Gooru
Tonight, I was inspired to write my final blogpost for the semester on a company that a friend of mine is working with. It is call Gooru, and it is a community in which teachers can share lesson plans, which are organized by SCUTL, or subject, course, unit, topic, and level. It provides an easy to use interface, where teachers can navigate and browse whatever their needs may be. The sources range from lessons created around video to trips through Google Earth. While I am not completely versed in the project, I have been told a little bit about it and plan on learning more. It is currently in the alpha stage, which means that all the bugs aren’t worked out and it is not completely operational. Right now, it is limited to math and science for grades 5-8, but grades 9-12 will be added December 15. These will also include an AP section. If you would like to know more, I would be happy to provide you with more information as I continue to research Gooru. I can also pass along an access password that will help you dive into everything the program has to offer so far. Hopefully it will materialize into something that all of us could use!
Kindle Fire and Nook Tablet
Up until about a month ago, the iPad had dominated the market for tablets. For many, including myself, the price tag was a little to rich to justify buying one, especially when I already used a laptop for most of the functions that I would use the iPad for. However, Amazon and Barnes & Noble are releasing their own tablet versions of their popular Kindle and Nook eReaders that aim to compete with the iPad. Their price is much more friendly, with the Kindle Fire coming in at $199 and the Nook Tablet settling at $249, meaning that a Tablet is now much more affordable for the general public.
This got me thinking, how could we use tablets in our classroom? With the iPad’s steep price, I never really thought that having those eReaders for my class would be a possibility, but, now, having a few tablets for classroom use is realistic. The Kindle Fire and Nook Tablet each have functionality to offer kids handheld reading, along with the ability to research and relay information quickly. Utilizing the Amazon Cloud would also be a valuable aspect of the features, which would provide students with the ability to access their files and projects from the Kindle and their home computers, making transfers much easier. Overall, I think utilizing one of the new tablets in the classroom would be a great way to integrate new technology in a cost effective way.
If you want to know more, check out this review, which compares all three of the leading tablets http://digitaldesi.com/
Google+
After today’s hangout on Google+, I began to really think about the benefits that it offers, especially to us as educators. While no one has been completely sold on it’s ability to overtake Facebook or Twitter as the leader of social media, it is undeniable that the functionality and versatility that Google+ offers could be utilized by educators everywhere. The hangout session brings together a number of people in a common place, even though they may be separated by miles, states, or oceans. The collaboration that it promotes and offers is enough to confirm its validity to the world of education. For example, a group of five educators could be working on a research project in five different schools in five different states. Even though there are hundreds or thousands of miles between them, they can still gather nightly to review their findings in a face-to-face manner. Also, classrooms from around the world can come together, work on conversation skills, and improve a target area. One of the big complaints of social media is that it takes away encounters where individuals have to interact. The benefit of Google+ is that it enables its users to interact face-to-face instead of simply relying on text to interact. Hopefully Google+ will catch on, fostering the possibilities that it is capable of meeting.
21st Century Technology
As a future English teacher, I have been looking for new ways to include technology into my classroom. Recently, Apple announced that they will soon be revealing their newest iteration of the iPhone http://news.cnet.com/8301-27076_3-20108290-248/ipad-3-in-11-no-two-new-iphones-seems-so/ With Apple’s recent announcement of the iPhone5 and our world’s movement towards the high use of smartphones, I would love to be able to find a way to incorporate these into my class. While they obviously present a would-be distraction, I believe that they could be valuable tools that give access to a number of applications as well as quick access to a number of literary works. This would also be possible with the iPod Touch, iPad, or a number of other e-readers. While it may be difficult to get the funding from schools, it would be a valuable tool to increase students ability to read and work on their comprehension on digital formats.
Post FOKI
Looking back on our short session, I feel as thought I have grown a lot. The FOKI standards have been very helpful in assessing myself and seeing growth as I move forward and move closer to becoming a teacher.
Professional Self: I feels that out of any of our “selves” in the FOKI categories, my professional self has grown the most. I feel that I have a better understanding of what teaching, specifically catering to young adults, consists of. I can now say that I have successfully put together a short unit that could be expanded into a larger one. It integrated technology with something that I was passionate about, literature and history. While I was able to successfully put this lesson together, I know that I will not always be as passionate about the literature I am teaching, but I will always be passionate about my students. I know that my challenge moving forward as a professional should be to focus that passion into the curriculum I teach, all while teaching and learning with my students.
