Literature and America: technology in the classroom

Showing posts with label technology in the classroom. Show all posts

Wednesday, July 18, 2012

Learning from Students

As this school year approaches, I've decided that this will be the year of actively learning from my students. I know, I know this may seem like a thing that we all just do and there is no need to talk about it but I've chosen to put it into action.

This year I'm going to implement a new reminder system in my classroom. This system is one my students are already familiar with. It's one that they use on a regular basis. Twitter.

This year I've decided that maybe its not about teaching my students new and inventive pedagogy. Maybe it's about using that time I would have spent teaching them new procedures to actually teach. Why not use a venue they already know and understand?

The plan is to use Twitter (a social media outlet that my students already use in their personal lives) to send out reminders and even extra goodies, like relevant articles and videos.

Twitter is the perfect outlet for this kind of thing. Firstly, there is the privacy factor. Twitter allows users to set there tweets to "private", so only approved followers can see them. Secondly, you can send students links to anything you want to show them but don't have time in class. Lastly, students don't have to login to an "educational" site; they can see your class tweets right beside people like Justin Bieber and their boyfriend.

Thursday, September 1, 2011

A New Model of Storytelling: Transmedia by: Laura Fleming

As a School Library Media Specialist, storytelling is at the core of what I do each and every day. Over the years, I have seen many children who struggle with reading because of a lack of engagement with traditional books and stories. The new media that surrounds educators and learners forced me to rethink the concept of storytelling for our 21st-century learners. After some experimenting within my classes, I found a way to successfully engage and capture the attention of all of my students. As a result of this, a new model of storytelling emerged for me: Transmedia.

What is Transmedia?

There are two components that must be present in transmedia storytelling. 1) Critical parts of the story must be told across multiple story spaces, and 2) there must be active participation on the part of the readers. The roots of transmedia lie in pop culture and in the creation of media franchises. In education, these same techniques can be used to create a powerful connection with curricular content. Transmedia storytelling speaks to learners in a way that they inherently understand, and when purposefully designed, it can be an effective tool for all age groups and in all learning environments.

An Example of Transmedia

The leading example of this transmedia in education phenomenon is the born-digital storyInanimate Alice. Written by award-winning author Kate Pullinger, directed by digital artist Chris Joseph, and produced by Ian Harper, this transmedia story introduces us to Alice, a young girl growing up in the first half of the 21st century, and her digital imaginary friend, Brad. "Born digitally," Inanimate Alice was conceived, written and created entirely within the digital domain. The multimedia episodes are interactive and use a combination of text, sound, images, and games to tell the story of her life. The media itself becomes a part of the story when Alice herself becomes a video game animator, and the reader is immersed into the story by playing games and solving puzzles to progress the story.

Free Resources for Educators

Through a free downloadable iTeach education resource pack, Inanimate Alice is supported by lessons, which include making connections with the story and the medium. Their vibrant Facebook community allows for educators to share their success stories as well as to find opportunities for collaboration globally. In addition, teachers now have available to them interactive whiteboard lessons that are hands-on and address the needs of all learners. Because of their immersion into a storyworld, participants in transmedia narratives are inspired to repurpose the content and generate their own; thus encouraging creativity and innovation. With Inanimate Alice, it is the inspiration of her story that motivates students to want to create next episodes of the series.

21st Century Literature = Engagement

Developing a narrative over multiple platforms while interweaving learning outcomes creates transformational learning experiences. Participants engage, inform, inspire, connect and collaborate over content. It is this interconnectedness that fosters a dialogue which connects learners around the world. This global interconnectivity allow for the collaborative sharing and proliferation of knowledge. Transmedia storytelling exemplifies learning in the 21st century.

