Sunday, February 8, 2015
Tech Teach-In Brainstorm
For the Tech Teach-In I have a few ideas that I've been kicking around. So far I have a solid idea of what objectives the students need to complete as part of this lesson, but I'm not sure which technology tool I want to leverage to help the students complete the objectives. I want the tool to be integrated into the lesson in order to enhance learning, not just additional "fluff" that I add to the lesson to include technology only for technology's sake.
While this plan is still very much in development, here is what I would like to do as part of the Tech Teach-In:
Currently, as a class we are reading The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien. I'm hoping to implment technology here to accomplish two goals. My first goal is to hopefully organize the characters in the novel for the students, and my second goal is to hopefully use technology to help students explore some of the deeper thematic elements of the novel.
With my students I anticipate that the number of characters in The Things They Carried will be an issue. Here's why I want to use technology to help my students. I'm hoping to use a tool such as Padlet to organize the characters for the students. Each character will have its own box on the Padlet canvas with a description of the charater along with both the physical/emotional burdens that the character must carry throughout the novel. My hope is that by using Padlet the students will have the multitude of characters organized, and writing their final paper will be easier because they have this accessible organizer to reference while writing.
The second plan for this lesson is to use it as a writing assessment for the students. From a content perspective I want the students to start seeing that one of the themes of the book requires students to recognize that the "things" you carry don't necessarily have to be physical. I'd like the students to start writing on this subject so I can assess if they're grasping this particular theme of the book. I'm thinking it would also be nice to make this lesson social by having students work in groups to write the character descriptions that would end up in the Padlet.
While I'm still trying to figure out the details for this lesson, there are two main concerns that need to be addressed prior to the lesson being written. Is Padlet the best tool I can use for this lesson? Would it be just as helpful to use a tool that the students are already familiar with such as Google Drive? From a content standpoint, I'm still wondering what the writing prompt for the students will look like. So, I need to make sure those details are solid prior to planning out the full details of the lesson.
Overall, I see great benefit in using technology to help the students organize the novel while also making it more accessible (our students only have a classroom set of the book), so I'm hoping that Padlet can be the vehicle to carry out the objective, but I'm still open to any changes that could be more beneficial to the lesson.
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ReplyDeleteI hope your feet don’t hurt from kicking things around! I completely agree with you that you should have a lesson that incorporates real material and leave out the fluff.
I think you have the opportunity to create an awesome lesson using technology with The Things They Carried. I really like the idea of having them create their own ‘box’ on Padlet. Do you think it might be helpful if they work in pairs in order for them to help each other out with technology. I know it can start to get annoying and frustrating if you have students coming to you all the time related to technical difficulties and not asking about the assignment itself. Overall it sounds like it could be a great lesson and very beneficial to your students learning. I am exited to hear how it goes!
Yes, Padlet could work. Could be another tool. The way I see how you describe it are pages or links, one per character. Maybe it's facebook or fakebook pages, like the poets thing in our 430 readings. Students would be assigned a character or characters to develop pages/profiles for. Or maybe you'd create the “frames” for each character and students would all contribute to filling in the “picture” inside. (The latter would be harder to grade, I imagine. How MUCH harder? IDK.) The assessment could be an essay based on a compare/contrast of two characters or some theme (perhaps the pages could be cross referenced in different ways to show connections that students maybe wouldn't otherwise see. It would be a kind of scaffolding: taking themes or ideas from the book and putting them into a cyber dimension to allow various categories (such as the things they “carried”) to line up in different ways.
ReplyDeleteHolly,
ReplyDeleteI think that Padlet would work for organizing characters, especially if you are thinking about making this a group activity. You could separate students into groups, give each group a character and questions regarding physical/emotional baggage that are to be answered in their post, and each group could post a box about their character on Padlet. In that medium, all students would be able to see what other groups have done, and the character information is neatly organized. I think that you could do the same thing using a Google Presentation or a Google Doc, but in my mind it wouldn't be as neat. I also had the idea, while reading your post, that Webspirations would be a good tool for organizing characters and forming relationships between characters based on their baggage. Webspirations is a Concept Mapping website, and is pretty user-friendly. My school has the program on our computers, but I think you can also get it for free. I do think that Padlet would work though, and I think that Facebook pages (as John suggested) would work too.
Holly,
ReplyDeleteI appreciate that your thinking about your lessons backwards here, identifying first your goals and objectives and then thinking about what lesson and what technology will be best suited, rather than just throwing on some technology for its own sake. I think the padlet idea could be comprehensive and helpful for students moving forward towards their final papers, and it will also probably be useful as a form of assessment with a solid amount of writing to be done. I really liked John's alternative too, about the facebook pages for each character. This assignment would display that they know the ins and outs of a character, because not only would they list traits and attributes, but they could display how those come to life through things like status updates and likes etc. I think overall the ideas and objectives you have are strong, and so any assignment you offer will have benefit.
Holly,
ReplyDeleteLove this idea. I'd like to know how this is going and/or if you're finding that something other than Padlet will work better. Let's discuss so I can steal your ideas.