comment is different from what you would expect on MySpace." With all his experience as a teacher and his willingness to incorporate new and emerging technologies into his practice, Chris is meeting the needs and learning styles of his students and setting a great example of what an educator can be in this era of new technology. Listen to the whole interview: If the above player doesn't work, download the file here: Chris Sloan Interview Websites Judge Memeorial High School The Bulldog Blog Classroom Blog- Sloanspace Youth Voices ELGG Personal Blog

Copyright 2006 National Writing Project. All rights reserved.

The Voice       2006

NWP Cyberspace Project Connects Youth Voices
Paul Oh

The piece begins with the gentle rain of a harpist’s notes, which fade into a teenage girl’s voice stating matter-of-factly, “Ever since I was little, I’ve always loved to perform.”

Chloe, a ninth-grader from Salt Lake City, strings her words together quickly but clearly, as she describes the local children’s hospital where she volunteers by playing her harp. She details an encounter with an elderly woman, at the hospital to be with a dying granddaughter, who is grateful for the beautiful sounds of her harp. Interspersing the spoken words are Chloe’s own notes on the instrument, sounding like the interludes for a National Public Radio essay.

“Richay is forced to ask a white woman to hail a taxi for her so that she can get home.“

Richay, an eleventh-grader at Eastside Community High School in New York City, writes calmly and even-handedly about the moment she realizes that cab drivers won’t stop for her because she’s black. Richay is forced to ask a white woman to hail a taxi for her so that she can get home. Her story ends with this thought: “Next time, I am at least going to ask the taxi driver why cabs don’t stop for blacks and can he do something to change the situation or speak up.”

Chloe and Richay, two thousand miles and two time zones apart, are both part of a common online project, called Youth Voices, that connects the written and audio compositions of students in journalism classes at three high schools—two in New York and one in Utah—through the use of weblogs. The idea for the project formed at the Technology Matters Advanced Institute for NWP’s Technology Liaisons Network, and was seeded by a Technology Matters minigrant awarded to the Utah Writing Project (UWP) to fund a podcasting project.

Students from the three high schools post both written and audio pieces, with images if they choose. Some pieces emerge as responses to specific assignments while others are created without teacher direction. The posts assume a variety of genres and forms—from poetry to persuasive essays; from personal pieces like the ones highlighted above to research projects on topics such as immigration reform; from the very informal to the formal. And all pieces invite responses from the readers in this geographically disparate community.

Many of the students’ weblog posts, like Chloe’s, involve a combination of the written and the spoken word; that is, they are “podcasts.” Podcasting, which as a concept is only about two years old, is a way to use the technology of weblogs to broadcast multimedia files. In this case, students from the three schools record and then post digital audio files of their written pieces that are then often uploaded to digital audio players. There is no charge to listen to podcasts and the technology is relatively easy to set up (both for broadcasters and for listeners), a feature that makes podcasting attractive to educators.

“When I started to hear my voice played back to me, I became a better writer.”

Chris Sloan, the journalism teacher at Judge Memorial High School in Utah and the technology liaison for the Utah Writing Project, was introduced to podcasting by Paul Allison, technology liaison at the New York City Writing Project. The two soon teamed up as part of the UWP minigrant. Sloan says he embarked on podcasting, in particular, because he wondered if students, hearing recordings of their work, would then be able to create stronger voices in their writing.

As a musician, Sloan says, “When I started to hear my voice played back to me, I became a better writer.”

Sloan believes podcasting has in fact helped many of his students in their ability to develop a writing voice, and he’ll be studying the issue further next year. This year, he spent much of his energy wrestling with the logistics of making the one Internet-accessible computer in his classroom and the ten in the school library available to all his students so they would be able to post their pieces, record their writing, and respond to the writings from the New York City classes.

Though the project required work, Sloan feels it was well worth it. “A compelling thing—and the kids echoed this in their reflections—that really was pretty eye-opening for them, was that their work was read so many times,” Sloan says. “They were read more than they would have been read, that’s for sure, had it been just an in-class, typical, traditional approach to English composition.”

By using a counting feature at the weblog, Sloan figures his students had 43,371 “reads” of their 33 posted stories, or an average of 1,283 per piece. A read simply indicates that someone has clicked on that post, but to his kids, the high number of reads meant that there was a wide audience for their work. And this caused the students to be much more careful and aware of what they wrote and the message they intended to convey.

The students were also asked to respond to the posts from their counterparts in New York City. And the New York City students, too, commented on what they read.

For instance, in response to Chloe’s piece about her harp playing, Rasheem from New York City said he liked the podcast “because it had a real life issue to it and the music didn’t hurt either.”

Rasheem said he looked forward to more of Chloe’s writing, noting, “I know that it’s going to be moving.”

Paul Oh is a technology program associate with the National Writing Project.

Paul Allison - Spring at Youth Voices Coast to Coast: NYC and Utah   2/23/2006; 12:56:22 PM (reads: 27509, responses: 0)

Spring at Youth Voices Coast to Coast: NYC and Utah In this first of a series, Chris Sloan, from Judge Memorial High School in Salt Lake City Utah, Susan Ettenhtim from Eleanor Roosevelt High School in New York City and I discuss the blog that we manage for our students with the focus of podcasting. Permalink-# | posted 2/23/06; 9:56:33 AM | department: Podcast | Youth44100Voices22006.mp3 (44.9MB)

My name is Chris Sloan.  I'm the technology liaison for the Utah Writing
Project.  Among other things, I'm interested in how the various media
change the message.  I could go on, but since I've got 10 minutes I'm
going to limit myself to one example from my collaboration with Paul
Allison last year.  My case study focuses on one post on our youthvoices
blog.

http://blogs.writingproject.org/blogwrite265/discuss/msgReader$965

I'll have a hard copy of the post & comments and will play the audio.
Here are some questions that come to mind when I look at that post.  I
think they could make for some interesting discussion.

* What’s a research blog entry look like?  Should it be as long as the
traditional research paper?  What effect do the hyperlinks have on the
reading experience?

* How is the accompanying audio different than the text?  How is an audio
story different than a traditional text paper?  Is audio more personal
because it has a more distinctive “voice”? (I could show results of a
survey that highlight students' attitudes toward recording and hearing
their own writing)

* How do the comments of the other students add to the text?  Does it
matter that the comments come from students at another school in a
different state?

* What effect does audience have on a student’s writing when it’s online
for everyone to see?  The post had over 3,100 "reads," or "hits." (I’ll
mention the results of my exit survey concerning students’ attitudes
toward this larger, anonymous audience).

At this point I'm probably over my time limit....

Anyway, looking forward to Nashville.