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.