If you like this, you might also like

A Primer on Interactive Books by Laura Fleming
Digital Is National Writing Project Transmedia Collection
Connecting Meaning and Learning Through Storytelling by Laura Fleming (Huffington Post)

http://www.edutopia.org/blog/transmedia-digital-media-storytelling-laura-fleming

Saturday, June 4, 2011

If You Were on Twitter by: Scott McLeod

Dear educator, if you were on Twitter yesterday, you might have found:

But you weren’t on Twitter yesterday, so it’s likely that you saw none of this. And, yes, you probably also would have seen someone posting a picture of some strawberries or talking about how they just went to their kid’s Little League game. Or some friendly banter between friends. Or even someone chatting about walking their dog or the great sandwich that they just ate. Good grief, who posts that stuff? Don’t they have anything better to do with their lives?

Instead of being on Twitter yesterday, perhaps you were talking with your neighbors over the back fence. That’s a real relationship, isn’t it? Not like those so-called online ‘friendships’ where people ‘like’ each other. That back fence relationship is great, isn’t it? Almost every day you share little tidbits with each other. Much of it is banal or just friendly chatter, but much of it also is useful: where’s the best place to get this, how can I find that, do you have any suggestions for how best to accomplish this other thing, by the way I saw this thing today that might interest you, and so on. At some point you also realized that those small day-to-day interactions over the back fence about each others’ strawberries and Little League games and dog walks and sandwiches have somehow added up to something more enduring: lasting friendships and a positive interdependency that you never would have anticipated at the beginning.

Because you’re not on Twitter, what you don’t realize is that Twitter is the back fence you share with your neighbors. Except your neighbors are people all over the world who share your interests and passions and can help you accomplish your personal and professional goals. Every day you have a chance to learn from these online neighbors. Every day you have a chance to receive resources that you otherwise never would have found. Every day you have a chance to intersect with people who care about what you care about and are willing to help you be more productive and save time. And much of it is banal or just friendly chatter, but much of it also is useful.

What’s that? You don’t want to be part of a community that shares your interests? You don’t have time to learn? You’d rather not receive helpful resources? Oh, okay. Good for you, I guess.

Why, again, dear educator, aren’t you on Twitter?

http://bigthink.com/ideas/38698utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=Feed:+dangerouslyirrelevant+(Dangerously+Irrelevant)

Monday, February 14, 2011

E-Readers Catch Younger Eyes and Go in Backpacks by: Julie Bosman

Something extraordinary happened after Eliana Litos received an e-reader for a Hanukkah gift in December.

“Some weeks I completely forgot about TV,” said Eliana, 11. “I went two weeks with only watching one show, or no shows at all. I was just reading every day.”

Ever since the holidays, publishers have noticed that some unusual titles have spiked in e-book sales. The “Chronicles of Narnia” series. “Hush, Hush.” The “Dork Diaries” series.

At HarperCollins, for example, e-books made up 25 percent of all young-adult sales in January, up from about 6 percent a year before — a boom in sales that quickly got the attention of publishers there.

“Adult fiction is hot, hot, hot, in e-books,” said Susan Katz, the president and publisher of HarperCollins Children’s Books. “And now it seems that teen fiction is getting to be hot, hot, hot.”

In their infancy e-readers were adopted by an older generation that valued the devices for their convenience, portability and, in many cases, simply for their ability to enlarge text to a more legible size. Appetite for e-book editions of best sellers and adult genre fiction — romance, mysteries, thrillers — has seemed almost bottomless.

But now that e-readers are cheaper and more plentiful, they have gone mass market, reaching consumers across age and demographic groups, and enticing some members of the younger generation to pick them up for the first time.

“The kids have taken over the e-readers,” said Rita Threadgill of Harrison, N.Y., whose 11-year-old daughter requested a Kindle for Christmas.

In 2010 young-adult e-books made up about 6 percent of the total digital sales for titles published by St. Martin’s Press, but so far in 2011, the number is up to 20 percent, a spokeswoman for the publisher said.

At HarperCollins Children’s Books e-book sales jumped in recent weeks for titles like “Pretty Little Liars,” a teenage series by Sara Shepard; “I Am Number Four,” a paranormal romance by Pittacus Lore; and “Before I Fall,” a novel by Lauren Oliver. (Some sales, publishers noted, are from older people crossing over to young-adult fiction.)

