CI5461: Exhausted, and finished

"The Bet" has been made. Yikes, I must be tired. "Has been" in the first sentence? Yuck.

Here's the link to our adaptation of Anton Chekhov's short story:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XkJWs9KjkiY

Have a swell afternoon, all.

Oh, and if you watch it, make sure to set the video quality to 720p. There's no point in shooting it in HD if you don't take advantage of it. You can adjust it in the bottom right corner, by the full screen icon.

Cheers,

Dan

CI5461: Poetry on Film

Oh, how I long for a laptop cart. Then, I could integrate all these new media and not be as scared of the technology gap, and my lessons could seemingly be more relevant to my students.

With that slightly snide opening out of the way, I want to spend a few moments lauding the poetry activity (and others) that Jeffrey Schwartz describes in "Poetry Fusion." I had considered the short story a great medium that could be presented in film, by students, but the poem may actually be just as effective. I love its possibilities to teach writing skills, as Schwartz describes in his final paragraph: "What could be clearer than cutting the extra seconds out of a good shot? Get to the point. Use all of your creative and analytical resources to express your meaning to your audience. Pay attention to the language." And so on, and so forth. It's a great closing paragraph, and I side with Schwartz. Students would better understand poetry by giving it the repeated readings that film creation demand.

I also like how he built up to the activity with poetry reading in podcasts. Again, this forces a second reading (or a second listening) and infuses the poem with life-giving voice. It is the natural bridge to film, and it is also a bit less daunting (I think) to record your voice and then share it than it is to read aloud in class. This aspect could more easily transfer to a less tech-savvy classroom, but perhaps that is what we've been doing all along.

CI5461: A nod to this, an homage to that

The Jenkins article, "Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century, besides being a mouthful of words, bridged "new" and "old" literacies more meaningfully than anything else I have read. As I listed off its recommended skills - play, performance, simulation, and so on - I realized that these aren't actually new at all. What is new is the technology and the way we can enhance those experiences. Well, maybe not enhance. But we can match them to our students in a more current way, and that immediately helped make sense of new literacies.

Technology is too often, I think, presented in a manner that is daunting for teachers despite the best interests of its proponents. Integrate this because it helps with learning goals. Try this out because it engages students. Yet what has been missing is this piece: The skills remain the same, but the medium changes.

CI5461: Pass the duties

This week's readings addressed what had become my primary concern about writing instruction, and that is: editing instruction. I feel great - great, I tell you - about coaching students individually and as a class. But when I am removed from that equation and I am left with peers helping peers, well, what am I to do? Can I assume they will be able to help each other? These readings spoke to these concerns and ameliorated them to a certain degree.

First, I am quite sure that if I let them adrift into the Caspian Sea of writing without so much as a paddle, they will have no direction, become distracted and eventually start playing cribbage (provided they know how to play, happen to carry a travel-sized board on board and don't capsize in what can be a very rough sea). So, I know I have got to give them paddles, checklists, helpers, something to keep the editing process going. I liked VanDeWeghe's chart of peer response types, because I could show it to students and guide them toward the "reader's needs" and "writer's strategies" edits. I could also model such commentary individually and as a class. Additionally, I think it will be important to employ peer editing sheets to keep the process guided and on task, because chaos can really soak a great editing day.