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.