Multi-Modal Literature

The Socially Networked Classroom: Chapter 1 


The "selected tweets" cracked me up. I don't have a twitter but I go online and read all the stupid, outrageous things people post. Recently my roommate and I read a survey that said that only 28:% of the people on twitter actually read other people's tweets. Twitter is essentially an illusion. It's a way for people to think they're being heard, but really they are just getting their thoughts and feelings out to almost no audience.

Twitter Stats 1

Twitter Stats 2

I am not at all surprised by the statistics about high school children. I totally believe that most families are divorced. I also believe that half of high schoolers are sexually active and I would have actually thought the statistics about drug use and alcohol would be higher. I teach swim lessons and there are a couple "helicopter parents."  An eighth grader on the swim team I coach has a mom who would sit beside his lane and coach him herself. It was frustrating because I couldn't tell him about his progress and I couldn't push him to be better than he was. One day he swam into the side and she blew his nose for him and threw the tissue away. I wanted to punch the wall. It totally kills me because I think about what will happen to them when they finally get away from their parents. It makes me wonder if the parents are really naive enough to think that their children will never have the desire to be independent or try things they aren't supposed to. I also am really against parents trying to control what music their kids listen to and what books and movies their children read and watch past the age of 13. That crushes kids creativity and independent thought. Around age 12 kids start to think in the abstract. If parents keep controlling their environment it hurts kids ability to discern between things they know are right and things they know are wrong because they aren't exposed to both sides of the spectrum.


Posted 1/21/11


An Oral History of the Internet


I had already read this article and i've been to the rock and roll hall of fame. I think it's so interesting that the internet started as this gigantic computer and is now being fought over and people are starting to claim rights over their "spaces" on the internet. It's like trying to claim rights to parts of the ocean. The internet has come so far since the first type of internet, which was full of codes and up/down shifting keys.  Bob Kahn comments that after the first "baby" internet was born it took about a year and a half for a great fully operational site to become active. In the beginning it evolved so slow, but now new things pop up on the internet everyday. The rest of Bob Metcalfe's family uses AT&T? Verizon is way better. I think its also pretty cool that there was a "first" email usage in a court case. It was one of the huge steps for the internet. I was just born when the internet was picking up with website creation and email was being used for the first time mainstream. I use the internet for all my projects. Most of the articles I cite for research papers can be found in full-text online. I almost never go to the library to get books unless I need to cite an actual book. I also have facebook, which I think is great.  I love looking at profiles and talking to people on facebook. I also sell all my used textbooks on half.com which is a partner site of ebay. It's really useful. I can sell my books for the price I want to sell them without going through a bookstore and I get reimbursed for shipping. In high school it was a daily assignment to look at the articles on the drudge report and present them to our fellow classmates. We thought it was hilarious. I've never blogged before. Last semester and this semester have been completely new to me with the website for sharing your thoughts. I never really thought people would want to hear what I was thinking. I guess it's cool that we can all communicate more with each other. Sometimes it's even anonymous. It's totally true that "us young people" ask a question and go to the web to figure it out.


Posted 1/30/11


Little Brother


I just finished the book. I'm not impressed with the way Doctorow wrote the book. I feel like there were a lot of amateur descriptions and he took too much time explaining small insignificant things like LARPing. I wasn't interested at all in learning anything about coding or what it means to be a computer geek. I was really interested in how he fought the terrorism and the DHS. A passage such as the one on page 151-`153 explaining the public and private keys is unnecessary to me. A couple other passages that seem the same are pgs 97-100, 111-112, 128-129, and 285-290. I'm just being overcritical here, mostly because the book wasn't one of my favorites. For the record though, it wasn't horrible. I focused more on the dramatic part of the book rather than the factual part about computers. I feel like Doctorow used the computer savvy technology to write about the real threat, terrorism and the government, which is why I focused less on the technical aspects. I wasn't really drawn in to the character of Marcus. I liked that he was fighting for a cause, but the overall atmosphere of the book didn't really captivate me. I had to switch between this book and another book to keep myself alert and focused. I think it may have been because the writing struck me as fabricated. I couldn't get into the book because I couldn't get a very clear picture of all the different places and scenes in my head. I also couldn't really get a clear picture of Marcus in my head. I probably wouldn't use this in my classroom. I don't think my students would be very interested. I could probably find a better book that has to do with technology or terrorism or both. Cory's blog uses such heightened language I sort of wish he had put that in his book! I think it's cool that he's helping raise money for libraries and that he is really into people reading books. He seems like he knows a lot about technology himself. That's proabably why he put so much technological description in his book. I really like the article on net neutrality. It's pretty much impending doom we have to literally pay for.


