Final Project

I chose to create a wiki, but not for student use. One aspect of my future teaching career that I think will be crucial to my performance in the classroom is my willingness to work with other teachers. There are many teachers out there who have fabulous ideas for how to teach a certain book or subject that have no way to share their successful lessons with other teachers. I have created this wiki for teachers to use to collaborate with one another. It is a safe space online that can only be entered and read with an invitation from another member of the wiki group. This way, everyone would know who was accessing the page and it wouldn’t have to be open to the public if it makes others uncomfortable that anyone could see it.

I specifically think this will be useful for my English education cohort. We have been discussing the creation of some sort of support system for when all 17 of us are out teaching at different schools. It would be incredibly comforting to know that you could communicate with other members simply by going to this site online and get feedback for your teaching questions. My wiki is designed to solely deal with questions and suggestion for how to teach critical lenses to students. I chose this because I think it is crucial that students know how to be critical of the texts they read and how to apply what they learned to the world around them; not just in classic literature. In addition, from my experience, the critical lenses are not always being taught in an engaging and interesting manor. I think that it would be incredibly helpful to have access to a place that offers many suggestions for how to engage students while learning about these lenses. In my wiki I have created a space where anyone can post a sample lesson plan onto the wiki if they feel that students enjoyed it and learned from the experience. I think it would be nice to get fresh ideas from other teachers and expand my creativity.

My parents are teachers and they always express how difficult it is to collaborate with other teachers since everyone has such a busy schedule. This wiki allows for that collaboration because you can add to it or read it at any time you want. There is no need to schedule a meeting or sit down to talk to other teachers. The wiki also affords for you to work with people outside your own school. There can even be teacher collaboration from different states! It is reassuring to know that even if I end up teaching in a different state or area, I can still toss around ideas or discuss lesson plans with people from my cohort.

Because I am going to be working independently from the rest of my cohort when I begin teaching I can safely say that I really appreciate tools such as a wiki that allow for such collaboration. This class has shown me a bunch of tools to use in the classroom as well as with other teachers and I am so thankful for it! I did not realize how useful and engaging technology could be in the classroom previous to this course. I am very interested to see what everyone else comes up with for their final projects!

My Project:

http://exploringcriticallenses.pbworks.com/

e-portfolios

When I look over my blog posts it really becomes apparent that I had little knowledge of how to effectively implement the use of technology in my classroom. Even if I had knowledge of a program or website, I was unaware of how to incorporate these ideas into lesson plans to help students learn. What has been very helpful to me is reading other students blogs from this class. Everyone has such creative ideas for how to make this technology useful to us teachers. It is especially helpful to hear from those people in this class that are already teachers. They have specific instances/lesson plans that incorporate technology and are already using them in the classroom! It’s reassuring to know that all we are learning is useful and applicable to my future teaching.

If I had students create a portfolio for one of my classes, I think it might be fun to have the portfolio be an online display of all the work they have done in my class. They could upload all of there documents and include an explanation. As a tool for reflection on my assignments, it might be interesting to have the students write a paragraph or so about how they felt about the assignment; what they did or didn’t like. This could be used for more than just papers, but with Comic Life comics or podcasts too! They would have the freedom to acknowledge the aspects of an assignment they didn’t particularly like. This would help me as a teacher know how the students are feeling and I would be able to change and modify the assignments as necessary for the next school year. I think getting feedback from the students would be very helpful.

I am planning (maybe rather ambitiously) to implement almost every tool we have learned into the classroom at one point or another. I believe that everything we learned could easily be added into an English lesson plan with the result that the student learning would be amplified. Another huge benefit is that with the amount of technology that students use in their daily lives, these additions of technology in the classroom is very relatable to students and they can see how it applies to their lives. This class has really broadened my idea of how to incorporate technology into my classroom and I am very glad to have these blogs to look back on once I become a teacher.

Giving Feedback

My final project is a place where teachers can collaborate and work together to help one another with lesson plans or ideas for teaching critical lenses to their students. Therefore I will not need to provide students with any feedback for my final project. For this blog post I have decided to discuss how I might give feedback for an Inspiration assignment instead. (This Inspiration assignment would be a pre-requisite to a larger paper) I think a good way to incorporate peer feedback for this specific project is through blogs.

Since I now know that it is possible to post your Inspiration or Bubbl.us onto a blog, I think it would be really cool for students to be able to go to any student’s blog in the class to check out their projects. The students could even create an RSS feed so the entire classes blogs would be in one place. Each student would be required to comment on at least five other students’ blogs. They would be assigned five students to ensure that every student gets feedback. I think student’s performance would improve with my feedback because they would know which elements of their concept map are important, and which elements are unnecessary to include in their larger paper. They might be required to revise their concept map if their map doesn’t make sense or there are lots of important elements missing.

