Hansel and Gretel on "Mywebspiration.com"
Hansel and Gretel, one of the most famous of all fairy tales, is great material to establish a common ground for exploring other topics. If you want to demonstrate something else while referencing literature, using a story everyone knows helps. Here I'm using the story as a way to demonstrate the value of the website Mywebspiration.com, a great website for moving through the stages of writing as well as creating and delivering presentations in a classroom setting. (It's the online, even better, available-anywhere version of the software program, Inspiration, which schools have been using for about a decade.) Webspiration is an excellent and refreshing alternative to Powerpoint, for it gives a vastly expanded visual field, rather than Powerpoint's strictly linear series of slides.
As you will see, having students work with Webspiration can get them involved with each of the four learning styles. On this page, I've separated out the visuals you see below; this is the link that will open up the entire presentation. (It's a visual of the presentation, not the website itself.) When a group of students presents, the whole presentation is opened up and each student takes his or her turn presenting an aspect of the story to the class. These different aspects here are the traditional elements of the story: plot, characters, setting, imagery, symbolism, mood and atmosphere, and possibly other aspects, such as stylistic elements, historical context, etc.
With today's projectors and screens that project computer images for the entire class to see, far surpassing the overhead projector in image quality, students and teachers can create presentations that are vivid, rich in visual power and content. Here, for example, are a series of visuals created in Mywebspiration.com based on Hansel and Gretel. I used this to give students a sense of what can be accomplished with this website, and they take off from there. What we call the Plot Mountain is a time-honored way of visually presenting a story's events, so we start with that. It's essentially a timeline with an apex for the story's climax. Timelines especially appeal to or involve the concrete sequential or "clipboard" learning style.
Webspiration can be also be used as a graphic organizer for brainstorming, appealing to the "beachball" (abstract sequential) learning style. As ideas occur, creating text is as simple as "tap and type" and "thought bubbles" pop up. They can be kept in bubble form or shifted to other geometrical shapes, such as these rectangles, or images from a library of clip-art that is part of the program. These forms can also be easily linked with arrows to form a web of hierarchical or sequenced ideas, the prototype of an outline. With a single click, they can be converted into a "clipboard-style" outline for further evolution into an essay. This outline can be downloaded into Microsoft Word or Google Docs. In doing this, there a seamless shift from graphic organizer to outline to rough draft. One question that easily springs from these explorations is this: "How do we get to know a particular character through the elements in the story, such as these plot events, their interactions with the settings and other characters, through the symbolism and atmosphere or mood, etc." With this type of question, students can use their work as a stepping stone to building their essay.
When you use Webspirations for group presentations in class, the collaboration involved incorporates what we call the "puppy" or social learning style; it's also called "abstract random" and is based on feelings. As a socially-rich experience, students collaborate next to each other in class, discuss the ideas involved, and delegate and accept responsibility. They share the editing to each other, or even easier, they set up two documents and paste individual work to the "main document," so they can work alongside each other simultaneously. They can also work from home in a collaborative manner, since the website is available anywhere. This is where mywebspiration.com is an improvement on the functionality of the software program Inspiration. Mywebspiration.com allows for "inviting" and "sharing" (through an email address) of a document so they are viewing the same document as it grows and evolves.
Mywebspiration.com can also include the "microscope" (concrete random) learning style if research is brought in. This last visual on the story's traditional symbolism incorporates the results of research from Bruno Bettleheim's well-known book, The Uses of Enchantment. Bettleheim was a seminal, though controversial, figure in the field of analyzing the symbolic and psychological content of fairy tales.
This website has so much to offer: easy graphic organizing, the fluency of brainstorming, the "wow factor" and challenge of classroom presentations, socially-rich learning opportunities, and a stepping stone to outlines and essay building.
-- John Chamberlain, Clarke Middle School, Lexington, MA.