Read Over My Shoulder

Updated Course Outline

vtdoglover — Sun, 10 May 2009 20:02:42 +0000

complete with rationale, goals, and suggested texts! (format will not be correct of course)

21st Century Reading, Writing, and Communication

Rationale:
Over the past decade, educators have directed much of their attention to words like differentiation, multiple intelligences, and learning styles, always trying to pair these words with the ever-important new technology. The intention here is positive: we, as educators, work hard to create a collaboration between what we want students to know and how they will best achieve that knowledge or skill set. Thus, a multimodal approach to teaching literature is not a new concept; the suggestion to make use of listening, speaking, and viewing skills as well as reading and writing skills is already built into most states’ high school English standards. The problem is that most teachers have not incorporated the most current forms of technology and multimodality in their classrooms. It seems we are always behind the eight ball, so to speak: we’re still teaching the formal business letter when much of that kind of communication now takes place via formal emails, or even text messages. This course is designed to introduce students to some of the newest, most cutting edge forms of literacy and to engage them in conversations and activities that not only support understanding but also questioning. In this course, students will learn about and create multimodal texts and will develop opinions of those texts’ place in the overall definition of twenty-first century literacy.

Course Goals:
1.   Redefine the word text.
2.   Integrate skill levels and differentiate within a single class (adjust assignments to fit varying interest and skill levels).
3.   Address truly new texts and approaches (i.e., not deal with “old-new” texts like Power Point, wikis, Facebook, MySpace, etc.).
4.   Discover new ways to deal with existing, traditional curriculum (e.g., incorporate classic literature into new methods of analyzing and creating).

Course Outline:

I. Introduction to 21st Century Literacy
A. Introduce essential questions:
1. What does it mean to be literate in the 21st century?
2.   How does technology affect our view of literacy?
3.   How can some of the ways we currently learn about communicating be modified to better fit our current culture?
4.   What does it mean to take a multimodal approach to learning and is that kind of approach more effective than current practices?
B. Define literacy, communication, multimodal, multiliteracies – find text(s) to illustrate
these words and give students a place to start a conversation about essential question #1
C. Set up class blogging – a semester-long assignment for students to post to the class blog a
certain number of times a week; most of the posts will be free response on the unit    they’re currently working on, but some of them will be assigned specifically to practice    some of the modes of communication we discuss in class.

II. Interactive & Tactile Texts
A.   Possible texts: Cathy’s Book (and sequels), Dragonology (and variations), Griffin &    Sabine (and sequels), Choose-Your-Own-Adventure style books, Post Secret (and    sequels)
B.   Book choice: each student will choose a book (or series of books) to read as his/her main text for the unit; wide variety of choice, geared toward level of student, with incentive to challenge him/herself
C.   Final Assessment: students will create their own tactile/interactive text

III. Cultural & Emotional Symbolism in Storytelling
A. Subjects for discussion: Manga, emoticons, graphic novels, sitcoms, stand up comedy
B. Final Assessment: create chapter of Manga or graphic novel; short story in IM/chatspeak; analyze a form of cultural/emotional symbolism that we have not discussed

IV. Online Composition
A.   Subjects for discussion: fan fiction, Etherpad (collaborative poetry)
B.   Book choice: each student will read a “classic” text (chosen from a list provided) as his/her main text for the unit; wide variety of choice, geared toward level of student, with incentive to challenge him/herself
C.   Assignments: during the unit, students will write at least one collaborative poem and one online review (of their choice book)
D.   Final Assessment: create a piece of fan fiction based on your classic book

V. Online Broadcasting
A. Subjects for discussion:
1. podcasts
2. screencasts
3. videos
B. Question to ponder: how is online broadcasting used, and/or how should it be used to communicate?
C. This unit will involved a few fairly intense “how to” lessons
D. Final Assessment: create a podcast, screencast, or video and write 1-2 pages explaining why your project best fits into this mode

VI. Texting
A. Questions to ponder:
1. Is texting ruining our language?
2. Is texting decreasing communication or streamlining it?
3. How does texting compare to other forms of communication from the past?
4. How is texting affecting our social interaction?
B. Explore types of formal texting – compare to formal emails/letter writing
C. Blog post: analyze your own texting behavior
D. Final Assessment: create a text poem or short story; write a persuasive paper on one of the issues we’ve discussed in this unit

VII. Gaming
A. Subjects for discussion:
1. Tabletop RPGs
2. Console RPGs (3 levels): Legend of Zelda, Final Fantasy, Dungeons & Dragons- style
3. Interactive Wii-style (including Guitar Hero and DDR)
B. Question to ponder: what kinds of skills do you learn and use through gaming?
C. Final Assessment: story board for a game; choose one style to defend as a literacy (persuasive paper)