on a side note. I noticed the creative commons license on the bottom of his site. Thanks so much to Ms. Foot for the informative powerpoint on copyright. Now I know what to look for!


posted 2/1/11


History of Facebook


This is essentially the movie the social network in article form. I've seen the movie. I wasn't such a fan of it. I think the Mark Zuckerberg character was played really well, but the movie didn't really interest me. I learned a lot from it, however. I think Mark was a really creative guy. I also think that it was a really terrible idea to compare women to each other. I think it is hilarious that the stereotypical Harvard student turned out to be true in Mark's case with the twins. I think Mark did the right thing in the end. I want to point out a recent article I heard on the news over the weekend. A New York man is sueing facebook because it deleted his profile. He is sueing for 500,000 dollars because he says he lost all his pictures and he can't keep up with the friends he doesn't get to see. I think that's so dumb. He definitely won't get 500,000.
I love using facebook. I have tons of pics and I can talk to my high school friends even though we're at different colleges. I'm friends with all my relatives and I find out what's going on in their lives through facebook. I also think it's pretty cool that you can find things on the internet you think are cool and post them to your wall or your friends walls.  I'm not a huge fan of people that post lyric status's and I hate it when people spell things wrong in their status. I am also not a fan of people who post a million status's a day. It's annoying. I usually block their news feed. The first thing I do when I get home from school or work is check my facebook. I think it's become an auto-pilot thing for me. I can definitely go without it, but whenever there's a computer at my fingertips, I just have to check facebook before I do anything else.


Posted 2/5/11


The Socially Networked Classroom: Chapter 2 "Short"


I had a teacher in high school that incorporated music into her teaching. We did an activity where we had to deconstruct the lyrics of a song. We had to play the song in class and then tell what we thought the lyrics meant and why that artist chose to write what he wrote about.
I think creating the mult-genre autobiography was an interesting activity, but I don't think it needed to be quite as drawn out as it was for our class. We are all the same age, so we grew up doing the same sort of things. Unless someone is from a different culture or is a different race, all our autobiographies essentially said the same thing. If we were in a class with people of all different ages it would have been really be interesting to see what fads were in in different decades.
I would really have to consider showing films in my class. They really have to be worth watching. I think its a better idea to pair a film with a book or novel instead of just watching a film. I do like the idea of showing older films that introduce a new way of film-making and then analyzing how those films were made and comparing it to how films are made today.
I absolutely love the idea of having students make an ongoing list of their favorite authors, poets, etc. . . and giving it to them at the end of the year to keep. I think a whole class list would be really beneficial for them to look back on at a later date. I would have really loved if one of my teachers had done that for me. I also had a teacher that paired music with a text. In our case it was To Kill A Mockingbird. We each had a section of the book and we had to bring music in that we thought would be appropriate for the scene. It was so cool. I loved that teacher and i'll always remember that assignment.
I think parents might be against students getting their own email addresses and letting me email them. I also think parents might be against nings and facebook and twitter. The school probably wouldn't let students use their phones either so it would be hard to "text."
I think a good way to deconstruct poetry is having each student read a word so the class can hear the poem out loud and after it's completely read the students can talk about how they felt about the poem and what reading it aloud meant to them. We could then look at what the author meant by writing the poem and see how it compared with how the students felt about it. I also think the students would really thrive if they created their own poem. I think a good group activity would be the one described on page 36. They could then maybe bring in a song that goes with their poem and play it while they read the poem aloud.
We played the apple activity to no avail the other day in class. I don't think it works very well. We're pretty bad at multi-tasking. I might save that as an end of the year activity.
There are a lot of great ideas in chapter 2. I think i'll use or adapt and use most of them. Depending on how my school district views technology I think i'll be able to introduce some really great new ideas into my classroom.


