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?