Week 3: Pop Culture Meets Fame in the Classroom

As most of you know, I struggle to have my students remember their log-in information.  The idea of them creating their own web pages is beyond overwhelming.  Once I get past the first initial idea of how much my students still need to learn I start playing with some ideas.  I felt the over arching themes from this week's readings were how to create critical thinkers in relation to digital writing from what information is important to what information are you comfortable putting in the public eye.  In addition to critical thinking there was a strong message about the influence of popular media and how it can and cannot play into the classroom.

I found it shocking when Hobbs and Moore (2013) cited that 40% of students said they valued fame the most in their lives (p. 78).  This statistic made me feel scared and excited.  I felt excited because it reinforced the idea that my students want to be heard outside of the classroom.  I think that is the way that many things are headed and I am constantly try to figure out ways to make their ideas heard.  It made me scared because fame can mean a lot of different things.  We live in a culture where students want to be celebrities or go "viral".  As their teacher I want fame to mean a cure for cancer, or a discovery of a new and powerful teaching tool.  I wonder if we as educators can shape fame into incorporating celebrity in addition to civic engagement.

Currently my students are learning how to decide if information is fact vs. opinion.  This is a very challenging skill for primary students.  Developmentally students are just starting to realize that there is a world outside of themselves.  This translates to just because I love lasagna doesn't mean it is the best dinner of all time for everyone. We reinforce fact vs. opinion for the rest of the year.  We start with discussing facts and it leads into a research project.  Students pick an animal and write four separate paragraphs about it.  The consistent message in our class readings relates to student's writing being read and used beyond just by the classroom teacher.

In Hick (2013), he discusses the idea of optional links vs. required links (p. 51). This really got me thinking about how I could work to teach students about how to use visuals to help their animal projects.  I think that even though my students cannot type more than a couple words a minute they might just be motivated to enhance their writing.  Hicks (2013) goes on to discuss "digitally enhanced" (p. 57) work  It could lead to a good lesson about what visuals help make a project better and which visuals distract of don't add to the content.  I do think this is a lesson that 2nd grader could access and in turn have a more public platform for their work.

While reading Hicks (2013) and Hobbs and Moore (2013) I was able to really analyze my classroom and my perceptions about popular culture as well as what I want digital literacy to look like in my classroom.  I think first and foremost I want students to be able to become more fluent when using a computer (i.e. logging in, opening up a web page, trouble shooing small technical errors).  I also want students to become more fluent in typing as this is a skill they will need to use heavily in 3rd grade.  Lastly, I want my students to access each other's writing and be able to take information from their research and represent it in a more powerful way than a traditional paper-pencil paragraph.  I think by teaching my students how to critically analyze visuals, create a Google Document that links student's to each others work and providing time with technology my student's can meet these goals and enhance their learning experience.

Lastly, I was very interested in being able to pull up YouTube videos without distracting other videos.  If you are interested in using this in your class you may go here.  I think that my students that have special needs might benefit from verbally being able to read their paragraphs and post them to YouTube as an alternative to having to type all of their work.  For now these goals feel lofty, but as I start planning out their unit I am excited to see what is reasonable in my classroom!

Week 2: Interconnected Timelines and Copyright Instruction

This past week, I hit a road block in my classroom.  One of the standards in 2nd grade relates to being able to identify key people that have impacted history.  In our 2nd grade classroom we teach the Civil Rights Movement in order to meet this standard.  My students come into the classroom with a lot of background knowledge about Martin Luther King Jr. from 1st grade.  This makes it a good unit of study specifically for this time of the year.  Even with a lot of background knowledge my students were disengaged.  They didn't see how these event mattered in 2016 and appeared bored by the lessons. I realized that they were struggling to see how interconnected these events were to key influential decisions.  

