Last semester, I observed an eighth grade English teacher who implemented what he called Daily Writings into his daily curriculum. I really liked the idea of them and wanted to share the idea as well as expand upon them a bit. The idea of a daily writing was to have students write for a solid five minutes every single day before the lesson began and then students were encouraged to share their pieces if they chose to. Students were allowed to opt out of sharing if they felt their piece was too personal or otherwise chose not to want to share it. The inspiration for the writings were usually a short prompt, written or oral, or sometimes merely a single word. Students could respond to the prompt as best as they could, or, if they prompt did not move them or they had a more pressing topic in mind that they wished to write on, they could write on another topic.
The idea of Daily Writings were to get students more comfortable with writing and doing so with less restraint. This proved to work well. Student pieces grew lengthier and more detailed as the year progressed. Also, it encouraged students to make writing a public, interactive art. As the year progressed, more and more students chose to read their writings aloud to the class.
I really liked this idea, as I said before. I loved the results of it. It made writing a regular, important part of every single class and made students comfortable and confident in sharing what they had to say via writing. I, also, see more potential with the prompts for these writings. Since these writings are so freely open, I see them being a good opener for teaching different styles of writing. For example, before a lesson on persuasive writing the prompt for a Daily Writing could be something on the lines of "Write a sales pitch for an imaginary product." The prompt could also be a picture, short video clip, or music. Daily Writings have so much potential.
Saturday, March 16, 2013
Active Reading
I recently read Geof''s post on close reading skills and video production, and this spurred me to expand on my own ideas surrounding close and active reading.
I think students have such difficulty with reading closely with a text because they believe that reading involves solely reading the words on the page. They pick up the reading, read it front to back, put it down, and expect to be able to answer any question thrown at them. This is such a flawed view of reading. Reading needs to be an active experience not a passive one. I know that a lot of the methods for active reading involve marking up a text and this makes school districts cringe over the "defacing" of their pricey textbooks, but there are ways around this. A method I plan on using in my classroom is employing the use of many, many post-it notes. At first, I want to make it an assignment to make so many notes on the post-its or write down so many important lines that you would highlight if it was a text you owned, etc. as my students read a text. My hope is that this will eventually become a happen and less strict measures will be needed to be taken to ensure that students interact with the text as they read it. I see this being really helpful to high school students. It teaches a skill that will definitely help them to better digest a text, more intelligently discuss it, and perform better on test, including the standardized texts Geof mentions that require close reading skills.
As always, I'd appreciate any other ideas for active reading activites or criticism on the one I proposed.
I think students have such difficulty with reading closely with a text because they believe that reading involves solely reading the words on the page. They pick up the reading, read it front to back, put it down, and expect to be able to answer any question thrown at them. This is such a flawed view of reading. Reading needs to be an active experience not a passive one. I know that a lot of the methods for active reading involve marking up a text and this makes school districts cringe over the "defacing" of their pricey textbooks, but there are ways around this. A method I plan on using in my classroom is employing the use of many, many post-it notes. At first, I want to make it an assignment to make so many notes on the post-its or write down so many important lines that you would highlight if it was a text you owned, etc. as my students read a text. My hope is that this will eventually become a happen and less strict measures will be needed to be taken to ensure that students interact with the text as they read it. I see this being really helpful to high school students. It teaches a skill that will definitely help them to better digest a text, more intelligently discuss it, and perform better on test, including the standardized texts Geof mentions that require close reading skills.
As always, I'd appreciate any other ideas for active reading activites or criticism on the one I proposed.
Friday, March 8, 2013
Video: Foundations and Acceptable Genres
This week's readings took a multifaceted look at the complicated medium of video. David L. Bruce's article in Miller and McVee's text was really interesting in the fact that it gave me some very basic knowledge of how video actually works. Bruce calls this the "grammar of video". As with the grammar of a language, you have to understand it in order to be successful in intaking or producting a video in the best way possible. This brief introduction s very helpful to me. As a wrote last week, I'd like to incorporate a movie/video project in my classroom if I get the chance in the future, but without understanding simple things like the names for different shots, I now realize just how unprepared I'd be for doing this. I really look forwarding to learning more about the langauge of film in class this week. That will help me do a much better job on my proposed video project.
