Final Reflection!

Allison Witham
Rick Lybeck
CI 5461
8 March 2011
Reflecting on Starting Over
It is currently four thirty in the morning. I have been trying for the last six hours to scan in, import to my blog, and post a series of comics I have been drawing that depict memorable moments thus far in my student teaching. The reason I chose to draw comics instead of keeping a traditional reflection journal is twofold: for one, I enjoy drawing and looking forward to getting to draw helps me be more diligent about reflecting frequently and relaxes me if I am reflecting on something unpleasant, secondly, because comics utilize humor, I feel that this form will help me process and get over a lot of the uncertainty and unfortunate events that happen at school. And, I have to say, this practice has been working. I’ve become very meticulous about the process of sketching, then drawing, then tracing, and finally inking the comics. I have even purchased a light box to help make tracing a much more fluid process.
Unfortunately, in all my preparation for our final project I forgot to take into account the fact that I have never in my life used a scanner. Nor, did I envision how difficult sizing the comics would be in order to upload them to my blog. I have not given up yet, you will eventually get an e-mail in the coming weeks, loaded with exclamation points, alerting you to the fact that I have finally succeeding in getting the comics up online, but for tonight/this morning, this is not the case. So here, in one reflection, is a depiction of a technological failure of epic proportions as well as an example of technology as the knight in shining armor.
Needless to say, as I stood over our printer/scanner combo, who glared back at me with its glassy display mocking my technological inaptitude with every rearrangement of its ink cartridges, I wanted to cry. But then I thought, is this what it has come to? I have spent the last nine months learning more about technological teaching tools than most practicing teachers have heard of in their entire career and I am crying over a battered, 1999 HP printer?
Realizing how absurd this scene really was, I re-read the final project details and went for a walk to think things over. As the cold, damp air seeped into my nose and down my throat, some of the lines of Dylan Thomas’s Under Milkwood popped into my head. Thomas has a scene in which three drowned sailors come and haunt the blind Captain Cat, and the description of how the sea salted air tastes in their lungs was bouncing around my brain as I trudged through the slushy streets of Seward. Hardly anyone was out, it being three o’clock in the morning on a Thursday, and the opening monologue of the play ran through my mind. I realized that this was the perfect substitute for my comic (no pun intended) catastrophe and headed back home to try out Voicethread. Speaking the lines of the poem I love so much was lovely, and made me forget the frustrations I had been mulling over for the last five hours. I locked myself in our back room, put my face by the computer, and read out loud to myself. The playback feature of Voicethread is also interesting. Hearing your own voice makes you hypercritical of your verbal presentation all of the sudden, which makes me think that this might be a great scaffolding tool for students preparing to give a speech or presentation to the classroom who might be particularly nervous. They can practice go through the speech without stopping and then go back through and listen to where they had difficulty, stumbled, or mumbled.
As I mention in the blog post and in the Voicethread, Dylan Thomas wrote the piece as a “play for voices” and it is most commonly done as a radio play. In thinking about the question of how digital media can best enable a text to be fully realized, I think Voicethread is actually perfect for the play. I would love to bring the text and Voicethread into the classroom and assign scenes to pairs of the students to read as the two voices. I would also like to have the scenes doubled up so different pairs of students could hear how different voices affect the text. The text also has a terrific amount of poetic and language devises such as alliteration, assonance, consonance, long sentences, short sentences, etc. All of these poetic techniques really need to be heard in order to be understood, and I think that Voicethread is a brilliant solution for demonstrating these verbal techniques for students and also allowing them to participate in their usage. Jim Hatten showed us the “This I Believe” project on Voicethread, and I remember being very affected by that. The fact that students can comment on each other’s work with their own voices is also very significant to me as a teacher. Although I was reading Thomas’s text, my delivery was uniquely my own, which gives me an odd sense of ownership over that small piece of digital media. My tone, inflection, pitch, and articulation flavors the text with a reading that no one else will be able to reenact. I think this feature would allow some students who normally do not like speaking in class to voice their thoughts in a safe, secure space where their peers can listen without interrupting or intimidating them.
Ultimately, what this project has reiterated to me is that, when using technology in any form, at any point of a project, ALWAYS have a backup plan. Despite my original idea not working out, I actually had a really great time making this piece. It made me think about a text I am very familiar with in a new light and got me excited about poetic forms again. If projects like this can cause me to find joy in failure, I can only imagine what potential it holds for student learning. I would be happy to welcome Voicethread into my classroom any day.

Voicethread- Just in Case...

I have drawn some comics of some highlights of student teaching thus far, but I am having trouble scanning them to my blog. So, just in case the library scanner does not work tomorrow, here is a Voicethread I made reading my favorite opening sequence in my favorite play, Under Milkwood by Dylan Thomas. The play is a play for voices (it is done often as a radio play), so I though Voicethread would be a nice modern homage to what Dylan Thomas originally intended the work to be.

Poetry in Practice

I read both 5 and 6 because I am really interested in hearing what experts have to say about blogging and I am also terrified of the magnitude of a video production project in the classroom. I just feel like it is so time consuming, and I am so new to the form, that I would be unprepared and uncomfortable doing a video project in my class. But, I love the metaphor of video production as composition. I mean, it makes perfect sense once you think about it and would probably do a greater justice to visual learners than any graphic organizer could ever offer. Really allowing students to create, edit, and produce provides both extrinsic and intrinsic motivation because it is a real product (snazzier than a piece of paper) that they get to make. I also prefer the educational possibilities of teaching metaphor through film rather than paper. There is more subtlety and finesse needed in visual metaphors as opposed the more straightforward paper form. Video also allows for instant transfer of knowledge culled in class to practical applications. "Why are we doing this?" Because you need to know this in order to make your video.

I have some questions about the rubric: 1. How can I as a teacher truly tell how "collaborative" the group effort was, 2. To what extent can I glean how much the students actually learned about the poem, and 3. How do I assess how "fun" the project was. I think being more direct with expectations would help foster a stronger rubric for video projects. I do, however, like that a large portion of the assessment is centered around reflection- for many reasons- but particularly because it allows students who struggle with the actual filming can still do well, and comment on or vent their frustrations and what they've learned.

Here is a great site that has all sorts of jumping off points for education based video projects: http://edtech.guhsd.net/video/videoideas.html