YouTube and Chopin

This week, I tested a couple of new ideas in my English classrooms. First, I should explain that in one of my classes, we read short stories every week, and as many students and English teachers know, reading and discussing short stories can get boring quickly if the teacher does not integrate a unique approach into discussion. Of course, dialogues about themes, symbols, and characterization are exciting to me, but eighth graders for some reason do not have the same internal desire to discuss such things. Okay, I can live with that, but usually, students enjoy watching film adaptations of novels and plays, right? So, where do you find film adaptations of short stories? YouTube! After an effortless search for Kate Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour,” I discovered numerous hits, and I had each student view a different adaptation while taking notes on the director’s interpretation of plot, characterization of Mrs. Mallard, and overall point of view. After watching their video clips, which were more than likely produced by high school or college English students around the world, I let each student share his/her observations and explain why they agreed/disagreed with the director’s production. Anyone up for some critical, reflective conversations? This was an awesome exercise, and I would recommend it to everyone. Now, only if I had enough time for them to create their own rendition of the short story.

For my younger students, I have been trying to teach research skills, and this week, we maneuvered Google Maps to develop mapping skills – which is somewhat related to research. In our novel for class, the characters travel along the east coast of Denmark hitting three large cities in addition to Copenhagen. With the list of other cities, students had the following mission: locate the four cities on a map, calculate the total distance traveled by train from Copenhagen to the northernmost city, and draw a map of eastern Denmark and southwestern Sweden. (The proximity of Denmark to Sweden plays an integral role later in the novel.) What made the activity interesting was that all of the city names were in Danish (e.g., Copenhagen = Kobenhavn). Overall, it was a fun activity. Students enjoyed using Google Map and found it “cool” that you could add destinations to extend your route. I wonder how they would have responded to Google Earth.

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Image Citations:

YouTube. Retrieved on June 26, 2008, from http://www.erikbosgraaf.com/images/youtube-logo.png

Kate Chopin. Retrieved on June 26, 2008, from http://nzr.mvnu.edu/faculty/trearick/english/rearick/readings/authors/specific/chopin.gif

Copenhagen. Retrieved on June 26, 2008, from http://noerrebrolokalhistorie.dk/img/histbillederkort01s.jpg

Experiment with confidence

From reading blogs and instructional technology magazines, I come across quite a few different tools that I can supposedly implement into the classroom to improve instruction. With enough time and resources, I could probably make my classroom into one of the most interactive and rich learning environments around, but time is tough to come by. During the school year, it only takes a few months (if you are lucky ;) ) to fall a little behind schedule, and once behind schedule, you must utilize every extra moment to get students back on track. In the summer, however, teachers generally have a lot more time on their hands. Now, before I hear the cry of tired teachers, “We need a break from school, too,” trust me, I understand. Occasionally, though, over the next two-and-a-half months, experiment a little with various Web 2.0 tools. If you practice during the summer months, you may prevent many mistakes in the fall.

Last Thursday, for example, I used Audacity for the first time. First, the students wrote a 1 – 1 1/2 page response to one of two prompts. Second, they recorded their written responses using Audacity. After exporting the sound files as .WAV files, I easily inserted them into our Wikispaces classroom website. Once the two students were finished, each student listened to the other student’s recording and responded to the recording with a one-paragraph response. The exchanges were incredible! With a primary focus on a couple of character relationships from the short story we read in class, students generated original analysis of characterization by creating hypothetical verbal exchanges between characters. Overall, students found the experience enjoyable, and I look forward to experimenting with other tools over the course of the next few weeks.

On a slightly different note, I want to share an observation. The other day, I had fourth grade students perform some research on the Danish Resistance and the role between Denmark and Sweden in 1943 in preparation of our reading Lois Lowry’s Number the Stars. I gave one group the former topic and other group the latter. After about 20 seconds, the second group began complaining that they could not find anything about their topic. When I asked them to show me how they researched, they demonstrated how they attempted to use Wikipedia and Google, but nothing was coming up. After encouraging them to use different resources and to search various key terms, they eventually found appropriate information. I was a little surprised how quickly students felt defeated when an online encyclopedia and a search engine did not find the right facts for them after a couple attempts. What’s the best way to teach students how to perform research?

