Chapter Twelve: Final Integrated Lesson Plan

Course:
Middle School English
Title:
Analyzing Media
Overview:
For my integrated lesson plan, students will spend a class period searching the internet for a video, article, or political cartoon illustrating persuasion or argumentation. It may be a clip from a news show, a talk show, movie, play, excerpt from a book, an article, a poem, etc. They will take notes on their selected material and begin to plan an outline for a brief paper and presentation. The next class, students will compare and finalize their outlines together, making sure that they have successfully taken a stance on the issue and sufficiently defended their view. For homework for the next class, they will write their one to two page papers.  Their next homework assignment will be to revise their short paper, and to embed their source material into a Powerpoint presentation. The next class, each student will share their findings with help from the Powerpoint presentation, and explain their analysis.
Objective of Lesson:
The purpose of this lesson is to strengthen the students’ skills in research, analytic and persuasive writing, and the use of the internet and Powerpoint as an educational tool; and to practice their public speaking skills.  In addition, the lesson will teach students to back up all claims with quotations from the text, whether it be written, visual, or audio/visual.
NJ Core Standards:
3.1.8 E. Reading Strategies (before, during, and after reading)
1. Monitor reading for understanding by automatically setting a purpose for reading, making and adjusting predictions, asking essential questions, and relating new learning to background experiences.
2. Use increasingly complex text guides to understand different text structure and organizational patterns (e.g. chronological sequence or comparison and contrast).
3.1.8 G. Comprehension Skills and Response to Text 
1. Differentiate between fact/opinion and bias and propaganda in newspapers, periodicals, and electronic texts.
2. Compare and analyze several authors’ perspectives of a character, personality, topic, setting, or event.
3. Analyze ideas and recurring themes found in texts, such as good versus evil, across traditional and contemporary works.
4. Locate and analyze the elements of setting, characterization, and plot to construct understanding of
how characters influence the progression and resolution of the plot. 
5. Read critically by identifying, analyzing, and applying knowledge of the purpose, structure, and
elements of nonfiction and providing support from the text as evidence of understanding.
6. Read critically by identifying, analyzing, and applying knowledge of the theme, structure, style, and
literary elements of fiction and providing support from the text as evidence of understanding.
7. Respond critically to text ideas and the author’s craft by using textual evidence to support
interpretations.
8. Identify and analyze literary techniques and elements, such as figurative language, meter, rhetorical,
and stylistic features of text.
9. Identify and analyze recurring themes across literary works.
10. Read critically and analyze poetic forms (e.g., ballad, sonnet, couplet).
11. Identify and understand the author’s use of idioms, analogies, metaphors, and similes in prose and poetry.
12. Understand perspectives of authors in a variety of interdisciplinary works. 
13. Interpret text ideas through journal writing, discussion, and enactment.
14. Demonstrate the use of everyday texts (e.g., train schedules, directions, brochures) and make judgments about the importance of such documents.
15. Compare and analyze the various works of writers through an author’s study
3.1.8 H. Inquiry and Research
1. Produce written and oral work that demonstrates comprehension of informational materials.
2. Analyze a work of literature, showing how it reflects the heritage, traditions, attitudes, and beliefs of its authors.
3. Collect materials for a portfolio that reflect personal career choices. 
4. Self-select materials appropriately related to a research project.
5. Read and compare at least two works, including books, related to the same genre, topic, or subject and produce evidence of reading (e.g., compare central ideas, characters, themes, plots, settings). 
Technology Used:
Internet
Powerpoint
Blog
Assessment:
Students' drafts will receive comments and they will have a chance to revise them before the final due date.  Students will be graded on the following: their research skills and ability to cite references, their writing skills including argumentation or persuasion, organization, structure, and clarity.

Chapter Eleven: Integrated Lesson Plan

For my eighth grade English integrated lesson plan, students will spend a class period searching the internet for a video, article, or political cartoon illustrating persuasion or argumentation. It may be a clip from a news show, a talk show, movie, play, excerpt from a book, an article, a poem, etc. They will take notes on their selected material and begin to plan an outline for a brief paper and presentation. The next class, students will compare and finalize their outlines together, making sure that they have successfully taken a stance on the issue and sufficiently defended their view. For homework for the next class, they will write their one to two page papers. All claims will be backed up with quotations from the text, whether it be written, visual, or audio/visual. I will assess their draft and return it for revision. Their next homework assignment will be to revise their short paper, and to embed their source material into a Powerpoint presentation. The next class, each student will share their findings with help from the Powerpoint presentation, and explain their analysis. The purpose of this lesson is to strengthen the students’ skills in research, analytic and persuasive writing, and the use of the internet and Powerpoint as an educational tool; and to practice their public speaking skills.