Posted 2/16/11


The Socially Networked Classroom: Chapter 3 "Tall"


When I was in high school the teachers were allowed to use a server to get on YouTube and social network sites so they could show examples and use those sites as aids for their lectures.  The students were blocked from those sites, but we found ways of checking our sites through "cache" sites and such.  I was in middle school when there were a string of cyber killers on the loose. AIM had just become popular and it was the "in" thing for everyone to talk on AIM. People could tell you they were just about anybody and you would never know the difference. There were fake profiles everywhere. My mom was so overprotective about me talking on AIM because she thought someone was going to come to our house and kidnap me. I know almost nothing about computer technology, but I feel like it would be hard to regulate how people talk on the internet because, just like in "Little Brother" people could just create a different porthole and a whole different server (?) and talk on that instead of the regulated server (?). 


Cyber Petophiles


This is something my mom would have LOVED.


This kind of stuff is also why I don't like to put a lot of personal information on the internet, which is one of the reasons I was so against getting a twitter. I know I have a facebook account, which is probably the most open form of communication there is, but I felt like myspace and twitter were two places where my information just couldn't be traced because I had never even made an account on either site. disappointment. :(
I've been using hyperlinks since high school and i'm really grateful to Ms. Foot for showing us the powerpoint on fair use. Our blogs right now are a great example of how hyperlinks can work into a journal entry.
We have an "intranet" where I work. Its our agmc intranet that can be accessed at all the computers within any of the akron general buildings. Its great if you need to look up standards or charts that are relevant to your area of work. I think it would actually be a great way for students to use technology and communicate safely. I would totally think about trying to get something like that set up at my school.
I love Dr. Pytash's literature circles. I got so many different opinions and sides to the story we read. It was great to see how other people viewed the characters and the plot. I loved being able to talk to people and have my opinions heard on the subjects in the book and we could post links to relevant information. there were  a lot of great links in our lit circle.
I also think the Wiki is going to be really beneficial to go back and look at when we actually start teaching. I'm excited to start gathering my lessons for Hamlet.


Posted 2/21/11


Great Books and How To Teach Them: Chapters 1-4

This picture is from one of my favorite chase scenes of all time. The Bourne Supremacy. I think the Bourne movies were done really well. I'm crazy about the plot line and the different effects. I'm also crazy about these movies:

 The Shooter

The Italian Job


I think i'm a sucker for cheesy action movies. But also I think these are done really well. I like that they have parallel montages in them.
This is my favorite scene from an older movie. I LOVE An Affair to Remember.

I think books that are made into films are always worse than the books themselves. No matter how well done the movie is, you read a book and you dream up an image in your head of how you think the scenes should look. The movie never looks how you picture the story in your head. There are some great adaptations out there such as Pride and Prejudice,  A Beautiful Mind, The Harry Potter Series, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. 
If you want to see a film that has some pretty interesting acting, great scene cuts, weird dialogue and plays on words, a great cast, and a crazy setting you should check out Paris, Je T'aime. I hated it when I first watched it, but it grew on me and i'm a huge fan.  I think it's a good example of our time period. It is outlandish and structured a lot differently than the traditional movie.


Posted 3/4/11


I'm So Totally, Digitally Close to You


I am on page three of the article and I have to shout something to the world. I DO NOT FEEL THE SAME WAY. I value phone calls with my loved ones. I love hearing the voice of my boyfriend and my grandmother. Both of them have distinct voices and when I'm missing them I would rather hear their voices than constantly be updated about what they are doing. My boyfriend and I do text all through the day, but its more about funny stuff than constant updates. If we don't text throughout the day it's not weird because one of us will realize it and call the other at night. I did think it was interesting that the guy who started using twitter got a feeling that he was never really away from his friends. I've felt that way about some people that I don't see very often, but I found that if I know what my best friends are doing all the time I get annoyed because we don't have an new information to exchange when we actually see each other. Absence makes the heart grow fonder. That phrase is actually true. One of the thing I do agree with is that when I post something I'm confused or frustrated with I get a response almost immediately. The same goes for something I'm excited about. I love the feeling of connectedness because it makes me feel calmer. I am not in deep, meaningful relationships with most of these people though. I do feel like I have more friends, but the true ones are the ones I want to see in person.


