Article groups

The article groups have been fun, and also informative for me as a future teacher. Since I am always trying to gain ideas on how to be an effective teacher, these lessons have helped me see some platforms of learning I hadn’t necessarily thought about.

The first group did a great job and I had fun looking at the online platforms. We used Ujam and I thought it was really fun. Since I was in the Hip Hop group it actually fell directly into what we were talking about. When we started to talk about letting kids record music in a way that inspires learning, we felt that UJam could be a fun way to do that.

The gaming group was also interesting, and of course I believe that there is always room for fun and games in the classroom. I liked that the game wasn’t centered solely on literacy but focused back by the sentence-making competition. I will say that I have more questions about gaming and literacy now. Since I am not a “gamer” I do not know how a digital/video game could used in the classroom, other than the basic educational computer games most of us had in school. This lesson was good, but gave me a lot to think about and left me with questions. I will have to check out their site and see if it helps me understand video game uses I could bring to the classroom.

During our own presentation, I think we learned a lot about hip hop and music in general. There is a need for music in the classroom, but it can be easily misused. Of course, lyrics are like poetry, and etc. We have all heard that before, but what I think makes music so important is the fact that kids (well everyone really) seems to love it. Students listen to music as often as possible now that most can play it from their phone, iPod, or similar device. It can be tricky to take something students love and integrate it into a lesson, so as we learned about this I had to think a lot about how to use it without ruining it for them. As a group we were happy with our presentation, and I think we were really impressed with the ability of our peers to quickly write and preform. We brought iPads because we thought people would be too shy to rap out loud. Little did we know, because most people found live performance more favorable. Clearly, I didn’t realize the amazing rapping/spoken poetry skills our class had.