Shafer

I could not decide how I felt about the Shafer reading on literate movies. The teacher in the article take five weeks and lets their students take an author, story, or event and portray it through a movie. At first, I loved the idea because it was a new and creative way to look at literature. Then I started to change my mind. Are all five weeks solely devoted to this project? The students can pick any topic which makes the five weeks very unstructured, you could only really give class time for the project. Then it was mentioned that class time was used to learn how to work the video camera and how to edit. Is this worth it? That most certainly is not in the curriculum and takes up a lot of time that could be devoted to literature.

I like the idea of this project because its a new spin on just a normal research paper but is it worth the time and energy? Is it worth taking time out of the class to devote to the teaching of video camera and production? I'm not convinced.

Further Research

I wanted to discuss what I had learned in my for further research assignment from Monday. The article that I read was about texting and literacy and the results of a study found that students who text in "textese" language, or the abbreviations, could have better literacy because the learn more about phonetics than they realize. When they are sounded out words to make abbreviations they are learning word and letter sounds and how they fit together. I was not completely convinced about this finding and wanted to get your opinions!

Chapter 3: Wikis

I loved the reading off of D2L for this week. I knew the basics to blogs and wikis but I liked reading more in depths about them. I had no idea what a digital story was though so it was interesting to learn about that.

I really liked the idea of the wikis actually. I had never thought of all the possible things they could be used for because I have never really used one before. This class is the first time I have ever used one for a class! This chapter had a lot of excellent ideas for ways to use wikis in the classroom. I loved the idea of the teacher having a wiki with all the things the students might need to print off if they lose anything. I also like having the wiki open to parents so that they know what their children are doing and also have a way to put their input in on things happening in the classroom! Parent involvement is always important.

Literature circles

We did literature circles in my American literature 2 class this week. Normally, I love literature circles because we did them in Young Adult Lit but in this specific class I did not really think that it worked. We were not in even groups which meant for my group, who only had 4, that one person had to do multiple jobs. It was helpful to talk over the novel in my small group but when we came together as a class it did not work. We did not really go through every job or topic we came up with. This taught me that literature circles are a really useful tool but they require a lot of organization and teacher direction. In my class the students just kind did whatever because we are in college but I did not feel like it was a useful way to down our time.