Suggested Texts:

Bantock, Nick. Griffin & Sabine: An Extraordinary Correspondence (and sequels and spinoffs)
Barker, Cicely Mary. Fairyopolis: A Flower Fairies Journal
Blake, Spencer and Dugald Steer. Spyology
Brenner, Robin E. Understanding Manga and Anime
Burrows, Terry. Txt Tlk: Hw2 Tlk W/o Bng Hrd
Cook, Dane. Rough Around the Edges: Live from Madison Square Garden
Crystal, David. Texting: The Gr8 Db8
Family Ties (Paramount)
Dance Dance Revolution (Konami)
DK Publishing. WSUP?
Drake, Ernest and Dugald Steer. Dragonology: The Complete Book of Dragons
Dungeons & Dragons: Heroes (Atari)
Friends (NBC)
Fine, Gary Alan. Shared Fantasy: Role Playing Games as Social Worlds
Final Fantasy series (Square Enix)
Gaffigan, Jim. Beyond the Pale
Gravett, Paul. Manga: 60 Years of Japanese Comics
Guitar Hero series (Activision)
Knoebel, Michael and Colin Lankshear, eds. A New Literacies Sampler
The Legend of Zelda (Nintendo)
Marti, Valli. E-Z Text Messaging 4 Grandparents
Miller, Frank. Sin City series
Montgomery, R. A. Choose Your Own Adventure series
Moore, Alan and Dave Gibbons. Watchmen
___ and David Lloyd. V for Vendetta
Myracle, Lauren. ttyl
___. ttfn
___. l8r, g8r
Seinfeld (NBC)
The Simpsons (Fox)
Slavicsek, Bill, Rich Baker, and Mike Mearls. Dungeons & Dragons for Dummies
Steer, Dugald and Master Merlin. Wizardology: The Book of the Secrets of Merlin.
Stewart, Sean and Jordan Weisman. Cathy’s Book: If Found Call (650) 266-8233
Taylor, T. L. Play Between Worlds: Exploring Online Game Culture
Thompson, Jason. Manga: The Complete Guide
Warren, Frank. PostSecret: Extraordinary Confessions from Ordinary Lives (and sequels)
Wii Fit (Nintendo)
Wii Sports (Nintendo)
Williams, J. Patrick. Gaming As Culture: Essays on Reality, Identity and Experience in Fantasy Games
Wizards RPG Team. Dungeons & Dragons Player’s Handbook: Roleplaying Game Core Rules
www.etherpad.com
www.fanfiction.net
www.fanfiction-directory.com
www.livejournal.com
www.mydamnchannel.com
www.wordpress.com
www.youtube.com

Podcasting Day – Two

jmfuller — Sun, 10 May 2009 14:27:27 +0000

One the second day of meeting with my podcasting group, many students were eager and ready to begin recording. Before we began, I shared with them a collectionof ham radio postcards. I asked if anyone had every heard of or seen a ham radio or if any of them knew anyone who used one. JL, who normally does not volunteer, said that his grandfather used to have one. I explained that the beauty and fun of the ham radio was that anyone could have one and that they could be used to communcate with people around the globe. Sometimes you could acquire a strong enough signal to have a conversation, but victory was just a few static words, exchanging contact information. When contact was made, people would often give basic contact information, then send a postcard confirming contact. “Boys and girls,” I said to these junior and senior high school students, ” This was social networking.” Podcasting shares many of the same qualities as the old ham radio. Anyone can do it from anywhere.

Here are some of the ham radio postcards from Reverend Floyd Fuller’s collection. Notice the efficient spelling, aka “textese” on some. All postcards are addressed to: Floyd Fuller, W9CMM, Aurora College, Aurora IL. Most postcards are designed for this purpose with all of the pertinent information printed on the card, including: location, call letters, transmission.

Republica de Panama “To W9CMM, This confirms our Q50 of FEB 15 1931 20 m – at 9.10 am EST / Your RAC sigs QSA 4 R 6 / Lost u at 9.25 am / Using 852 1600 V on 7000 / Using 210 500 V on 1400 / single wire fed hertz / Thanks for that fancy card / 73 / RD Prescott”

Portugal W9CMM on 22/2 -31 [February 22, 1931] at 3.00 GMT

D. McaLaren / Austrailia VK2DM / May 3, 1931

Minas (Brasil) PY – 9HC / hr is a place for ur crd ob hi hi !!

Groton, Conn W1AAM / 8/7/30 / “hrs crd, thx”

There are dozens more. If my scanner was working, I’d scan some in instead.

