Jstor

I want to make my classmates aware of a website called JStor that I came across while searching for journal articles for my "further research" paper.  I thought about presenting it as my digital tool, but decided it's not quite important enough for that, but still very useful.

Jstor is a place to view and buy journal articles.  With an account, you can have up to 4 free journals on your shelf.  These free journals can be deleted after 14 days, giving you more space on your free shelf.  I found this very useful when I wanted to use an article that was absolutely perfect for my further research paper but it was not available through the library. I know that unavailable journals can be accessed through interlibrary loan, but sometimes that can take days.  Jstor gives you instant access! The only downside to Jstor is that you cannot print out a free article, only ones that you have paid for.  But reading off the screen was worth it to have an article that I really wanted to talk about.  Jstor could save your butt if you put off research till the last minute, really need a certain article not available through library, and don't have time to wait for interlibrary loan!

Blogging Revisited

I blogged about blogging last week, but this weeks reading was also on blogging and brought out a few points that I would like to talk about.  Wilber's Chapter 3 talkedd a lot about the benefits blogging has for students.  Blogging encourages them to write and gives them an audience.  As a reluctant blogger, I have never been concerned about having an audience for my writing.  I've never been much of a writer to begin with and never write for personal enjoyment.  But after reading about how much students enjoy reading their classmate's comments and love knowing that someone else is actually going to read their thoughts, I decided to read over all my comments and see how they made me feel.  I surprised to see that I was actually a little disappointed that a couple of my blogs did not have any comments.  Although I have never cared much about the audience of a blog, I suppose I should have known I would have some invested emotion in it based on how disappointing it is when I think I have posted the most hilarious facebook status and nobody likes it.

Admittedly, I get extremely self-concious if I think too much about having an audience.  It definitely influences what I decide to say and what I leave out.  The amount of thought I put into a blog also determines how much I care if someone actually reads it and enjoys it.  I doubt I will mind if no one comments on this one because it isn't very thought out or extraordinary, even in my opinion.

Cellular conundrum

I find myself growing increasingly more excited to begin teaching. And by exciting, I also mean anxious.  I am constantly thinking of what I want to do in my classroom, what rules I want to have, how I will have my syllabus set up, what I will do for bonus points...I'm becoming obsessed.  And student teaching is still a whole year away!! So I definitely need to start writing some of my ideas down in a retrievable place so that I can revisit them later and not have to remember them for a whole year.  Since documenting our educational ideas is the entire of this blog, I decided I would jot one down in this post.

We have been talking about the increasing amount of technology in students' social lives and in the classroom.  Although we need to integrate technology into the classroom to fit the students' learning styles and preferences, and to add multimodality and different levels of learning, we also need to find a separation and gain control of the students' use of technology while in class, aka the cellphones.  If how students are with cellphones in class is only a foreshadowing of what they will be like when I am finally a teacher, than I need a plan of action. Hopefully one that works. This is what I came up with:

I will have two baskets: one for the cell phones and one filled with candy and small oddities.  If the students place their cellphone in the basket, they will be allowed a piece of candy or whatever is in the basket that day.  I think somedays I will bring in brownies or maybe something even more entreating.  Especially on group project days or computer lab days when it is more difficult to supervise the students. I cannot decide if I will have the baskets on my desk so that the students can help themselves, or if I will go around the desks with baskets while I take roll so that I can make sure no one is taking candy without putting their phone.  I also thought about giving bonus points to whoever turns their phone in everyday, or perhaps having a pizza party if everyone in the class puts their phone in the basket everyday.  Obviously, keeping track of which students put their phones would take more monitoring but I think it would be worth it.

I would like to feedback on this from anyone who likes or dislikes the idea :)

Blogging about Blogging

I really enjoyed the section on blogging in the Kist reading.  It addressed a lot of the stereotypes and fears I have had of blogs before.  Although I am an English major, I have never enjoyed writing and I have definitely never enjoyed writing about my personal thoughts or opinions and then sharing them with others.  When I think of bloggers, I always picture people who have nothing better to do than write down what they believe to be the most important things in the world. They think their words are from God and that everyone should believe in them.  They write about deforestation, religion, philosophy, politics, and sex.  I never wanted any part of that.  But Kist says that bogs need to be "more than just a place to pontificate," which is a great word for what I thought blogging was for.
I expected to approach this blog with reluctance and extreme hand-waving.  I had to keep a blog in high school too and I absolutely hated it because I knew that all of my classmates were going to read what I said. I was supposed to be saying intelligent, meaningful things, but felt like I had absolutely nothing to say. The teacher responded to every single one and was highly critical and judgemental of what we said. The blog for this class is much easier because I don't think of it as something for my classmates, but as a place to write down what I think.  Also, I can write about what I want, what I found interesting, what I am passionate about.   I can't say that I LOVE to blog, but it has definitely been more beneficial than I expected.

Potential in all it's unattainability

Freshman year, in College Writing 101, I wrote a paper about e-literacy and it's dangers in the world of student research. The danger it poses is not because of the internet's tendency to be an unreliable source, or that research from books is so much more credible, or that the internet is just so full of distractions that students will never be able to focus.  The danger is that students are not taught how to effectively research online and find credible sources. A lot of the research I looked at included detailed studies about students who simply use google and just choose from the top search results.  What students aren't told is that the top google search results are merely those that viewed or used the most, that the ones that provide the most information about the search topic or that are the most credible. Because honestly, wikipedia is almost always going to be in the top search results and it is neither the most informational nor the most credible source.  Websites can also pay google to place their site in the top search results so that they receive more publicity and activity.  However, if students were given just a few simple instructional sessions on how to research online, how to cross reference sources, how to check credibility, and how to access the vast amounts of viable knowledge that can be found on the internet, then their research projects and papers could become vastly superior to those of our parents who used typewriters and periodical catalogs.

