Sample Questions for TKAM Newscast

When considering your newscast production, think about what news sounds like on the radio.  Begin by listing at least two items that would be newsworthy for Maycomb.  One story that I found very amusing was the story of the Cunningham boys and Arthur Radley locking up the town watchman in courthouse outhouse. Could this be incorporated? What are some other stories that would make good news?

For links please go to portaportal and login as a guest, login in shadden. Check out those links. Be sure to share any information you find that can be added for use by other classes now and in the future.

Wiki or Not?

The word itself, wiki (quick), should inspire caution. While I believe there are applications where using a wiki can be a positive learning experience, I also worry about the openness of the material. I always begin the research project with a caution to students on using Wikipedia. While I believe it is a great resource to uncover information, especially if they don’t know where to begin, it cannot be considered a reliable source of information because the entries can be changed.  This in itself is a great learning lesson for students on what reliable information is and how do I find it on the web.

This brings me back to the question of how to use a wiki with high school students. Because of the collaborative nature of wikis, my initial thought is to use it as a source of information of “what’s going on”. I can see my students building a newsletter together to describe events that are happening in the school, in the classroom or in their lives in general. My concern is to provide guidance and allow freedom of use, but curtail the inevitable need for some students to vandalize the site. Currently, our school uses Moodle, which I am not completely familiar with, but I understand that it provides more control over content, yet will still allow students to post. I will be training on Moodle in the next couple of days, and I am hopeful that this might be a good first step for my students. I would love to hear from any of you who have Moodle experience.

Romeo & Juliet Project – Balcony Scene

Each year all my classes read Romeo & Juliet as part of the course of study. This past year, I had my students “interpret” the balcony scene. I purposely left the instructions wide-open to allow for a broad range of projects. The purpose of the project was to persuade me that they had an understanding of what happened and how quickly. Students were allowed to work individually, in pairs and in some special circumstances, with three. Each student had to explain his or her part of the project, if they worked in groups, prior to presenting the project.

I was quite axious about not defining parameters of the project except to say that it must be school appropriate and it must be presentation based. I was pleasantly surprised to find how creative my students were. I received poems, raps, art work, set designs, and “translations” into modern language. Not all the projects were fabulous, but many of my students certainly surprised me. The students enjoyed performing and seeing what their peers produced. I will certainly use this approach again, possibly as a wrap-up for the entire play.

One problem I did encounter was that I had several students who took the dialog and changed very little. I will give more direction in that area in the future. One thing the project did reinforce is that each of my students has his or her own unique talents and it is important to allow them to find their “voice” and achieve.

Welcome!

Welcome to my blog. This is my first foray into the world of blogging. I am trying to shake my “digital dinosaur” status in order to help my students become productive citizens of the 21st Century and learn how to appropriately collaborate with others. Much like the textbook of the past, I see blogging as a new tool in education.

One important thing I have discovered in my search is that there is so much information and so little time – especially for those of us who did not grow up with the Internet. When I graduated from college, technology consisted of mostly manual typewriters, filmstrip projectors and mimeograph machines. While working in the corporate world, I was privy to the emergence of the personal computer, workstation, and networking. The Internet as a tool and e-mail were in their infancy when I became a full-time mom and had little time to keep up with technology. I was astonished when I re-entered the workforce and, in particular, in the past couple of years, at the emergence of technology as truly a world-wide unifying force.

Now, as an adult with a spouse, children, home and job that all demand my attention, it is difficult to keep up with technology. My children are far more adept at navigating the web than I am. Especially as a teacher, it is easy to become bogged down in the day-to-day paperwork that seems to leave little time for incorporating and planning for use of new technologies. As the new school year bears down, my goal is to begin to incorporate the use of these technologies into my classroom. As I have begun to explore the new Read/Write Web, I can see many fabulous uses of the new tools of the 21st Century Classroom. This first step will, hopefully, allow me to plunge in. In the words of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.: “I want to stay as close to the edge as possible without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can’t see from the center.”