Karena Writes Digitally

Wow! As I look back and reflect upon my blog posts throughout this semester, I am amazed at how much I have learned – and how automatic it has become for me to use blogs, wikis, nings, podcasts, iMovie and other kinds of programs and tool I hadn’t touched before this class! And the great thing is that it’s been painless. I think what has been especially useful is that using these tools was a consistent part of this course, so I became more proficient and comfortable with them than if we had just used them once or twice and then left them behind to learn something new. I have seen the connections between the different technologies in this class and have been able to formulate and reflect upon practical classroom use of the tools as well, which makes my learning more relevant and meaningful. As I reflect on all that I have learned this semester, I am realizing that I am finally not completely clueless about technologies (inside and outside the classroom) and I have gained confidence in implementing technology use in my future classroom.

I’ve done a lot of blogging this semester – a lot. I’m talking – upwards of 70 posts in 14 weeks if I combine all posts from the classes that used blogs. Going from a complete non-blogger to an average of 3-4 posts a week, I’d say that’s a pretty extreme turn-around. While I felt overwhelmed at times, I can now appreciate that I now have a very organized record/portfolio of what I have done all semester. All of my posts on adolescent literature are in one place, my posts about technology are in another and posts about teaching literature methods in yet another organized “portfolio” that is my blog. I am realizing how these posts will come in handy when, after the intensity of this semester, I may forget some of the things I have done/learned. Blogs and other online portfolios like e-folio or ePortfolio enable the learner/worker to have easy access to their history of work and allow for reflection on the progress of learning. Because of my own experience with archiving my work, I think using some kind of portfolio in the classroom would be a great way for student and teacher to reflect individually and together about the personal progress of each student.

I think an easy way for students to keep track of work is having each design his or her own wiki site with pages that organize works from different units or even different grades. I would have my students select their “best” works from the course (which requires them to be immediately reflective of the relative quality of their works) to present to the teacher in a final reflection of what was learned in the class. To make sure students are really reflecting on the portfolio (and it’s not just some useless activity) I think I would also have students write a short rationale for each piece, explaining why they’ve included it in their work sample and what it demonstrates about their efforts/abilities/learning progress in the class. The mini reflections/rationales would be a part of the portfolio as well and I would probably assign some point value of “credit” for them so students weren’t tempted to view them as a “blow-off” activity.

I’m taking a lot of new things away with me from this course. One thing in particular would be having some sort of collaborative/interactive class site like a wiki or Ning where students and teacher could together take ownership in the creation of the site. Another thing I plan to use in a future classroom is interactive powerpoint presentations. I realize from my own experience as a student (who has had to endure hellishly boring presentations) and from what I learned specifically in this class that “lectures” are less effective when the students are just passive listeners. There needs to be some invitation for the learners to participate in the presentation, and it should be delivered multi-modally (is that a term?) if possible. If we have audio and visual capabilities that would add flavor and excitement to a presentation, why not use them?!

For my final project, I have designed a class wiki, where students will work collaboratively to create their own readers’ guide for the novel The House of the Scorpion. I have it set up so students are EACH responsible for posting specific information about certain characters or chapters, but I also have areas in the wiki where students are more free to add information.

It will be important for me to set up guidelines for the quantity AND quality of work that students contribute to the wiki. Right now, my thoughts are that I will evaluate students with a check/check-/check+ for their contributions. Students who contribute the bare minimum or miss one or two contributions will receive a “check-”, those who contribute what is expected will receive a “check,” and those who go above and beyond and really get into the wiki collaboration will receive a check+. Of course, I will have a more summative assessment as well, which will require students to individually explore an issue from the class wiki and develop their own project or research paper on the topic. In that case, I will have more specific criteria and students will earn grades on the A-F scale.

In order to see which students have contributed certain information, I will be able to easily track “changes” on the wiki.

Some areas where EACH student is expected to contribute:
*3-4 assigned “Chapter Summaries”
*4-5 Character “mini-biographies”
*12-16 Vocabulary/Key Terms
*2-3 relevant links to websites/articles/videos/etc.
*9-10 “Readers’ Guide” questions with “answers”
*1 Character monologue podcast
*Questions/information/discussion on 2 of the 4 overarching “issues”
* Adding information to “someone else’s” page/character/chapter summary at least 4 times. This promotes collaborative writing among students.

