Slightly rambling concerns, questions and comments:
The first thought that I have watching this video is how important is it to me, as a 10th grade English teacher preparing students for the Regents exam, to engage students in activities that involve non-textual communication. Not that I always want to teach to the test, but given the challenges that my students already face in reading and writing – how much time do I want to dedicate to this? I teach in East New York where my students sometimes have to literally fight to get to school, and are discouraged in their community from reading and writing. One of my best students was voted by his peers to be the “brainiest” in a school awards ceremony and he was furious. Being perceived as intelligent, for the boys especially, is the same as being perceived as weak. As I combat this in the forty-two minutes that I have each of these students in a day, am I really helping them by saying put down the book and pick up a digital recorder instead?
Possible Practical Applications: the interpretation of poetry and development of controlling idea/critical lens arguments.
“Visual and written communication continue to be held in a kind of tension–the visual figuring into the teaching of writing as a problematic, something added, an anomaly, a "new" way of composing, or somewhat cynically, as a strategy for adding relevance or interest to a required course. Only rarely does that call address students as producers as well as consumers or critics of the visual. (13-14)”
For me, as I stated above, the tension doesn't lie in being some sort of luddite and rejecting this type of composing and decoding, but as we saw the other day in class there is a real sense of not being able to rely on the resources. When computers crash - you lose a whole lesson and you are sitting there with 24-30 bored fifteen year olds. When pens run out of ink, you hand a student a new one. It is also a time consuming process to teach students how to use the media. Many of my students can bounce around the web all day and text with the best of them, but the cannot even use word to write an essay. I teach them that, but how many programs can I teach in a year and still teach them literature?
One of the students addresses my concerns in the Writers process Media clip, “Why not just teach a class on film-making?” The response is that even that class wouldn’t just be a class on film-making, but it would involve media, text, storyboarding etc. Action and agency as a producer – I do this in poetry slams and essay contests, what does this bring to the table?
OK..so the extracted still image explication assignment can be powerful and can address my needs as an educator. I also enjoy the assignment handout in digital form with explanations of how to use the technologies as hypertexts within the document. Clever (although as a publishing criticism the dark font on a dark background was making me squint and highlight text, and while I am on the subject, the interspersed video clips that create layers of voiceover is cacaphonous). He is right, this is a transferable skill. This is a great lead-in to close reading and I am feeling a lot more comfortable about this idea as a teacher. (Note: I copy and pasted all of these assignments into word documents).
I am always skeptical about how well a project will work with high school students when the example used is of college students. I know that our class and this article is not specifically related to my needs as a teacher, but it is easier to get paying adults to create a group project than captive adolescents. The volume of the video clips did not match the main clip – some were barely audible.
I share the same issues that the 7th grade teachers do in the 7th grade standardized test clip. The English Regents exam is one of the worst assessment tools I have seen for student writing and preparation for college. The format of the essays and the types of thinking that students will have to do on the exam is not iterable for college level work. But, I digress.
Tony, I think you bring up many interesting points. For one, teachers today are under an inmense amount of pressure to get students to pass their state examinations. Because of this, some teachers spend all year focusing on test preparation. And when you consider that their jobs and tenure are on the line, can you blame them? I completely agree that these examinations are not real indicators of a student's ability, however realistically students must pass these tests... or else. So how much time should a teacher spend on something like this? Also, what about resources? Which schools offer working, up-to-date computers? Probably not that many in out public school system. These are somethings to consider. Although I must admit that teaching a class such as this would hold the interest of many students. You would be surprised at what the students could bring to the table.
ReplyDeleteI think you make good pionts, Tony, not to mention (as I think has been noted elsewhere) the demands on faculty time and energy. I wonder, though, about some pretty simple technology, like a blog. It does require Internet access and a computer, and I know that's a problem for some students. But if we agree it's important, doesn't that suggest we need to push for greater access? That this value should inform our policy initiatives? And, as MyT notes, there's a lot of value in the interest digital media spark in students. Maybe it's so difficult to engage students in reading and writing because they don't like it; can the same goals be reached by other means that appear more relevant to students?
ReplyDeleteYou voice the frustration that many teachers feel. At the same time that new technologies are making real learning experiences possible and affordable, we are increasingly asked to focus on the pen and paper tests.
ReplyDeletePersonally, I think it is our responsibility as teachers to try to take what students are already doing (using technology) and keep them engaged by making it applicable to the curriculum (even the Regents).
It seems like you do this already, but some of the projects presented in the clip offer some learning that will actually apply to the Regents exam. The "screen shot" where students were asked to select one picture they found interesting in a short story could be a wonderful introduction to imagery. And imagine the ownership the students will have when you show them their selected images. Or you could sequence them to reveal different plot devices like rising action, climax, or resolution.