After this quick debriefing by Bruce's article, I moved on to get an interesting contradictory message in Lund's article. Though Lund pushed for how valuable video production could be in the classroom, he says that "students typically suggest projects that imitate their favorite television shows: MTV music videos, violent car chases, or Beavis and Butt-Head humor. While respecting students' desire for ownership of the project, the teacher must tactfully guide them into more acceptable genres" (Lund 79, italics not original). This statement made me cringe. I'd love to see students turn The Great Gatsby into an MTV music video or The Catcher in the Rye into a Beavis and Butt-Head style comedy. I think the solution is not to stifle the creativity you are originally trying to work out of students, but instead to help them channel it. Suggestions are a great idea, but the idea of acceptable genres reminds me too much of all the things that turned me off of multimodal assignments when I was in high school. Guidelines, specific requirements, and a check-with-me first policy should allow students to be creative without producing a video that doesn't achieve what you aimed for them to achieve.
After this quick debriefing by Bruce's article, I moved on to get an interesting contradictory message in Lund's article. Though Lund pushed for how valuable video production could be in the classroom, he says that "students typically suggest projects that imitate their favorite television shows: MTV music videos, violent car chases, or Beavis and Butt-Head humor. While respecting students' desire for ownership of the project, the teacher must tactfully guide them into more acceptable genres" (Lund 79, italics not original). This statement made me cringe. I'd love to see students turn The Great Gatsby into an MTV music video or The Catcher in the Rye into a Beavis and Butt-Head style comedy. I think the solution is not to stifle the creativity you are originally trying to work out of students, but instead to help them channel it. Suggestions are a great idea, but the idea of acceptable genres reminds me too much of all the things that turned me off of multimodal assignments when I was in high school. Guidelines, specific requirements, and a check-with-me first policy should allow students to be creative without producing a video that doesn't achieve what you aimed for them to achieve.
21st Century Educational Technology and Learning Blog Review
By digging a little deeper than my orignal toe-dipping into the world of blogs and wikis, with the help of ideas from Wilber's chapters from last week, I've found a really helpful blog called 21st Century Educational Technology and Learning. This blog, as you can tell from the title, explores an ernomous amount of information on technology as it applies to the classroom. What is truly exceptional about this site is that it very well organized, unlike many sites I ran into, and covers so much information.
First off, the organization is superb. Each post is rather clearly labeled, and many are a part of a multiple post, more general topic. This allows you to get at the information you want more easily. Also, within each post, the author is very good at breaking his rather lengthy posts up with headings and bullets points for easy reading and information locating.
Secondly, when I used the word "plethora" to describe how much information this blog contains, I think I may actually have used this overused word correctly this time. This blog is fit to burst with information, links, and ideas. Take the latest post as of the last time I looked at the blog for example. It actually lists 125 different specific uses for word clouds like Wordle. The author has another multi-part series of blogs that covers creative ideas for the digital classroom that's very lengthy and full to the brim with ideas and links to other sites and even one to a web seminar the author was hosting.
In all, if you can get over the author's frequent overuse and misuse of ellipses, you can find a lot of great, well-organized information on digital educational tools and ideas for using them in your classroom on the 21st Century Technology and Learning blog.
First off, the organization is superb. Each post is rather clearly labeled, and many are a part of a multiple post, more general topic. This allows you to get at the information you want more easily. Also, within each post, the author is very good at breaking his rather lengthy posts up with headings and bullets points for easy reading and information locating.
Secondly, when I used the word "plethora" to describe how much information this blog contains, I think I may actually have used this overused word correctly this time. This blog is fit to burst with information, links, and ideas. Take the latest post as of the last time I looked at the blog for example. It actually lists 125 different specific uses for word clouds like Wordle. The author has another multi-part series of blogs that covers creative ideas for the digital classroom that's very lengthy and full to the brim with ideas and links to other sites and even one to a web seminar the author was hosting.