After the students passed around the postcards, we got back to work. All students were ready to record, but suddenly many felt shy about “talking to themselves” in a room full of people. A few got right to work, despite self-consciousness. Others stalled. I thought we would wrap up the recording pretty quickly: record, add some segue music, and convert to MP3. Instead, I found that students wanted to record and re-record until they were happy with their transmissions. Later I realised that I need to go back and explain to them that part of the fun and authenticity of podcasting is the lack of rehearsal and professionalism.

As students tired of “rehearsing” I showed them the next lesson. Even though they had not finishedthe podcasting, it seemed that their interest in it was strong, but that they needed to set a different pace than I had planned. One one one, I showed half of them jing, a program for creating screencasts. All of the computers in this wonderfully equipped lab already had jing installed, but I helped two students download the program to their personal laptops. To give them ideas for what they could screen cast, I showed two examples: my sad little screencast “How to download Audacity” and the infamous serial screen cast “You suck at Photoshop.” My instructions were to watch my screen cast and just the first episode of “You Suck at Photoshop” in order to get ideas for what is possible. Six episodes later, the bell rang and apparently it would not be possible to move forward until they had all watched all 20-something episodes. Is this a success or a defeat?

Texting Day 2

vtdoglover — Sun, 10 May 2009 17:52:20 +0000

Texting Day 2 actually happened last Monday, so I’m a little behind on the commenting, but I hope you’ll forgive me…

The texting unit is not going as well as I’d hoped, and I think there are several reasons for this (not necessarily in this order): 1) it’s hard to give the kids the whole picture of the 21st century unit in just a few sessions, so their context is skewed, and that makes doing this one unit harder I think; 2) Jo’s kids don’t know me as well, and we haven’t had much time to build a relationship so they’re more reluctant to take chances with me, and since this is a unit that is somewhat different and out of the usual “school” comfort zone, I think that plays into it; 3) these kids need more structure than I’m used to giving, even from my high school experience — they are just not as cerebral and discussion-oriented as I’m used to, which is not necessarily a bad thing, but it’s just something I have to adjust for.

That being said, on day 2 we discussed articles the kids found dealing with the texting/English language controversy, and we did have some good moments of talking about where the language might be headed and whether texting is here to stay (which they decided it is). I also had them break into two small groups and come up with a texting glossary; that was fun and interesting — I knew most of the stuff they came up with, but some of the abbreviations, initializations, etc. were quite interesting. That ended up being great because it lead us into a discussion about how some of the meaning of text terms depends on the context of the conversation, which also applies to just regular conversation, even though we often don’t acknowledge that.
Next class will be Monday, May 11, and we’ll be completing text poems, so I’m looking forward to that — I think it will be really fun.

First Day of Podcasting

jmfuller — Wed, 06 May 2009 11:14:38 +0000

I’m backlogging a little, but on April 30 my Journalism class began their pod-casting unit. A few weeks earlier, I’d offered this as an optional activity, and no one was interested. I’d forced one student to make one so I would have something for the on-line version of our school newspaper. This time around, I had no trouble recruiting 7-8 volunteers. However, half of them wanted to rescind once it was made clear that they would be making pod-casts, not just listening to them. I’ve thought about this and I don’t think that their reluctance was related to work ethic. Now that we have finished two days of the workshop, I realize that insecurities about their work and shyness about reading aloud into the microphone were the hurdles. More about that later.

I thought that we would need to spend the first class downloading Audacity and LAME, but at the last minute we switched labs with a middle school class and were thrilled and surprised to find that the lab were switched to was set up for pod-casting! Mics, headphones, and software! The point of this lesson was to try something new – to bring 21st century technology into the classroom. Finding that the school had a lab prepared for this was fortunate but also assuring. However, even though the school had the equipment and capability, these students, juniors and seniors, had never used it before and were all trying pod-casting for the first time.

By the end of our first session, students had tested the features of audacity, found LAME on their harddrives, and chosen pieces to record. I allowed them to choose anything that was their own original writing, even if it was not written expressly for journalism. For homework, I asked them to scan itunes and podcast alleyfor a podcast they appreciated.

Day 1 (Take 2)

vtdoglover — Sun, 03 May 2009 20:52:55 +0000

OK, so as you know already we had to postpone day 1 because of Jo’s daughter…which was fine, cause truth be told I was a bit nervous. Mind you, that nervousness only returned on Thursday, when we were to do our actual day 1 lesson. And then, to make matters worse, it looked like none of the kids wanted to do the texting lesson with me — they all RUSHED to sign up for Jo’s podcasting lesson. I tried not to take it personally.

