In our final meeting, Isabella surprised me with a script for her project that she had written at home! With her words as our motivation, we finalized the images, video, quotes, and audio that would make up our presentation. We ended up with a slideshow that is both educational and inspirational. Here is our final project. Hope you like it!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMMVfg-ghc8– Isabella and Amanda
Unfortunately, Isabella was not able to attend our most recent meeting. I was pretty bummed not to have her around because we were supposed to piece our story back together after the episode from last week. I tried to put the video and pictures back in order to the best of my abilities, but Isabella will have to confirm that I am staying true to her vision when we meet again. The time I spent working on the project alone really made me consider what Isabella and I are trying to accomplish together. I think that this project is about more than this final product (which we may or may not have at this rate). In one of the Annenberg teacher resource videos, a speaker said that, as educators, we must remember, “writing is a process” and I think that is true for any literacy endeavor. I am looking forward to reflecting with Isabella about our time together and I hope that she will see the value in the process as well.
Here are some links to professional development resources that I found for English Language Arts teachers:
Facing History – Although this company has the word ‘history’ in its name, its goal extends beyond the history classroom. Facing History aims to nurture civic learning and democracy in all educational disciplines. While the resources primarily pertain to history, I noticed that the web site also has a literature collection and connects the texts to big ideas and essential questions. Facing History also offers professional development programs in the form of seminars, workshops, and online learning, which the school or district must pay for.
National Council of Teachers of English -This website has both resources and professional development programs for English teachers. The resources include, but are not limited to, books, grants, career opportunities, and lesson plans. The professional development programs include consultants, web seminars, and an annual convention. Teachers can access the resources without paying for membership, but cannot take part in the professional development programs unless they pay.
I may have been looking in the wrong places, but my search for professional development programs primarily led me to resources that the educator, school, or district must pay for. While the companies are doing important work to support teachers and schools, I can’t help but feel that, because they are ultimately trying to sell their products, they have their own agendas too. Well, check out the websites anyways. Some of the articles and lesson plans looked pretty cool.
This week, Isabella and I experienced a minor setback on our project. While I made a concerted effort to save our iMovie project so that it could be accessed from multiple computers, some part of the files didn’t transfer properly and all was lost! I, as is my custom, went straight to panic mode, but Isabella seemed relatively unfazed by the whole situation. I envy her ability to remain calm and composed under such circumstances. For the rest of your meetings (there are only two! ahhh!) I will bring my laptop to class so that we can safeguard our progress.
Although we weren’t able to get any farther on the construction of the story, Isabella and I did have the opportunity to discuss how she wants to narrate the images and text. We talked a lot about poems, and decided that we are going to try to find some poems related to crew that we can record her reading. I am planning on bringing in some example poems to our next class as inspiration. I found some poems about rowing on here. I hope that in our next meeting, we will have a concrete idea of what needs to be done on our project so that it is ready to be shared with the class. I also hope that we will have no more computer problems!
I just read the book Reading, Writing, and Rising Up for the Multidisciplinary Methods seminar and I wanted to share the resource with the class. The author of the book is Linda Christensen, who has 24 years experience as a literacy teacher. I would recommend this book because Christensen is writing from a place of both experience and passion. The text contains unit descriptions, lessons, and sample worksheets and handouts. She also supplements the information with classroom anecdotes and examples of student work.
Throughout the text, it is evident that Christensen has developed and shared her curriculum because she genuinely loves teaching literacy and her students. She is upfront about both her struggles and triumphs in the classroom and has created a resource for teachers because she empathizes with their challenges and wishes to help. She wants every educator to have the tools to create a classroom in which students work “together in a community to make meaning and to make change” (Christensen 182). Although the text does not explicitly address technology, the lessons could definitely be adapted to include digital literacy skills. I hope you all check it out!
After reading “Looking for a struggle: Exploring the emotions of a middle school reader” by Cheri Foster Triplett and “Re-Seeing (Dis)Ability: Ten Suggestions” by Patricia A. Dunn, I was struck by the similarities between the two articles. Dunn “challenges us to think about disability as socially constructed: that many barriers encountered by people with disabilities are not the ‘fault’ of their disability per se, but are rather a result of the ways they’re treated in society” (Dunn 14). Triplett’s case study demonstrates that we can conceptualize struggling readers in a similar manner. Literacy thus becomes a socially constructed phenomenon that is not the sole responsibility of the students, parents, or teacher, but rather the result of the interactions between these different social frameworks.
Thinking of literacy in this way really made me consider what a teacher can do to shape and manipulate the social environment of his or her classroom. Although Mitchell, the student from Triplett’s article, states that he enjoys classes when teachers appear to like what the are teaching, I do not think that just enjoying one’s subject matter is enough. Teachers need to actively foster an educational environment that accommodates all students. But how does one accomplish this task? Unfortunately, I don’t have an answer to that question. Part of me wants to say that educators must employ the Principles of Universal Design, get to know their students personally, and consistently validate and incorporate students’ funds of knowledge into the curriculum. However, I realize that saying is easier than implementing. These three teaching principles seem to be, in some incarnation or another, the solution for everything.
Although achieving a classroom that incorporates all these elements may be difficult, I think that the readings don’t indicate that educators need to be successful in all these respects. My take away is that, regardless of how this is accomplished, teachers have a duty to shift a student away from a negative perception of his or her abilities to be a student. Perhaps Mitchell is right: if teachers construct a positive space for learning, then the finer points will follow.