Jon Anderson, the publisher of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing, said some titles, like “Clockwork Angel” and books in the “Night World” series, nearly doubled their e-book sales in the four weeks after Christmas, compared with the four weeks before.

“We had an instant reaction — ‘Boy, a lot of kids got e-readers for Christmas,’ ” Mr. Anderson said, adding that another significant bump in sales occurred over the three-day weekend that included Martin Luther King’s Birthday. “If it follows the same trend as adults, it’s the start of an upward curve.”

Digital sales have typically represented only a small fraction of sales of middle-grade and young-adult books, a phenomenon usually explained partly by the observation that e-readers were too expensive for children and teenagers.

Another theory suggested that the members of the younger set who were first encouraged to read by the immensely popular Harry Potter books tended to prefer hardcover over any other edition, snapping up the books on the day of their release. And anecdotal evidence hinted that younger readers preferred print so that they could exchange books with their friends.

That scene may be slowly replaced by tweens and teenagers clustered in groups and reading their Nooks or Kindles together, wirelessly downloading new titles with the push of a button, studiously comparing the battery life of the devices and accessorizing them with Jonathan Adler and Kate Spade covers in hot pink, tangerine and lime green.

“The young adults and the teenagers are now the newest people who are beginning to experience e-readers,” said Matthew Shear, the publisher of St. Martin’s Press. “If they get hooked, it’s great stuff for the business.”

It is too soon to tell if younger people who have just picked up e-readers will stick to them in the long run, or grow bored and move on.

But Monica Vila, who runs the popular Web site The Online Mom and lectures frequently to parent groups about Internet safety, said that in recent months she had been bombarded with questions from parents about whether they should buy e-readers for their children.

In a speech last month at a parents’ association meeting in Westchester County, Ms. Vila asked for a show of hands to indicate how many parents had bought e-readers for their children as holiday gifts.

About half the hands in the room shot up, she recalled.

“Kids are drawn to the devices, and there’s a definite desire by parents to move books into this format,” Ms. Vila said. “Now you’re finding people who are saying: ‘Let’s use the platform. Let’s use it as a way for kids to learn.’ ”

Some teachers have been encouraging, too, telling their students that they are allowed to bring e-readers to school for leisure reading during homeroom and English class, for example.

“I didn’t buy it until I knew that the teachers in middle school were allowing kids to read their books on their e-readers,” said Amy Mauer-Litos, Eliana’s mother, adding, “I don’t know whether it’s the device itself that is appealing, or the easy access to the books, but I will tell you, we’ve had a lot of snow days lately, and 9 times out of 10, she’s in the family room reading her Nook.”

Some younger readers have been exploring the classics, thanks to the availability of older e-books that are in the public domain — and downloadable free.

After receiving a light gray Sony Reader from her grandparents for Christmas, Mia Garcia, a 12-year-old from Touchet, Wash., downloaded “Little Women,” a book she had not read before.

“It made me cry,” Mia said. “Then I read ‘Hunger Games,’ ” the best-selling dystopian novel, “and it also made me cry.”

Her 8-year-old brother, Tommy, was given an e-reader, too. “I like it because I have so many different books on it already,” he said, including “The Trouble Begins at 8,” a fast-paced biography of Mark Twain written for children in the middle grades.

Eryn Garcia, their mother, said the family used the local library — already stocked with more than 3,000 e-books — to download titles free, sparing her the usual chore of “lugging around 40 pounds of books.”

“There’s something I’m not sure is entirely replaceable about having a stack of inviting books, just waiting for your kids to grab,” Ms. Garcia said. “But I’m an avid believer that you need to find what excites your child about reading. So I’m all for it.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/05/books/05ebooks.html?_r=2&src=me&ref=books

Sunday, November 21, 2010

Students and Technology, Constant Companions

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/11/21/technology/20101121-brain-interactive.html

Saturday, October 2, 2010

Teachers Shake Up Shakespeare with Digital Media by: Russell Scott Smith

"My name is Macbeth / I'm the Thane of Glamis. / I might not be the king / but I'm still hella famous."

