Creation with Technology

This upcoming week will end with the official start of Spring Break. The students can feel it and so can I. These types of weeks are always exciting, because the countdown to a break is in the single digits. These weeks also have the potential to be the longest weeks for the same reason. The students are antsy and so is the faculty. Behavior can be rough these weeks and that is to be expected. As a result, instruction has to be top-notch. There can be no slacking, otherwise students will shut-down early. I also want to end our instruction on a high before the break because I know that students will not be studying consistently over the break. With all of this in mind, I want to focus on having student create. If students are creating, they are working at the highest level of thinking. However, they can't "create" just anything. The assignment needs to be aligned with the content we are working with. It needs to push their thinking.

For my 9th graders, this week includes their mid-term. I am anxious to see their progress, because their 4.5 week assessment was awful. They completed that assessment on the day I returned from maternity leave. I knew that the scores would be shaky, but I wasn't expecting it to be that bad. It was evident that we needed to work on pulling information from the text, grammar skills and general comprehension. The first major text that we worked with was The Odyssey. I have a vision of students re-telling the story with a modern update. I think this would be really fun for the students, and really help them understand the idea of an "epic" and a text that is really the fundamental text for the classic "journey story." In my last blog, I spoke about them creating a video. I'm thinking of giving students option to make a radio show or a video. I think there is a lot of potential for this project, I will just need to keep them on track.

My AP juniors have been working hard on As I Lay Dying. It is a complex text and they already have a project due after Spring Break using Multi-genre, however I also want to do a class project. I have recently found a source that explores how to make a "Story Corps." For those unfamiliar, Story Corps is made up of interviews between individuals. I'm thinking of having students explore narration by creating their own interviews between he different characters. I think they would really enjoy this process and it would show their understanding of the characters and the relationships. Today I am going to create the assignments, so we'll see how it goes!