This week was really fun! I loved learning things from my colleagues and in turn trying to teach things to them as well. The activities we did opened up a lot of things I had considered before but never really dove into. I really liked inspecting the hip hop lyrics as poetry because I had never truly considered how great lyrics could be in the classroom. It seems like something everyone sort of understands but never applies as an actual resource. I can’t wait to try something like that out in my own classroom someday and seeing how the students react. It would be awesome to see them get excited about interpreting a work of literature because they would already recognize it. Looking at a poem that makes no sense to them will make even less sense if they have never seen it before. However, when they are told to find literary devices in a work that they are already familiar with it is much easier to see what they missed at first.

I also liked exploring all of the digital literacy resources that the group last week did. I’ve only heard of half of those websites and even in the ones I recognized I had never actually gone into depth and explored them. It was nice to take a chunk of time to just explore a resource I might have looked over beforehand. I will definitely be using those resources again, if not only in my teaching career but also in future classes. It’s nice to have a repertoire of resources building up so that I can have lots to work with in my future career. I definitely want to go back and revisit some of the ones the other groups got to look at so that I can have experience with more of them.

I am looking forward to this week’s presentations and activities and I hope they are as interesting as the last ones have been. It will be nice to not be thinking about my own activity but to completely experience the presentations that the rest of the groups have to do.

http://www.hybridpedagogy.com/Journal/files/Will_MOOCs_Work_for_Writing.html#unique-entry-id-107

I read this article about teaching writing composition and MOOC’s which are Massive Open Online Courses designed to teach a multitude of students all at once from all over the country and globe. The author of this article, Chris Friend, brings up a good point that much of composition teaching is done through a “specific and individuated” environment which doesn’t seem to match well with an online course that houses so many students. However, he brings up a good point that we should be learning from these new course structures instead of ignoring when they bring to the table. His five philosophies that can be taken from MOOC’s are very helpful and are a good outline to any classroom but especially for writing. His outlook on MOOC’s as a paradigm shift into a different teaching age was very helpful to me as a future teacher who needs to learn how to shift and change while education does.

This reminded me of some of the topics we have discussed this semester such as digital literacy and how important it is to be competent and literate in many of the new technological advances that we have to be able to use. One day I could be using computers to entirely communicate with my students and being prepared now is the best I can do for myself and my career. I’m not saying that the classroom will ever completely lose it’s effectiveness but for the most part face to face conversation is not the primary mode of communication and I don’t expect that to change any time soon. It is my job to look at the face of education and see where it is headed instead of where it has been and grow from that. By using strategies that are used in things like MOOC’s I can make sure my teaching methods are relevant and always be ready for what is coming next.

I was really nervous when I signed up for my group because I have absolutely no experience with gaming besides what I have watched my husband and friend’s play. The extent of my video game knowledge begins at a one time experience with Donky-Kong and ends with a surprisingly extended episode with Guitar Hero, along with DDR interspersed in between. So when I told my group this I could see not only shock and horror in their eyes but anxiety as well. However, I was eager to learn and so I’ve  been doing my research and trying my best to really understand gaming culture and the different facets of it that affect how people view their own gaming and game play.

So far we have come up with a lot of different ideas for how to teach gaming and literacy but have finally settled on one that encompasses all of our ideas. We decided to focus our project mostly on cooperative learning along with situational learning that you acquire as you go. Many of the ideas we had seemed really fun but it was hard to incorporate all of this into a game that wouldn’t take a long time to play. Eventually we came up with a game that involves word play and team work that will hopefully teach the rest of the class about how important gaming strategies are and how we should not devalue the importance of gaming culture in our everyday lives. We’re going to mold our game so that everyone’s strengths are played to and nobody has to pick up the slack the whole time. We want to show how to lean on each other and depend on your teammates while trying to reach a goal. Hopefully it will all play out the way we want it to and everyone will really enjoy it. But I guess we’ll see.

