Final Project

For my final project, I wanted to create a group novel project that would be adaptable to many of the novels I teach in my 11th grade American Lit course. Additionally, this class is intended to focus on the Historical/Biographical lens (it's taught chronologically) and to have a large research component. Even though this novel unit would not be the only place these skills are taught, I wanted to incorporate elements of them here.

http://novelprojectwiki.pbworks.com/

While I have a wiki for the course on which I include projects and assignments (with possibilities for student interaction), for this project I want students to create their own wikis in groups so that they have the opportunity to plan the organization on their own.

As the project stands at the moment, students need to (in groups) conduct Historical Research on the author and time period of the selected novel, individually create a blog for one character where they include a character profile (similar to a facebook profile), a comic demonstrating a defining moment for their character, and blog posts responding to the events of each chapter as that character. Students will then individually create bubbl.us maps for their characters connecting them to themes in the novel and will use the information contained on those maps to collaboratively write a literary analysis essay. All of their sources must be included on the Works Cited page and in-text citations must be used appropriately.

Portfolios

I have used portfolios in composition classes in the past, but never in the digital realm--until this semester. Typically when creating a portfolio, I ask my students to include a certain number of essays they've previously written (in a final, revised version), along with a "Dear Reader" letter which details the struggles, challenges, and triumphs involved in all of these pieces of writing.

This semester, I considered the portfolio project I generally use in my CIS Composition class and allowed students to create a digital portfolio via wiki if they wished. More than half the class took me up on it (which surprised me as it was a trial project).

The project:

Create a portfolio about yourself as a literary person—an intellectual or artistic bon vivant. Imagine your portfolio will be appreciated by those attending a graduation open house or as an artifact of your life in 2009. Directions:

1. Title your portfolio on the front page of the wiki.

2. Include the following links:

a. a fully revised and edited personal narrative

b. a fully revised and edited personal essay

c. a fully revised and edited literary analysis

d. a fully revised and edited review

3. Additionally, include any of the following:

a. A tribute to your favorite childhood author/book/movie.

b. A tribute to your current favorite author/book/movie.

c. A tribute to those who have helped you become a literate person, or a description of

obstacles you have overcome on your path to literary enlightenment.

d. An explanation of the criteria you use to evaluate the worth of a literary text.

e. Photos, illustrations, passages from literary works, famous quotes, jokes, song lyrics, poems,

etc. that further illustrate your path to literary enlightenment.

Additionally (after creating all of these entries), I have students create a page where they reflect on their writing development within the course. I have found that students enjoy this project because of the items in #3 above; they love talking about childhood books or movies or other influences. Once they've looked back at their writing from the beginning of the course (as well as some from years previous), they can really articulate areas of improvement and struggle that they have found. Even though they haven't necessarily thought about this consciously before, they are generally reflective and notice these trends as the course progresses.

See these samples from my class this semester.

For my own learning, I appreciate blog entries as a concrete place to look back. I'm not necessarily always organized enough to keep track of actual paper products, so a digital record of thoughts is important. For this class, it's been important for me to look back at the various technologies we've learned as my own teaching moves along. Applications that didn't previously occur to me suddenly do based on what we're doing in class. Something else I've started this semester is a blog for my daily lesson plans. I give the address to my students (for when they miss class) and their parents (to find out what their children should be doing), but it also will be super useful for me to look back on in future semesters. I've always kept a general paper calendar of the structure for the semester, but the more specific daily blogs will help me to remember more specific activities that worked well. Sometimes if there are new projects, I'm guilty of forgetting what they were.

Feedback on digital writing

With any sort of writing project I do in my classes, I prefer to have a peer-feedback stage before it comes to me--it's just not practical for me to read three drafts of 70 papers in a timely manner.

One of the problems with peer-feedback is that many students just want to focus on the editing level when I would prefer they begin by looking at more big-picture issues. One way to solve this problem is to have students in writing groups and then create a wiki. On the wiki, each person can post their completed paper for other group members to read. Rather than each student editing the first draft of the paper, they need to begin by leaving one comment at the bottom of the page. That will help them to focus their comments on large ideas, rather than trying to tell what sentence to edit commas in.

