Life in a 21st-Century English Class | MindShift | KQED News - 4 views
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Finally, technology is embedded into the structure of all we do. It’s part of how we research, how we capture information, and how we display our learning. It’s never an accessory tacked on at the end.
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tantoniades on 17 Nov 15This is where I need to get. I'm still very much in the "tacking on" phase.
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My students started by creating a Flickr feed, Facebook page, a YouTube account, a Tumblr blog, and a Twitter account. They decided that visual representations of their knowledge would be the most powerful. So some of my students created photographs depicting images that they felt best represented modern trafficking. These photos were then edited in Picnik, and posted to our blog.
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A few years ago I tried to teach this idea to a grade 12 class when we were studying essay writing. They didn’t get it. But in the context we were using, after comparing social media content, it made perfect sense to my grade 11 students.
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The Museum Box site allows you to build an argument or description of an event, person or historical period by placing items in a virtual box. Students can display anything from a text file to a movie. My students will be using this platform to argue their thesis, rather than writing a traditional essay.
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My students have started designing our curriculum units. Seriously. While transitioning to our current unit, we discussed the possibilities as a class.
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Before the technology/constructivist shift in my classsroom, I would have taught all of this quite traditionally. We’d read books, answer questions, and then address those questions in class. I’d lecture a lot, with supplemental grammar lessons here and there, and I’d include some type of artistic project to achieve viewing and representing objectives. The whole design would have been extremely teacher centered. And at the end of it all, I’d hope they learned something about writing and thinking. Instead, inquiry and technology are a natural part of our English classes.
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Again, I know I'm being a cynical old grump, but you cannot use "technology" and "constructivist" like they're two parts of the same idea. I think it's perfectly feasible to imagine a constructivist classroom that runs without tech, and vice versa. Both of them running in harmony...that's the dream, all right.
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