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?

Blog Search...

So I started looking through some of the blogs that were listed in Wilber. Some no longer existed and some I found hard to read and did not like. There was one that I found, however, that sparked my creative interest and I really enjoyed. It's called A Really Different Place. You can follow this link here to get to it. On this blog page, a teacher posts things that she thinks that others might enjoy or want to know about and corresponds with her students as well as has her students share stories that they have written.
This made me think of how valuable a single group blog page could be within a classroom. It would be a place where the students could comment together on posts and be easily accessible because all of the posts would be in the same place intead of on different pages. Students could collaborate on class activities and help each other when questions arise while outside of the classroom. The teacher would be able to keep track of what the students are doing on the page and make comments on posts that are made.
As long as there are clear rules and expectations set for the class blog as well as consequences if those are not followed, I am sure that the blog will run smoothly and be a smart, interactive way to facilitate learning within the classroom learning environment.

Safe and Efficient Blogging Within the Classroom

As I was reading Kist for this week, my thoughts went toward the security of blogging and the importance of the students understanding that blogs are the same as a social networking site like Facebook when it comes to the possibility of people seeing the information that the student posts on that blog. When I teach, I am planning on taking advantage of the possibilities that blogs present. With that comes the need to educate the students. I will start out by showing the students a copy of Bud Hunt's Blogging Guidelines and then craft an activity where they have to search blogs to see how old some are as an example of the fact that what you put in your blogs and on the internet staying there forever. They will need to explore the blog site in a directed activity so that they have the chance to get a feel for the site and can ask any questions before they have their first blog entry. The blogs will most likely be closed to only the people within their class and have to do with their responses to class readings and activities as well as things in life that the students find that link to the class material. I know that this is very similar to what we are doing in class, but that is because I think that the blogs are working well and are more interesting and open for student creativity than just written responses every other day.

What do you all think about the safety of using blogs within the classroom? What are your main concerns about blogs and your future students?

Connection within Classrooms

So I realized something interesting this week. Many of my teachers are discussing similar and related topics without actually collaborating with each other to do so. As a student, this helps me to more easily connect the material together and both remember and understand the material. So... here is my thought that came out of this realization...
Why don't teachers work together to make material in the classrooms across the grade related? I think that the biggest problem with classrooms today is that the students do not feel like there is a connection between the material they learn in each classroom and what they do outside of the classroom. So why don't we make a connection? At the start of the school year, get the students to fill out an interests form about themselves and work to incorporate those interests within the classroom throughout the year so that every student will feel a connection to the material. Include Web 2.0 tools to incorporate the digital generation's interest and natural gravitation to the technology. Decorate your room with material that the students themselves have created to create a sense of ownership between the students and the classroom. On designated days, have the students present topics that interest them to the classroom. Of course, there would have to be guidelines for this, but that would be determined as the classroom is set up. Work with other teachers in the building to make lessons match in some way such as time period, concept, or material. Teachers in different fields like English and History can back into a topic in completely different ways without actually covering the same material but making it clear that the material is connected. With this, the student, who might have not understood the topic from the Engish side might now understand it from the History side or the other way around and apply that understanding to the other class. That collaborative working of the teachers could have unlimited potential to the student.

What do you all think of this? Have you ever seen or read of it done in the classroom?

Podcasting and Collaborative Learning

So after reading the class material for this week, I have a new view of podcasting in the classroom. And it links up to my previous blog about incorporating orality into literate culture.
Podcasts are the perfect way for students to focus their intellectual ideas using a medium that they are familiar and comfortable with: technology. It is now easier than ever for students to access material online with computers everywhere (school, home, the library and at other friend's houses), smart phones, and iPads. Not only can podcasts be used to tap into the students' love for technology, but it also serves as a way to connect those students to other cultures and influences outside of the classroom. By being exposed to these different world views and cultures, the students will become less ethnocentric in their view of themselves in relation to the world around them and realize that everything that happens happens as a result of something else happening in the world outside of their sights.
With podcasts, outside of the basic requirements of what needs to be included in the podcast, the students have complete freedom in how and in what way they want to express their thoughts and ideas on the book report or other assignment that they are using the podcast for. You can learn a lot about a student from what they do with their podcast. From what the student puts in their podcast to how they arrange it, the entire podcast has the touch of the student and therefore their own personality imbedded within the work. This becomes an extension of the student and something that they can take great pride in producing and presenting to others. I believe that being confident in your work is huge for a student. Without that drive from the student, the work will be lackluster and have very little passion behind it. If done the right way, podcasts can captivate a student's mind and make them want to work on it even when they are supposed to be doing something else. That pull of the student toward an activity is the mark of a good classroom assignment.