Chapter Ten: Ethical & Legal uses of Technology

Although I believe the main responsibility for teaching kids the appropriate uses of technology lies with the parents, educators hold a great deal of responsibility as well. Unfortunately, parents are allowing their children to have cell phones and use the internet unattended at an increasingly earlier age, and this allows for a culture that normalizes things like sexting and texting cliques.

I think that a discussion about ethical and legal uses of technology should have a place in Health classes (sexting, cyber bullying, etc.), counselling sessions, and classes that rely heavily on technology. If a class has a discussion forum online, for example, the teacher should reiterate that the same rules apply to this forum as they do to the physical classroom (respect for each other's ideas, etc.).

A topic that may have a place in all high school classes is the issue of social media such as Facebook and Twitter and how an inappropriate representation on these sites could have a negative affect on the student's chances of getting jobs or scholarships.

Finally, I think that presentations and assemblies should address the issue of ethical and legal uses of technology. Students should learn about students such as Tyler Clementi, the Rutgers student who committed suicide after having intimate video footage "out" him on the internet. There should be a discussion about tragedies such as Tyler, Hope, and the other teens who have suffered to the point of even taking their own life because of misuse of technology.

Chapter Nine: Copyright Issues in School

Fair Use in reference to copyright laws refers to the situations in which it is lawful to use a copyrighted work without permission from the author or copyright owner. Fair Use is determined on a case by case basic based on these four criteria: (1) Purpose of the use (usually instructional or educational uses are considered Fair Use); (2) The nature of the work; (3) The amount of the work used (Usually small portions of a work are considered Fair Use); and (4) The effect of the work on the work's market value (Using a single-use subscription of a computer program for an entire school district would not be considered Fair Use).

It is important for educators and administrators to be aware of copyright laws, especially in the age of technology in which it is easier to access information but copyright laws are more difficult than they used to be. Those in education need to be careful to monitor their use of copyrighted material so the school and/or district doesn't get sued. In addition, showing respect for copyright laws teachers students this importance as well because they may need to know these issues in their future whether it is at college or on the job.

Chapter Eight: Technology Integration Matrix (TIM)

The example I chose from the TIM was called "Animal Story: An Informal Narrative." In the Matrix, this activity corresponds with the Infusion column and the Active row, meaning that teachers infuse technology into their lessons and that students are actively engaged with that technology rather than just passively absorbing information from it.

This activity seems to exhibit best the NETS for Teachers 1 (a-d) and 2 (a-d). The project, in which students studied animals from the Everglades and published a story about an animal using technology such as Comic Life, certainly encouraged "student learning and creativity." Furthermore, this activity was a great example of a "digital age learning experience."

At this point in the semester, I feel that Adaptation and Infusion are my levels of comfort. I could see myself encouraging students to think out of the box when it comes to technology (ie. finding ways to use technology even if it wasn't originally meant for that purpose) and doing a project like the one referenced above, creating an original and informative end product.

Chapter Seven: Podcast

The assignment associated with the below podcast would be for students to learn about how to quote books, plays, and poems in their essays and then write an essay on one of the course readings of their choice (either a book, play or poem). The essay must include at least 3 quotes from the work of choice, one of which must be a block quote.

Podcast Powered By Podbean

Chapter Six: The 21st Century Skills Debate

Where I stand on the debate

As a future English teacher, I tend to value the hard copies of things. I’d rather hold a book in my hands than navigate the non-linear format of a blog or digital text. Therefore, I tend to agree with the critics of the 21st Century Skills movement. I agree with the cognitive psychologists who argue that one must develop basic knowledge before they reach deep understanding, such as a subject area’s application to technology. I am not against teaching technology, career, and life skills in school, but, like other critics, I fear that the new standards will lead to schools sacrificing basic content understanding by focusing too much on more applied skills. I also fear that schools will spend a great amount of money on new state-of-the-art technology and that will be underused or ignored as it was for the most part when it first arrived in my high school, Chatham High School, before I graduated in 2006. Now, according to the Frontline video, technology is a big part of CHS, but I find myself relating to the English teacher featured who felt discouraged by it rather than exited.

Ravitch writes in “Critical thinking? You need knowledge”:

Inevitably, putting a priority on skills pushes other subjects, including history, literature, and the arts, to the margins. But skill-centered, knowledge-free education has never worked. (Ravitch)

I would rather see the money spent saving social sciences and arts programs in schools that are often cut first (by politicians such as NJ Governor Chris Christie), than on initiatives many teachers do not believe in and are likely not adequately trained in themselves.

I support the goal for students to “master skills such as cooperative learning and critical thinking and therefore be better able to compete for jobs in the global economy,” but I’m not fully convinced that the standards will accomplish this (Ravitch).

