Chill I know that you and Ruth and Bryan and Craig – a few others as well – have been thinking about vPQA and how to rescue it into some kind of form that we can use as a community here this year. Here are my own thoughts on it at this point. Maybe we can hammer something usable out since school is starting and vPQA, the way Julie designed it is, in my opinion, a super valuable tool that we can turn into a powerful library to share as downloads in our computers and make our teaching lives much easier this year:
1. Just making a Power Point presentation with slides in a general way (no taxonomy as per Julie’s brilliant format) is not acceptable. We need the steps in red in the article below to make vPQA the CI beast that it can be:
2. We dump Haiku Deck. It sure didn’t get a lot of love. Bless its heart.
3. We make our own slide shows using Power Point with Creative Commons as per the steps above. We have to make sure that the slides build as per the taxonomy Julie invented. Otherwise our students will be getting shallow and wide instruction when vPQA as per the above steps brings it narrow and deep. Again, please don’t send any flat and generic slide show about a verb. Use the steps or don’t label it vPQA.
4. Pick a verb. Any verb. But just one. That is a new suggestion as we were thinking of putting up two or three verbs in one slide show. That is too much. Rather, by just doing one verb, we can find another verb in our collection of slide shows that we may want to pair it with, and even a third verb, to create a story (if we feel that the verbs are compatible to make a story). I hope that makes sense. Just one verb per vPQA slide show under this new suggested format.
5. We send the link here via a comment or to me at benslavic@yahoo.com. Those in the vPQA “club” look it over and decide if it makes the cut to be called vPQA as per Julie’s model. (Some people in MN didn’t even see the depth of what Julie has developed here.)
6. We use PP with Creative Commons to make our presentations.
7. We label them this way for example: “vPQA.looks for.French.Ben Slavic” In labeling it in that way we keep all our vPQA downloads together and can find them fast if we need a lesson in a hurry.
8. If we know enough of a language we can translate it. For example, (I know enough Spanish to put it into French and then it can be added to the vPQA downloads as another slide show in the new language.
9. (An aside: one reason I really want lots of vPQA slide shows downloaded in my computer this year is that I am seeing the wisdom of the DPS model of just teaching verbs day in day out, in stories, vPQA, verb slams, whatever. Working with verbs is for me the new frontier in this work. Constantly working with verbs. The rebar. The other words are mere concrete pieces that will stick to the rebar rods, as per those posts in that category here. That is where this work has led me, to teaching verbs, not so much stories. Stories, of course yes, but stories not for stories but to teach verbs for auditory and visual reading recognition in various tenses and forms.)
10. Once the link is available in a formal post here, after it was added in a comment somewhere or sent to me so I can make a post out of the new addition to the vPQA data base – after it makes the cut of aligning with Julie’s model – we download it. (I figured out that PP is compatible with my Macbook.)
11. As the vPQA downloads are added in from the vPQA Club of PLC teachers who are willing to invest the time and energy to make good slide shows, our stress level goes down. We do stories and vPQA classes and a lot of other stuff, but we have our basis of teaching in stories (which allow for more whimsy and creativityand provide the most fun in any form of CI) and vPQA (less spontaneous, a bit more boring, but great for days when we don’t feel like doing stories or other more loosey-goosy CI).
Comments and suggestions welcome.