Smartboards in the Classroom (Blog 14 Makeup)

A very important idea commonly taught in ELA classrooms is note-taking strategies and implementing an outlining system when writing papers. The use of Smartboards in the classroom during this lesson would be helpful in keeping students engaged in the note-taking process. The teacher could construct the beginnings of an outline for a research paper and could either appoint a student to sit at the computer and type up the rest of it as she speaks/presents in front of the class, or students could come up and write their own examples on the board. The use of the Smartboard would allow the teacher to present in front of the class at the same time notes are being annotated on the board. It would also allow the teacher to point out specific things through different colored markers and highlighting capabilities. The teacher could also use the "screen" capability to hide specific parts of the outline as she reaches different points in her lecture. 

The final and most important way the Smartboard can be utilized in any classroom, but an English classroom as well, is through the capability of "saving" any of the notes taken during class (including the drawings, highlighting, etc.) and then uploading those slides to a blog or online file for students to refer to later. 

SAMR Exploration (Blog 12 Makeup)

My attempts in “technofying” this lesson plan was to hopefully create an experience that reaches beyond the abilities of the traditional activities. Through the implementation of technology in each of the four steps, the lesson plan was strengthened and deepened to more creatively reach more students in addition to differentiating the learning instruction for varying abilities.

            Following the SAMR method, the four steps included a substitution, an augmentation, a modification and a redefinition of the traditional activities. The substitution segment of my lesson incorporated students using iPads and the highlighting tool instead of paper/pencil/highlighter. Although the inclusion of the iPad doesn’t necessarily add any more learning content to the lesson, it does make the activity more interactive and fun for students. The incorporation of technology in any English grammar lesson is extremely effective considering most students find grammar dry and boring. By using tools like the iPad, students are able to use something they’re familiar and comfortable with to help make the lessons more interactive.

            For the augmentation segment of my lesson, I chose to use the “Audio Boo” app for iPads and iPhones. This app can be used quickly and easily to record short segments of speech that are shared on the Audio Boo website or imbedded into blogs. The teacher will make several recordings incorporating either a run-on sentence or a sentence with a comma splice. The students will be hearing these sentences with errors rather than reading them. This ability to record through technology drastically transforms the complexity of the lesson; It teaches the students the differences between oral English and written English and how when we talk especially, our errors become more prominent. By evidencing this fact, students will become more conscious of their spoken word and then eventually more careful and articulate in their formal writing. They will also establish a better ear for detecting these sorts of errors while learning the proper difference between run-on sentences and comma splices.

            Modification involves incorporating a game-like iPad app in order to teach students about the different parts of speech. In the game, eight different colorful characters represent the different parts of speech (verb, noun, adjective, etc.). This playful twist on the traditional hand diagramming of sentences will be much preferred by students. While the “Grammaropolis” app may not be as intensive as tradition sentence diagramming (a potential drawback to using this particular game), it does teach the basic aspects of sentence construction.

            The last transformation in my lesson plan involves redefinition. My traditional idea was to have students actually teach an aspect of grammar to their fellow students through concrete visual aids such as writing on the board or using poster boards. In my transformation, I implemented the use of Podcasting. After listening to the popular Podcast, Grammer Girl, Students will try their hand at creating their own Podcast to help teach something to the class. This use of technology will require students to articulate their knowledge in a succinct verbal manner, thus improving their public speaking skills.

            The technofication of this lesson plan greatly expands the scope of its ability to reach all levels of students. It adds dimensions of hearing/speaking/interactivity that would otherwise be left to simple pen and paper. And most importantly, it makes the lesson more fun, a quality that becomes especially important when dealing with grammar.

Google Tools (Blog 10 Makeup)

I plan to integrate Google Docs and Google Presentations into another technofied lesson plan in this blog post. The lesson is intended for middle school-aged English students. The lesson will ask students to collaborate on a pre-made Google Doc worksheet in order to answer questions to the beloved and famous novel, "To Kill a Mockingbird" by Harper Lee. The students will work in groups of two or three to read the chapters at home and then answer the questions on a Google Document. The intention of having students do this over the internet is so that they can answer question as they read at home and not have to wait to manually fill out worksheets in class the next day. The next step is for students to identify an aspect of symbolism in Lee's novel and create a collaborative presentation using Google Presentations to prepare for the class. Using both Google Docs and Google Presentations allows for students to more effectively execute group projects from places outside of the classroom. 

Here is an example of the Google Document that will be used in this lesson: (Study questions borrowed from Sparknotes.com)

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Ph2TkAoz-wk9QqtGIu23j0JFyc_GY52N29lTGF5DJ4w/edit