Posted 3/16/11


You're Leaving A Digital Trail


I am actually really scared of collective intelligence. I would feel really violated if the government used something I thought was private to incriminate me. That's not how our justice system works. It makes me want to live in a remote part of the country and never come out of my house. If that's how our government wants us all to feel they're doing a great job of it. I understand that if they apply their collective intelligence to find criminals it makes us all safer, but if they need to be fair and use it across the board I think I would rather the criminals get caught another way. I don't enjoy feeling like my thoughts are being ruffled through. I don't post anything to twitter and nobody knows exactly what I'm doing at all times of the day. I don't post status's very much on facebook. I have friends that I am close to and they know the most about me. Facebook won't tell you much about my everyday life. I use it to connect with people I don't see often, not to make myself feel like people care about what I'm doing.
I don't think I mind so much if companies like sense networks uses my information for statistics. I think that's an advancement that could help generate revenue and get people jobs. If not full-time jobs, seasonal at least. They would figure out when the busy times are and hire people during the biggest selling times. Companies would also be able to figure out when people are most apt to spend their money and make sales during that time. 


Posted 3/20/11


The Socially Networked Classroom Chapter 4 "Grande"


Right now when I blog I feel like I'm mostly talking to no one. It's hard for me to read other people's blogs unless I'm really interested in what they're saying.  Most of the time I'm not, I only read them because I'm required to for school. Nobody really comments on my blog either, so I know no one is really reading it. 
There is a question about ambiguous guidelines in one part of the chapter. I always wanted a page limit when I was in high school and I wanted to see a rubric. Now that I'm in college I write until I'm satisfied with the product because I have to be interested in what I'm writing. I shouldn't be in the major I'm in if I'm not interested in the topics I have to write about. I only say I'm not interested in what other people have to say on the blogs because I would rather talk to them face-to-face about it rather than commenting on a blog. I think the opposite would be true for shy/ self-conscious middle school or high school students. I think they would really enjoy not having to talk face-to-face because they don't have to deal with intimidation.  
We had to participate in a Wiki for my Intro. to Exceptionalities class. It wasn't so bad. We got a group of 5 people and we communicated through the Wiki and it was graded based on our posts and our responses to our group members posts. It's just another way to get your opinion out there.
I really like the youngvoices idea. I think it would be a great thing to pair with my coffee house idea. The students who come to coffee house could be active on that and the subjects we talk about in the coffee house could end up on a huge site like that so students who can't make it to the coffee house can have a chance to be active in what we discuss.


Posted 3/23/11


I <3 Novels


I want to open this post by saying that I got placed at Cuyahoga Falls! I'm so excited! I can't wait to go. It feels so weird that I'm finally gonna be a teacher, even though this is only student teaching. I ran around my house screaming and shouting. I'm excited! I also scheduled my last semester of classes for the fall. It feels really weird. I may never be a "student" in an classroom again! I think i'll go on to get my  masters, but there's always that possibility that I'm gonna be the teacher from now on!


In regard to I <3 Novels I wonder if anyone has ever heard of the american run website called Postsecret? It is a website dedicated to anonymous posting. You send in a post card that you draw or take a picture of and it gets posted to the internet for everyone else to see. People use it as a way to tell their secrets and get them off their chest without anyone knowing who they are. It's also really hilarious to read some of the secrets people post. Check it out. There are a series of postsecret novels out now as well. The novels are made up simply of all the secrets. It's a bunch of postcards put in novel form. I think there was also talk about a postsecret movie coming out, but I haven't really heard much else about it. There are also postsecret conventions where the founder of postsecret, Frank Warren, speaks about all the secrets and the real stories behind the secrets. It sounds a lot like the website we read about in I <3 Novels except people don't write novels, they just post secrets that they don't want anyone else to know. I enjoy looking at post secret and some day I might even send in a postcard! Here are some of the post cards.

Some of them are really funny, and some are also really touching. It's really comforting for people to know that there are other out there that have the same private thoughts as them. I think that is the same thing those young girls were feeling when they wrote the cell phone novels. I would probably enjoy reading the cell phone novels very much.


