Week 8
So far this week I’ve found helpful materials for my project in the week 8 readings. I plan on using Cynthia Selfe’s chapters two and three from our textbook for my project and also Johnathon Alexander’s“Media Convergence: Creating Content, Questioning Relationships” as well. His thoughts on media convergence and the Jenkins participatory culture fits in nicely with my remixing in the English classroom. plus, Selfe’s chapter three activities require metacognition which is something I will talk about as necessary for these new digital media texts.
I am up to 7 annotated bibs including the three I have added from the course readings. I don’t think this is “cheating” because I still have 30-some other texts to sift through and decide which I plan on using and which I am not. Steve thinks my project is too broad, and I know it is, but I’m not sure where and what to pare down just yet. I want to define literacy, discuss the importance of digital literacy in today’s global economy, introduce the idea of metacognition and reflection as important to the successful incorporation of these practices, and give a few examples of how secondary teachers can use this stuff in their classrooms. I think I can do all that in a 15 some page paper 
Week 7
I wouldn’t quite say I haven’t done anything this week. I definitely have. I am officially on about 6 entries for my annotated bib. I know we have to keep them to only a few lines each, but mine are WAY longer than that right now- mostly for my own benefit. I want to record all the quotes and info I plan on using now so I don’t have to panic when it comes time to writing the actual paper.
The most interesting thing I found this week was from the following entry:
Herrington, Anne, et al. Teaching the New Writing: Technology, Change, and Assessment in the 21st-Century Classroom. New York: Teachers College, 2009.
Also points to the importance of metacognition and teaching students to pay attention to audience, purpose, message, etc (11). They say that teachers notice the changes in student literacy before most others and want to change their classroom to meet those needs. On this page there’s also a good quote from Blake about what the new literacy looks like (7). This book gives lots of awesome ideas on how to do that. Chapter 3 talks about whole-class writing activities, as in one whole class working together on the same story. Sounds like a cool idea, especially since they mention that the teacher needs to pass the process on to the students (43). Pages 44-45 demand a lot of teacher modeling, which I think is one of the best practices anyways. 45-roughly page 50 takes the teacher all the way from the project’s inception all the way through the assessment of the creative project. WOW!!! Chapter 7 is going back to the high school classroom with me. It’s all about a senior-year multi-media project that students present to a board of adults and students to be assessed by someone other than the teacher- an authentic audience on top of multi-modal literacies!
Chapter 7 really showed me that the use of digital and multimodal technologies are incredibly important, and that schools are finding really cool ways to bring this stuff to students. I was impressed!
Week 6
Research this week is going pretty well. I’ve got all my research and then some. I have managed to do a few annotated entries to get my work progressing, so that’s pretty good. My topic incorporates ideas from multi-genre projects, digital projects, fan culture, visual literacy and more. I’m not 100% sure of how my outline of the paper is going to go yet, but there is definitely a great deal of scholarship out there that tells me this topic is important. Visual literacy and the remixing of that information is seen as a valuable practice.
So far, my title is: Remixing and Rethinking the English Classroom
And my Working Thesis is : The use of remixing (as a form of visual and digital literacy) in the secondary English classroom can aid students in developing a deeper, more critical understanding of a text, build a strong sense of community amongst the students, and enable students to engage in creative and reflective ways of learning.
Things I have learned from my research work this week: Teaching students how to remix is important because it allows them to use images, words, sounds, and other modes to make an impact on its readers. This type of work is engaging and motivating to students. They WANT to perform these lessons and want to use these methods. Students find them to be relevant to their lives and their futures. I like the idea of using remixing in the classroom because it not only allows the students the opportunity to be creative and use technology in the classroom, but it also forces them to think in new and exciting ways. Through this method, students will no longer simply regurgitate what they read for homework the night before, in recreating something new, they must begin to make conscious choices about the text and question its ideology. Remixing is NOT taking the original text and just redoing it in a new medium, it is the making of conscious decisions throughout the creative process. Students must think of the best medium in which to portray their message, their purpose must be clear and concise, they must have full agency over their work, and they must have a strong sense of audience awareness. By bringing remixing into the classroom, teachers will be opening up the door for student success now and in the future.
