{"podcast":{"title":"The Spark Creativity Teacher Podcast | ELA","slug":"the-spark-creativity-teacher-podcast-ela-743282","podcast_index_feed_id":743282,"rss_url":"https://sparkcreativity.libsyn.com/rss","website_url":"http://nowsparkcreativity.com","image_url":"https://static.libsyn.com/p/assets/c/2/e/b/c2ebf102a6acd494bafc7308ab683e82/TSCTP_3000px.png","author":"Betsy Potash","episode_count":425,"summary":"Want to love walking into your ELA classroom each day? Excited about innovative strategies like PBL, escape rooms, hexagonal thinking, sketchnotes, one-pagers, student podcasting, genius hour, and more? Want a thriving choice reading program and a shelf full of compelling diverse texts? You're in the right place! Here you'll find interviews with top authors from the ELA field, workshops with strategies you can use in class immediately, and quick tips to ignite your English teacher creativity. Love teaching poetry? Explore blackout poems, book spine poems, I am from poems, performance poetry, lessons for contemporary poets, and more. Excited to get started with hexagonal thinking? Find out how to build your first deck of hexagons, guide your students through their first discussion, and even expand into hexagonal one-pagers. Into visual learning? Me too! Learn about sketchnotes, one-pagers, and the writing makerspace. Want to get your students podcasting? Get the top technology recs you need to make it happen, and find out what tips a podcaster would give to students starting out. Wish your students would fall for choice reading? Explore top titles and how to fund them, learn to mak…","last_synced_at":"2026-07-30T04:18:43.548102+00:00","page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-spark-creativity-teacher-podcast-ela-743282"},"episode":{"title":"429: Don't Miss this Essential Lesson on Multimodality","slug":"429-don-t-miss-this-essential-lesson-on-multimodality","published_at":"2026-06-24T14:25:00+00:00","page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-spark-creativity-teacher-podcast-ela-743282/429-don-t-miss-this-essential-lesson-on-multimodality","show_page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-spark-creativity-teacher-podcast-ela-743282","url":"https://sparkcreativity.libsyn.com/429-dont-miss-this-essential-lesson-on-multimodality","audio_url":"https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/sparkcreativity/multimodal_intro_full.mp3?dest-id=518145","summary":"Recently I was invited to give a poetry workshop on a reflection day at a local school. They wanted the writing element of the day to help students understand themselves better, so I chose to provide a workshop based on George Ella Lyon's poem, \"Where I'm From.\" You know I love that workshop. Together, we looked at how details bring poetry to life, brainstormed images about their childhood experiences, explored how various creators have interpreted the \"I am From\" prompt to create videos, paintings, photo essays, poems, and combinations thereof. Then I invited them to work multimodaly as they knit together their images with color and imagery. But I had never worked with them before, and none of them had heard of multimodal communication, though they're surrounded with it everyday. I realized I had left out a crucial step in the workshop, to help them see that multimodal communication would go well beyond \"decorating\" their poem or underlining all the lines in color. So how can we introduce this concept to students? How can we help them see that text, images, audio, and video can all convey such very different shades of meaning in communication? This week on the pod, let's talk about introducing multimodality, and showing kids what works and what doesn't. Be sure to grab the free download that goes along with this episode, a slideshow full of examples you can share with your students. You can sign up to have me send it over totally free right here . You'll also be subscribed to my teaching idea emails, though of course you can unsubscribe at any time. OK, let's dive in. Grab your copy of the multimodality introduction slideshow: https://spark-creativity.kit.com/bdde614049 Go Further: Explore alllll the Episodes of The Spark Creativity Teacher Podcast . Snag three free w…","meta_description":"Recently I was invited to give a poetry workshop on a reflection day at a local school. They wanted the writing element of the day to help students unders…","key_points":[],"chapters":[],"topics":[],"duration_seconds":625,"processing_state":"not_requested","actions":[{"name":"request_transcript","method":"POST","url":"https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/the-spark-creativity-teacher-podcast-ela-743282/episodes/429-don-t-miss-this-essential-lesson-on-multimodality/transcription-requests","description":"Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode."},{"name":"read_markdown","method":"GET","url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-spark-creativity-teacher-podcast-ela-743282/429-don-t-miss-this-essential-lesson-on-multimodality.md","description":"Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource."}]}}