Giraffe was on the menu in ancient Pompeii:

“The ultimate aim of our research is to reveal the structural and social relationships over time between working-class Pompeian households, as well as to determine the role that sub-elites played in the shaping of the city, and to register their response to city-and Mediterranean-wide historical, political and economic developments. However, one of the larger datasets and themes of our research has been diet and the infrastructure of food consumption and food ways,” says [University of Cincinnati associate professor of classics Steven] Ellis.

 

He adds that as a result of the discoveries, “The traditional vision of some mass of hapless lemmings – scrounging for whatever they can pinch from the side of a street, or huddled around a bowl of gruel – needs to be replaced by a higher fare and standard of living, at least for the urbanites in Pompeii.”

Manicure Monday

Manicure Monday

Scientist Hijacks Seventeen Magazine’s #ManicureMonday hashtag on Twitter.

At the beginning of each week, Seventeen magazine encourages women and girls to tweet pictures of their done-up fingernails under #ManicureMonday. But if you searched the hashtag yesterday in hopes of finding some bedazzled inspiration, you were in for quite a surprise. Seemingly all at once, scientists hijacked #ManicureMonday with their own images of fingernails interacting with ghost crabs, keyboards, shark bait, and coyote scat….

Hope Jahren is the scientist who single-handedly orchestrated the coup. Jahren works as an isotope geochemist and laboratory scientist studying photosynthesis at the University of Hawaii Manoa. She got the idea a week ago when autocomplete suggested she tweet something under the #ManicureMonday tag. Once she figured out what the French tip that was, she hatched a plan to hijack the hashtag.

“Seventeen magazine has 700,000 followers,” said Jahren, “and it’s my dream they’ll retweet one of these images to show their followers, presumably a lot of girls, that it’s about what their hands do—not about how they look.”

Using Haiku Deck as a Visual Flashcard Generator

Next year, I want to try out a project that involves students using the iOS app Haiku Deck to collaborate on a set of visual flashcards. Haiku Deck is presentation software that makes very quick, very beautiful Keynote-style presentation slides. One key element that is amazing is it searches the text of the slide for related high-quality Creative Commons-licensed images. Here’s one that I made for a professional development session with my colleagues:

Haiku Deck-generated slide with text DIFFERENTIATION THE IPAD GIVES STUDENTS FLEXIBILITY AND CHOICE (original photo here)

Please note the small banner at the bottom of the slide that includes the Creative Commons license and the source of the picture.

Here’s my vision of the project. A student is assigned something: a Latin word, a phrase, a concept. The student then uses Haiku Deck to make two slides. The first is the “front” of the flashcard: it has the Latin word or phrase. The second is the “back” of the flashcard, and it has the Latin as well as the English translation or explanation. The student then shares her slides with the class. Ideally, each classmate would be assigned a different word or phrase, which allows the entire class to split the labor of a long list.

Here’s my example:

Carpe Diem slide (original photo here)

Carpe Diem Seize the Day Slide (original photo here)

I like Haiku Deck for two reasons: it is very simple, and it only searches through Creative Commons-licensed images.

Here are my (potential) problems with what I want to do.

1. Haiku Deck makes lovely images, but I want students to have a single image with the Creative Commons license included. To do this, the current workflow is to make a slidedeck, share it to myself as a presentation that I then email to myself, open in Keynote, play fullscreen, and then screenshot each slide. After I share my presentation to the web, I visit the Haiku Deck website to copy the original photo URL for citation. That is far too many steps for students; maybe Haiku Deck will consider simplifying this someday.

2. I haven’t figured out the best image repository for the students. It needs to be a place that everyone can easily upload to, and everyone can easily pull into their own photo albums. If all my students were over 13, I’d just have them post to a Flickr group, or maybe to Pinterest. But I teach middle school students, so I have to find another solution.

I like this format because it could be used for anything: student-generated study-guide questions and answers; student-written Latin sentences that show vocabulary in context (first slide = vocab word; second slide = sentence using the vocab word). I came up with this as a way to get students to interact with Latin phrases like carpe diem or tabula rasa, but it seems like something that could potentially be expanded into a number of different directions, if I can just figure out how to simplify the workflow.

[[UPDATED TO ADD: The Haiku Deck blog has a very helpful post on tips for classroom use. I hadn’t considered using a single email to create a classroom Haiku Deck account that all the kids use. Might make it easier!.]]

The Twitter Twacker

This year one of my goals has been to increase the amount of writing in Latin that my students do. I wanted to do this in an authentic way without taking up too much time of either the students or myself. Inspired by a picture that I saw online, I’ve come up with a basic procedure that has been working well for me. I call it the Twitter Twacker.

I begin by having everyone say the phrase “Twitter Tracker” three times as fast as they can. It’s impossible to pronounce this normally; instead we all end up sounding like Elmer Fudd; because we’re in Latin class, I prefer to think of us as sounding like good ol’ Emperor Claudius (of I, Claudius fame). The Twitter Twacker is a poster that I adhere to the whiteboard. Each student writes a sentence on a post-it and then “tweets” by sticking the post-it onto the board.

pic three Twitter Twacker boards

This gives me a quick formative assessment of whatever grammatical concept we are working on as a class. The students enjoy it because they can be creative. I ask them to write their name in the Twitter convention, using the @ symbol. Some students want to also use hashtags.

pic single tweet with three funny hashtags

Some draw pictures that illustrate the sentences, or even draw their own “avatar”.

four tweets with pictures

Some imitate the Twitter user experience by including the timestamp or other metadata.

single tweet with handwritten metadata tweeted at 3:16, favorites: 104, followers: 8000

I’ve found that my students really enjoy the opportunity to “tweet” in class in this manner. Since we are not actually broadcasting online, they don’t have a fear that an unknown public is seeing their content or judging their mistakes. The tactile nature of writing the sentence and then sticking it onto a poster is somehow very comforting to them. And because the size of the post-it only realistically allows a single Latin sentence, possibly paired with an English translation, the task does not feel cumbersome to them.

I’ve found that my students love this activity, and they appreciate the fact that their poster hangs in my room alongside those made by students in other grades. I love it because I’ve stumbled across a method to get my students eager to write Latin sentences quickly and often.