Online Role Play Reflection

Truth be told, my commitment to the online role play was minimal. First, I had to miss class the day we began it because of parent-teacher conferences, and then I went out of town during MEA weekend. I believe that the time we spent in class on the role play was very valuable though. From a purely organizational/technical aspect, I feel like this activity did not work well with so many people participating in a synchronous way. First of all, my convos were, for some reason, being organized in way that did not allow me to read the responses in the order they were written. Second, I thought that with so many different perspectives, it really became difficult for people to actually have a conversation with one another. Lastly, it felt a bit strange to be sitting in a room full of intelligent people and communicating with each other through typing on a website. Why couldn't we have just spoken to one another? I believe that in order for this to be useful, a few things would have to change. 

First, we would have to make sure that the technology was set up to synch the convos in order so that people could actually follow them as a conversation. Second, I would break the students into smaller groups so that they could actually have a conversation that would move forward. The idea is for the students to learn things by researching and taking on and listening to various positions in an argument, but I felt like last week's debate was a bit hard to follow, let alone to analyze and respond to. Part of my confusion could be due to the fact that I missed the first class on this topic, but I think these things just seemed built into the activity (as this is the second time I have learned about this; I saw Rick's presentation at the MCTE spring convention last year). 

Anyhow, I would try this in my classroom with the various adjustments I have mentioned. 

Wiki Update

Now that we have completely finished one wiki project, I am happy to reflect on the experience. I thought that the wiki medium was a very interesting way to teach writing; however, because this was my first time teaching with it and using the technology, I felt that we spent most of the time just trying to get comfortable with using the wiki itself. I believe that the technology can help the kids get engaged in writing, but first they have to learn how to use the technology at all. I know that the kind ladies who came in to talk to us about how easy it is for kids to blog and write on wikis meant well, but with 7th graders in a lower income area (it's not tough to find a lower income area THAN EDINA), there really does exist a digital divide, not just a broadband divide. If seventh graders do have a computer, they are heavily regulated as to their use, and they are 12, so regulation still works. So, they aren't as active on facebook as we adults might believe, and as a result, part of teaching digital writing means teaching the "digital" part. 

That said, now that the kids know how to use the technology, I am going to attempt another wiki writing project. For my low track class, we will be focusing only on writing content and adding pictures to individual pages. For my regular track class, we will be writing and using inspiration on the wiki pages. And, last but not least, for my honors class, we will be writing and creating podcasts using audacity and posting them on the wiki pages. I like the idea of a wiki as something that the kids can use so that they can write for a larger audience, as opposed to writing just for me. I still don't know quite how to hammer it home that audience should affect writing, but we are also going to work on that this time. We are going to look at examples of good and bad websites, and hopefully the kids will get that mistakes in grammar and spelling and boring design lower the credibility of websites. 

All in all, I am enjoying the wiki technology, and I look forward to using it more in the future. 

I should be good at posting these by now...

Here is another example of my prowess with imovie. I truly love imovie, and my love for it has only increased in the past few weeks as I have been forced to teach using movie maker, which is just clearly inferior to imovie for many reasons. Anyhow, I used a poem by Leslie Adrienne MILLER, not RICH, as I say in the audio, but I was too tired to re-record, re-mix, etc. So, I left it. Forgive me Ms. Miller, if you see this, I am very sorry! 

Other than that, for a more detailed version of this type of thing, please again refer to my digital literacy projects from last February. They are the same type of thing. I think I am going to have students do something like this during our poetry unit in December, just in time for Christmas. The wiki has been a big hit; but I do think that people are "underwhelmed" by the quality of the videos and wiki pages, a charge to which I offer the following defense: we had seven days from start to finish, which includes not only writing, but learning all of the technology as well. I believe that next time we use the wiki (hopefully in a couple of weeks) we will work more on the writing aspect as opposed to the digital aspect, which kind of consumed us this last time. Anyhow, I hope you enjoy the post, and please check out my class's wiki at www.7thgradenorthcore.pbwiki.com. 

Wacky Wiki

I am not going to post about wikis until I am done with the wiki project I am currently doing with my kids. This will be after next week Tuesday. Currently, the project is going well, but tomorrow I am going to give the kids video cameras and tell them to film commercials they have written. We'll see how that goes! After they film them, they will post them to the wiki. The other side of the 7th grade core did their videos/wiki posts last week, so you can take a look at those. 

www.7thgradenorthcore.pbwiki.com