An MLA Nightmare

Teaching sophomores how to research is such a hard task. As teachers, we take for granted the fact that we’ve been doing research papers for years and we and it is innate within us to cite sources, and end with a works cited page that shows the standard MLA documentation. This week I found out the hard way that sophomore students are not yet equipped with this tool and need much guidance. If plagiarism were a sin my whole class would be going to Hell on scholarship with gasoline underpants. They had to do a research project on a Chinese dynasty that was set up for them with guided questions to answer. Though the students did an excellent job of regurgitating information in essay form they neglected to give anyone credit for their amazing thoughts and ideas.

I think this is the first time this year that I had to completely re-teach something because I did an absolute poor job because I assumed the students were aware of a skill that they had never been taught. I took this as a lessoned learned because I had to reflect on myself as a student and when I was introduced to this skill. I had realized that even as a college student I never really grasped how to effectively use internal citation and I never (still to this day) knew how to use correct formal documentation in my works cited page as I have to look it up on MLA online every time I do a paper. I could I expect my students to perform a task I continually need help with myself.

Aside from the MLA issue, the students have truly gotten a lot better with their researching skills. Their key words they use in different search engines have become much more specific and relevant to the topics that they are studying. The sites that they use for sources are a lot more credible and they can, for the most part, decipher between relevant and irrelevant material, leading to a much more analytical focused paper.

In my African American Experince class we are teaching a unit on teh African American oral tradition. One aspect of oral tradition that I will be presenting will be on the history of rap music and the roles that it has played and the purposes that it serves for African Americans. Once again I am not the most technologically incluined but I felt that it would be best to let rap tell its own story through lyrics of integral records over teh course of its 25 year history. I was fortunate enough to have a fraternity brother who had a huge library of hip hip music from the birth up to more recent tracks of today. He showed my how to loop the music, fade in and out from song to song so I could get the portion of each song that I wanted to help best tell the story. Being able to mix the songs in chronological order, cutting the lyrics and picking up with another song that completes sentences, allowed students to show the interconnectedness of hip hip music and its ability to tell teh story of a people. Presenting various eras of hip hop will allow the students to better understand how rap music serves as a form entertainmentas well as a vehicle for social political consciousness. Because the studnets are immersed in hip hop culture daily in tehis age of technology, using this type of technology to burn, and stream music to use as a teaching tool will have the students feelt that they are learning culturally relevant material in through a meaningful instructional method. I'm looking forward to presenting this information because I can show off my music "cutting" skills and teach the students something they will be highly intriugued by.

Media Scrapbook

For my African American Expereince class I decided to have the students do a media scrapbook as a lit set assessment. The students read different novels about inner-city life. I picked the groups so that the 5 members of each group read a differnt novel. Their duty was to creat a visual representation (media scrapbook) of the common themes, and messages that ran through their novels. They were only to use technology to accomplish this task. The visual wsas to serve as the voice for the group and therfore no students were allowed to speak during teh presentation. The scrapbooks turned out really well. Some students used power point others Windows Movie Maker. I was surprised th way they were ab le to streamline videos, incorporate music, voice overs, and the creative graphics they used to tell a story of iner city living. The students were able to see the power that music, words, and colors, have on the construction of media and teh messages that are conveyed.

The project helped teh students better uderstand the inner-city experience and the social implications atttached to this lifestyle. Through their creativity, they were able to bring into the classroom, through a short 4 minute presentation, social stigmas, hurt, pain, suffering, determination, perseverance, pressures, and strengths and weaknesses of inner city living as shown through their novels. Because students can relate well to music, pictures, and short quotes, better than novels at times, through the use of technology, the presentations allowed students a second chance to receive the messages that they may have during teh reading of tehir novel, and bring to understanding other aspets that they may have missed due to a monlithic reading. I hvae to say that my co-teacher and I were very pleased!