Inspiration Rubric

	Not-Satisfactory	Proficient*	Strong
Relationships	No evidence of meaningful relationships	Relative importance of ideas is indicated and relationships are mapped	Relative importance of ideas is indicated and both simple and complex relationships are very effectively mapped
Communication	Information is not clear; very difficult to understand	Information is presented clearly and allows for a basic level of understanding	Information is presented and clearly allows for a high level of understanding
Exploratory	Thinking process is not clear	Map show definite thinking about relationships between ideas, themes, and the framework	Map shows complex thinking about the meaningful relationships between ideas, themes, and the framework
Concept map Blog	Concept map is not posted to blog		Concept map is posted to blog
Comments for Blogs	Commented on no students blogs	Commented on 1-4 students blogs	Commented on five students blogs

Modified from a rubric found at: http://dmc.umn.edu/activities/mindmap/assessment.pdf

Design for Digital Texts

I decided that since I am now an avid blogger I decided that I would compare blogs that I discovered on the web. I determined what aspects of the blog would act as effective, and what aspects wouldn’t.

I found this blog online: http://www.samnangsim.com/blog/

This blog is incredibly easy to read and follow. There is a wonderfully colorful graphic at the top, and there is no other bright color on the rest of the page. This makes the blog fun, but not to bright or overwhelming. The blog is also designed so that the beginning and end of each individual blog post is light blue, as the rest of the posts are white. This makes it very easy to see the individual posts; they don’t run together. There is also white space between each post, as well as the date it was written. This blog is very effective because any visitor could read it without any trouble. The site has no clutter and is very organized.

I also found this blog online: http://mcornwell.typepad.com/

This blog isn’t terrible. It has no horrible color schemes or flashing lights. The reason I don’t particularly like this blog is because it is too busy for me to understand! I think the format is actually pretty simple, but there is so much content! I am overwhelmed when I look at the page. It might be because I’m not used to the sidebars and other links to different sites. The sides of the blog seemed to be organized under larger categories but it is just difficult for me to follow. Maybe I will get better at this as I become more used to reading blogs, especially blogs of notable people or places, which might have more content like this blog.

I think an activity to help students learn about effective design is using PowerPoint in Microsoft Office. I think the students are pretty familiar with this program, but what they aren’t familiar with is using links that you can click on within a PowerPoint slide that will take you directly to a different slide. With students designing their PowerPoint’s in this way they will see how the design not only affects how much information the viewer gets out of it, but it also affects how entertaining and easy to read it is.

Here's my Presentation!

http://docs.google.com/present/edit?id=0AezJTi3Z4PHzZGZ0OXJtMl82enpxdzUzZGI&hl=en

Creating Comics

Wow. Making comics is fun! I think the ability to use Comic life, or other applications similar to it, is incredible. As a future English teacher, I feel that I could adopt this technology into any book or novel the class was reading. It could be a final project to take a theme from the novel and create a story that also incorporates that theme and shows how it plays out in the novel. I found the making of these comics to be very enjoyable! If using this type of project in the classroom students would be thinking at deeper levels. In order to get your comic to appeal to the write audience, and have the dialogue and storyline reflect themes of a novel, the students would have to be applying what they have learned in class to the creation of a comic.

The application of this project goes further than just asking students to write a paper as a final project. Creating a comic forces students to think about the visual aspects of their presentation as well. The message that they would try to get across in a paper now also has to be transmitted through visual channels. Using this technology is another way to ensure the students’ comprehension because in order for them to create the comic, their visual aspects of the comic must align with the text. This project also allows students to express their creativity, which can be a motivator for most students. I’m really glad I’m getting all these ideas before I begin teaching!

Podcast Reflection

My experience using a podcast was very different than any technology I have used before. I had many ideas of possible uses for a podcast, but they all seemed to work better on a Skype conversation for instance. All of my ideas would be better served using technology that allowed for multiple voices to contribute to a conversation, not just the teacher delivering a monologue. However, this being said, I did get a good idea for using a podcast from my sister, and that is to announce daily work. I think if students were able to access a podcast of the day’s lesson if they missed class because they were sick it would be very beneficial. Not only would the students always know what is going on, but it would reduce a large amount of work for the teacher who has to ‘catch up’ the students that were absent.

Specifically in the classroom, there are many ways students themselves could implement the use of podcasts. One way is in a presentation. If every student in a class presents information about their project, ii is often difficult to remember the information presented in every one of them. It might be beneficial to have each student record a podcast of their presentation so their peers could have access and listen to it whenever they wanted. This could also be used if students are writing an ethnography paper and they need to conduct interviews. This would be helpful not only in the student’s writing process but to the rest of the class as well.

I think students would enjoy using a podcast and I think it might even be motivation in itself. The students also would know that the entire class has access to their work, so that might be more motivation to do a thorough job since they realize everyone will be listening to it. In terms of evaluation, I think the content of their podcasts would be much more important than fluidity in their voices. This might be a very new concept to students so hopefully they’ll be excited about it!

Podcast

I figured out how to do a podcast!

http://mediamill.cla.umn.edu/mediamill/embedqt/49398