Posted 3/30/11


Firestone Experience


My student has very apparent strengths and weaknesses. She is a great visual learner. She understands things when she sees them laid out in front of her. She needs examples to follow, especially to complete a math problem. She loves to read aloud because it helps her understand the story better. She is easily distracted, not because of a psychological issue, but because she is very social. She loves talking to the people around her. Unless she is really fired up about the work we are doing, she would rather be chatting with the person next to her about the weekend. Her English teacher right now has tapped into her strengths by asking her to read aloud for the class and giving her problems that open her mind up to thinking about what could happen if the story (the crucible) were set in present day. She has some trouble pronouncing words she has never seen before. This was the biggest problem she had when we were studying for the OGT. I had to pronounce the word for her and give her the meaning. After I told her the meaning of the work I asked her if she could think of another word or phrase that means the same thing, so she understood the word more fully. I also had her read the sentence it was in again and asked her to tell me what the whole sentence meant now that she knew the meaning of the word. She is great at memorizing and interpreting. She can use a graph to answer questions. This is also part of her visual stimulus. She knows she is a visual learner. She told me she needs to see things to really “get” them. She needs to learn a good strategy for memorizing. I told her she should memorize her math facts by setting them to a song. It always helped me when I was in school. She is great at test taking as well. As long as no one is sitting around her, she can completely focus and move at a fairly fast pace. She knows how to move on to a different question if she is stuck. She also is great at double-checking her answers. I watched her take the practice OGT and she always read every question twice. Sometimes she caught herself and changed her answer. She was definitely prepared to take the OGT. An anticipation guide would give her a topic she could use to discuss with her fellow students. Doing group work with an assigned topic that relates the story to the students would be a great exercise for my student because she loves to talk. If I could get her talking about something that relates to her, but also has meaning to the text, she would be thinking in one of the highest critical forms. It would commit the themes in the text deeper into her memory and she would get a chance to use the vocabulary in the text when she talked to the students in her group. By speaking using the new language, she would also commit the new language and vocabulary to a deeper level in her memory. She could use this lesson to move onto the next text. There would probably be some of the language and vocabulary from the previous text in the new assignment. Deconstructing a text would allow her to formulate multiple ideas about the text. She could then relate each of those ideas to a multi-modal source and she would have a larger understanding of how the text fits into real life. After each unit I do in my classroom if I have  ninth or tenth grade students they will get a practice OGT to do. By doing this after each unit they can see how they have progressed and if it gets easier to answer the OGT questions. 

A multi-modal lesson I could use for my student could be reading American Romanticism Poetry since she is in (tenth) grade. One lesson could be for “The Raven.” When the students read “The Raven” they will also watch the short video “Vincent” by Tim Burton. We will have a fishbowl discussion about the similarities and differences between “Vincent” and “The Raven.” They will write an essay comparing and contrasting “Vincent” to “The Raven” and Poe’s life. The essay should also relate the situation they discuss in the fishbowl to “Vincent” and “The Raven.”One full day will be spent on a specific grammar lesson before they write their essay. They can ask questions about how to cite from “The Raven” and they will start a rough draft in class and email it to me so I can look it over before the fishbowl discussion the next day. My room would have to have a computer for each student or we would have to secure a full day in the computer lab at school. They will also be asked in the fishbowl to think of a situation they have been in where it seems like there is no way out. How did they deal with that situation? What was the outcome? Did it seem a bit chaotic? Do they think it was worth it for Poe to resort to drinking? Was it just bad luck or did Poe’s actions result in his untimely death? I would prefer to have a classroom wiki because I like the idea of the Wiki and how the Wiki pages are set up. I can post a question on a page and the students can respond to the question and it all stays on one page. The students are part of the Wiki and can update at any time. To me the Wiki is the most organized of the social networking websites.  This mock lesson plan would be great for my student. She loves to write and she loves to go to the movies. “The Raven” is a shorter text that holds a lot of meaning. It will be good for my student to read because it is a great example of something that holds more meaning when read aloud. My student will also benefit from being able to talk in a fishbowl discussion. There is a specific goal for her to complete. The goal of the whole class is to come up with the similarities and differences between “Vincent” and “The Raven.” The goal for each student is to think of a time when they saw no way out of a situation. The essay is a way for them to put all their thoughts together and express themselves on paper. The grammar lesson will help my student become a better writer on paper. Since she is good about double checking her work I am confident she will proofread her paper a couple times through. She likes to write so an essay that has something to do with her life would be a great way for her to express a part of her life while getting her to think of a great text. This is developing her writing skills and she is learning how to look at a text critically to compare it to a multi-modal source. She is learning about history as well. By bringing all these different areas together her understanding of the time period and the text is put on a deeper level of memory and she will take this lesson on decoding a text and using a text as a reference for a different event with her on to the next lesson.After this lesson the students would get a practice OGT packet to complete. Hopefully they are able to answer more questions than could before the lesson. I think this is a great multi-modal way to help students prepare for the OGT.

