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....... ;)