Culminating Assessment

For my culminating assessment I am going to extend my expert page and continue with the thread of using wikis and other online tools to teach historical fiction, and more specifically the Arthurian tradition in literature. I am going to infuse the use of more web 2.0 tools into the unit because I know now how much value they hold, and how much my students will be able to use them to learn more about the literature. I know that I want to have the students use Google lit trips, and a blog, but I am not yet sure how I am going to infuse those tools into the unit. The blog will be easy because they have homework journals to write, but I want them to be more valuable than just a place for homework journals. It is important to write this lesson because it can show how valuable using online tools can be in the classroom, and I want to show how they can compliment the literature. Also, wikis etc. can have huge implications for teaching students how to read and write and develop their skills.

Digital Story

I want to do a digital story on my trip to Africa next week. I want to show the purpose of the trip, who I am going with (AthensChurch), why we are going, what conditions are like in Mpolonjini, and what I learned through the experience.

Ideas for Culminating Activity

1. Continue with teaching historical fiction via wikis, and incorporate more digital tools into the unit.
   
2. Show how web 2.0 tools can be used to enhance differentiation for gifted/talented students
   
3. Modify King Arthur unit to use digital tools to create the students' final creative writing piece.
4. Create a unit or assignment where the students use digital and online tools to create a multigenre project to post to the classroom wiki.
   

Favorite Books by Cynthia Ramirez

Video by Cynthia Ramirez at Educational Uses of Digital Storytelling found here.

What I really enjoyed about this video is that it was not just the spoken words that told the story. The pictures as well as the words on the screen helped to tell the viewer even more. The author used several different audio clips of songs throughout the video so that it was not monotonous, but ever changing and exciting. It is effective because it shows me what I wanted to see. I wanted to see what some of her favorite books were and why, and she provided both of those answers.

Tool review night, what are my thoughts?

Well, I had my perspective changed on a tool tonight. I have been strongly against the use of twitter for a while just because I feel like it creates a redundancy from facebook statuses. Rungqing shared her tool review and explained how twitter is a microblog, I started to think differently about it. As far as following hollywood celebrities, who cares. But, twitter may have some value from an educational perspective. Obviously, I am not against blogging seeing as how I have three, and to think of twitter as a microblog changes my mind. I feel like it could be a great tool to keep up with the major work and goings on of outstanding scholars in my field, universities, and professors. That way I can keep on top of what is going on in the field, so I can know where or who with to pursue scholarship.

Linking Stuff

This is a blog from the Reading & Writing Project. More specifically it has tips and hints for how to teach historical fiction in the secondary classroom.

Focusing my thoughts

I would like to look at how teachers can use wikis to teach historical fiction in the secondary English classroom. I have a wiki that I used to teach a King Arthur unit in the past, and I can use screenshots of major pages to show activities teachers can use to teach a unit on historical fiction. I think that is would be really valuable to see in action what a wiki page would look like before a teacher tried to make one of their own. That way, they are not just left to try to figure out everything by themselves.