Portfolio/Final Blog

This class was different than what I was expecting. I thought it would be all about composition of essays, but I ended up learning and challenging myself in completely different ways. First of all, I neve thought anyone could convince me that video games were anything but dull, mindless, violent entertainment for teenage boys, but the Gee book made such amazing points that made me look at video games as tools that are actually valuable for learning. I enjoyed the parts about schema-building and getting to try things over without really being penalized (the psychosocial moratorium idea), which we later incorporated into the reading inquiry we did. Seeing how editing and revising works helps students realize they don't have to create perfection, or get the the last level of the video game, on their first try. The concept that he introduces early that I had never considered was that the more challenging video games sell. This he tried to incorportate into a classroom setting by encouraging teachers to make assignments more stimulating, engaging, and challenging with rewards. This is such a novel idea to have been derived from analyzing video games. This idea of working within the regime of competence is directly related to many things we are taught as Liberal Studies students; children learn best in the zone of proximal development, or in another class we called it FLOW, where you are challenged and it's not so easy you're bored, but not so difficult you get frustrated and quit. This is so important to adapt to a classroom and for each individual because tehri levels will be different.
The Harvey book had some great suggestions that tied in with many of the articles we read for the inquiry and for the memo and reported on in our wikis. One of my favorite ideas I saw in both were letting students choose their own topics and having them read like writers in order to learn to be better writers. In one assignment in my junior year of high school our final was too look back on our portfolio of work since our freshman year and make some conclusions. One that I made, which was the basis for my essay, was that if I cared about the topic and was interested and engaged, or if I got to choose what I would write about, I ALWAYS wrote much deeper, more meaningful essays and that was consistently reflected in the grades I received. This really is such an important idea for encouraging students to write. In my assignment sequence project I made sure the students were allowed to pick someone they wanted to read and write about. Learning to read as writers was a theme that was repeated in the inquiry articles and in Harvey's book where she had examples of students breaking down articles and saying what the article was conveying within each paragraph and using that as a model for how you should write. This is so important to help students learn the different ways there are to format your writing and that the fundamental part is that you are engaging the reader and getting across the important points, so having this model shows the students how and where to do that.
I've always thought that teaching writing is one of the hardest concepts for teachers. I don't remember being taught. It's not like math where it's seemingly black and white or like science where you follow a formula to determine something. Even history has dates and people and landmarks, but writing is so abstract. There are so many ways and it seems like there can be no "right" way to write, but the ideas from the inquiry reading articles and the Harvey book show how as an educator you can help your students improve their writing by modeling for them, co-authoring, letting them choose a topic of interest, having daily short writes, and many more.
The most difficult assignment for me was the digital document. It wasn't only difficult because of my challenges with getting all of the technology pieces to amalgamate, but it was my topic that I found to be toughest. It was a very cathartic experience for me, though, to discuss and put down my feelings about these people that I loved who have died recently. I had been trying so hard to get through these things and move on that I hadn't dealt with my feelings, but this assingment allowed me to turn to microscope on myself and experience my emotions and convey them to others. I obviously had serious difficulties with the technology as well, but despite all of the hours and frustration and blunders, I'm glad I learned a little more about technology and my computer, and that I've made something that I will value for the rest of my life as a snapshot of my feelings at the time. This is not the kind of advanced composition I was expecting, but I've written a million essays and while I have some I value, this digital document more deeply reveals what I could have never expressed verbally in an essay.
I'm not going to do the credential program and I won't go on to teach at this point in my life, but I have absolutely learned many valuable things from the readings, class sessions, and assingments. Just some of the concepts can be used in a broader way than just to teach English or writing and those are the ones I will value the most. I still don't like video games personally, but now I can appreciate the value and learning tool they can be.

Memorandum Review

Writing the memorandum was really very daunting at first because first we had to read those articles that were very informative and had lots of ideas in them. My section of articles alone were enough to write the memo with, but then taking into account the other articles read by my peers was a lot more information for me to pile into my memo. My first draft was very rough and just a little synopsis of my main recommendations and the basic format. My peers who read it realized my draft was already long because I had way too many recommendations and hadn't even really said anything specific yet. For my final draft I went through and condensed my thoughts and ideas into broader categories and then expanded on those. It still ended up being really long, but after all the time and effort I spent reading and finding great quotes as well as integrating my own opinion, I think the memo went well. I know I'll never have to actually write a memo for a principal, but just the practice could be useful for other jobs that I might get in the future.