Argues Ravitch:

For the past century, our schools of education have obsessed over critical-thinking skills, projects, cooperative learning, experiential learning, and so on. But they have
paid precious little attention to the disciplinary knowledge that young people need to make sense of the world. (Ravitch)

As my favorite English teacher said a few days ago when I returned to my old middle school to catch up with her: “In college, English majors are still reading books and writing papers about them. So why is everyone making such a big deal about this (Technology/21st Century Skills in school)?”

My response to Ken Robinson's talk about the need for creativity in schools


I agree with Robinson's statement, "[C]reativity now is as important in education as literacy, and we should treat it with the same status" (Ken Robinson says schools kill creativity).  I have always considered myself a creative person, and as such I always thrived in school classes that emphasized creativity the most, from the box sculpting we did in pre-school to the printmaking class I took in sophomore year of college.

Robinson states, "If you're not prepared to be wrong, you will never come up with anything original" (Ken Robinson says schools kill creativity).  This quote struck me because it mirrors what my professor of my Teaching, Democracy and Schooling class (Vince Walencik) always says--that schools teach kids that making mistakes is the worst thing one could do, and that this is the wrong message for learning.  As humans, we learn many of the most valuable lessons by making mistakes.  As Professor Walencik jokes, "We learn never to marry that person again after we get a divorce."  It is the same for mastering most concepts in school.  We improve our understanding and skill from both our successes and our failures.

Robinson states:

We need to radically rethink our view of intelligence.  We know three things about intelligence.  One, it's diverse.  We think about the world in all the ways that we experience it. We think visually, we think in sound, we think kinesthetically.  We think in abstract terms, we think in movement.  Secondly, we know intelligence is dynamic.  If you look at the interactions of the human brain...intelligence is wonderfully interactive.  The brain isn't divided into departments.  In fact, creativity, which I define as the process of having original ideas that have value, more often than not, it comes about through the interaction of different disciplinary ways of seeing things. (Ken Robinson says schools kill creativity)

But schools tend to value facts and test scores more than other measures of intelligence such as the arts and social intelligence.

Can we integrate this into schools?  Yes, I don't see why not.  It isn't a matter of money, but one of a new attitude, which can actually be harder to acquire.  But, I think we can and we should in order to improve eucation.

Chapter Five: Adding Audio to a Presentation

Back to school ppt

View more webinars from LessThanCarly.

Chapter Four: Back to School Presentation

The presentation above is an example of an embedded item, something that can be utilized in education. A teacher can embed a video or Powerpoint presentation as I have down without making the students download a large file or having to risk sending a large file via email. In week two, we discussed school websites. These sites would be a great place for embedded material. Teachers could embed a back to school night presentation just as I did onto the school website so that parents who were unable to attend could acquire the same information as those who were there in person.

Chapter Three: 21st Century Skills and Educational Technology

After browsing the NJ Core Curriculum Standards for Technology, the Frontline video clip about Chatham High School, and the other resources for this week, I feel overwhelmed.  I knew that the expectations for teachers integrating technology in the classroom have change greatly in the past several years, but I did not know that the extent was so great now.  Watching the Frontline video clip about Chatham High School was especially thought-provoking to me because Chatham High School is where I went to high school.  I graduated there in 2006, and to see the ways that my school has progressed in its use of technology since then is startling.  Regarding the Standards, I was surprised by the grade levels that students are expected to be proficient in certain technological tasks by.  For example, I don’t think I ever touched a computer in school until third grade, yet the standards state that students are expected to be taught the basics of technology use by second grade.  CPI 8.1.4A.3 states that students should be able to "create and present a multimedia presentation that includes graphics" by fourth grade.  I probably did not do this until sixth grade. What I wasn’t doing with technology until eighth grade, students are probably already mastering by the sixth grade.  As a future educator, it is intimidating that I will be expected to engage students with technology in ways that I may have never experienced in school, or at least not until a couple of years later than is now expected.

Specifically, I decided to focus on a standard under strand 8.2.  According to CPI # 8.2.4A.2, students are expected to be able to do the following by the end of grade four: “Using a digital format, compare and contrast how a technology product has changed over time due to economic, political, and/or cultural influences.”  When I am an English teacher, I could utilize this standard by conducting a lesson about the way that print technology has evolved throughout history from the written word to the printing press to online blogs and digital readers such as the Google Nook and the Amazon Kindle.

Chapter Two: School District Web Page

This week, I examined the website for the Madison school district.  Aesthetically, it is nice that the web page is all red for the town's school color, and I like that there are photos of the different schools and the town clock at the top of the page.  However, the navigation tabs on the top pf the the home page are quite small and crowded together, making it a somewhat overwhelming task to browse around.  Despite these small difficulties, however, the site does contain important information for parents and students.

