I’ll just respond here to Jim’s idea about finding a single internet place for embedded readings:
Actually Jim, if the readings are from story scripts found in your book and in Matava’s two books, then we should keep them in one place. I hear what Laurie says about the tprstalk site, but, like the list itself, there would be so many readings there not related to what we do, just random readings, that we would end up searching for them in a big cloud.
I say no to the wiki. Wikis get messy fast. Why not just have a category for embedded readings here on this site? But they would have to be only for Matava’s stories and yours. If we start publishing embedded readings based on other story scripts, we get too big, like the list, and they have little value for us.
We really don’t want to get too big and all over the place with this site. One of the things that freaks me out is the absolute thousands of definitions of TPRS, CI, TCI, etc., the thousands of ways it is done, of which many have served to turn rational thinking traditional teachers off because those ways had little to do with what Krashen and Blaine have developed.
I say that we have our own category for “Readings Based on Matava and Tripp Scripts”. That way, we keep things tight and we don’t get into that mega cloud effect, which merely serves to confuse. I don’t see how readings written from thousands of scripts we don’t even know could help us.
The great value of this site to me is that it is focused on specific issues that we all agree are problems in our learning more about comprehension based instruction. This includes techniques and skills but also the mental/emotional side, which is huge.
We are able to say things here that we couldn’t in a public venue. The fact that we have agreed to put up mediocre video of ourselves teaching, just to get closer to the method, to get to a closer understanding of definitions of the Three Steps, is huge.
So, unless the group decides otherwise in this discussion, if somebody gets a reading based on a Matava or Tripp script, then send it to me via email and I will publish it and put it in the category mentioned above and we can have access to it. We can cut and paste it and personalize it to our own version of the story that our own class came up with, and it should save us some extra time in the middle of the week.
Group please respond to those ideas.
And, while we are on the topic of organizing things, an update here is:
1. The avatar thing is not figured out yet. I am talking to my web guy now about that. I do want them.
2. Keep the bios coming and the bio updates with your school and city. We are getting closer to having the whole group identifiable, for safety reasons, by any other group member. I definitely want that.
3. Keep in your mind that you CAN send in mediocre video. Again, we have to put aside the notion that we are superstars, 4%ers who are great at grammar and only teach 4%er kids. We are not superstars of this method. The only way we can become superstar teachers of the 96% is going to be via the videos we share in safety here. We are all just learning, so send in vids when you can get to them. I’ve got some fairly crappy video coming up, if I can even find the time to get that together. But, if it helps us learn, it gets published, in trust, and we learn that much faster, as we try to approximate as closely as we can the atmostphere of a conference.
4. Send in embedded readings and songs that are really good (let’s start with level one songs that are really effective). I will post my embedded reading of Jim’s Halloween story as the first story for the new category, until the group makes a decision on how to respond to Jim’s original idea.