I did actually end up with a group of seven though, and we did some talking about texting. We had a shorter period Thursday because the kids had to do a writing prompt first, but we did spend about thirty minutes discussing various elements of texting: when and how we text, why we text, whether anything is “unacceptable” to text (to which they unanimously responded, BREAKING UP!!). I briefly mentioned how there’s been controversy in the English world over texting, how people are afraid it’s “ruining our language,” but we didn’t discuss that in much detail. Don’t worry — it’s coming. I gave them all an assignment to find one article about the texting debate for tomorrow, and my plan is to share summaries of those articles (I’m going to bring one in as well) and use that as a jumping off poing. All in all, I think the first day went fairly well considering these kids don’t know me very well. I’m looking forward to an even better class tomorrow!

Course Outline

vtdoglover — Sun, 03 May 2009 20:52:39 +0000

Here is the course outline Jo and I came up with for 21st Century Reading, Writing, and Communication. It’s still a work in progress, so feedback is appreciated! Also, I still have to add a few elements to it: an opening rationale for the course, a text list, and a summary of our goals for the course. And of course, I can’t figure out how to attach a whole document, so I copied and pasted, and the formatting did not translate! ugh.

21st Century Reading, Writing, and Communication

Course Outline:

II. Interactive & Tacticle Texts
A.   Possible texts: Cathy’s Book (and sequels), Dragonology (and variations), Griffin &    Sabine (and sequels), Choose-Your-Own-Adventure style books, Post Secret (and    sequels)
B.   Book choice: each student will choose a book (or series of books) to read as his/her main text for the unit; wide variety of choice, geared toward level of student, with incentive to challenge him/herself
C.   Final Assessment: students will create their own tactile/interactive text

I’m not here…

vtdoglover — Sun, 03 May 2009 20:52:13 +0000

Hello! I just wanted to post so you knew I’m here, but really I’m not here because I have to go work on my thesis now. I promise to post for real soon though!

Day 1

jmfuller — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 17:53:45 +0000

Golly gosh. And I feared we would have nothing interesting to say. Today was supposed to be Day 1 of our “21st Literacy” unit (working title only). We met about an hour before class, excited and exchanging ideas for how to begin. We were quickly interputed by a call from the nurse at my daughter’s school. I had to scramble for a sub and leave to remove the infected child from her pristine high school. Our awesome plans are on hold until Thuesday when the class meets again. At least Keyna was able to meet a few of the students that she will be working with. Before I darted out, I was able to spend about three minutes with the class and let them know that we would be starting a amzing new project on Thursday and that they may be working me or Keyna. This totally peaked their interest and they asked a few questions about how we would go about deciding who works with whom and which one of us would be “nicer.” I remined them that they already know how mean I am.

Moving on, on Thursday, we will present our two “workshops”: Podcasting & texting. These 11th & 12th grade English students will be able to choose which workshop they would like to join, but we will limit each group to 7-8, dividing the class in half.

Should be fun. Sorry we missed our chance to begin. Instead, I left them to watch Outfoxed with the sub.

Keyna and Jo have left the blog

jmfuller — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 14:31:57 +0000

Okay, so we haven’t actually left. We will, of course, continue to post and and participate on Richard’s lovely class blog. Here, however, we will be blogging specifically regarding our experiences creating a multimodal English class for 11th and 12th grade students. Yesterday we began by writing an outline of a course syllabus. We agreed on six units that we want to include and we mapped out what each of those units will look like. Our goal, for the purpose of this final project, is for each of us to finalize one unit and two lesson plans within that unit. The part we are MOST excited about is our “lab.” Keyna will visit Joanne’s 11th& 12th grade English class for two weeks (four class periods) and we will actually use the lesson plans we have created for this course proposal. Hopefully, Keyna ,a much better typer than Jo, will post our course proposal for feedback. But I don’t know. We didn’t discuss it

And of course we would LOVE comments. We are also hoping to hear from our students and fellow teachers.

We are hoping to encourage and inspire students to explore their multimodal talents and interest. This kid doesn’t seem to need our guidance in mutimodal presentation, but I wan our viewers and readers that he does need a lesson or two in political and social decorum (Miss California would NOT be the person to teach that lesson):

Ironically, I think Whitman would have approved of play with language and media, including this video, Twitter, and texting . . .

“Viewed freely, the English language is the accretion and growth of every dialect, race, and range of time, and is both the free and compacted composition of all.” – WW

Hello world!

jmfuller — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 00:33:33 +0000

Welcome to WordPress.com. This is your first post. Edit or delete it and start blogging!