My Firestone experience wasn’t as great as I expected. I became a bit more confident in my teaching ability, but I mostly came out of the experience disappointed. I really feel for my student. It isn’t fair that she be completely held back because she messed up once. She also shouldn’t be penalized for her mom’s lack of planning. I am frustrated by the school system’s neglect for students. They didn’t tell her until a week ago that she isn’t a sophomore. I spent all this time tutoring her and preparing her and she can’t take the fresh information she just learned and use it. It’s more of a reflection on the school system and the education system in general than it is on the specific school. This school year I’ve seen my student grow. From last semester to this semester she has become a lot more serious about her studies. She is in night class to make up the math she missed and she hasn’t been to the in school suspension room since before Christmas break. For her, it’s a great thing. I’ve seen her grow mostly by teachers using the development theory. These articles are on my favorites menu in my internet now. I know for sure I will refer back to them when I do my lesson plans so I can make sure I’m making a wholesome lesson that tries to encompass different theories of learning so I can hopefully touch on all my students’ learning styles.

 Posted 3/31/11


International Film Festival: The High Cost of Living
1. This film should touch everyone who sees it. It is a super sad story about a woman who gets hit by a car at 7 months pregnant. She lives but her baby dies. They tell her when she gets to the hospital that she will have to deliver the baby stillborn. She has two weeks to schedule the delivery before her health will be a concern. She has to somehow come to terms with the fact that she is no longer actually carrying a living human being. It would touch anyone who saw it. Everyone feels a sense of parental love when they are around children, especially their own. Everyone can relate to what would happen if one of their immediate family members died.
2. The shots taken made the most difference throughout the movie. Most of them were close-ups on Nathalie and Henry and Michel. You could see their minute facial characteristics and body language. You could also tell how they were feeling by looking at how they moved and their facial expressions. The lighting also helped a lot. Most of the lighting was dim. When the lighting was dim you knew there was a serious or dramatic scene coming up. One big weakness to me is that there really wasn't a whole lot of music used at all. It was mostly very quiet. A lot of the time it needed to be quiet to experience the moment, but there could have been more sounds and music going on around Nathalie and Henry.
3. Henry, Nathalie, and Michel were perfect for their roles. Even though I know Zach Braff as a funny kind of guy, he really pulled this movie off well being serious. Both of the other actors are foreign, but it made the movie more believable because they are the nationality the movie was supposed to be set in.
4. The plot was definitely original. I've never seen a movie where the man who injures the woman ends up falling in love with her while keeping the secret. I love that they also threw the twist in about Henry's friend getting in trouble if Henry didn't turn himself in. I was really hoping they would end up together in the end, but I'm glad Henry got to be in the hospital with her when she delivered and he did the right thing and saved Johnny.
5. The message is very touching in this movie and also very blatant. The movie is trying to tell you that lying to someone is the worst thing you can do. It is also telling you that people can always change. It also tells you that forgiveness is the highest form of grace you can give someone.
6. This film is a drama and they are very popular today. It is like What Dreams May Come, Everything Is Illuminated, or Love Actually.
7. The main difference here is between the rich and poor. Henry makes is living as a prescription drug dealer who is super poor and Nathalie married a wealthy man who works for some sort of accounting firm. These two people should never meet under normal circumstances, but he hits her and feels horrible about leaving her behind and they end up having a wonderful sort of fake relationship.
8. The concept of the family unit was challenged in this movie. Nathalie thought she had everything she wanted with Michel and the baby and she ends up leading a completely different life when the baby isn't involved. Wealth is also challenged in this movie. Nathalie starts living in the grunge of Henry's apartment instead of going back to her nice, clean home. This challenges what people would normally do.
Overall I had a superbly enjoyable experience at the film festival. I was supposed to see two movies. The High Cost of Living and Soul Surfer. Unfortunately the Soul Surfer reel never made it to the festival. I'm so glad I picked two movies, because I would have been sunk because the one and only time Soul Surfer was playing was tonight! I will definitely be going back next year and i'll probably buy some of the movies on DVD!
Posted 4/3/11