One of the many struggles in teaching elementary school is, how much do you tell students about the real world?  I don't want to sugar coat the events that are currently taking place, but I also want to respect and enjoy that my students are 7 and 8 years old. We live in a world surrounded by civil rights issues.  Most people know all about Ferguson and Michael Brown, but should 2nd graders know that?  Should they know that the shooting of Michael Brown is not an isolated event, and that this is a civil rights issue our country is dealing with in the very moment?  We have endless opportunities to be the source of information for our students, but with that power I do think their should be limits.  

Back to my original dilemma... my students were disengaged and I needed to respond.  In Chapter 1 by Hicks (2013) he states, "... and publish their works for a variety of audiences" (p. 1).  This idea that we are creating writers that need to be heard by more than just their teacher, helped shaped my lessons for the week.  I realized my students creating timelines in isolation from each other counteracted the idea that history and current events are a series of interconnected events.  I then was able to introduce my students to a variety of media materials.  

We decided to ditch the personal timelines that retold 6 key events in the Civil Rights Movements and make one large class timeline with events that mattered to the students.  Students were given printed books and access to World Book Online (a tool they have practiced in Library).  Their job was simple, read about a person or event I have discussed in my teaching and find out more about it.  They had the choice to find facts or key dates to add to the class timeline. 

It was one of those thrilling moments where all students are engaged and on task.  Media would have you believe that these moments occur every day in the classroom, but as teachers we know how hard this can be.  My students were talking, discovering, and developing their knowledge around our common goal.  Hicks (2003) mentions, "When writers begin to think intentionally about creating meaning in their readers' minds, they are beginning to master the craft of writing" (p.13).  My students worked tirelessly to gain knowledge form multiple media sources and report their findings back to the class.  This interconnectedness that was created through a shared visual representation of knowledge built on how essential it is for students to feel that their writing has purpose.  They need to know that someone besides their teacher will read their writing.  This motivation to be heard and share what they learned catapulted my students to a new level of engagement.  

The end result of the class timeline was simple.  We had over 15 dates that the students felt were important to the timeline and over 5 separate facts that they learned about the people they researched.  We even had a student go to the Longmont Library and pick out books to bring into class to share with others in order to help build the timeline.  

Usually this lesson results in all of us knowing 6 key events in the Civil Rights Movement.  Instead as suggested by Hicks (2003) I had students find their own exemplars of good writing and contribute that knowledge to the class. In addition to getting to see the power they held by picking their own sources of information my students were able to learn as writers, historians and use technology to further their knowledge.  Hicks (2013) talks about pushing students to be more than "born digital" (p. 25) but to really empower students into becoming purposeful and power contributors to digital writing.  I think this lesson really was the first step for my 2nd graders.  They finally saw their work viewed by others.  They also saw how their new knowledge had the power to teach others.  

The Center for Social Media (2009) discusses, "Feedback deepens reflection on one's own editorial and creative choices and helps students grasp the power of communication" (p. 4).  This feedback given by other students greatly contributed to the positive engagement in my classroom this week.  My students saw how the power of their research, verbal communication, and written communication impacted our entire class. 

As I look to future lessons, I was able to relate heavily to talking about the need to cite sources. That was not a requirement in this lesson but needs to be my next step.  I found a fun a video to introduce the need to cite sources and to talk about copyright law.  I am going to create a Google Doc for our classroom. I will then have students look for articles related to the Civil Rights Movement and copy their source to a shared document.  I hope this will build on the interconnectedness that was so successful this week and help students understand the important of citing their sources. 

I look to future lessons in my classroom to see how this week's readings can help me continue to build creative writers who understand the importance of their knowledge.  I also hope to help my students understand the importance of citing and sharing where their knowledge came from.  Here is the website for a copyright assessment I plan to use in my classroom to help my students understand these rules in a more interactive way!