Correctness

So after looking through the Rules of Thumb book, I realized that English is ridiculously convoluted. I guess I take for granted that over the years I've somehow, if by osmosis, learned all these strange, intricate rules of the English language and grammar. It's the antithesis of cut and dry. Flipping through those pages I realized that I really already knew most of those rules and things, but I'm still fuzzy on some rules: is it who or whom? My mom and her mom are the people I know who have the strongest grasp on the English language and grammar and apparently it was passed down. Only a couple times have I ever caught my mom make a grammatical error or not know how to spell a word. My maternal grandmother used to give us little aphorisms and adages to complete like "Waste not,........" "or Power corrupts and absolute power......" We were encouraged to read often and my mom never simplified her language for us, so we often learned through context. What was very important was (were??? I don't know all of the rules.) that we had good grammar. All daily speech,homework assignments, and letters written had to be perfectly spelled and punctuated, and if it was to Grandma, formal. I don't remember learning any of these rules in school but they were enforced at home and my mom still corrects any of us if we say "I" instead of "me" or if we put ourselves first in a list, or say "myself" instead of "me". In classrooms today though, and just in general, I don't think these rules of spelling and grammar are as valued as they used to be, or maybe it's just my family. My dad and my sister in law are two of the smartest people I know and they often use incorrect grammar and spell things wrong. My mom even proofread my dad's papers when he went back to college for him. Most of my teachers don't value grammar either. I often catch my teachers misspelling or incorrectly pronouncing words or using incorrect listing. I catch them saying "supposeably" instead of "supposedly". It errks me. I know no on is perfect, but I've always been taught that the way you present yourself is important so if I'm writing a cover letter for my resume, correct grammar is essential. I judge my own brothers who write "your" instead of "you're." Revising is really a great thing, though. In one of the inquiry readings it talked about this girl who wrote well and fluently but with horrible grammar. When she was asked to be more careful with her grammar she completely lost her sense of paragraphs and focus, so this is where I feel that editing is wonderful and you don't have to be perfect on the first try. English is tricky, for sure, but for basic daily correspondence there are some spelling, context, and grammatical rules that are absolutely essential.

Taaching Writing Readings

Reading these three articles so far has been very interesting. I think they have some really great points and ideas in them. The first one that was such a huge long research written paper was too long and it had some good ideas and thoughts, but the other two I've liked more. Being written by teachers, I think they have a much different point of view and I especially appreciated the third article. If I were going to teach I would definitely take a lot of her ideas into account. I love the idea of the quick writes with the prompts and having students do them daily which makes them think and produce something in a short period of time. Then having them share them with one another is sucha a wonderful idea. The second article was good because the teacher was a coauthor with her students. They helped her write and she reciprocated, bt also had the students help one another. It just really shows that other people can be really helpful if you need a little nudge or you hit a wall with your writing. I have enjoyed learning what my fellow groupmembers have been reading as well. They've had some similarly interesting articles and reading their annotated bibliographies has been a great way to share the knowledge and get new ideas. I think that writing this memorandum will be daunting and knowing that I'll never have to actually do this in the future makes it feel less relevent to me.

Non-reification

I worked really hard on this project, which I'm not sure is evident in my fine product. I spent at least 20 hours between collecting pictures, finding and cutting music, setting it, and then learning that it was too short and that I wouldn't be able to set the narration over the music. Then once I recorded my narration on gabcast, my computer wouldn't download it as an mp3 in a place that I could find it and I used explorer and AOL to try all these different ways to download it. Finally, after and evening of utter frustration, I accidentally stumbled upon a way to import it as an mp3 into MovieMaker. I tried so many ways I couldn't repeat it if I tried because I have no idea how I got it there. I tried to get some video in my document and downloaded snag it, but could only capture pictures. Then I figured out moviemaker better and made the pictures fit the narration, but I was disappointed with the sound quality and lack of music, so I decided to re-record the narration (which came out better the second time because I finally got through it without crying) and downloaded audacity to try to fit the music and narration together. Once I figured that out and made the music lower, it wouldn't let me export it as and mp3 and even though I downloaded some program called LAME that was supposed to let me do it that way, it wouldn't. After trying mulitiple times, I decided to take a shot int eh dark and export it as a wav file, which moviemaker accepted and finally imported. I knew my last hurdle would be to save it to a disc. I went through 4 blank discs in an attempt to "save to a CD" and finish the movie. After hours of trying and having it burn to a CD 65% and then tell me it had an error, couldn't finish, froze movie maker, and my computer so that I had to keep restartng it, I decided to save it to my computer and hope I could make a folder, and burn it to a CD. Somehow, once again I have no idea how I finally got it to do it, but it saved it in Windows Media Player and I burned it. I tried so many times with the other discs to play them on moviemaker on my roommate's computer, even to save them to my jump drive and hope that it would work, but EVERY time the pictures were red exes and only the titles showed up. I finally decided to relent and save the Windows media player version to a disc, which played in ym roommate's computer and that was the best I could do for 1am after struggling with it for 8 hours that day alone. Honestly by that point, I was just happy it played and that anything went together.
This project made me feel so incompetent on a computer, which I usually can figure out. It expanded my knowledge of internet capabilities and how to make a video and appreciate the effort it takes to create something like this, but navigating 5 new programs took a lot of time with guess and checking. I know I could have turned it in when it was in simpler form, but I wasn't happy with my outcome and so frustrated with the programs. You made it sound so easy in class, and I thought it shoud have been, but this ended up being the most difficult project I've ever had to do, and the worst part is I feel like I still don't have a very good product to show for it.
I really wanted to make something that anyone who has lost someone special to them would be able to identify with, which I guess isn't really an affinity group. I put in a lot of personal pictures and I feel like I could have said a lot more to explain these wonderful people. I felt my insider position made this more personal and hopefully this dispersed knowledge will allow people to appreciate their loved ones and find a way to deal with their feelings even when someone they love dies.