Week 5
Ok, so after talking to Steve and looking at a few links, I think I know where my project is going. I am working on getting a head start on next week’s paper proposal and just jotting down a few ideas for what I want to talk about in my paper. So far, I think my title will be something like, “Remixing and Rethinking in the English Classroom”. I plan on looking at participatory culture, as in having students actively participate in creating new technology projects based on texts we read as a group. After reading Oliver Twist they might write a song and create a music video, write a scene from the life of a minor character, etc. One bit of theory I plan to use is the idea of metacognition. I’m not sure exactly what I’ll say about it yet, but I feel like these ideas go together. Students need to learn about how they learn and how the choices they make reflects audience awareness, past ideology, hidden biases and so on. If students are aware of how to question their actions (in the active creation of new digital literacies) then we will be creating not only more advanced students technologically speaking, but students who are more capable of questioning the world around them.
I hope this makes sense. I know it does in my head
Week 4
Steve! I need help. So I went from being totally stressed and unsure of what I want to do for the research paper (because I’m usually much further along in the research process by now!) to thinking about settling for PowerPoint, to not being too excited about that, to still not knowing, to thinking about poetry in some way, to thinking about visual notes, to knowing I HAVE to do something with creativity, to still being slightly unsure, lol.
Right now, I’m thinking something along the lines of multigenre projects (digital of course) kind of like remixing… I think. I don’t know much about remixing and every time i’ve looked things up, even in the EMU library and databases I get still on remixing hip hop (NOT what I want). I guess what I’m thinking is something along the lines of having students consciously making decisions to take something they read (a novel or a poem) and re-examining that and creating something new out of it. Not necessarily a movie, but a brochure created online, a newspaper, a flash poem, a song, a photo album with words on Flickr, etc. Maybe it takes the point of view of a character who is left out, or the silenced voice of the minority group, something along those lines. Does that make sense?
I know the paper is theory based, not how I would use it in the class, but what would I search for? Is remixing the right term? Any ideas? I could really use some guidance!
Thanks
Week 3
I am a little worried that nothing is jumping off the page and screaming “RESEARCH ME!!!” like it usually does. Normally by this point I have a pretty solid idea of what I want to read and research for my papers, but I think its because digital media and how to use it are still so new and unknown to me that I can’t come up with any ideas.
I’d really like to focus on a practical application of these topics in my classroom, but I know the paper is supposed to be theoretically based. That’s why I’m still going back to the idea of powerPoint in the classroom. I KNOW digital media is waaay beyond just the use of powerpoint, BUT since I will be going back to the high school classroom and PowerPoint is so prominent, I’d at least like to know theoretically the best way to use the program to be effective in the writing classroom.
I’d like to do something with using digital media to teach writing. Writing is definitely my main thing right now, and if there’s something creative and interesting you can think of, maybe something with poetry or creative/personal writing, I’d love to hear suggestions! I’ve looked around online and nothing has jumped at me just yet. I’m hoping that after reading a few more chapters from our textbook and the other book we’re getting chapters from on ereserves (plus my bookreview book) i’ll find something I love. For now, I’ll just keep looking.
Week 2
After reading the first few chapters of the Writing New Media text, I am thinking about something to do with having students write in new media ways. I know some teachers at EMU have students design their own Wikipedia pages. That would be great because they’d have to research, add pictures, possibly movie clips, timelines, bibliographic information, hyperlinks, etc. I don’t know how I’d go about doing this or teaching this, but it’s an idea…
Week 1
I am so not sure what I want to do for my research project yet. Although I know I want it to be something that interests me, I don’t know what’s big in the technology world for the secondary English classroom. I’ve thrown around powerpoint (finding the “right” way to use them), blogs, twitter, podcasts on a class website, and frankly, I just do not know. I really have lost sleep over this and wish I could just jump on something already! Any ideas?