In our most recent meeting, Isabella and I got to work on putting together her digital story about crew. We now have videos and pictures of professional rowers and their coaches, photographs of Vassar’s crew team, and a few images from Poughkeepsie High School. Isabella brought in the transcripts from her interviews with her teammates. We began to extract quotes from those interviews and spliced the text in between the images. We found some other entertaining quotes about crew on this website. Isabella liked these three in particular:
“Rowers do more before 8:00am than most people do all day.” — Rowing Shirt Logo
“Real athletes row. Everyone else just plays games.” — Rowing Shirt Logo
“Crew is life … everything else is just details.” — Racing Shirt Logo
We also interviewed Fiona about her experiences rowing. (Shout out to Emily and Fiona who are making an awesome movie trailer – Isabella and I got to try out our acting skills, which are sorely lacking on my part, and play supporting roles! You can read more about their project here). Next class we are going to put in the last of the quotes and photos and write Isabella’s narration! We still have a lot of work to do but I am so happy about all the progress we made!
After reading this weeks article on video games as learning machines by James Paul Gee, I interviewed a close friend who really likes to play video games. He uses them to relax and get his mind off of school. They are an enjoyable form of entertainment because they are interactive. He said that the aspect of video games that he finds most appealing is the story, which plays to his interests and emotions. I was intrigued by the role that the narrative played into my friends enjoyment of a game. His perspective made me consider video games as about more than just guns, explosions, and multiple lives. An understanding and appreciation of the narrative arc and complex rules of a video game is it’s own form of digital literacy.
I was also interested in Gee’s explanation of the shared knowledge between video game characters and the players. My friend said that he usually imagines himself as being the character in the video game as opposed to interacting with them through shared knowledge. He selects characters that can do things that he can’t do in real life. For instance, they have magical powers or elite skills. I think that Gee’s observations of players projecting onto their video game alter egos is accurate because it appears to be more fun to play when you imagine yourself, only better, in the game.
Because Gee presented video game structure as a framework for classrooms, I asked my friend what he had learned from video games and if he had ever employed this knowledge in a school setting. He said that he has mostly learned obscure vocabulary words, such as lycanthropy, which is the ability to turn into a world (I checked on this definition after the interview and he was right!). Other than the expanded lexicon, he didn’t really call upon his video game skills or knowledge in high school, except in the occasional speech or debate anecdote.
From my interview, I didn’t get the sense that my friend wanted video games to cross over into academic territory because he uses them as tools for escaping from the stresses of school. Because I have very limited knowledge of video games, I don’t know if I would use their structures in a classroom. Although I’m not completely sold, I imagine that somewhere, there is a video game player whose experience at school could be significantly altered if his or her knowledge of video games was welcome in a classroom setting, and for that reason I think that it is valuable to consider this innovative mode of instruction.
This week Isabella and I finally made a decision about the concrete shape for our digital literacy project. Isabella’s vision for the project is a slide show about crew that contains pictures, videos, and her voice over. While I was on Spring Break, Isabella interviewed her crew teammates at Poughkeepsie High School and will bring in those interviews and photos of our team for our next meeting. In the mean time, we looked up photos and videos of famous rowing icons and coaches. Isabella plans to give some biographical information about these figures and talk about how they have inspired her. Because Isabella found most of the information about the rowers and coaches online, we talked a little about credible Internet sources. As she continues her research next class period, I hope to talk to her a little more about citation. I think I will show her some examples. My personal favorite online resource for citation standards is the Purdue Online Writing Lab.
While Isabella looked up inspirational rowers and coaches, I got a brief tutorial from Baynard on how to capture YouTube videos so that I can use them in iMovie. I used a program called Snapz Pro X. The program is really easy to use and is on all the computers in the Digital Media Zone – all you have to remember is control-shift-3. Here is a link to one of the videos I captured for Isabella’s project:
I’m excited to see how our project will take shape next session now that we have some material to work with. I hope that Isabella and I can work on her narration so that we know what she wants to say about each image and video.
In Frey and Fisher’s article “Motivating Requires a Meaningful Task” they discuss the importance of productive group work as a classroom tool. I think that their observations about the delicate balance between too many group members (some students do not make an effort because “they know the work will be done by others”) and too few (“students begin to feel overwhelmed and give up on the task”) were right on track. I also liked the idea that the group size should change depending on the members and the class at hand and that the groups should consist of diverse skill levels. My only concern about forming the groups in this way is whether students of different levels would work well together. I remember that when I was in middle school, we were divided into reading groups based on our literacy skills and the students in the separate groups made fun of each other for the content and difficulty level of the books the respective groups were reading. The behavior seems (and was) petty, retrospectively, but I imagine that students today may conduct themselves similarly. On the other hand, when I worked in groups with peers of varying skill levels, usually in classes other than Language Arts, I always found that helping each other was rewarding and enjoyable. In order for teachers to prevent riffs between students at different levels, I think that they should establish the precedent in their classrooms that all students will be working together regardless of individual achievement.
Another passage from the article that I found interesting was the section on the complexity of a task. Frey and Fisher write, “if students merely divide [a project] up and agree to meet again later to assemble the final product, it’s likely that the task was not challenging” (Frey and Fisher 31). While that was not how I approached group projects in middle school, in my experience in both high school and college, that is definitely how group work is conducted. However, I don’t think that my group members and I approached a project in this way because the assignment wasn’t difficult, but rather because we had limited time in which we could all work together on the project. I am personally not a huge fan of group projects and regularly find them taxing, so I don’t think that they need to be any more challenging. I just wonder, after reading this article, if part of the reason why I don’t like group projects is that the assignment is not difficult enough to motivate my group members and I to want to collaborate. I will have to consider this point with greater attention when I am designing lessons for my future students and inevitably dividing them into groups.
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