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Image Citation:

The non-scientific partent's guide to science fair projects. Retrieved on June 22, 2008, from http://www.onlinescienceprojects.com/guide/scientist.jpg

Who else knows about wikispaces?

Tonight, I taught my first lessons as part of an intensive English workshop for local Ann Arbor students, whose parents believe nine months of regular schooling is not enough to prepare their children for whatever ends ;) With 90-minute instructional periods, it is important for teachers to consider two things: breaks and varied activities. The first point of consideration takes little to defend, and I think most teachers in block-scheduling environments incorporate at least five minutes or so for students to relax and stretch halfway through the class period. The second recommendation, however, I think very few teachers actually consider. In both of my 90-minute periods, I changed topics and modes of instruction at least seven times, and both sets of students could not believe the end of the hour had arrived when it did. When teachers take the time to meaningfully consider natural breaks in instruction and appropriate transitions from one topic to the next, students tend to become more engaged in conversation and less focused on the minute hand.

Shortly after introductions and reviewing the outline of the courses, I took my students across the hall to the computer lab. Each class participated in a jigsaw where half of them researched one topic and the other half researched another topic. Using Wikispaces, I created a quick, clean classroom website this afternoon for both of my sections, and with links already posted to the wiki pages, students wasted less time searching the internet for fruitful resources. Although I eventually intend to use the classroom website as a real wiki with students contributing content, I currently have them all believing (or excellently pretending to believe) that the website is an unchangeable electronic document. When I was reading the website address aloud for all the students to type one character at a time, a 10-year-old boy finished the URL by asking, “Is this a wikispace?” Now, I did not know about Wikispaces until last summer, so how is it possible that a fourth grader knows about it? I will tell you how – because Web 2.0 grows faster than any of us edubloggers know.

Future educators, I implore you to learn about how we can use various Web 2.0 tools in our classrooms to enable students to work with us in constructing knowledge.


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Image Citations:

Clock. Retrieved on June 17, 2008, from http://blog.wolfram.com/images/carlson/clock.gif
Wikispaces. Retrieved on June 17, 2008, from http://www.classroom20wiki.com/space/showimage/wikispaces.png

A new sandbox

While I had hoped my blog would become a record of my experiences with instructional technology as a student teacher, I never anticipated all of the time necessary to become an effective teacher. After allotting time for lesson planning, assessment creating, and assignment grading, there did not seem to be enough time to reflect on my practice in the blogosphere. Well, over the course of the next year, I hope to do a better job in recording my successes and failures in utilizing instructional technology in my classroom to enhance instruction, encourage student engagement, and maximize skill mastery.

This summer, I have a couple of new teaching opportunities. First, I will be teaching summer school at my field placement from graduate school. Although the courses are not in my first love, English, I hope to integrate a little technology here and there to help my students forget that they are actually in school during the dog days of summer. Primarily, I hope to introduce the calculator as a machine more capable of processing basic computations; in fact, I want to showcase our calculators, the TI-84 plus, as a tool capable of presenting information in exciting ways (e.g., bar graphs, histograms, box plots, scatter plots, trend lines, etc.). I want to show my seventh- and eighth-grade students that they can use calculators for other things besides playing Tetris or Block Dude.

Second, I will be teaching a couple of intensive English classes for middle school students at a local tutoring center in Ann Arbor. With small classes, excellent texts, and a computer lab (!), I envision students using blogs to produce original compositions accompanied with visual or auditory aids, which other students will read and leave comments. Both classes are four weeks long and meet every Tuesday-Thursday night for 90 minutes, and I think we will have plenty of time to experiment with different modalities and maximize teaching and learning. While I am a couple of months away from entering my own classroom in the fall, I am going to value the next month or so in testing a few ideas on a small scale in preparation for full classes next fall.

Wish me luck!

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Image Citations

TI-83 Plus Silver Edition. Retrieved on June 16, 2008, from http://www.ticalc.org/images/clacs/84plus-se-big.gif.

Dmmaus. (2006 November 1). Waves of sand. Dmmaus’s Photostream. Retrieved on June 16, 2008, from http://www.flickr.com/photos/dmmaus/311011350/