Terry, a student at Toronto's York Mills Collegiate Institute, wrote that rap for his tenth-grade English class as part of amusic video depicting William Shakespeare's famous playMacbeth. "We got 100 percent on it!" Terry recalls.

More important, adapting the play into a modern rap helped Terry understand the Bard's old English prose. "I'd never had a chance to interpret one of Shakespeare's stories in a contemporary way before," he says. "Shakespeare's stories are timeless."

That kind of genuine enthusiasm from a millennial generation student is music to a teacher's ears. "Terry's video was fantastic," says his teacher, Meredith Szewchuk, who taught the tenth grader last year at York, a public high school. Szewchuk is part of a new wave of Shakespeare teachers who want their teenage students to reimagine the Bard using the younger generation's language and media.

Raps, podcasts, and short films are perfect vehicles for teaching Hamlet and Macbeth, says Peggy O'Brien, the former director of education at the Folger Shakespeare Library, in Washington, DC. "Kids have been handed these plays like they're sacrosanct, holy things, when actually they're gritty and alive."

As many scholars point out, Shakespeare was the 16th-century equivalent of a remix artist. Most of his plots were borrowed from other authors, and several of his plays were written on the fly in collaboration with others. He would have probably approved of today's participatory culture, in which students simultaneously create and consume art.

Teachers are finding that allowing students to emulate the playwright and make the text their own gets them more excited to learn the plays. "You have to get those words in your mouth and get your body moving," says Robert Young, who holds O'Brien's former position at the library. "Once you perform a scene, you really understand it." Having students perform is the key to learning Shakespeare effectively, and video and audio tools enhance that performance for today's learners.

Shakespeare, Meet YouTube

Joshua Cabat's students film Shakespeare scenes as short videos. "It forces them to envision their own through-line, or interpretation, of the play," says Cabat, who teaches English and film studies at Roslyn High School, in Roslyn Heights, New York. "They have to work with the words and the subtext, getting to the emotional core of the scene."

Some of Cabat's students produce faux trailers for Shakespeare movies or reedit scenes from existing films. One group recut the murder of King Duncan in Roman Polanski's The Tragedy of Macbeth to make it more nightmarish. "They felt it needed some improvement," Cabat says with a laugh. After finishing their movies, students write about the experience. "I don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater," he says. "It's still them wrestling with the text. But they're using different tools."

Posting their short films online allows students to experience a level of relevance that only a public medium like YouTube can offer. Suddenly, homework assignments become works of art that anyone might download, watch, and maybe even enjoy.

Type "Shakespeare English project" into YouTube's search box, and you'll find links to a long list of school assignments. Terry's Macbeth rap is there. So is a short video retelling of Romeo and Juliet with animated characters from a video game, The Sims 2. Another high school student posted Hamlet: The Silent Film, a Keystone Kops-like version of the Prince of Denmark's climactic swordfight with Laertes.

And there's the decidedly low tech The New Othello Rap, by Katie Kovacs and Danny Wittels. This video isn't complicated -- just two students in front of a blackboard, rapping lyrics out of a spiral notebook. But the kids do a spot-on summary of the play, and with a good beat: "Iago's lying, Iago's cheating. / Iago needs a good beatin'. / Iago's lying, Iago's cheating. / He's got to stop all this deceivin'." You can also find a mashup of clips from Polanski's Macbeth to a song by the Geto Boys, a hip-hop group from Texas.

Some of these YouTube English-project videos have received as many as 20,000 hits, in part because teachers at other high schools use them to engage their students. "That's the magic of Internet culture," says Christy Desmet, a professor of English at the University of Georgia. "Kids put their work out into the world, and other people see it and care about it. It's very empowering."