The Socially Networked Classroom: Chapter 5 "Venti"
I agree with Brett about the religion teacher's facebook project. I wouldn't have used facebook in the classroom when it first came out because there were a lot less security features. Facebook has become a lot more secure. There are ways to block people you don't know from seeing your profile and you can create secret groups. If you don't want people who are friends with people you know to see you you can hide yourself so only your friends see you and only you can friend people. The same goes for groups, which makes me a lot more comfortable talking about myself in our lit. groups.
I don't agree with having a split school. I think the kids would like it too much to really participate outside of school. I think maybe once a month or maybe every other wednesday could possibly work, but I think that's also a problem for working parents. I would have to really think about the structure of my lessons if I had kids take days of school to work on school related assignments.
I think there is a reason kids go to high school and have to be there. They haven't had the kind of experiences older adults have and they don't have quite as developed brains as adults do. A positive aspect of the outside studies is that it gives them a sense of independence, but so many people say the phrase "enjoy your childhood while you still have it." I think kids need to enjoy the fact that they don't have to be independent quite yet. I'm not sure if it's really a balance between independence and security if the are taking days off school. I work best either in the early morning or late at night. It just depends on when I get in the mindset to really commit myself to the project I have to do.
I'm not against Facebook in the classroom. I'm pretty dead set against twitter though. The
things I would use twitter for I can use facebook to do instead.
Posted 4/7/11

Reaction to Firestone
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All these videos are about school violence. The last two are how teens feel about the violence and the weapons. One mentions that the teacher will always take care of it, but what if that doesn't happen? What if the students with the weapon is more powerful than the teacher? It is scary to think that these students would never see something like a school shooting coming and that they are getting more and more desensitized to school violence and profane actions on school grounds. I'm really disappointed that I hear guns are being brought to school and that it is literally happening in my own backyard. (I grew up by Firestone) I am also a swimmer and I know the head coach at FHS. I'm sure she is really disheartened that one of her swimmers would be so ignorant and cocky. I would be.


Posted 4/19/11


Pinocchio: Vampire Slayer vs. Naruto
Text and Dialogue
I want to first start off by saying I was much more interested in Pinocchio than I was in Naruto. I think Naruto might have been more for like middle school students and early high school students and to me Pinocchio is ageless. I really enjoyed reading Pinocchio even though I'm not really a fan of graphic novels. The novel was easy to read and the pictures did a great job telling the story. I felt like Naruto was hard to understand because of the dialogue. To me, the dialogue didn't match up with what the characters were doing. In Pinocchio each box was one character talking, but in Naruto characters would talk to each other within the same box. The characters themselves weren't really introduced very well in Naruto either. I felt like the scene was set in Pinocchio by the introduction boxes. The introduction to Naruto only gave me some vague information that was hard to follow during the novel. All the labels and signs were clear in Pinocchio, but in Naruto you couldn't tell what he was painting over at the beginning and I had no idea what a Doppelganger was until at least the second story. I like the short sentences in Pinochio way better. There were long stretches of talk and undescriptive pictures in Naruto that led me astray and confused me. I think Kishimoto expects the narrator to infer too much about what the characters are thinking in Naruto. Sometimes you see the character thinking, but then it's never really clear what he was wondering about. When Iruka wonders about Naruto having power I never really understood what he was wondering about. I didn't know what a doppelganger was either.


