Oh boy...

I can't believe that we only have a few more weeks of school left. I feel like we have just started this class and still have so much to learn. However, I am glad that I was able to take this class and learn the new forms of technology and multimodal learning that I can put into practice within my future classroom. Having already completed my field experience, I find myself wishing that, during that time, I had been aware of the things that we have learned in class. I definitely plan on taking full advantage of the technology that is available to me to make leaning more interesting for my students and feel fortunate to have had a teacher who is as passionate about the subject as T.O. Thank you!

Analyzing Movies

Have any of you ever read a book then watched the movie adaptation and analyzed it the whole way through, deciding you either hated or loved the movie adaptation at the end? We are English Majors. Of course you all have. I started wondering about how I could take the movie adaptations of some of our favorite books and use them within the classroom. What I came up with is something similar to what I had in one of my high school English classes. The students will read the book or play. Lets say that they were reading Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. After they read the play, they will watch a movie version of Romeo and Juliet. Most people like to show the Claire Danes and Leonardo DiCaprio version over the older versions and I would tend to agree. The Claire Danes version is more action packed and theatrical than the older version and will keep the students' attention easier. As the students watch the movie, have them keep a piece of paper folded vertically down the middle with a heading on the top left and the right listing the similarities and the differences between the movie and the play. They must have so many of each and be able to discuss these in class after watching the movie. This will make the students actively pay attention to their readings and the movie and be able to critically analyze the film and the play. You could also make the students pay attention and take notes on different filming techniques used within the film to convey a particular emotion or emphasis on detail and how that effects the reading of the play.
Have any of you ever done a classroom assignment like this? If so, what did you think of it?

Wiki Discussions

I just finished writing my wiki responses for this week and felt that I had to share how much I like the program. I feel like wiki is a forum where we, as a class, are able to more freely and openly let our minds wonder on generally guided discussion questions. I really like some of the comments that I get to read on the page and find them helpful and insightful in my thoughts on our readings. Unlike in class, where we only have a limited amount of time to talk and can easily get sidetracked into one particular view on a large issue, wiki allows everyone to get their comments down in one place where they don't have to worry about feeling pressured in class or worried about what others might initially think about their comments.
I will definitely be trying to use wiki or other sites similar to wiki in my future classroom teachings.

Random Idea...

So today I was reading my email like I always do every morning and my mind started wandering. I had just clicked open an email from Barnes & Noble about the books that they have reviewed for the week and recommend that you take a look at. And I started thinking... what if you started something like that within your classroom? You could create a blog page where everyone in the class is friends and then require them to post a comment every other week about something that they have read. This can even be as short as a poem that they really liked or as long as a couple hundred page novel. With this page, the students could easily search it to find out interesting new things to read and share their love and excitement about what they are reading while, at the same time, getting them to think about what they are reading as they read it. This could be a new avenue to create excitement within the classroom about reading.

Teaching the Book with the Help of the Movie

For all of you who are in Shakespeare as well, you will recognize the spark for this idea from that class. I have found that, when I read something like Shakespeare and then see parts of the movie, it is often a way to clarify some questions and/or confusions that I had about the play from just reading it through. For this reason, I think that it would be a smart idea to show specific clips from the movie version of the book that you are teaching within the classroom to show an important idea or action from the story in another way for the students. Some students have a hard time visualizing action within texts and this could allow for another way that the students could intellectually access the material and make sense of it. This could easily be done with a book like The Great Gatsby. Now, obviously, you would not show the students clips from adaptations that have clearly butchered the movie or show a clip just to show a clip, but show it so that students now have something extra to work off of to put their thoughts into order and make more sense of the reading than they had before seeing the clip.

Has anyone ever seen this in action in a high school classroom and how did it work?

Bringing Connections into the Classroom

I have noticed something interesting in all of my classes this week: they all connect or overlap somehow. That's not because they are all a part of a block or the same department, but they all connect in some way. That got me thinking and I came up with a classroom idea that can advantageously work on the fact that there is almost always some connection between what you are learning in one class and learning in another and what you are seeing outside of school.

You could have the students every few weeks, bring in and share with the classroom something that connected to the lessons that they are learning within your classroom. The students would share those with the class in a short informative explanation on why they thought that connected to the classroom as well as hand in a short write up detailing what they tell the classroom. This explanation should include how the student came to the connection and why they think that it is important to the classroom, themselves, and/or others.
You could also have a single student share a connection everyday so that you have a different student sharing thought provoking ideas every day within the classroom that could be advantageous for the other students within the classroom in making connections to the material being learned in class and therefore possibly learn the material better than they would without that connection.

What do you think? How would you change this exercise within your classroom?

Once again, teaching material in meaningful context

I found chapter 3 in Miller and McVee particularly enlightening when it comes to how to teach grammar in different and unique ways. Bruce writes that grammar is given a negative connotation "because of the tradition of assigning exercises that disconnect language from its working contexts as has often occurred in the form of isolated grammar worksheets or sentence disgramming activities" (33). As we keep seeing within our readings and teacher education classes, it is incredibly important to make sure that you teach content so that the students know how that information connects to their lives outside of the classroom rather than the student just thinking that the material is only applicable to the classroom environment. We need to provide the students with guidance and training when teaching them something new within the classroom.  When working on any kind of activity or writing within the classroom, the students need to know how to go about "molding it, experimenting with it and shaping it with the eventual aim of telling some sort of story" (41). Using a film within the classroom to analyze how the director conveys a message is an interesting way for the students to see that messages can appear anywhere in many different forms.
The most compelling statement within the chapter was that "we can write only with what we have read, and we can read only by writing" (41). To know what writing is, we need to read writing. To know what good writing is, we need to be able to write. The idea is circular in understanding. One process leads to the other in a continual cycle of learning. Without any one step in the cycle, learning is stinted and the student must back track to regain the knowledge that they have missed out on.

What do you think? Do you agree with the Bruce's idea of writing?