Fast Forward

Shakespeare can easily be adapted to multiple media platforms. Christopher Shamburg, an associate professor of education at New Jersey City University, has worked with inner-city high school students on podcasts of Macbeth -- audio plays with sound effects and music. "These kids are bringing their own interpretations to bear," Shamburg says. "And what's a better, more authentic experience of Shakespeare? That, or taking a quiz?"

There's even a reconstruction of the Globe Theatre in the virtual world called Second Life. In May 2009, these actors and their avatars -- with names like Caliban Jigsaw and Prospero Frobozz -- performed a live-action virtual Twelfth Night in their version of the Globe.

Meanwhile, teachers are brainstorming more ways to bring students to Shakespeare through modern media. John Golden, a language arts curriculum and instruction specialist in Portland, Oregon, has his students analyze the "To be, or not to be" soliloquy from Hamlet by looking at how actors performed the famous monologue in seven movies.

In 1948, Sir Laurence Olivier delivered the soliloquy atop a cliff. In 1996, Sir Kenneth Branagh performed it in an ornate room with a chessboard floor, and in 1990, Mel Gibson delivered the lines from inside a crypt. In the 2000 version, the soliloquy is done as an interior monologue in Ethan Hawke's head as he wanders through the action section of his local Blockbuster video store. "Looking at these multiple versions and interpretations, students see that Shakespeare is still a living document," says Golden.

As Golden's students spend hours thinking about those 33 lines of text, they come to realize the power of Shakespeare's legacy. "I've had kids stop me in the grocery store years later," Golden says. "They'll launch into it: 'To be, or not to be. That is the question.' They still remember it. When we help students realize that Shakespeare is alive today, we're giving them a gift that lasts a lifetime."

Friday, August 6, 2010

10 Tools for Teachers in the NY Times, By Katherine Schulten and Holly Epstein Ojalvo

1. Certain classics have appeared on a majority of high school English lists every year since the 1960’s, and many, if not most, are likely somewhere in your own school’s curriculum. We have made special Teaching Topics pages of Times and Learning Network resources for many of these, including:

major plays by Shakespeare, including “Romeo and Juliet” and “Hamlet”
50 Years of ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’
J.D. Salinger and ‘The Catcher in the Rye’
“The Odyssey”
“The Great Gatsby”
“Frankenstein”
“The Lord of the Flies”

Use the comment field below to let us know what other works of literature you’d like to see us create a Teaching Topics page about.

2. But say you’re teaching a book – perhaps a work of nonfiction – that we haven’t made a special collection for, and you want to scare up somerelevant and interesting Times features to share with students.

To find Times articles from 1851-present related to almost any book, use Site Search. Click on Advanced Search (on the right-hand side of the Search page) to narrow your search. To go back further, search the archives from 1851-1980. (Note that some articles are not available for free.) As needed, sort your results by “newest first,” “oldest first” or “closest match.”

Take, for example, “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.” If you do a site search for “Huckleberry Finn,” you’ll see that one of its very first mentions in The New York Times came in 1885 in the form of an editorial republished from the Springfield Republican. Headlined “Trashy and Vicious,” it comments on the Concord Library’s ban of the book. Among other things, you would also find:

You might choose one of these for students to consider as they read “Huck,” or you might have them skip through the archives themselves and muse on what they find there and how it affects their reading of the novel.

3. To enrich students’ understanding of works’ settings, you might useTimes Topics pages and the Multimedia/Photo Archive to find related articles, photographs, video, interactive graphics or podcasts.

For example, if you’re teaching “The Grapes of Wrath”, the Great Depressionpage has a short overview of the social, political, and economic conditions of the period, as well as photo slide shows of both black and white and colorphotographs from the era. The page also highlights several videos in The New Hard Times series in which people who were alive during the Great Depression compare it to conditions today.