Literate Self: I feel like I have taken the first steps towards becoming a more literate young adult reader. I have found books that I love and have seen the value that so many genres have. My time reading Rot & Ruin, Ship Breaker, The Glass Castle, and Runaways has given me a solid foundation on which I can move forward and continue to build a library that caters to the students I will be teaching. One way that I can challenge myself moving forward is to find books that I wouldn’t normally be drawn to and read those. It may be hard to motivate myself at times, but I know that I will become a much better teacher because of it.
Virtual Self: I didn’t think that I would ever struggle with the virtual world, but this class on YA Lit challenged me in ways I never thought. I struggled to find assignments, I found out what voicethreads were, and even used SecondLife. I think that this class has shown me that incorporating the virtual self into the classroom is not as difficult as I previously thought. I know that moving forward, I will continue to find new ways in which I can encourage my students to contribute using technology instead of alienating my classroom from it.
Synthesis:
Overall, I feel like I have taken my first steps towards becoming a teacher. I have especially come to see that, with the education I am getting, I will become an extremely capable teacher. I am especially proud of ALP project that I put together, because one big thing I took away is that my work can always be revised. I have also gained so much from our class’s reading list and the book club discussion that we had. It is something that I would love to continue and I could see it being implemented with a group of teachers in a school I teach in. Finally, my virtual self has come a longer way than I ever could have imagined. I hope to continue to find new ways to incorporate technology in my classroom and my teaching like I learned in this class.
Bold Choices CCI
First of all, I will say that there are a number of books that I feel should not be taught in schools. However, I feel that there are also a number of books that are overly scrutinized for their content. Just about everyone looks to The Catcher in the Rye as the epitome of a controversial book. I honestly do not have a problem with it, but I would teach it to 11th and 12th grade students. As I went on to read the article on The Perks of Being a Wallflower, I was taken a bit aback by the resistance to it.
I think sometimes when parents read YA Lit and something they don’t want their kids to do is in it, their immediate reaction is that it’s not a good book. Put it away, I don’t want it to corrupt my kid. I think these parents need a bit of a reality check, because there’s a lot worse things going on when their kid walks down the hall, and just reading about it could be beneficial, because that time isn’t spent doing it.
Parents need to be honest with themselves: teens are doing drugs, teens are having sex, and it’s not always something that they’re going to be happy with. That’s why it is their responsibility to talk with their child about it. School’s aren’t the ones educating their kids in this way, it’s their peers.
I have read plenty of books filled with activities that make parents nervous, but that doesn’t mean that I have tried them all or have even considered it. Sometimes it takes a book to turn kids off to these activities, because they see someone like them going down a road that they don’t want to go down. Or they see a powerful protagonist who can stand up to their friends. YA Literature rarely, if ever, glamorizes destructive life choices.
My contention with controversial novels comes with books like Huck Finn, which I read in high school. I was not comfortable at all reading it. Even though the book was written in a different time, the rampant use of racial slurs just struck me the wrong way. I believe that novels like that, which are degrading to whole people groups, should not be taught in public high school. Continuing centuries of oppression by teaching the book does a lot more harm than a book that presents the realities of being a teenager.
Multicultural CCI
When I think about awards based on race or ethnicity, I feel somewhat estranged. Personally, I have never had an experience with racial or ethnic awards, but I know that they can be empowering to those who are able to be nominated or the winners. Being recognized for your writing by a whole people group is surely a gratifying feeling.
I tend to side with Pinkney on the debate between the two in the articles that we read. I believe that these awards not only open the doors for those contributing to the books, but also for the readers who are seeking a connection that they may not be able to encounter in mainstream literature.
Typically when we thing of ethnic awards, African American, Latino, and Asian American genres come to mind, but there are others that can be overlooked. We have focused in class on Maus and how powerful it is, especially for a Jewish audience. Highlighting these achievements in literature can be assets in the future, because they are able to draw people groups back to a time they may not be completely educated on.
The ability to do this is valuable for us as teachers as well. Being able to cater to the needs of you diverse classroom is very important, and having diverse literature ready and available is one step in this process. Being able to provide students with literature that contributes a mind of understanding will go far in establishing a classroom where students are quick to listen and slow to speak. This creates an environment within which students are comfortable to be who they are and share their thoughts, because, as teachers, we show that we value diversity in our classroom.
Lit Review Lite
As a prospective English teacher, I love my fair share of literature. I have my favorite novels and favorite genres, but part of me can’t shy away from history. I’ve always had an interest, mainly stemming from movies like Gladiator, Braveheart, and The Patriot. However, as I grew older, I began to see that history was much more than a few bloody battles. So much goes on behind the scenes that we can only know a fraction of it before we need to study the individuals.