There is a tab dedicated to Parent Resources which lists various parent associations such as fund-raising and volunteering clubs and information about before and after-school care programs.  The Calendar tab is also particularly useful to parents as well as students.  It lists school events, school holidays, and PTO meetings.  In addition to these detailed pages, the Home Page also highlights important news and events and announcements.  Under the Curriculum and Instruction tab, there is another section for Parent Resources which includes useful links such as Book Recommendations organized by grade level, Homework Survival Tips, and a Family Newsletter.

How does the Madison school district website stack up in comparison to the kind of ideal school website Dr. McKenzie talks about in his article?  McKenzie states that a quality school/district website should inform visitors of the following things: "its mission, its character, its look, its offerings to children, its stance on new technologies and its overall spirit" (McKenzie, 1997).  The Madison school district website presents these important traits in the following ways:

• Mission/character: The site  does a good job of sharing its mission and character in this link.
• Look: Madison's schools are represented in photos at the top of the home page.  These photos, however, fail to give the website visitor the best picture of the schools because they don't include any indoor photos and they are all shot from very far away.  Thus, the visitor only gets a vague idea of the look of the schools.
• Offerings to children: The site makes it clear that Madison schools go out of their way to provide for the needs of all students, as evidenced in their Special Services tab.
• Stance on new technologies: The site has a Technology tab dedicated specifically to the effort of the district to "tap into the transformative educational power of technology."
• Overall spirit: The site paints the district to have an overall spirit of professionalism, dedication and achievement.  This is evidenced by the copious amount of information and references found on the website.  Clearly, a great deal of work was put into the website, suggesting that the administration and staff of the Madison schools put the same kind of work into their daily jobs as educators.

In addition, McKenzie states that quality school/district websites need to include "the best resources the Web has to offer an educational family" (McKenzie, 1997).  The Madison school district website certainly accomplishes that goal with the following links:

• Board of Education FAQ's
• Testing Reports
• School Website E-Alerts
• Madison Education Foundation
• Title I Notification
• Parent Resources
• On-Line Faculty Resources

McKenzie states that websites should "offer an opportunity for the publishing of student works to both a local and a global audience" (McKenzie, 1997).  The Madison school district website does so.  Click here to see an example of this.

Finally, according to McKenzie, a quality school/district website must include collections of "rich data locally collected on curriculum related topics" such as "data warehouses, virtual museums or virtual libraries" (McKenzie, 1997).  A good example of this, I think, would be the Testing Reports.  This appears, however, to be one of the only examples of this kind of data collection, so McKenzie would probably consider the site to fall short in this regard.

Chapter One: Purposeful Integration of Technology in Schools

My experience with technology in the classroom has been minimal. In fifth grade, I remember doing a project on the planets that involved some internet use.  In middle school, I recall frustrating library sessions designed to teach us students to use EbscoHost for a research project.  In high school, the old fashioned library was transformed into a “Media Center,” but the only thing the computers seemed to be used for was Myspace and using the school’s new email network to send jokes to friends.  Thus, in my academic experience, technology was used, but the reason for doing so instead of using traditional methods was never clear.  Students didn’t know why they were occasionally made to use technology, and I suspect that the teachers didn’t know either.

To me, the important thing about utilizing technology in the classroom is having a clear purpose for doing so.  The state-of-the-art Media Center at my high school may have been created with good intentions, but without tech-savvy teachers and a different kind of curriculum to accompany it, it turned out to be an enormous waste of money.  All too often, it seems that technology is integrated into the classroom as more of an attempt to make a point that the school is keeping up with the times than as an actual improvement in education.

Of course, some schools have managed to use technology in meaningful ways, as described in “Four Takes on Technology.”  The first entry, about technology’s ability to improve students’ interaction with primary source documents, was nice but did not seem to be the best use for technology.  The other three entries, about using the internet and digital software to learn about one’s culture and others’ cultures, however, did strike me as great applications of technology in education.  Not only do projects such as Friends and Flags, the project on the Amistad, and GenYES teach students valuable technical skills, but they also serve important social purposes.  Friends and Flags has the potential to improve tense relations between Jews and Arabs, if only among children.  The project on Amistad has the potential to teach students things about the African American identity that they may not encounter in other classrooms.  Finally, GenYES utilizes the technological know-how of students to teach teachers of older generations the information technology skills that they need in today’s education field.

In conclusion, I hope to use this class to get some ideas about how to use technology in a real, meaningful way as discussed in the video and article assigned for this week.


*UPDATE: It seems my high school, Chatham High School, did change the way it used technology since I graduated from there in 2006.  And for the better, it seems... Frontline story about technology in CHS