Blog post #5

   My experience with digital storytelling and multimodal composition is limited. It was the year after I left that students in my school district were all given Chromebooks to take home with them to work on schoolwork and to do their projects on. Because my teachers couldn't guarantee that their students would have access to technology at home to work with tech, I never had a lot of assignments that made them necessary. Apart from this reality, I would have to say that the most interesting program out there at the time to do anything academic on was probably PowerPoint...maybe Prezi, but that program was a pain in you know what to figure out.

YouTube

   After Viewing the course website examples of multimodal composition, the ones that stick out to me the most are the book trailers and the digital storytelling. Although writing is an important skill to learn, I see how it could be important to encourage students to use these forms of learning as well as it gives them a different way to express what they have learned and what they know. Often times the struggle with teaching writing is getting kids to say what they mean--they can't figure out how to say it, but with book trailers and digital storytelling, those forms of assignments give students the opportunity to show what they know. These activities could be used as a pre-writing activity as it helps students to pick out what's important and it gets them put them in sequential order. This is exactly what writing does, however, students are more likely to be able to put what they know into something of a visual expression easier than they would be able to put what they know first into writing.
   If we can get kids to easily do the process that we want them to do one way, it'll make it that much easier for them to convert it into an academic style.

Blog Post #4

To be honest, after working with kids from MLS high school I'm a little scared. Out of 10 students that I was assigned, only two of them seemed to be sending me work, and of those two students, their work isn't exactly spectacular. In my college courses at UWM, I've been given some instruction and some resources on what to do when kids can't read...but what if they won't read or they refuse to read? What if they refuse to do anything for that matter? I can see how a teacher can get burnt out quickly...in an educational environment, there needs to be an effort made with both the teacher and the student. I feel like I don't have job to do, or that I can't do it well if my students aren't giving a better effort. I'm not in a classroom in front of these kids, so I can't really foster a personal relationship with them, I'm not sure if that would make any difference--would they let me build a relationship with them? I wonder how much of my being able to teach students will depend on my ability to reach them? Will I have to be responsible for their desire to learn as well as helping them learn? When kids don't want to learn... <----Link that talks about to get kids motivated to learn. Alright, but I just also have to add that I imagine that Mr. Harvil does care about his students and wants them to want to learn just as much as any other teacher would want their students to learn...so how should teachers respond when they literally feel like there is no hope of getting a student to respond at all? I was given a random 10 students...only 20% of them are even putting forth an effort...he probably has 100+ students...that's just scary.