I will also use this method to comment on big-picture issues and on in-process papers. I've used this method in the past and the students have found it really helpful. I hesitate to actually edit on a student's wiki page because I want them to do more of the editing than to have me do it. Even when I reach the nearly-final project stage, I can comment on the types of errors they're making or the concerns I see and they can then go through and fix those on their own.

Since I tend to see my students every day or two, I find this method of feedback more useful than other more technologically advanced methods. There are times when I would create a vlog or podcast entry if I see errors that many students are making--or I will make edits on a wiki or blog assignment sheet.

Poetry Terms prezi

I have, in the past, used a Power Point presentation with my English 11 students to review poetry terms. While it's a clear presentation and simple to follow, it's not very engaging. Here's a presentation I've begun creating at prezi.com to attempt to make the information more engaging. It's not done yet, but my students gave a positive response when I used them as guinea pigs today...

Pomic comic

Here's an assignment I gave to my class today. Our volleyball team was in the state tournament, so I have a total of four students in class. Because we're studying poetry this week, I decided this would be the best way to engage the few students who are here in a meaningful activity while not making the other students feel too far behind. I'll then have the students post their poetry comics on my class wiki page.

Come see Harvey!

Reflections on Podcasting.

I can imagine that trying to create podcasts in a classroom would cause great amounts of stress among students and the potential for technology difficulties is great. My computer, for example, has an internal microphone, but the recording quality is fairly poor. Hence, my podcast sounds rather echo-y. I also had some technical difficulties in trying to upload the sound file, but that's to be expected the first time I try it. With students I would now be able to answer some of the questions because I've been through this once now.

Uses in the classroom:

I've discussed in other places some of the different uses to which I could put podcasting, including poetry projects and "This I Believe" essays, but I have since thought of a few more. First, students in my Composition class write an ethnography and are required to conduct at least two interviews. I ask students to turn in written copies of their field notes on observations, but have not found a good way to check on their interviews in the past. This would help with that problem. Additionally, if I were to make some of these interviews available to the full class, they would serve as effective examples. We practice interviewing skills in the class, but it's still something that makes the students very nervous the first time they have to do it.

I've tried to use hand-held recorders to capture literature circle discussions in the past, but the problem with that is I don't have enough digital recorders for every group and I'm unlikely to check them out to a group for use outside of school. Skype would provide a good solution for that. I like to allow lit circles the freedom to meet outside of class, but it does make evaluating their discussions more difficult. I've been searching for a couple of years for a solution to this problem. I'm delighted that Skype has possibly given it to me.

I am also looking forward to trying to give students audio feedback on their writing. Typically reading their work does not take long, but writing constructive criticism is very time-consuming. In an ideal world, I would have time to sit down and conference with each one of my students on their work. Realistically, however, this can't happen. There is simply not enough time in the day. Providing audio feedback that they can access another way (without me being there) would help to solve this problem.

There are a lot of students who would love the opportunity to use these tools for class projects. They always enjoy playing with GarageBand, but have never seriously considered using it for an English project. On the flip side of this, the use of technology beyond word-processing freaks out a surprising number of my students. Even in upper-level courses, there are many, many techno-phobes. This surprises me every time; typically in high schools the teacher is much less technology savvy than students, but there are many who are downright resistant to using new tools. Even something as simple as commenting on a wiki or blog seems to be too much. I haven't found a great way to solve this problem, but I do try to introduce technology in small, useful chunks. We'll use a wiki for a project one week, and then I'll add another component the next week. The students who chose to create their own wikis for the Personal Newsletter projects have become my best advocates for this--after figuring out the technology, they've determined how useful it can be for them, how much time it can save them, and how flexible it can be when they create their own projects. Hopefully, their positive attitudes will continue to positively influence the other students into conquering their fears.