Group items tagged

The truth is, every platform has its strengths and weaknesses. My argument here is pretty simple–there is no perfect platform for student blogging because everything that does exactly what a teacher wants sucks for students, and anything that is exactly what a student wants will probably get a teacher fired.

seven quick reasons why Tumblr may be perfect for the writing / blogging / posting / literacy piece in your room: Students can post by email. There’s an “ask” system. It’s social-by-design. Hashtags, sharing, reblogging, tweeting–it operates both as social media and a blogging system. It’s flexible. It can be visual or textual; video or gifs; audio or links; conversational or one-sided. It’s already on their phones. Well, most of them. Though they may delete it when they found out that you know. It’s dead simple to use. Reblogging is an interesting way to share thinking–and simple too. Maybe too simple to be considered cognitive heavy lifting, but that’s all in how you use it. Liking posts, using hashtags, posting new blogs–all simple to do from a tablet, phone, laptop, or desktop. It’s platform-agnostic. It works (almost) equally well across operating systems, much like Evernote. In fact, it can be thought of as the Evernote of blogging platforms.

The book is an excellent summative text for the course because it brings together the historical, ideological, philosophical, and artistic viewpoints that students had engaged with throughout the semester. 

At first glance, this might seem like a simple assignment, but it requires higher order thinking. It required students not just to understand the story of the character in question, but also to apply this understanding by retelling the story in their own (German) words. Students did not just demonstrate reading comprehension; the assignment forced them to identify key details in the story in order to make the story fit the limited number of panels available.