Interactivity 5

                The teacher I interviewed is currently employed at a private high school that is under the jurisdiction of the Diocese of Metuchen. She presently teaches 11^th and 12^th grade English classes on the College Prep, Honors, and Advanced Placement levels.

                When I began the interview with a brief bit of background information on this assignment being for a class on technology in the classroom, the teacher did not appear to be surprised by the topic. Based on the information she has given me, technology has been a strong aspect of education in this particular school since she began working there about five years ago and has continued to increase in its importance.  When I specifically asked her about the NETS-S and NETS-T, she seemed more surprised that I knew that there were standards for technology than she was about being asked about the standards themselves. She was very knowledgeable about the standards, citing them as the latest area of focus for the entire school that is being strongly pushed by the school’s new administration.

                In recent years, the whole school has been very focused on implementing the NETS-S and NETS-T. The school has adopted the slogan “Educating for the 21^st Century” to reflect their new-found forward-thinking emphasis on technology. This has been an ongoing process, beginning a year or so before she started teaching at the school with the policy of all teachers being assigned a laptop provided by the school. With the laptops, teachers became required to use online grade-books that allowed students and their parents to view their grades and attendance. In her years teaching at the school, she has witnessed the introduction of online courses offered as electives, the introduction of the web-based tool Moodle, students being assigned laptops, and a change in curriculum to increase the amount of Technology classes required for graduation.

Although she focused more on the school’s overall emphasis on incorporating technology than how it is used in her own classroom, she did mention that it was required for teachers to meet both Common Core Standards and The National Educational Technology Standards for Teachers and Students. Given that she teaches at a private school, I wasn’t sure if the standards still applied so I was surprised to see how important they were in this particular setting. The teacher stated that the Diocese wants to ensure that their schools are aligned with the standards because it both asserts their credibility as an academic institution and gives them a competitive edge by using their focus on technology as a selling point to boost enrollment.

As a future educator, I would focus more on how students use technology to reach the standards and less on how much technology is used in general. If the whole purpose of the NETS-S is really to use technology as a tool for enhancing students’ creativity, communication, and critical thinking skills, then they should be discussed with those intentions in mind. 

Click Here to Access Revised Spreadsheet with NETS-S Listed 

Cell Phone Polling in the Classroom

                Over the course of the last four or so years, I’ve noticed an increase in the amount of presentations that include polls conducted through text messaging technology. I’m not sure if there’s a specific term for this technology or how it works exactly. From what I understand, people in the audience send a text message to a certain phone number that contains either a number or a code word and then a poll is generated through the magic of technology based on the code words/numbers received. I have seen this system being used with audiences ranging in size from about 30 people to over 6,000.

 After seeing it be used with a variety of audiences, I began to wonder how this system would play out in a classroom setting.  This method of polling would allow students to answer questions in a timely manner while enabling them to use one of their most beloved technologies (their cell phones) in the process. The use of cell phones as a medium for communication in the classroom would also help more introverted students have their opinions counted. It would certainly be useful for getting student input for simple things (such as "Which book should we read next?") that would allow students to have some level of influence in what's going on in their classroom.

While the texting-polling system is great for gleaning simple input from many students at once, it isn’t without drawbacks. With a poll, the answers would be pre-determined and may detract from getting responses accurate to what students would verbally say in response. There’s also an element of social interaction to polling—seeing what your peers like or don’t like, what they want, how they feel, and who thinks or feels what—that a generated poll simply can’t convey. With that said, I think this relatively new method of polling could be great in a large class if used sparingly for simple questions that rely on student input.

Interactivity #4

URL to Spreadsheet: Lesson Plan Spreadsheet

                I chose the lesson plan “All’s Well that Sells Well: A Creative Introduction to Shakespeare” because I found the idea of connecting Elizabethan theater to modern movies via commercials to be alluring. The activity prompts students to make connections between Shakespeare’s time and the modern day, which incite students to better understand the audience that Shakespeare’s plays were originally intended for. Given that Shakespeare is a classic staple of any high school English course (and one that students often struggle with), this seemed like a great topic for a lesson plan.

                The primary objective of the assignment is for students to: compare and contrast The Globe Theater with a modern movie theater based on research and their own experiences, and create an advertisement of a modern product targeted to an Elizabethan audience at The Globe Theater. Many standards are listed as relevant to this lesson, but some of the standards are only weakly linked. For example, standard 9-10RI 1 (Citing textual evidence to support analysis) may be involved in students analyzing the similarities and differences of The Globe and modern theater, but it is not explicitly mentioned in the project handouts. The teaching strategies were largely student-centered, relying on graphic organizers and outlines for students to fill out rather than direct instruction from the teacher. Perhaps with a bit more instruction from the teacher, the connections between the standards and the lesson objectives would become clearer and students would have a better idea of what is expected of them.

