Technology and our future classroom
At the beginning of the Bright Ideas Conference, we listened to keynote speaker Jacqueline Woodson speak of writing as a process much as Peter Elbow does. Woodson writes because she loves writing; she does not outline; she just writes and writes and sees where it takes her. She believes that you cannot know where your writing is going until it has begun, and that is an important element to note of her style. To make a good story, the writer not only has to figure out what the story has to say, but more importantly, the writer has to let go of his/her fears. That writer’s block that we feel is not what we think it is; it is really our body’s way of telling us to write something real, something true; something we know and should not be afraid of.
Woodson also believes that we all have a story to tell, and we all have a right to tell our story. The problem is, many people (especially younger people) are not taught the value of their individual voices and so they learn to be afraid to say or write what it is they really want to say. What she believes, and I agree with, is that students need to be taught that what they have to say is important and they should feel free, or obligated even, to let their ideas out into the world.
Personally, I thought that Woodson’s speech had many key elements that people who came to the conference should listen to and take to heart. Young learners are not taught the joys that can come with writing, and so it becomes something they both loathe and fear. If we could only bring the power of personal writing and narrative back into the classroom, then perhaps students would learn more about themselves and about the writing process (which would carry over into more academic pieces that the students must write).
The three conferences that I chose to go to had a lot to do with what I have been trying to discover in this blog space over the last few months. The first conference I chose was entitled “Introducing a Twenty-First Century Curriculum: Incorporating Mass Communication into the English Classroom.” This was an interesting start because it brought up how rapidly technology is changing and growing, and how education is struggling to find ways to keep up. The presenters (Andrew Reimann, Kate Salvadore, and Sara-Beth O’Connor) discussed how wiki’s (such as wikipedia) are not considered by almost any teacher or administrator as legitimate sources for students to use. However, as technology grows, many of these sites are becoming more and more dependable. At some point, they cannot be ignored…so why not start now? The group talked about how wiki’s could be set up in the classroom. For example, the class could create their own wiki together; they would read a book, then find research and together create an online collaborative essay. Through making it a wiki, anyone who views it could update it, changed it, and even delete students’ findings, which could help students to see how reliable such sources are.
In the second conference I went to, called “macBeth: Using Technology to Enhance the Teaching of Shakespeare,” Jeff Patterson and Lindsay Steenbergen touched on a related subject of bringing technology into the classroom. What the presenters showed us was how to integrate tools such as PowerPoint, iMovie, Garageband (a program that creates music tracks), Google, and a video camera to bring Shakespeare’s MacBeth into the modern day. What Steenbergen and Patterson have been doing in their English classrooms is taking today’s “Digital Natives” (as they call students) and allowing them to create modern-day creations using MacBeth as a starting point or as inspiration. In Steenbergen’s class, one group set MacBeth up as a Jerry Springer show, keeping some key elements and emotions, but changing events and time periods so that students can more easily connect to Shakespeare. Another group created a version of the Real World, set in Scotland. One other group created a Dr. Phil episode. Then they uploaded their videos onto a computer, added graphics and music and had a drastically different and powerful array of outcomes. In Patterson’s class, the students created a mock-version of a MySpace website using PowerPoint. Each student was given a character from the play and had to create a MySpace webpage, complete with pictures, likes/dislikes, friends, favorite books/movies, a quote, comments, and so on. These cross-cultural adapations and textual interventions by the students allows them to engross themselves in a play they might normally hate, be bored with, or not understand. They think critically about the characters and what motivates them and then translate it into something they are familiar with, making the play worthwhile.
The final conference I went to was presented to us (fabulously, I might add) by our very own English 310ers Bethany Erickson and David Knapp. Their presentation, entitled “‘Whose Space is It?’ Integrating Social Networking Sites into English Language Arts instruction,” was very much like the macBeth one I had gone to before it, only they argued in strong favor of allowing the actual MySpace website to by used in the classroom by the students. So many schools are banning, or have banned, social-networking sites like this one because administration does not see the educational value of such media. For the two macBeth presenters/teachers, social-networking is not allowed, and so they must improvise by making a mock-up of MySpace on PowerPoint. Bethany and David, however, argue that the amount of negative attention given to social-networking sites is blown far out of proportion. Teachers who want to use MySpace in their classroom can set up the account for the students in their class so that it is very private; only students who have the password would be allowed to write on the walls, and it would be closely monitored by the teacher so that inappropriate things do not appear on their site.
Before I had gone to the Bright Idea conference, I have to admit I was not what one might call “enthused.” The idea of heading to East Lansing at seven in the morning to listen to a bunch of presentations did not get me excited. However, once I was there and listening to the ideas the people were presenting to me, a whole new array of things I could actually implement into my classroom were given to me. Things like Shakespeare that even I hated in high school can now have some kind of connection to students and their daily lives; it no longer has to be yet another five-paragraph essay. All in all, getting up at 5:45 am was well worth it. 
