Saturday, February 6, 2010

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

This week was an interesting week in my journey in teaching with technology. Even though I have not received the netbooks, I have seen The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. Here is a run down of what my students were doing this week. The British Literature courses created comic books based on the epic poem Beowulf. My Humor and Satire courses were creating short 3 minute skits from the hilarious sitcom Seinfeld. (I feel like I must defend this assignment. Last semester a common phrase from my students was, "That's not funny." We started this semester talking about where humor comes from. We are discovering that humor comes from the interpretation and not the words. So they are using an episode of Seinfeld to show this.) Thanks Hutch for the help on this.

The Good...The amount of students on task in British Literature has been 100%. The students have spent three class periods creating their comic books on toondoo.com. Thanks D-Rage for the sweet website. Some of them have come up with some very creative and interesting comic strips. The Humor and Satire students have been working together, problem solving and figuring out how to use those cute little flip cameras. Overall, the students have enjoyed the assignments and have worked hard.

The Bad...Even though the students have worked hard, some of the comic strips are still ARGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHH. After looking at two of them on Thursday, I was ready to scream. I thought because they would have to post these onto their blogs, that I would see more attention to grammar and to the details. That was not the case. The humor students did not "go over the top." I wanted them to really get into them. I wanted more and I am not getting that "more."

The Ugly...No real ugly with the comic strips, except that I wanted the website to do more, and it has limits. For the Humor students, there has been some ugly. I thought I had figured out the problems we were having with editing their scenes on the student accounts. I was wrong. It has been a mess. It has been irritating and discouraging. But at the same, we worked through and finally found a solution. The most irritating part...the wasted time. My wasted time and the students.

The Next Step...Keep trying new ways of doing old assignments. The good outweighs the bad, and I look forward to finding new ways of connecting literature with the student's lives.

Lunn

2 comments:

  1. Well, as usual, David, I have some thoughts rolling around my head and just had to share them. (Smile.) I think one of the things we see time and time again is students' apathy towards their work. I wonder though, if it has anything to do with the fact that we tell them what to do, beginning in kindergarten all the way through college? While WE might think something sounds exciting, interesting, creative...well, this doesn't mean everyone else agrees. So, I wonder, could you include the students in the decisions about how to demonstrate their learning of key concepts? Could you show them some of the tools they could use and then let them decide what the product looks like?

    I know...I know...grading would be infinetely more difficult; so you may to have some parameters to insure fair assessment of all projects. But I'm just wondering if you would get more "buy in"...more passion...if you gave them more ownership over the process. Just something to think about; I think you're doing some incredible work with your classes and they are so lucky to have you as a teacher. I also appreciate your transparency as you grapple with the use of these tools. You, my friend, are one of my teachers right now. Thanks!

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  2. Hey David-- What about using http://goanimate.com/ as an option next time? This will create a cartoon, not a comic strip & can be embedded/shared etc. I also used ToonDoo & I thought that goanimate was richer. You can import images from Flickr & add sound also. I know what you mean about quality... I try to go over my rubric for specific grammar I am looking for before kids start doing work & then give them time to peer edit those specifics. It is well worth it... and I don't get too stressed on "perfect" if I think the kids got something out of the activity. Make sense?
    I agree with Cary about giving them choice. What I am struggling with is that many kids are not interested in learning how to do something different unless you give them that extra little push... Last year, given the choice of a PPT or a Voicethread, kids chose the PPT because it had no learning curve. Once they learned how to do a VT (because I asked them to), then they used it. I even had some students do VT in their Social Studies class... It wasn't hard to do, but there was a learning curve... Toward the end of the year, my kids were using GoogleDocs & VT naturally & choosing these tools themselves, but they would not do so unless I had given them that extra little push to learn those tools...
    Sorry this is so long... let me know if you have any questions, OK?

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