My digital document

So I've been working on ym digital document a lot, but I'm definitely not done yet. There are some things I've really been struggling with like making it long enough, having enoughpictures, making my music fit and flow, and really communicating what it is I'm learning. I'm very nervous about trying to do the narrative and make it fit with my story and make my whole document cohesive. I don't have any videos, either and I feel like they wouldn't fit in my story that well. I need to do some more work on my project and I'm just feeling like I don't know where to go next, like do the music more, or get more pictures, or try to do the narration, which I thought I should do last.

Active learning and discovery

I like what Gee talks about in Chapter 5 about how the hands on learning of video games is really an important form of discovery, but how past experiences also can guide our behavior. In school I have always appreciated tasks that were interactive and involved so much more than just trying to read a book and write a report. Being in an environment where trying something new and being allowed to fail at it without giving up is so important. In one of my computer classes, although it would have been faster to tell us step by step how to do a project, one of my teachers gave us a new program and told us to create this slideshow and print it out with all of these specifics. She gave us no instructions about how to do it, so we all were forced to discover things for ourselves-open files, click buttons, pull down screens, search everywhere and try everything. While it seemed like a very structured project, there were many things that were left to our discretion and we were encouraged to be curious, but were left to our own devices. It taught me how to interpret the program and while I did the assignment I found out so many things that I would still remember now, but I know if the steps had just been put in front of me, I wouldn't remember at all. You really do learn much more by doing something for yourself than by just being told what to do.

Situated Learning

The chapter on situated learning immediately made me think of some of my psychology classes from the past and the formation of schemas. These are ways of organization that everyone has occur in their brain, completely without consciously doing so. At the beginning of the chapter, Gee talks about hwo we recall these little categories that we've created in our head to relate to a current situation. We start doing this when we're incredibly young, so children can recall these situations they've been in and the observations theyve made and recorded for future reference. These are very important for all kinds of learning, especially like in video games, as he describes. Assimilating is way for humans to use these old schemas on these new situations that are confronted in classrooms or in video games, while accomodation is a way to adjust these existing schemas to account for these new situations. I think these are very important points to remember when teaching.

Video games book

The intro to Gee's book was interesting and made many claims. He talked about the way we aren't socially recognized for reading and that every time we read our experiences influence our interpretation which I think is very accurate. I've never thought of how video games have to be more challenging in order to sell, which is an interesting phenomena. I've also never thought of how teachers could make class more interactice, engaging, challenging, and stimulating to encourage children to find school as rewarding, or at elast expend the same energy on their schoolwork, as video games. I think this is a good cue for teachers to adopt some of the learning strategies from video games to update their curriculum and adapt to our changing culture.

Something I'm learning...

Over winter break my mom and sister-in-law were both crocheting while we were watching TV. My mom taught me a long time ago but I didn't remember it at all, so she taught me again. She's made a lot of blankets for many people-new babies, troops in the Middle East, my grandparents, and even our dog. She learned from her mother-in-law probably 20 years ago and has continued to learn new patterns and become more creative and was very excited to teach my sister-in-law and me again. It's really pretty easy once you get the hang of it. If you do it for too long it can make your left hand cramp a little, but it becomes something so repetitive that you don't really have to watch anymore-you just feel it. It's something fun to do in the winter while I'm watching TV or on a long car trip, which we recently went on. I'm almost done with my first blanket that's lavender, white, and grey stripes and I've enjoyed seeing it grow, but I still don't know how to finish off with the little threads on the ends. I guess I'll have to ask my mom again...

#1

Let's see if this works