Similarly, Anne Frank’s “Diary of a Young Girl,” Elie Wiesel’s “Night” or “The Book Thief” might be taught using resources from the Times Topics page on the Holocaust, or with our special Holocaust collection.

And just for fun, the interactive Literary Map of Manhattan might teach your students about writers like J.D. Salinger and Ralph Ellison, or might inspire them to create their own map or itinerary that features the literary landscapeof another region, state or country.

4. Show students the relevance of what they read to “the real world” by having them connect key quotes from the work to news articles, photos and editorials in The Times that echo this idea. How do these three famous quotes, for example, resonate today? What contemporary connections can students find in The Times?

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” (“A Tale of Two Cities”)
“No man, for any considerable period, can wear one face to himself and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be the true.” (“The Scarlet Letter”)
“How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.” (“Diary of a Young Girl”)

5. Maybe your students are reading contemporary fiction like “The Kite Runner,” “The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao” or “Life of Pi”. Or perhaps they’re recommending new titles to each other in preparation for a book group.

If so, the Books section offers podcasts and a blog with news and interviews about these and other popular books and writers. In December each year The Times also chooses 100 Notable Books of that year to recommend.

6. Or, perhaps, you teach young adult literature or pair YA novels with classics. In our lesson It’s the Same Old Story we highlight commonalities between the “Twilight” series and other literature, and the lesson can easily be adapted to work with any young adult novel, from the “Harry Potter”series to “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian”.

To give your students models of how to think critically about YA books, you might assign such pieces as the 2006 essay by Naomi Wolf about the “Gossip Girl,” “A-List” and “Clique” novels and the 2009 essay by Ned Vizzini about stereotypes in young adult fiction.

7. A common literature class assignment: to consider or create adaptations of literary works. Students might rewrite a portion of a literary text, either updating it, writing a point of view or recasting it in a new genre or under new conditions.

You might also point out the many published works that reinvent classics, such as the recent legal battle over the “Catcher in the Rye” sequel illustrated.This article lists many famous “sequels,” including the critically acclaimed “The Wide Sargasso Sea” and the creative
“Pride and Prejudice and Zombies”.

And if your students are critically reviewing film adaptations – or drafting their own ideas for the movie version of a book they’re reading – they might find and read the Times movie review and other commentary on adaptations (such as Joyce Carol Oates’s Opinion piece on the Disney version of “The Scarlet Letter”). These two lessons will help students compare book and movie versions of the same work: Setting the Stage From the Page and What a Character! Comparing Literary Adaptations.

8. If your students are delving into author biography, a good place to start is the Times Topics pages about them. Find them quickly and easily using the drop-down menu on the right-hand side of the Books section, which features many writers from Jane Austen, Nikolai Gogol, Ernest Hemingway, George Orwell, Edgar Allan Poe and Albert Camus to Raymond Carver, Stephen Kingand Edwidge Danticat.

Use these pages to discover intriguing tidbits about writers, like how Amy Tan came to write “The Joy Luck Club,” why Sandra Cisneros got mostly C’s and D’s in 5th grade and how Salman Rushdie uses his computer to compose his works.

9. Graphic novels, such as “Persepolis” and “Maus,” are taught across the curriculum in many schools. Here are two useful essays about graphic novels, one about the genre in general, and another about their use in schools. Our lesson That’s the Story of My Life has students creating their own storyboards for graphic novels about adolescence.

10. For more ideas, explore our ever-expanding trove of language arts lesson plans. (Tip: All of our lessons on literature since fall 2009 are tagged“literature,” but there are many more, going back to 1999.)

You’ll find a range of lessons about particular authors and genres, as well as activities encouraging having fun with and opening new vantage points on literature, such as these:

What other ways do you use The Times to complement your teaching of literature? Share your ideas here, and we may feature them on the blog.

Schulten, Katherine, and Holly Epstein Ojalvo. "10 Ways to Use The New York Times for Teaching Literature." New York Times6 August 2010: n. pag. Web. 6 August 2010. .

Literature and America