For me, my search for behind the scenes moments in history came during my junior year of high school. For many, including myself, junior year is defined by AP US History and preparing for the exam. Thankfully, my year focusing on history was not just having my nose in books. I had a hands on experience when my junior class took a bus from Lansing, Michigan to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania to see the famous battlefield. This put everything in perspective for me. I was able to see where Pickett’s Charge took place, saw the Eternal Light Peace Memorial, and finally understood the price that so many men had given, both Union and Confederate, to protect the ideals that they stood for. I began to take a new perspective on history that drew me to literature, specifically The Red Badge of Courage. I loved the idea of getting inside the mind of an individual who is in the midst of battle. The highs and lows that they go through are fascinating, and it is from this point that I draw my ALP and Lit Review Lite.
2011 marks the 150th anniversary of the Civil War; a turning point in American History. As I researched methods by which to teach the Civil War, I gained a great deal of perspective regarding how the history of the War has changed throughout the previous generations, especially during the 1980s, during which, Civil War studies and research saw a great revival. This was due, in large part, to multimedia presentations of the war, such as the film Glory and Ken Burns’ documentary from PBS.
Reginald Stuart speaks to this in his article “A Proud Heritage.” Stuart strongly urges the continued education and study of the Civil War and to think outside of commonly accepted points of view and perspectives (2011). I admit that when I first put together this project, I was very limited in the perspectives that I was thinking from. There is a complexity that goes beyond North and South, which Stuart urges people to consider. He says, ” The big headline — that the Civil War freed the slaves and ended the Southern rebellion — overshadowed many of the rich details about Black contributions. Even now, little is taught about the estimated 200,000 Black men (many of them runaway slaves) who suited up as Union soldiers. Federal records show that Blacks represented nearly 10 percent of the Union army by the time the war ended. Even less is said of the thousands of Black women who supported them.” (2011). Stuart raises two perspectives that I never considered when I thought of teaching Stephen Crane’s novel. There is a whole new realm of possibilities that can be engaged when more perspectives and points of views are opened up as options for students. While I was considering students writing either from the perspective of a Union or Confederate soldier, I know that adding more depth, such as a free African American soldier, a slave, or an African American woman can bring a new degree of discussion and thoughtfulness that simply focusing on the North and South cannot.
I found multiple other sources that highlighted the recent revival in studying the often forgotten participants in the war. Steven K. Johnson emphasizes the point that even when a point is suppressed, it still gains power to be remembered, and the Civil War is a prime example (2006). Even though history has often marginalized the role of African Americans and women in the war, they made immeasurable contributions that would not go away, and as recent years have shown, have been revived: “Certainly concerns about the role of freed slaves in post-war America are repressed, held subject to the symbolic mastery of the historical trauma—a mastery that advocates an aggressive white male as the ideal subject of power. More interesting might be to consider how post-Civil War short stories are optimal for such burials, and how such repressed memories uncannily haunt the narratives in spite of their intentioned forgetting” (2006). Opening up the door for students to write creatively about something that they care about, such as African Americans in the war, will garner more original and creative writing as well as varying perspectives. Johnson and Stuart both gave valuable insight into the importance of the inclusion of African Americans in Civil War lessons, and, after reading this article, I found other writers who continued to help me revise my outline for the ALP.
Alyssa Clapp-Intyre focused on the presentation of young people in Civil War literature. She takes a point of view similar to that of Marc Aronson, highlighting the difficulty for an adult to write from the perspective of a young person, especially one who lived 150 years before them (2006). Although she highlights its difficulty, she does emphasize that having new perspectives, specifically that of young girls during the Civil War, offers new possibilities for interpretation and understanding.
This was one of my main motivations for my project. As I attempted to answer the question “How can you use nonfiction alongside fiction to help students understand the complexity of a period of history?” I overlooked perspectives that could help students answer this question. While the Civil War website that I am using has a great deal of facts and information, taking these and varying the perspectives that they apply to can take them and give a greater understanding of the Civil War period than limiting response, as I was before.
I even found a lesson plan that went about addressing The Red Badge of Courage in a unique way that has help me to revise my proposal. I had been set in focusing on one way of teaching it and one way of responding to it. However, there are numerous ways, such as looking at Stephen Crane’s poetry and considering his writing as more general war literature than solely a representation of the Civil War (Soderquist, 2002). While I am not going to focus on either of those in my lesson, it did change my outlook on the response my students would give. I think that there are many forms in which a student can respond, and providing them an open slate to make that decision will enable them to respond creatively in the way they feel most comfortable.