Sources:
Copyright & Plagiarism for Kids. (2014, July 5). Retrieved January 23, 2016, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ngKGGoqFKTI

(n.d.). Retrieved January 23, 2016, from http://cyberbee.com/cb_copyright.swf

Week 1: The 21st Century Conundrum

This week's readings spoke to how I feel about being a teacher in the 21st century.  I often find myself wanting so many different things in my classroom and struggle connecting them. I want my students to be fluent readers, writer, mathematicians, scientists, and so much more.  I also want them to be prepared for the 21st century.   My principal is famous for saying; we are currently preparing our youth for jobs that are yet to exist.  I often find myself wondering how we can mold together good teaching practices with a strong desire for my students to be 21st century ready for jobs that are yet to be created.  

In the article by Warschauer & Ware (2008), there is a lot of discussion about how to engage students beyond just what is valued in the four walls of a school.  "Rather educators must look for ways to acknowledge and even appropriate for themselves the creative and complex literacy practices that youth bring to schools" (pg. 234).  As educators it is our job to make sure we are connecting with students and helping the develop skills needed to be successful in their adult lives. I often feel like my students digital literacy skills are lacking.  Many of my students do not have access to a computer with internet at home.  Many of them do play video games, though.  I wonder if there is a way to bridge the gap I feel when trying to teach my students the standards required in 2nd grade.  

I really struggled to pick a motivational label when reading Hobbs & Moore (2013): Chapter 2.  I hope that at the end of this course I can have multiple motivations to teach digital literacy.  I would love to be the teacher that really connected my students with civic engagement.  I think currently, I most connected with the Motivator and Spirit Guide labels.  I have worked deeply on my ability to connect with students and see them as a whole child.  We have spent a lot of the year as a class working on social emotional regulation and how we can share and connect to one another.  These are things I value as not only a teacher but as a person.  I often find that my students are dealing with situations way beyond what we expect most 7 and 8 year olds to deal with.  By being a Spirit Guide I work to channel my students' experiences into their learning.  I would like to be able to take the work we have already done around using a growth mindset and using social and emotional regulation to connect it to digital literacy.  I would like to see my students express themselves in many different multimedia modes and share their learning with their peers and families.  

And now we are back to the 21st century conundrum.  In a time where is feels like we are only piling work onto teachers without critically analyzing its effectiveness and whether it replaces anything we already have, I feel slightly lost.  I know my students need to learn to read and write.  They also need to learn to think critically and be able to use technology fluently.  Most of my students do not come into my classroom being able to use a computer.  They need help logging into a computer, opening the internet and navigating to new information.  My students also come to me not being able to read grade level text or write multiple complete sentences on the same topic.  All of these skills are important and take extreme amount of time in order to make them fluent.  Often as a teacher I feel the need to pick and choose, the lower my readers are the more I feel like I don't focus on practicing computer literacy.  The more time I spend practicing computer literacy the less time my students have time to practice how to write using a pencil and paper.  Maybe I am stuck in the 20th century or interpreting the standards in a narrow way.  

In the article by Warschauer, M., & Ware, M. (2008) there is discussion about how school district focus too closely on what would be defined as traditional reading and writing (pg. 220).  This is what worries me as an educator.  I feel like we are often given new things to try in addition to the things we are already doing.  Instead of really critically analyzing the purpose of this.  As our students move to all high stake testing on the computer this question about how to best prepare our students becomes even more important.  If a student cannot type, they cannot write the required essays needed on PARCC.  If a student cannot write with a paper and pencil, can they type? This article discusses how some studies might say yes, with the note that students must be able to type.  

These readings perhaps left me with more questions than answers.  I want to motivate my students and connect with them.  I also want to send them into the world with the most skills possible.  I am hoping by the end of the course I will be able to take well-established effective teaching strategies and combine them with 21st century skills in order to meet all the needs of my students.  

Sources:

·       Warschauer, M., & Ware, M. (2008). Learning, change, and power: Competing discourses of technology and literacy. In J. Coiro, M., Knobel, C. Lankshear, & D. J. Leu (Eds.) Handbook of research on new literacies (pp. 215-240). New York: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

·       Hobbs & Moore (2013): Chapter 2 

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