Visual Features
I like the look of Naruto. I think Kishimoto did a great job coming up with an original look for him. I also like all the illustrations in Pinocchio. I could tell when his nose was growing and that he snapped it off to kill the vampires. I think the cricket was done really well too. I think the illustrations were more in depth in Naruto, but I couldn't really tell what was going on because of all the detail. I finally figured out what a Doppelganger was when Naruto had all the naked women surround the villian in the second story. I like the simple text and simple drawings in Pinocchio. I could understand it much better because there was less confusion.


General Layout and Design
I was a fan of the square boxes in Pinocchio. I didn't like that there was so much on one page in Naruto. I the drawings were small and sometimes I couldn't tell what the characters were really doing. The open panels in Naruto were the most descriptive to me. I really like the whole page scenes in Pinocchio and I liked the scene were Pinocchio followed the vampire around a bunch of corners. It moved slow enough so I knew there was a chase going on. I didn't mind that both of them were black and white. Color doesn't matter much to me, I just needed to really see what was going on. I also like that there were no outside drawing beyond the borders in either of the novels. I think that would have confused me even more. I think open panels work in both of the novels. Like I said earlier, the bigger the picture, the better.


Angles and Frames
I think the close-ups work better in Naruto and Pinoochio. There aren't enough close-ups in Naruto. Close-ups with small text lines make graphic novels more enjoyable for me.  I think I get too overwhelmed visually by too much commotion in one scene. The long shots and extreme long shots are what confused me in Naruto. The full figure shots really helped me understand the texts better because I could see what the characters were doing much better.


Rhetorical Techniques Applied in Text, Visuals, and Design
I think there was too much exaggeration in Naruto, and it didn't stir up a mood in me. I could identify better with Pinocchio and I feel like the exaggeration was needed so you could feel what Pinocchio was feeling, especially when he found out that Geppetto was the head vamp. The mood was dark thoughout the entire novel in Pinocchio, but there was still some rude humor that made me absolutely crack up. I'm in love the the rabbits of ill-portent. The humor in Naruto was something a teenager would appreciate, which is fine if I ever assigned the text, but I didn't enjoy it much myself. I also couldn't lose myself in the Naruto text, which is what I would have had to do because I definitely couldn't personally identify with trying to become a Ninja. Neither story was real to me, but the theme of Pinocchio was more real to me than the theme in Naruto.


Posted 4/21/11


Semester Reflection


I feel like i've learned more this semester than all my semesters combined. Some of the assignments that really stuck out to me were my Wiki page and reading Pinocchio. I was also really intrigued by the Great Films book. I will definitely use that in my classroom. I think Firestone needs to be looked at closely and revamped before next years' juniors go, but I learned from my experience there. I was disappointed, but it wasn't all bad. I helped a student who I know will benefit from my tutoring in the long run. I also learned a lot about teachers and what to do and what not to do. I feel like creating the twitter account was pointless and I'm going to delete it once the semester is completely over. I haven't been back on it since the day I created it. I'm actually rather heated that we didn't do more with it now that I went through putting my information on yet another website. I think if Dr. Kist is going to have us create twitter he should think up some more creative ways to use it, or make a grade out of posting in some way. The lit. circle we are doing on facebook is interesting. I would actually consider doing something like that in my classroom. I would even consider pairing college students with high school students in a lit. circle. I thought the autobiography was a good way for us to get to know each other, but for students in a classroom I feel like they would not get as much out of the exercise because most of them probably know each other and are in the same grade. They probably all have close to the same interests.  I think my blogging was completely pointless because only one person commented on it the entire semester and I haven't received response comments when I post on other people's blogs. I don't really get the point if there is no conversation going on in the blogosphere. I understand that Dr. Kist wanted to open us up to the possibility, and it would probably work a lot better with high school students, but as college students we have too much to do to be worried about posting our thoughts on a blog as a requirement. I think the blog was useful for things like the Pinocchio/Naruto comparison and the film festival post and the Firestone reflection, but responding to texts could have been done in class when we could see each other face to face and talk about the curriculum. I think the blog is also good for posting reactions to current events like the firestone incident, as long as we all look at each others blogs and respond. Overall I learned a lot this semester and am looking forward to next semester and students teaching!


Posted 4/24/11