Ballads Anyone? Try Dylan Thomas

Angry Sea (Creative Commons license to reuse)

OMG!  What a wonder the digital world is for re-learning!  I am an avid reader of Open Culture, a fabulous site conserving, curating, distributing and indexing free materials that are more useful to ELA middle and high school teachers than YouTube.  Subscribe to the feed.

Today my feed reader brought me Richard Burton reading Dylan Thomas "Ballad of the Long-Legged Bait."

I have included many online audio ballads in my Calameo ebook.  This will link be included in the next version.  What a fabulous way to explore figurative language, compare/contrast of subject matter in literature, compare/contrast the experience of experiencing literature.  It is the perfect raw material for a flipped lesson about either ballads or figurative language (metaphor, symbolism, allusion...).  Or just plain have students listen to the reading.

I have revisited my own ebook with this ballad in mind, leading me to reread many old friends and to find more Dylan Thomas.  Alas, I have lost contact with the vinyl Dylan Thomas Reads... I carted around for over 30 years.  But several editions of this recording and Richard Burton Reads Dylan Thomas (CD) are still available from Amazon.

Or try YouTube.  You will find some mediocre student productions, but also some probably illegal video that includes biographical information about Thomas, readings by other British readers (Anthony Hopkins is no Burton, but he is good), and an amusing reading by Rodney Dangerfield (not of a ballad - the ballads are too long).

My advice?  Go with Burton and let your students explore YouTube on their own.  And have a discussion with students about the ethics and legality of posting to YouTube a cut from a purchased or borrowed copyright-protected video...

Make an e-Book: from those old instructional files

Thanks to Richard Byrne's ↬ Free Technology for Teachers, I have found a way to archive and distribute the many rubrics, lesson plans, and original materials I created for ELA (and kept, which is not most of them) over the years.

It takes a bit of time, as I have used Pages, not Word, for 8 or more years, and Calaméo will only accept .doc files.  I also decided to combine individual files, for this exercise, instead of uploading multiple files, so I created a Pages mega-file and saved it in .doc format.  I had some problems with appearance and recognition of page breaks, but images, links and tables worked just fine.

So, experienced teachers, give Calaméo a try - it might be an ELA teacher's ticket into the flipped classroom experience while at the same time providing a back-flipping archive.  I don't know about you, but I find that the more I make available in plain sight on the web, the better.

Here is a private link to my text, Ballads for Middle School Study. To access a private C, you need either to be on an approved Contacts list (can be imported) or provided with a "private URL" like this one. 

Below is the iPad compatible miniCalaméo of the text. The size can be increased, in case you want students or educators to actually read the mini-version without expanding it to full screen (this is an option at creation).  The miniC can be embedded in a web-based document (blog, wiki) that accepts .html code.  The larger file, if you give permission, can be embedded in a Glog or other visual web-pin tool.  It would be possible then to create and digitally archive entire units.

The first time I tried this, I specified that clicking on the miniC would send the viewer to the publication. This seems to have been a loop - when I clicked on the published miniC, I was denied access to the file.  So I uploaded the .html with the "read directly in full screen" button clicked (see screenshot below).

Ballads for Middle School Study

Publish at Calaméo or browse others.

I can see the miniC on my iPad, but it does not appear as the text itself.  Instead, the viewer is told to Read this publication.  It also works on my iPhone 4. I like that.  As students, especially HS students are not only fully smartphoned but also able to use the tools in the classroom, this might be a great tool for e-teachers.