I also want to give students the chance to perform a self- assessment on their work to get them thinking metacognitively about how they are contributing to the wiki, and how the wiki serves as a collaborative learning tool. Their self-assessment could be a blog post (if I choose to have student blogs).

Now that I am getting used to podcasts, I would like to provide one general podcast about the wiki that applies to strengths and “areas for improvement” during different stages of development for the wiki. All students will have access to the podcast. For individual feedback, I would provide each student with a response to their blog post on their self-assessment. I would respond to the things the student reflected upon as well as provide my own additional comments about the student’s work on the wiki. If the student wanted, they could post an additional response to my comments for a “conversation” kind of assessment/reflection.

This is a presentation I made for my teaching unit at Crosswinds Middle School. It was a unit on reading and writing scary stories. This was supposed to be a “non-linear” presentation, but when I uploaded it onto Slideshare, all of my inter-presentation links (between and among slides) stopped working. You can’t get the full effect I was going for with the non-linear format, but I still have some interactive aspects in the slides — activities for students and links to a youtube video and a website about urban legends.

For my example of a website with good readability, I chose the easy-to-use Oil of Olay website.

First, the homepage is aesthetically pleasing. The colors used, black and gold, are the same colors that indicate the “brand” on the actual products/containers/boxes in the store. Already the viewer gets a sense of continuity and familiarity with the product because it is consistent with the product “look” in the store. At the top of the home page is an easy-to-find drop down menu for finding a particular product line as well as a “search box” which is also easy to locate. The center of the homepage has an image of a featured product line along with a rebate offer. To the left is a simple sidebar where viewers can search for products according to a variety of criteria. This sidebar is meant to help consumers find what they are looking for in an easy, efficient way.

At the bottom of the homepage is an advertisement for a “skin consultation.” This feature is advertised on Olay television advertisements, so it is important that this feature is easy accessible from the homepage. Just below that are links to “other” information to which customers may want to have access including: customer service information, a site map, and terms and conditions of rebates/offers/etc. The homepage itself is well organized and not over-done with text and images. There is little to no “scrolling” on the first page. Rather, all of the information is visible on the screen at one time, which prevents site visitors from feeling overwhelmed with information.

By clicking on the links in the sidebar, customers can easily access ONLY the lines they are looking for. Olay has a lot of products, so it is important that they divide the products and their marketed “lines” simply and easily so people don’t get overwhelmed or frustrated trying to find a particular product for a certain “skin concern.”

Overall, the site is easy-to-use, aesthetically pleasing, and aligns with the Olay brand image that consumers see in the stores, and in magazine and television advertisements, making the site a success.

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For a website with little/difficult readability, I chose a website that was designed specifically to embody all of the “common mistakes” in bad website design. This site is hilarious; spend more than 1 minute on it and your head might explode. Bad website.

Here are some of the offenses that this website commits:

* Clashing, non-aesthetically pleasing color scheme
* Excessive animation
* Aggressive pop-ups/ advertisements
* Annoying music that plays over and over on a loop
* Images that don’t load properly
* Misspelled words and punctuation mistakes
* “Orphan” pages that get the page user lost
* Hyperlinks that don’t work or are outdated
* Text/background schemes that make text difficult or irritating to read

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Activities for the classroom: Looking at and analyzing “good” and “bad” website design examples is good practice for students — especially if they will be creating their own wikis/blogs/websites/social networking pages such as myspace (which many of them do). I think a good activity would be for students to set up a “T-Chart” and then keep track of common elements of “good” and “bad” websites and then come up with their own “how-to” guide of creating a website/ webpage with good readability. As far as powerpoints, a good exercise is having students make “nonlinear” presentations with relevant links to websites. Students could choose to do a “mini” presentation on a topic they care about such as global warming and then incorporate links to websites and video clips that add to the presentation. As always, good modeling is key, so as I teacher, I would walk through a good example of an engaging powerpoint and have students verbally discuss the features that make it effective and give suggestions for further improving the presentation.