Copyright Issues in the Classroom

     I think the idea of Creative Commons is really great. It works to allow internet users the openness to share their own work as well as learn from and gather other people's work. Especially in the world of education, it is important for teachers to be aware of copyright laws and in turn, teach their students about the dangers of using material from the internet.
     I particularly enjoyed the article about the 5 myths surrounding copyright infringement on the Internet. These five myths would be an important source to use in the classroom because many students probably succumb to many of these falsities surrounding copyright infringement. I, admittedly, believed many of the myths that were provided. I was aware that pulling images from Google without sourcing was most likely an issue, but, like myth #4 points out, I never thought too much about it because others were doing it all the time. Many of my past teachers use Google images in PowerPoint presentations often, which gives the false impression that this is acceptable to do. But as the Myth presentation points out, "It's not uncommon for people using images stolen from Google to be smacked with a bill for unpaid license fees" (http://brittanysbest.com/2013/08/5-copyright-myths/). This is something I certainly want to inform my students about in hopes that they can avoid this fate, as well as respect the people who create the original images used on Google.
     The idea of Creative Commons is especially intriguing as an educator. I was unaware of the fact that when you create a song or video and upload it to the internet it automatically creates a Copyright- own all rights reserved, in order to protect your material from being used. So when you actually WANT people to share and use your content, Creative Commons is the way to get around this. It provides free copyright licensing that allows you to choose specifically which portions of your content you want to protect and which you want to share. As advocates of the service explain in a Youtube video, Creative Commons "saves the world from failed sharing" (http://drapestakes.blogspot.com/2008/12/educators-guide-to-creative-commons.html).  It exercises our copyright in more ways, more simply. And most importantly, it creates the sense of an online community, an idea that we, as teachers, always want to be instilling in our classroom. Creating a community in which students can freely and safely share their work, and in the process learn from it, is an advantage for the Internet-riddled education world.

image from: http://virulentwordofmouse.wordpress.com/2012/06/17/what-does-the-average-surfer-know-about-creative-commons/

Imbedding Practice (Blog 2 Makeup)

English 28 classical mythology introduction from Mariel Jeanne Seras

Teaching English by 2012sjr

Implementing Indian Education For All

I found looking through the Indian Education for All Standards for Alaskan educators was especially interesting. The following five standards are the expectations for Alaskan Educators to help incorporate Native American studies into their curriculum. I appreciate that they recognize teachers who follow these standards as "culturally-responsive" educators. Especially in communities with high percentages of Native American populations (such as Montana and Alaskan towns), this "cultural-responsiveness" is easily accessible and extremely important.

A. Culturally-responsive educators incorporate local ways of knowing and teaching in their work.
B. Culturally-responsive educators use the local environment and community resources on a regular basis to link
what they are teaching to the everyday lives of the students.
C. Culturally-responsive educators participate in community events and activities in appropriate and supportive
ways.
D. Culturally-responsive educators work closely with parents to achieve a high level of complementary
educational expectations between home and school.
E. Culturally-responsive educators recognize the full educational potential of each student and provide the
challenges necessary for them to achieve that potential.

As an English teacher, it's easy to incorporate Native American literature into curriculum. In order to meet standards in both traditional and modern Native American education, books from older and newer authors can be used. For example, books such as "Bead on an Ant Hill" by Delphine Red Shirt and "Fools Crow" by James Welch, are excellent works describing traditional Native American culture. You can also introduce modern Native American texts such as "Diary of a Parttime Indian" by Sherman Alexie, which describes more modern challenges for Native Americans in a prominently white dominated society. The combination of these three texts would supply a well rounded view of Native American culture and the challenges and successes they've achieved throughout their many years in the North Americas.

In terms of achieving standard B, English classrooms have great incentives to visit/participate in community events. Events such as pow-wows and poetry readings or cultural presentations are great opportunities to bring students on field trips.

Web 2.0 Tools

After some exploration on "The 100 Best Web 2.0 Tools" website, I came across a couple useful looking ideas. The first is called Teaching Channel, a site that contains hundreds of useful videos focusing on teaching strategies. The videos include interviews with teachers about an array of topics including ELL students, project-based learning, motivation and student-advisor relationships. The videos also include a lot of in-class examples, filming of real students in classrooms. There are many lesson plans demonstrated through these videos, which I will find super useful in the future when I'm building my own classroom units.

The second 2.0 tool that I found to be pretty cool is called Eyejot. It's a site that allows you to send short video messages to anyone (but in this case, students) on your computer or handheld phone. This could be really helpful for teachers who have students who respond more effectively to verbal instructions rather than ones written down. Sending video-assignments might create a stronger sense of relevance for students, thus encouraging them to get more of their homework done on time and/or understanding the assignment more thoroughly.

I also found a couple articles on the Spigot website useful/entertaining. The first one, (although I'm unsure of whether it's a joke or not) is pretty hilarious for an English major like me. Rick Anderson writes on the Scholarly Kitchen blog that, "At this year's annual meeting of the American Library Association in Las Vegas, there will be a special performance by the Oxford Commas, a band composed of librarians and university press editors who are dedicated to raising the grammatical standard in popular music." It's brilliant. They feature grammatically correct songs such as "Whom do you Love?" and "Julio and Me Down by the School Yard." Would be a great and funny article to show to a classroom full of English students.

The last article I found was one in which I very much disagreed with the point of view. It came from a personal blog that talks about educational transitioning toward a more technological world. This particular article was about the shift from reading in books to reading on "machines." But he argues for the advantages of reading from computers/kindles/iPads for many reasons, while making some pretty outlandish statements. For example, he writes what if, "The machine could learn their readers preferences, nuances, 'intelligence', etc. and tailor assistive materials and experiences to the reader to maximize enjoyment and comprehension?" If the machine did indeed advance enough that it could do these things, then the role of an English teacher would be nonexistent. And students would spend an even greater time on screens instead of communicating with real humans. I think the role of paper books is important, and no matter how advanced these "reading machines" can get, they will never replace the traditional role of text on paper.