The Simplicity of A SMART BOARD

It surprises me the level of excitement that students have based on the sole fact that you are using a SMART BOARD in class. I am still very technologically illiterate and up to this point, I have only used it for on a very basic level. We have always had a data projector in the classroom and we used it for power point presentations, but it constricted us to simply using the direct instruction method. The students automatically become jaded to the thought of using power points because teachers often use this as their basic means of instruction. Though we use the smart board in the same manner, it seems to illicit a different response. It allows the students to become active participants in the direct instruction method. We can call on students to simply draw, underline, add to, or subtract from our power points with the color pens and they seem to love it. They are engaged a lot longer and they seem to not mind taking the notes because the “add-ons” allow them to better remember each slide.
I have also utilized my Smart Board over the past week during writing instruction. We do not know how to use the writing instruction program yet but the smart board was still able to make it successful. As we continue to receive more training on the use of our smart board it will allow us to have more intriguing and effective lessons.

SNOW DAYS!!!!

I remember when I used to love snow days. School was out, I could sit back and relax for a whole day, and do a whole lot of nothing. In high school, my friends and I would try to drive to each other's houses whether we were out for snow or ice, not caring that we were putting our lives in danger. We were often unseuccessful, but hey, we gave it a try. Snow days in Kansas City means that there is no physical way possible to get to school. I would say that the KCMO district is almost like MU it's rare that it shuts down.

Now I'm on the other side of education, I hate snow days!!! They get in teh way of the wonderful plans you had for the students, set your schedule back, and interrupts preparation time for the semester final (now that Columbia has the semester ending before the break. Snow days in Columiba dont seem to make sense to me sometimes. I know that it's not a reflection on the district, but the city as a while because of the ineffective method of getting the streets cleaned. It seems to me, as I look outside, that I definitely should have been able to go to school today. I tried to give the city the benefit of the doubt and think that possibly the storm was supposed to pick up while we were in school but then the weather man negated that thought and said that the storm and cool air were not going to be around this part of Missouri until 6:30 tonight and that we'd be above freezing for most of teh day. I give the district extra credit for being proactvie and cancelling school early on Sunday night, but I it seems that we could have been on snowroutes and been in school yesterday as well.

I guess I'm just complainig because I got up so early to get ready for school, excited to see my students and now I cant see them and i can't go back to sleep either. Honestly, I gues I'll just get a few things accomplished, God knows (and the Fellows do too ) that I have so many other things that need to be done as well. I guess I've vented enough about my hatred for snow days and the inconvenience they cause because now I feel a littel better.

All This Technology, What to do with It?

Teh technology grant that my partner and I wrote was finalized last week and we received our SMART BOARd, 8 lab top, and a digital camera. We immediately put the SMART BOARD to use, but we do not know how to utilize it to its maximum potential. All we've done thus far is a really cool comic strip to make India come to life, and used it to enhabce a couple of power point presentations. We are going to do more training to learn its capabilities so we can use it as a resource that benefits our studnets in ways that they could not have been had we not received this new technology.

It was humbling to receive lap tops for students' personal use in the classroom but we dont have a good plan to facilitate their use. The room is overcrowded because we share it with another team and it's hard to find space for the to be displayed. We built shelves for storage, but we have yet to utilize them.

Because we have this new and exciting technology, we are at a huge advantage and will begint to implement more activites that encourage students to fine-tune their use of technology. The digital camera, computers and the SMART BOARD will allow us so much versatility in assignments and activites, but we have to follow the Emints model of lesson planning to ensure that we are making the best use of our resources. It is disheartnening to have so much technology in our eduatcional aresenal and not know how to use it. We are in the process of working with our IITS speialists in the building to help with the logistical part of our resources and we have vowed to each other to implement more technology in the curriculum as our expertise on the subject is expanded.

RESEARCH ASSIGNMENT

So my students have had their first real taste of the use of technology in the calssroom. Last week we bagan our researching for our final assessmnet on Africa. The students were supposed to research one region of Africa and gather information on the region before and after imperialism. They were to analyze the impact of European Imperialsim on sub-Saharan Africa.

Sounds like a simple task to me...I could not have been so wrong. Many of the students did not have the computer savvy that I assumed they had. We started from ground one as far as research is concerned. I gave them the websites to visit, what was and was not a good site, and how to document their sources. Though it was a very hard task the students got through it. They took away many key skills that will benefit them throughout the rest of their hihg school career. I haven;t received all of their research information as of yet but hopefully my lie about plagarism and how it is an offense that can send them to jail prevented them from doing it. LOL...They were so scared. English teachers may be mad at me for this one, but I also showed them how to put thir sources into MLA format using "easybib.com." I don;t see this as cheating, I just see it as them using a source, research tool, that will make their lives esaier.