Those most interesting activity I was introduced to during presentations has been the compare and contrast of a rap lyric and a poem. I thought it was so new and brilliant. I hope one day I can use that activity in the classroom as a teacher. It’s great to have students realize that their favorite song might stand as their favorite piece of poetry in a way. Today listening to the AR saga really took me back to my childhood. I remembered those computer book quizzes on AR and honestly can recall reading super easy books to get my points done. I thought of reading a book as a chore. I would read other books independently at my home with my mother. The books I read not related to school, I actually enjoyed because I was reading at my own pace and knew I wasn’t going to get tested on it. I support the changing of AR! By the way, I never knew there were so many hilarious memes out there! I am pretty happy we are presenting topics in class in groups because one: I love watching my peers, and two: it’s a great laid back atmosphere to practice teaching other people.

http://www.hybridpedagogy.com/Journal/files/Will_MOOCs_Work_for_Writing.html

The MOOC movement allows students to be completely anonymous online away from the classroom. “The more massive the course the more compelled a teacher is to treat all the students en masse.” En masse means in a body or as a whole. “Many instructors fear MOOCs, seeing them as an unknown entity that threatens to swallow up their jobs as more students can be taught by fewer instructors.” The fear that MOOC classes will disrupt the natural education system is what is stopping MOOC classes from being in every state. The supporters of MOOC classes think that the online classes will teach modern technologies and will add a new way of teaching into the world. Supporters think the change of teaching possibly evolving out of the original classroom setting might be a good change.

Five essential MOOC philosophies that can be applied to face to face classroom teaching  are meant to be for writing courses and distributed learning. The five philosophies are: collaboration, connection, assessment, reflection, and trust. This class would be considered a hybrid pedagogy because it is a paradigm shift. The article says that MOOCs should be set free to writing classes so that students can experience an environment that is not isolated within classroom walls. Personal connections in students could become inherent in writing by having students write in the world around them. Teachers should involve the physical and digital spaces within their teaching processes.

I decided to pick this term/idea because I am interested in the literacy evolution of students being able to write more online, and use online sources in the classroom. This term explains both original classroom setting and how digital sources can be involved. I think it is a term future teachers need to know because students might write a certain way online in their world environment, and write in a different way in a classroom boundary setting.

The article group I am in is gender studies. The article I ended up reading is titled Boys and Literacy. The research in this article was conducted and compiled together in the 90’s into early 2000’s. The main points in the article were to describe and compare gender literacy. Boys apparently are always good at learning with shapes and visual literacy. Girls are always good at memorizing and will always be better at memorization in comparison to boys. This article is completely outdated and is categorizing gender when in reality people absorb information if they are interested in it. There needs to be an updated article that discusses students interests and learning methods not gender learning methods and strict practices that will never be broken. When I was reading the article I was basically being described as a male. Males always zone out, can’t memorize that well, and like looking at videos, and visual productions; and this only occurs in males. FALSE. My article group is leaning towards a presentation that basically proves these gender literacy opinions in this article are incorrect.

I am reading Just Girls: Hidden Literacies and Life in Junior High and have successfully read half of it so far. This book will bring anyone back to their middle school years remembering those fun things you and your friends did in class and will also bring up the not so pleasant memories. So far the purpose of the book is to examine adolescent social labels and how these labels tell something about literacy. When my book club met in class we talked about how the labels of adolescent social groups were much more cruel than the social labels from our past. The book states that the good girls at a specific school are called the “woof woofs” because these are the girls that are like dogs, they get barked and demanded at from other peers. Our group remembered the social groups of nerds, popular kids and jocks, band kids, goody-goods, and the teacher pets. Never once were the nice girls considered a target of demand and barks. The woman studying these social roles dresses herself down to look like an adolescent so that the students don’t think of her as an adult or someone to act different around. I really like this book so far because it is easy for me to understand. I remember the social roles of grade school and looking at it from an examining perspective is so cool!

 

The segment of New London Group that my group discussed defines multiliteracies as communication channels within cultural and linguistic diversity. I think it is interesting that success with modern literacy in a society depends on new vocabulary and new social relationships of work.  The Mike Wesch video states that digital text can do better because form and content can be separated. Using the web started a “human teaching the machine” revolution. The web is not just linking information, it is linking people. The video ends with a controversial statement saying because the web has increased and has started linking people, we now have to rethink definitions of communication, love, rhetoric, and so much more.  This video tells a multiliteracy story because the web is now a channel of communication in diversity and requires people to acquire new vocabulary and social relationships.