How I Plan to Use Stuff I've Learned in Digital Writing
I have already used a couple of easy tricks. The easiest and best so far, by far, has been to ask my students to create avatars for the course. I have a better sense of community. See for yourself:
Before, the students seemed anonymous. Now, I immediately have a sense of their personalities.
I was also able to use my blog entry about researching with RSS feeds to model search strategies for an assignment in my online Media Lit course.
If I get my same job back next year (and I sincerely hope I do), I already have a quarter and a half of new curriculum sketched out. I've been teaching in an alternative school for the past several years, and that means I often have to create new curriculum. Students may stay in my class for 1-3 years. Our attendance and participation credit system breaks the quarter down into two twenty day marking periods, and from this Digital Literacy course, I have the beginnings of curriculum for three marking periods. I'm all about the open source philosophy, but I almost don't want to make these ideas public because I can't wait to teach them and don't want anyone who might work with my students to use them:).
1. New Media Literature: use digital poetry to model and explore new media literature as a genre, gradually narrowing to only those pieces that have no language, only images. You know--group work, presentations, students create their own new media poems. Read Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer. Determine if it meets our criteria for this new genre even though it's published on paper. Allow students to explore in print and online and find other examples of new media literature (hypertext novels? graphic novels?).
2. Digital Writing: Explore how different forms of online writing serve different purposes and audiences by creating "digital documents" about our alternative school: a Voice Thread, a hypertext, and an iMovie documentary. We could use a wiki to post and share film clips/ audio clips/ images and other resources. The stated purpose of the project will be to advertise OCP to perspective students, their parents and current school administrators. I have to flesh this out, but our reflection will be about which form best serves this purpose for this audience and why...and maybe which form would best suit the "underground" version that students would like to show to entice their peers in other districts to attend OCP.
3. Analyzing an Argument: Use Candance's Moodle forum idea to facilitate a role play on a relevant issue. Probably something like the new electronics policy and dress code, or enforcement of curfews. Assign students roles and spend a significant amount of time fictionalizing those roles by writing biographies and creating avatars. Balance class time teaching mini-lessons on rhetorical analysis and posting to the forum in character. In the end, analyze the text of the forum using the mini-lesson content. I've tried to do something like this twice before using video clips of speeches as texts instead of classic readings, and I've had some success. But I think using the students' discussion as the text to analyze will be far more engaging.
Now, all I need to do all this is: my job back, $15,000 for new laptops with built in cameras, and a couple hundred dollars for books. It's possible.
I was also able to use my blog entry about researching with RSS feeds to model search strategies for an assignment in my online Media Lit course.
If I get my same job back next year (and I sincerely hope I do), I already have a quarter and a half of new curriculum sketched out. I've been teaching in an alternative school for the past several years, and that means I often have to create new curriculum. Students may stay in my class for 1-3 years. Our attendance and participation credit system breaks the quarter down into two twenty day marking periods, and from this Digital Literacy course, I have the beginnings of curriculum for three marking periods. I'm all about the open source philosophy, but I almost don't want to make these ideas public because I can't wait to teach them and don't want anyone who might work with my students to use them:).
1. New Media Literature: use digital poetry to model and explore new media literature as a genre, gradually narrowing to only those pieces that have no language, only images. You know--group work, presentations, students create their own new media poems. Read Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer. Determine if it meets our criteria for this new genre even though it's published on paper. Allow students to explore in print and online and find other examples of new media literature (hypertext novels? graphic novels?).
2. Digital Writing: Explore how different forms of online writing serve different purposes and audiences by creating "digital documents" about our alternative school: a Voice Thread, a hypertext, and an iMovie documentary. We could use a wiki to post and share film clips/ audio clips/ images and other resources. The stated purpose of the project will be to advertise OCP to perspective students, their parents and current school administrators. I have to flesh this out, but our reflection will be about which form best serves this purpose for this audience and why...and maybe which form would best suit the "underground" version that students would like to show to entice their peers in other districts to attend OCP.
3. Analyzing an Argument: Use Candance's Moodle forum idea to facilitate a role play on a relevant issue. Probably something like the new electronics policy and dress code, or enforcement of curfews. Assign students roles and spend a significant amount of time fictionalizing those roles by writing biographies and creating avatars. Balance class time teaching mini-lessons on rhetorical analysis and posting to the forum in character. In the end, analyze the text of the forum using the mini-lesson content. I've tried to do something like this twice before using video clips of speeches as texts instead of classic readings, and I've had some success. But I think using the students' discussion as the text to analyze will be far more engaging.
Now, all I need to do all this is: my job back, $15,000 for new laptops with built in cameras, and a couple hundred dollars for books. It's possible.
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