Reading Just Girls has brought back a whole lot of feelings I would have been much happier forgetting altogether. A lot of really horrible things happened in Junior High, and not just acne and the explosion of my hips, but bullying, gossip, and plenty of ended friendships. Its a time when you are really trying to identify yourself in a group while also being unique, all the while dealing with new feelings and body changes that are truly unkind to a girl reading magazines like YM. Its awkward for almost everyone, and if it wasn’t for you, then you’re simply oblivious to how miserable you were and it’ll come out someday in therapy. But back to the book…

While my group and I were talking about the book last week we kept straying off topic to talk about our own misguided, awkward stages as preteen girls and how our own literacy practices then influence us now. Reading about the girls who read R.L. Stine and Christopher Pike alongside books like the Babysitter’s Club reminds me so much of the types of things I used to read, and how much they got me through. Reading about the girls in this book really opened my eyes to how much reading affected me and what a huge part of my adolescent growth that it was. I didn’t even realize, as I’m sure they didn’t either, how much time I spent reading and how much a part of my social life involved talking about books, magazines and passing notes in class. All of those things that parents think are a waste of time are actually helping to make a literate society, however, some of that thirst for reading and information can be taken advantage of by advertising and marketing companies as we see in Just Girls.

While the magazines they read are still considered a type of literacy what it teaches young girls is not necessarily what they need to hear. No matter what the intention of the reader, the ads and models in the “zines” tell a story of what adolescence “should be” and when girls don’t measure up, it makes it very difficult to live through an already difficult time and remain happy with yourself. Most girls can look back at their insecurities and pinpoint their arrival at around the time of Jr. High which is when those types of advertisements and strategies are fiercely marketed and sold to them. This is one of the dangers of adolescent literacy that makes it difficult for some girls to move away from the lens that society puts on them and into their own worldview. Hopefully teachers can introduce them to literature that builds them up instead of breaking them down in order to counteract this cycle.

What I fear most about English and teaching it is the inevitable question of “why do I need to know this?” As horrible as it may seem, learning for the sake of learning is sometimes not so interesting, and I have asked myself the same question time and time again. Having purpose seems to help when trying to achieve a goal, but sometimes it is really hard to come up with a good answer. When it comes to reading, I have never needed much forced purpose other than my love for it and my geeky obsession with words. However, when it comes to writing that is a whole other story. I constantly have to remind myself that I need to learn to write a good essay so that one day I can teach my students to do the same, but why? Why do they need to know this? Why is it so important that their literacy be expanded? When will they ever use a 5 paragraph essay in the “real world”? How am I going to convince them they do need it if I don’t even believe that myself? But what I never consider, and Brandt had to remind me, is that the “real world” is constantly changing and instead of preparing students for something they will need to know in the job market “right now” we need to be preparing them for something they will use “someday.” This thought never really hit me until I read “Accumulating Literacy.”

When Brandt started talking about Genna May and her literacy practices I was almost envious. I got stuck on that last sentence of the first paragraph about how she only uses writing to balance her checkbook and send birthday cards. How nice would that be? To not have a constant flow of emails to respond to and blog posts to write and twitter and facebook posts. My future adult life flashed before  my eyes with mirage of papers to grade, emails to send, lesson plans to write. It would seem much simpler to live a life without all those messy words but today that isn’t possible. And I can’t honestly say I would like it better without them. Who cares if my mom is the only one who reads my status, it’s nice to post something into the world and have someone acknowledge my opinion. What would my life be like if I couldn’t reply to what I read in the news and comment on something someone said in a way that doesn’t make me look like an idiot?

It becomes hard to resist the urge to blame the education system and claim that teaching strong literacy only feeds into the system and doesn’t truly benefit you outside of it, and for some things that is true. But it’s easy to say you don’t really need to know how to read and write that well until you really do. You can tell yourself that you won’t ever need to know how to write a business letter or a resume until you are out of work and you really need to impress the manager at the place you are applying because 50 other people are applying as well. You never know when you might need to contact your children’s teachers or principal, or write a letter to your boss or the editor of a magazine, or perhaps you just want to reply to an interesting quote you saw online. Our era calls for constant use and expansion of our reading and writing abilities. It can become easy to use the cop-out of “I’m never going to use this”, but when you receive a letter back from your lawyer with the grammar mistakes and spelling errors circled you’ll wish you paid more attention in class and really practiced those skills the teacher “claimed” you would use later. Reading and writing is important for us and future generations because words are all we have and without them you lack access to everything this technological era has to offer and today, access is everything. Without it, equality can never become a reality.