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Thursday, April 19, 2012

The End Is in Sight

I can't believe another semester is over. What is harder to fathom is that I only have two more classes in order to be completely done with an MA in English, with one on of those classes just being my final project. As this semester was dying down and I had to decide how I wanted to present my final project, also known as the final phase of the Cookbook, I realized I wanted to explore something outside the world of this blog. As much as I have enjoyed blogged, I wanted to try something new, something I could take with me and maybe use in my teaching in the future.

On this journey of exploring platforms outside my blog, I fell in love with Wix.  I have played with website builders before, such as Weebly, but nothing I have used or seen before can compare to what Wix has to offer. Yes, I'm doing a plug for the program, but it, seriously, is one of the coolest website builders I have ever used. I cannot wait to come up with an activity that allows me to use it in my classroom.

Okay, off the bunny trail and back on track. My blog played a major role in the formation of this final piece, as I dialogued four of the posts with articles by Winston Weathers and Jeff Rice. I'm not going to say too much more here, other than you should go check it out by either clicking the picture below or the following link: Literacy, Grammar, and English.

Wednesday, April 11, 2012

New Media in the Classroom

If you haven't figured out, I'm an advocate of incorporating new media into the classroom. I came across the Wordle below and realized that each word describes something I'm striving for in my classroom. Even though I don't necessarily teach it and assess it (such as Amazon or Craig's List), I believe an essential (and unwritten but expected) part of my job as a special education English teacher is to teach civil literacy. This means that I've given students access to the skills that allow them to be a successful citizen.


Cynthia Selfe in "Toward New Media Texts: Taking Up the Challenges of Visual Literacy" from Writing New Media emphasizes the importance of new media texts, especially visually stimulating texts. I just love when I read works by people that are advocating for the same things that I'm trying to push for in my own classroom. I don't have too much else to say on the matter of new media literacies and visual literacy because I am a proponent for them, and I have been quite open about that in other posts. However, I came across this diagram (image below), and thought it was a great summarization of why new media literacies need to be and should be incorporated into the curriculum. If you can't read it, I believe you can click on the picture to enlarge it. 


Wednesday, April 4, 2012

Technology as Writing Instruction

Here I am again, discussing all the benefits of incorporating technology in writing instruction. Oh, what digital literacy has to offer! Geoffrey Sirc in "Box Logic" says the following: "I want to use technology in my writing courses; as allowing students an easy entre' into compelling medium and genre with which to re-arrange textual materials--both original and appropriated--in order to have those materials speak the student's own voice and concerns, allowing them to come up with something obscure, perhaps, yet promising illumination" (113). This is exactly what I was trying to get at in my previous post, No Longer Writing as We Once Knew It. There is something about teaching people through technology, through creativity that opens the world to new and exciting things.

Is it possible to teach "writing" through technology? I would argue and agree with Sirc that it most certainly is. For example, my students are constantly contributing to the world of YouTube. Why not take what they do outside of school and incorporate that into the writing instruction? Sirc poses the question as to whether teachers should "teach to life or college" (113). He goes on to state that he would prefer "to err on the side of life" (113). You know what, I completely and totally agree with him. High school and college are only a very small chunk of person's life. However, life is...well life is a lifetime.

Going back to this idea of having writing become relevant through technology, I am once again drawn to YouTube. I think of the thousands of people that are posting videos. Some of them are not so great quality, but it's the effort that counts, right? However, on the other hand, I think of other YouTube posters that create great short stories/films. The example below is one such example of how technology as writing can be and should be incorporated into writing instruction because with the right people, creativity can appear like this:


So I get the story is a little weird, but the idea is to show students that the basis of this clip (or any well thought out clip) has to do with writing and communication. I want my students to dabble in areas of "writing" that have never been explored. I want my students to not fear the world of creativity but embrace it. Writing really is something more than pencil and paper, and I want my students to be able to figure that out first hand.