This process will be reinforce with a response in the RAFT format. The student will be able to choose the role that they take, along with the audience they are writing to (Vandervanter, 2007). This is where more creativity can come in. The student may write to there family, giving a more intimate and emotional response, or they may make a political address, which would take a more opinionated tone. The format can vary as well, as I would encourage students to use a model that they are comfortable with, whether it be a narrative, poem, or spee ch, among other possibilities. And while the topic is fixed on being a response to the Civil War, there are a variety of perspectives that can be taken and a variety of ways the fiction and nonfiction texts can be coupled together.
As I continued to find articles, I found more and more on emphasizing the importance of educating people and not forgetting such an important time period in the history of our country. In the article “For the New Millenium, New Perspectives on the Civil War,” I found that there is a focus on breaking the stigmas of the war and challenging what people think in order to teach them a full scale view of what happened: “The [Civil War] Center strives to help all American citizens, young and old, North and South, avoid missing the war by urging them to imagine fresh perspectives that will enable them to make the war that most profoundly shaped the American character an integral part of our own individual identities today” (Madden, 1997). I believe that this completely embodies my question and what I am seeking to do with my ALP. Despite the ups and downs that surround it, the Civil War is still a part of our nation’s history and needs to be emphasized in such a way. To gain understanding of the Civil War is to better understand not only that time period, but also how our country became what it is today.
There is so much value that can be gained, and I continued to find myself being challenge by what I read. For example, “The once obvious truth of the Civil War does not imply that every soldier had slavery on his mind as he marched and fought. Many Southerners fought and died in gray never having owned a slave and never intending to own one. Thousands died in blue with no intention to set one free. But it was slavery that had broken one nation in two and fated its people to fight over whether it would be put back together again. The true story is not a tale of heroes on one side and villains on the other. Few true stories are. But it is a clear and straightforward story, and so is the tale of how that story became so complicated” ( Von Drehle, 2011). Statements like that make me realize that there are so many layers to the Civil War and that it would take a lifetime to peel them all back. However, I hope that my ALP will challenge students to look under there initial reaction and try and look at other perspectives, thus gaining a greater understanding of the Civil War and the people who were affected by it, whether they be Union or Confederate, slave or free, man or woman.
Radical Change – Graphica
I have to admit that I was pretty excited when I heard we were studying graphic novels in our ECI 521 class. Having studied them a bit in my favorite college class, I found it fascinating that we would be attempting to bring it to high school students.
Graphic novels have always appealed to me; I loved the coupling of true artwork with a captivating story. But despite my attraction, my life with them was confided to my house. At school, teachers referred to them as comics and not true “literature” (a misuse of word as Eliza Dresang points out in her introduction).
Reading and studying graphic novels in numerous settings has truly opened my eyes to the legitimacy of the genre, especially with reading Runaways. While I don’t claim to be an expert, I have never found typical superhero stories to be very groundbreaking. The plots often seem to be recycled and the characters rarely appeal to me. However, there was something different with Runaways, as the characters seemed so real and I was engrossed in the story the moment I found out that the kids parents were supervillians. There was just something different, and this creativity should be appreciated.
Sometimes it takes a masterpiece to usher in radical change. One of the masterpieces of graphica is Maus, which was read for the nonfiction book club earlier in the class. This was my first experience with the teaching of graphica in high school. Well, it wasn’t taught in my school but it was taught in my best friends. While I was reading The Diary of Anne Frank for my Holocaust unit, my friend was reading Maus. I was jealous. As a male teen, Anne Frank had little appeal to me. While her story is powerful, I wasn’t captivated. But when I saw my friend reading Maus and heard him telling me about it, I just thought how cool his class must be, and they must be getting a whole different perspective.
It is this reaction that graphica units can offer. While I am not saying that Maus needs to be the holocaust text, I am saying that graphica options should be consider and used in high school classrooms. They have the possibility of captivating students who may not be motivated by words on a page. As Dresang presents, the landscape of literature is ever changing, and this is one way that radical change could be presented.
I also see upcoming radical change in the medium by which books are taught. While I am partial to having a full book in my hand, I have been enticed by the prospect of having a Kindle to read from. In all honesty, if I was a freshman in college right now, I would probably get one, because it would have saved me hundreds of dollars in books! I can see digital books as becoming a more and more popular method of teaching, because it has the possibility of captivating students in new ways. As young adults’ lives become more and more technology driven, it only seems logical that one of the next steps becomes incorporating digital books.
matthewahayes 