In the library: (Who the hell is Edmund Wilson?)
The above is the reaction I would expect from a student reading Wilson’s jacket review of William Faulkner’s life-altering novel, Absalom, Absalom. Wilson says of Faulkner, “Faulkner...belongs to the full-dressed post-Flaubert group of Conrad, Joyce, and Proust”. I was first handed this book by a great friend and mentor by the name of Brady Harrison whose book, Agent of Empire, is available now. (If each of you order a copy, he will notice and wonder what shift has taken place in the universe. I have one, and he hasn’t signed it yet.) Even as a young literature student wandering the stacks, if Brady had not suggested the title to me as a friend, Wilson’s words on the back of the book wouldn’t have swayed me into reading what is now and will forever be one of my favorite insights into the human condition. How then, could I possibly expect it to catch the attention of a teenager who doesn’t know the name of their school principal let alone Edmund Wilson? I was lucky enough to know one of the two best librarians in the state of Alaska who helped develop this next project and it has worked best for us as another great link between LA and the library, but I sense would be a great bridge with other core subjects as well.
-Students in my Language Arts classes are required to read a book of choice on their own time every three weeks. The only restriction on the books is that they must be at the student’s reading level or above. Each book requires a short written review which assesses both a specific reading standard and writing standard. Each teacher has a collection of these prompts already or has some available, so I will not go into detail on each of them. One of my favorites is an exercise in conflict identification and discussion as well as word economics through focused word choice. I was introduced to this prompt by a colleague and I love it. After reading their choice book, students write a review identifying the main conflict, identify the conflict type, and analyzing its importance in shaping the rest of the plot line while judging if it was entertaining and effective. The catch is that the review must be exactly twenty-five words and grammatically correct. Needless to say, revision and editing also play a major role in this review.
-Once the written review is in final form, students use either a camera, a phone camera, or a computer with camera capabilities to record themselves speaking the review to the camera. Most reviews last less than thirty seconds. We have done this for a couple of years and learned some tricks to make them better. We have a green screen set up for this year’s reviews with the added challenge of students identifying a picture or scene to lay in behind themselves on their review. This will add the experience of higher technical skills with video editing in a relatively small dose as well as linking the book with a representative image. Once the videos are made, the instructor will need to make a vital decision in which they will choose to trust students or use a massive amount of personal time.
-I run a school youtube page which works great for communicating what our students can accomplish to the outside world. Each student signs a media waiver at our school for these purposes which is extremely important if you get into the media and digital world. The problem for us was that youtube is blocked by our district’s firewall and switching to youtube for education is a challenge to argue technically with our top education technology administrators. We had to find a system which, like youtube, sent a temporary clip player to the device opening movie URLs through QR Codes. If that didn’t make sense, feel free to ask what I meant by the previous sentence. We tried TeacherTube, but found it clunky at best. It took long amounts of time to upload films and then there was a longer-than-projected wait time for clips to be available for viewing. While scouring the online possibilities, we also toyed with the idea of creating our own in-house server with the needed capabilities. I then stumbled upon SchoolTube. It does what youtube does for our needs and is not blocked by our firewall. No matter which video site you use, make sure to designate the security setting as “unlisted”. This will limit access to the video to those people opening the link and will not allow the film to be accessed through a search. The QR Code, of course, is just a vehicle for the link. As the instructor, I choose to load each of the videos from the students. I could open a station for students to load the videos, but for short videos, it takes less time for me to load them as I receive them. I keep a running link/code spreadsheet on googledocs which is an alpha list with columns for assignment links and QR Codes. I put the link to the loaded videos into the appropriate column from my station once the film is uploaded and students can make their codes for the links at their leisure before the due date and place them in the appropriate column for that assignment code. The system runs quite smoothly and makes it easy for quick checks to see who is behind on turn-in.
-Once the codes are all turned in, we print off the name and code columns, turn it in to our librarian, and she attaches them to the backs of each copy of those titles. Now, when a student walks into her library, they can scan the codes on the backs of books for a friend or acquaintance of the same age and interests for their take on books. These reviews are far more powerful on getting students to read than obscure names of what they view as old people from far away.
Next Post: In the Geography Class or Beam us Down Scotty
No comments:
Post a Comment