Technology is initially incorporated through the use of a virtual tour of the Globe Theater, which is essential to the assignment by allowing students to visualize the Theater for their comparison. While the original assignment called for students to act out a commercial, I included the option of utilizing technology (either Powerpoint or a video-editing software) to produce a commercial. These technologies allow students a better medium to display the knowledge they have gained from their research via writing skills while providing them with an opportunity to practice presentation or video-making skills that can serve them well beyond life in a classroom.

Interactivity 3: Using the Inventory Beyond CURR 316

           During the same week we received instructions to collaboratively create a inventory of technologies used in the educational setting of our specific content areas for CURR 316, my READ 411 class was assigned to find an article that discusses how technology is used in our content areas. I found different sources for both assignments, but was surprised to see how similar yet different the results were. While the website I mainly used for the inventory and the article I used for READ 411 listed several of the same technologies (ex: Web Quest, Powerpoint), the website offered greater possibilities by including mediums such as comic-generators that go beyond the standard classroom technologies. The more creative technologies found on the Teaching English with Technology (tewt.com) website that I included in the inventory really struck me as useful for keeping classroom content engaging. The technology inventory has definitely helped me in READ 411 by enabling me to expand beyond the more basic technologies discussed in the article I used for class to more creative ones. 

          While the topic of content-area technology has not yet arisen in my CURR 314 class in the form of a formal discussion, it has been subtly present in our discussion of the performance task. When creating a performance task, technologies included in the inventory can be used for student projects in producing something (brochure, video, comic, etc.) that helps demonstrate understanding and analysis about a topic. Additionally, plagiarism-detecting software and content managers like Blackboard are two of the technologies included in our inventory that can be applicable to assessment as plagiarism-detecting software aids the evaluation of formal papers while Blackboard allows instructors to provide students feedback as well as allow students to view their grades and know how well they are performing in the class. Overall, the inventory has proved itself to be fairly useful already.

Interactivity 2: The History of Technology in Schools

                Throughout the History of Educational Technology video, the one technology from the 1900s that stood out the most as having a profound impact on English is the use of film the classroom.  The video includes examples of films teaching students vocabulary, indicating that film allowed students to learn Language Arts topics through watching video. The introduction of film in the classroom also paved the way for televisions and VCR players to become standard in the classroom.

                In both readings, the television is shown to have a profound impact on the way English is taught. According to Domine’s interview with educator Grace Dubois:

“Most of the elementary school teachers in her district not only enjoyed using television, but they also came to depend on it. Strangely, my mother couldn’t locate a single piece of research during the 1960s that shows any learning advantages in using televised rather than live instruction. She did notice, however, that her students’ overall interest in reading increased, but she couldn’t attribute it to their TV viewing” (“A Social History of Media, Technology and Schooling” 45). 

While the impact television had on students’ learning was not well-researched, this account indicates that television became a necessity in the classroom. This technology is especially important in the English classroom because it is correlated with increased student interest in reading. Moreover, I have seen television being used more in the area of English than other content areas because it truly brings text to life. With the use of film and television, Shakespeare plays can be viewed as actual performances in all their glory. Students can see film adaptations of novels they have read in class and compare the director’s interpretation to their own. According to Domine’s interview with Dubois, “[My mother] also required students to critically view and analyze McDonald’s commercials for their persuasion techniques” (46). This is yet another example of how television has been used to teach English by having students practice their analytical writing skills with critiques of McDonald’s commercials. Clearly, television has been used in a variety of ways to promote the learning of Language Arts.

                In order to obtain televisions in the classroom, many schools had to participate in deals promoting corporate businesses and advertisements, mostly notably with Channel One. The impact of Channel One is described as “Students were exposed daily to advertising in exchange for TV equipment. Schools received free TVs and VCRs that educators theoretically could use to support other school-wide activities” (Rethinking Technology in Schools 34-35). The text further describes the usage of Channel One to be widespread and the source of much controversy for its insertion of advertisement in schools. Having attended a high school that featured Channel One on small televisions equipped with VCRs in every classroom, I can say that educational good did emerge from this deal. While Channel One itself was not particularly helpful, the televisions it played on were useful for classroom content.  Having a television in the classroom had a great impact on English class, as we viewed professional renditions of Shakespeare plays, watched videos on grammar, and occasionally saw movie adaptations of novels we had read in class. While Domine explores the flaws in the notion of leaving a film to do all the teaching, citing Dubois' ancestors experiences with their students ultimately not learning any more effectively, it is possible to use television and film as an aid to teaching rather than a replacement. The "History of Educational Technology" video illustrates that film was originally envisioned as a replacement for a teacher, but that is (hopefully) not what is happening in today's classrooms. Films are useful tools for promoting analytic skills and engaging students with texts on a whole new level of visual and auditory perception. Given how common movie adaptations of novels are and how effective they can be in helping students better understand their core themes and messages, I can’t imagine a modern English class that did not feature a television being used to show a movie every now and then.

 TV/Film engage students by bringing text to life

*Photo Credit: Microsoft Office Clip Art. 

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