I had a lot of fun making my comic of “Travel Tips,” although it was a slight challenge for me as I had no previous experience using any “comic” software. One thing I realized right away was that I had to be really picky about text. There simply is not room to explain everything through text, and also, that is not the point of comics or graphic novels. This challenge of not relying on text makes choosing images more important. Although my travel tips are not “serious,” rather, some of them are completely non-serious, I still put thought into which images would illustrate what I wanted to say. Conversely, sometimes I chose images just because I liked it and had to think of a way to fit it into my theme by choosing my text carefully.

The challenge for me was finding pre-existing images to pull into some kind of narrative or theme. If I had more time, I think I would have like to actually draw my own images in order to have more control over my images in order to better convey my story. On the other hand, programs such as Comic Life allow students who are not artists to still create stories or comics by using “found” images or photographs they have taken and uploaded on a computer.

One thing I enjoyed about creating the comic was the inclusion of speech and thought “bubbles” or tags. To me, this is one of the most engaging aspects of graphic novels and comics. The reader can easily see who is saying what and can more easily “visualize” a conversation because the characters are shown along with words. Because space for dialogue and text is so limited, words must be chosen wisely, which is one of the great things about comic-type media. The writer is really challenge to convey meaning very efficiently and creatively.

I would love to incorporate Comic Life projects/activities in my classroom. Actually, during my teaching experience at Crosswinds, my teaching partner and I did a variation of this by asking our students to create a storyboard of a story they read. The challenge was to pick the most important “scenes” from the story and illustrate them. Students were encouraged to use “thought-bubbles” to convey character thoughts and emotions in order to develop their characters. Students limited their text for each frame, relying mostly on the actual images and speech and thought bubbles to convey meaning. Students LOVED the activity and were very engaged.

In a future classroom, I envision using Comic Life to have students illustrate confusing or difficult parts of a novel. For example, there is a lot going on at the end of Hamlet, and having students take the scene apart and create illustrations will help them comprehend what’s going on. Another idea is to have students take a scene from a novel and “adapt” it to their own lives. For example, students could take a scene or theme from a Jane Austen novel and put it in modern times with modern language and images. Students are relating themes from older texts to their own lives, which makes the information more relevant. Also, students can really demonstrate how they are understanding the story through their adaptations.

Yet another idea is to have students take characters from different stories and write them into a comic together. Students would synthesize information, characterization, themes and setting from two different stories and make inferences or interpretations of how a conversation or interaction between the two characters might go. This encourages students to demonstrate comprehension and synthesis of material learned across the curriculum.

I am excited to use podcasts in my classroom, both as a medium to transmit information to students as a tool for students to demonstrate their own knowledge, comprehension, competency, etc. Here are some ideas I have for using podcasts in my class:

• Have students create “book talk” podcasts. I plan to implement “book clubs” or “lit circles” in my room, which will be small, student-led discussions about a particular book that the group has chosen. Since there will be several groups, and only one of me, having students make a podcast of their discussion will allow me to listen to each groups discussion even if I cannot physically be there observing each group’s discussion as it is happening. Students could be required to edit their discussions to pick out the “best of” or most important parts of the discussion, which would encourage students to be aware of what a meaningful discussion looks like. Students could listen to each other’s podcasts to learn about the books their classmates are reading.

• Students could create character monologues in which they use information from the text in order to develop of hypothetical monologue from their character’s perspective. We could choose a class theme from the book and each student could take up a different role and discuss the topic according to how it might affect or be interpreted by their character. For example, in To Kill a Mockingbird, we could choose an issue such as “Is Everyone Treated Fairly in a Court of Law?” The poor characters or African American characters will have different perspectives than the more affluent or “racist” characters in the story.

• I really believe in authentic assessments and meaningful, relevant learning, so I would love to design an assignment where I student makes a podcast discussing an issue they care about. Students could work in pairs and do research on a topic, turning the podcast into an intelligent conversation about the topic, making sure to address multiple perspectives. For example, students could pick a school or government policy they may or may not support and discuss the issues around the podcasts. Students could practice argument/persuasion skills while doing an activity that is engaging and meaningful to them.

For my podcast, I plan to do a monologue discussing an issue in literacy — resistant adolescent male readers. I will be discussing the website “Guysread.com” as an inspiration and resource for this topic.

I find myself wishing that my mundane life tasks would take care of themselves. Since I don’t see that actually happening, I spent 40 minutes making this just so I could pretend this is what would happen each morning as I leave for school.