I started recalling all of this information while reading Kajder who discovers that social media and new technologies are being used in the classrooms, but are really just sort of thrown in there to look pretty and don't actually add to much to the learning environment.  Several people have mentioned this in class. Schools invest in ipads and smart boards but the ipads are only used to search online for certain class sessions and the smartboards are only used for power points! This is sort of like having the world wide web at your hands and just using the top google results. These tools have so much potential to add to the learning experience of the classroom.  They should be an automatic "go to" when we are searching for ways to make a lesson multimodal or simply more interactive.  But they often end up being just for show.  My high school recieved a grant to put smartboards in the "classrooms of the future" which were the basic subjects such as math, history, english etc. My English teacher only turned on the smartboard on at the end of the year when we were using power point for our research presentations. It was a complete waste. But I still do not know how she could've used that specific technology to enhance our learning.

There is so much evidence in our own experiences and in what we are reading that the technology out there could be very useful for a classroom of igeneration students, but still I have not learned HOW to use it. I grow increasingly worried that I will be left with this knowledge of potential with no way to reach it or even begin to grasp at it.

Frustrating and Life Enhancing

I was really intrigued by the quote from Gee (2003) in Miller, "Learning should be both frustrating and life enhancing."  I entirely agree with this.  I have retained the most knowledge, and the most useful knowledge, from classes that were both challenging and interesting.  I have attended many classes whose subject fascinated me, but the work was easy so I did not have to really injest the material.  But in classes that I had to really study and dissect the material in order to grasp the concepts, I learned an incredible amount; not only about the subject or the content, but about my abilities to learn in general. Reading Shakespeare is an excellent example. I remember almost everything from a Shakespeare play that I have studied because I have to really pay attention and examine every line in order to understand the vast amount of meaning that Shakespeare works into his lines.  But I can fly through a young adult novel, understand every word, but only retain the fine details for a short amount of time. 

I think that attaining this type of indepth learning is where multimodality or using technology in the classroom really comes into play.  Instead of just reading a book or a text, using technology or some other form of mental engagement would provide the interaction and context the students need to feel like they have really dissected the different levels provided by the assigned reading.  Having the students cross-referencing similar texts and writing down the similarities and differences or making flow charts of the characters and their roles in the text would provide a source outside the text that would contain information they have pulled out of the story themselves. And to me, knowing that I found the information and I figured out what a book is trying to tell me is much more of an accomplishment than simply memorizing what a teacher has said about a book and then applying it on test or in a paper.

Something on The Side

Throughout the past week, I have been thinking about how I will want to motivate my students to read for fun, outside of class.  In 8th grade, my English teacher said we were required to read 300 pages per 9 weeks outside of class and from books not included in our assigned reading.  This assignment more or less gave the students a reason to read outside of class, not necessarily motivation.  Also, there was no reward for the students who read more than the required amount.  Perhaps I only feel that this should have been changed because I always read well over 1,000 pages.  Many teachers require that the students read one book for fun outside of class, but this still makes reading a requirement and gives no personal incentive, besides the desire to not get an F, to read. 

I have decided that I will offer bonus points each quarter for any student that creates a project or gives a simple presentation in order to entice the other students to read a book they read in their spare time.  This would give the students who are falling behind to make up for lost points and reward the students who already read outside of the classroom.

I would love to hear anyone else's ideas!

Why Tweens and Teens Hate School

          Rosen's chapter detailing reasons why students might dislike school highlighted several reasons why I often found myself bored in school as well. Outside the classroom, our lives move so quickly.  We are immediately connected to each other through phones and the internet.  In fact, I know that my boredom did not become intolerable until I was given my first cell phone when I was 17.  Not only was I suffering from senioritis, but I was anxious to get back to a world that could communicate with me instantly and convey its meaning in just one symbol, the smiley face emoticon, :).  Adding that one symbol to a sentence (an abbreviated sentence) can define the meaning of the entire text.  There is anything like that in the classroom.  Everything is drawn out, wordy, repetitive.  Teachers repeat the same things over and over because usually the facts are not very memorable.  The facts we do remember are those that come with a catchy saying or an acronym.  We apply essentially the same concept when we see symbol <3 as we do when we look at the acronym "ROYGBIV." We immediately know the context of whatever communication or written text will follow it. Class and lectures just seemed like a waste of time when I was familiar with a language that was so incredibly fast.
         Rosen attributes the disconnection between teaching method's and the current students' learning methods to the fact that teachers are not family with how they learn today.  Even I am not familiar with how students learn today.  The technology now available in schools was not in place when I was a high school student.  I am terrified of the first time I will have to plan a lesson using a smart board.  My students will be ten times more familiar the technology than I will be. My teachers seemed inadequate enough with the technology available to me.  I can't imagine how much more difficult it will be to fight for the students' attention when we have to read from actual, stationary, non-illuminated books without screens and they are used to constantly being ocuppied with 5 different tasks at once.

Hey everybody!

My name is Jessica. I'm a Junior Secondary English Education major.  I live in Springville, New York but grew up and graduated from high school in Pennsylvania so I feel much more at home at SRU than I do in New York. I have two office jobs on campus for the College of Humanities, Fine and Performing Arts and for the Honors Program, so if you have any questions about the campus I can either give you the answer, find the answer for you, or direct to someone who has the answer.