In all, if you can get over the author's frequent overuse and misuse of ellipses, you can find a lot of great, well-organized information on digital educational tools and ideas for using them in your classroom on the 21st Century Technology and Learning blog.
Saturday, March 2, 2013
Wilber
One of the most outstanding things I read this week came from the very first page of Wilber's chapter 3. He makes the point that I think is at the core of the issue of technology in classroom. He says in the very first paragraph of the chapter that "[f]irst and foremost, andy teacher must habe a reason for using technology in his or her teaching. It's not enough that the school just bought Smartboards or that your principal has heard about wikis" (Wilber 4). This is a lot of what I spoke of in a previous post on the subject. Technology can't be used in the classroom just to for the sake of technology. There has to be a purpose. It has to be the best tool for the job, and that is why you choose to use it.
If you happen to choose a blog as that tool, Wilber makes some great points about that, too. For example, he mentions how personal blogs are very effective in that they help students express individuality and have a sense of ownership in their work. I find this to be very true. Too often I feel that students lose that sense of ownership and value for their individual work in the classroom whenever they simply do the work and hand it over to the teacher. When kids can have that sense of owership, I feel that it will undoubtedly translate into producing more confident, capable writers. Also, whenever their work is "out there" for anyone to see, students see that they put out their best work because they know how many people have access to it. This also would appear to bring up the overall quality of work produced.
If you happen to choose a blog as that tool, Wilber makes some great points about that, too. For example, he mentions how personal blogs are very effective in that they help students express individuality and have a sense of ownership in their work. I find this to be very true. Too often I feel that students lose that sense of ownership and value for their individual work in the classroom whenever they simply do the work and hand it over to the teacher. When kids can have that sense of owership, I feel that it will undoubtedly translate into producing more confident, capable writers. Also, whenever their work is "out there" for anyone to see, students see that they put out their best work because they know how many people have access to it. This also would appear to bring up the overall quality of work produced.
Amendment to the Video Game Project
You may have read a previous post of mine where I discussed an idea to make a project in which students apply knowledge of an in-class text and create, to a reasonable extent, the idea for a video game. I knew at the start that this idea would probably get a rather black or white reaction from students. Student who enjoy video games, I'd hope, would jump on the opportunity to bring one of their interests and literacies into the classroom. Those who don't really care for them or have little to no experience with them would probably have no desire to engage in this project. Though the sole purpose of a project should never be engagement, I never want a project to be the reason for a lack of engagement.
All of this said, I knew that I needed to make this project adaptable to be expressed in different mediums. Probably the easiest and most widely appealing medium I can think of for this purpose is film. Movies are a much more popular medium, and they have a lot of the same elements that I hope to utilize with the video game option. For example, I wanted to have students create characters textually and visually, if the project is used for creative writing, or reproduce characters from the text. This would work just as well for a movie. Also, I had intended on having students produce a cut-scene that would play in their video game, either via video or storyboarding. This, obviously would work just as well as film medium.
If anyone has any criticism or ideas for different mediums to be added to this project, please feel free to share them. I really appreciated all the comments on the "A Video Game Assessment?" post, so I'd love so more for this one as well.
All of this said, I knew that I needed to make this project adaptable to be expressed in different mediums. Probably the easiest and most widely appealing medium I can think of for this purpose is film. Movies are a much more popular medium, and they have a lot of the same elements that I hope to utilize with the video game option. For example, I wanted to have students create characters textually and visually, if the project is used for creative writing, or reproduce characters from the text. This would work just as well for a movie. Also, I had intended on having students produce a cut-scene that would play in their video game, either via video or storyboarding. This, obviously would work just as well as film medium.
If anyone has any criticism or ideas for different mediums to be added to this project, please feel free to share them. I really appreciated all the comments on the "A Video Game Assessment?" post, so I'd love so more for this one as well.
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