Slight Revival of Orality in the Classroom

Hi All! I hope that your weeks are going well so far and that you didn't get bogged down in the snow that we got last night ;)
Something came up in one of my classes today that got me started thinking. We were talking about the difference between an oral culture and a literary culture. For those of you that are in HDEL, you will understand and remember this. The idea was brought up that orality is the passing on of stories and lessons through speaking with each other and that this tradition is being lost, if it isn't already, in our literate culture. I personally find it a shame that such a thing could even happen. When I think about it, though, I can see the outward presentation of this in our society every day. You can hear the elders of our our society often saying that the yound have lost their way and that things just weren't the same back in their day. Well that might be true.
What I am suggesting is that, as teachers, we make a move in our classroom to try to reinstate some of that oral culture where stories and ideas are passed from generation to generation, respected and remembered with fond memories.
An activity that we could have our students complete within our classrooms is an expository speech where they are told to think of a time in their lives where they learned something valuable from another person by just being a part of an action. This could be cooking with their grandmother, hunting with their father, or sitting around the dinner table listening to those old family stories and memories that came from a lifetime of experience.

Maybe their bits of wisdom were something like this:
"The more make up a woman wears the more she's tryin to hide. Make up can hide a lot of evil."
- Phil Robertson from Duck Dynasty

What do you all think? Would you do this in your classroom? And, if so, how do you think that you would do it? Do you think that it would even work?

Practice and Endless Patience

After reading Miller and McVee, I came to one main conclusion: teaching in this world of endless technology will not be easy. That being said, I know that we can all do it well. After all, we are a part of the iGeneration. We naturally gravitate toward technology. The children that we are going to teach will take to technology even more seamlessly than we do. I think that this could lead to some pretty awesome teaching. Miller and McVee in Multimodal Composing in Classrooms wrote that 'growth resulted from choosing challenge over ease, and they encourage us to continue to try to teach in new ways' (21). With the continued technological growth of our students, there are so many different ways to work with this ability and make the material that we are teaching in our classrooms more easily accessible to our students.
Brainstorm:
Ask the students to give you ideas of what they would like to do with the technology. Since our students will know more about what is our there, it's like having a research group help you with some of the many options that are out there. Plus, with every student's answer, you will be able to get a feel for what each student prefers to work with. That way it will be easier to gear the technology in the classroom away from boring and stale computer methods that we, the teachers, think are new and fun but are really old and outdated for the students.
With a lot of patience and practice and some helpful input from our students, we can be fluent in the technology language of our students. And if we just admit when we don't know anything, then we can get ask for help and move on.

A man named Will and his writings

So this week I read William Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew and found a new love for Shakespeare and his writing. I hadn't read Shakespeare since high school and, to be completely honest, it was not made exciting then. So I was lead to think that Romeo and Juliet and Macbeth were the only Shakespeare plays that I would ever read and was not too excited by the prospect. But when I read The Taming of the Shrew, I fell in love with the smart wit and the flamboyant characters that appeared within the writing. And when I went and watched parts of The Taming of the Shrew starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton to compare that writing to, I fell in love with the play even more. For any of those Shakespeare lovers out there or other members of my Shakespeare class, I found this video on YouTube where the person edited different scenes from the movie together with a Doris Day song. The result is a comical version of the story and a creatively different way to look at the relationship between Katherine and Petruccio. You can find the video here. I recommend that, if you know anything about The Taming of the Shrew, or just really love Elizabeth Taylor or Richard Burton, you take a look at it. You won't regret it. :)

Mutlitasking generation? You bet ya!

As I sit down to write this post and start to organize my thoughts, I realize a few glaring details.
1. The tv is on and in full view.
2. YouTube is sharing screen space with my blog page and is streaming a music video. This is what I am listening to right now: Kenny Chesney- Pirate Flag :)
3. My phone keeps flashing text messages and Facebook alerts.
What does all of this add up to?
Well....I must be part of that illusive group of tech savy people that I am reading about for class.
Which leads me to my next thought: Why do I need to read about something that I should presumably know all about? Because, while I, and likely those of you reading this blog, know that we mutitask at almost every level of our lives, we don't take the time to sit down and actually analyze why we operate this way. We just do it. We were raised in a generation that had computer class in elementary school and we had cell phones by the time we hit high school. We have always been around technology and don't know any other way.
Within Larry Rosen's Rewired, he found that children that have grown up in this generation of constant contact with technology "achieve higher grades in school, create tech business before they even graduate from high school, and apply to and enter college at unprecedented rates" (2). Though parents of this generation's children worry about whether or not their children have enough socializing skills, they should really realize that you can't compare today's generation to our parent's generation. They were raised in a completely different world. The children of this generation can socialize just as well as their parents did/do, but they just do it in a different way. The sooner that people realize that and move on to ways that can help incorporate that heightened technological ability within this generation and the generations to follow, the better that the children of those generations will be able to collaborate within the classroom and the world outside of the classroom alongside people from all age groups and generations.

So this is gonna be my first try at blogging. I'll try to keep this interesting... so please bear with me for a little bit. Hear we go... Gentlemen (and ladies) start your engines....... ;)