Blog #4 Wesch and Turkle

I have thought of the different dichotomies and connections between Wesch and Turkle, but I think my review on them is how they are advocating on the same team.  Sure, they have different positions, but their end goal is the same.  I would like to look at the final lines they left us with:
 
"My job becomes less about teaching, and more about encouraging students to join me on the quest." - Wesch
"So I say, look up, look at one another, and let’s start the conversation." - Turkle

Both are advocating for conversations to happen in the classroom, and outside the classroom.  I am so enthralled with how they are united, that I am forgetting why I ever thought they were polar opposites.  I guess I could see how Turkle is committed to the idea of taking away technology for students to understand the art of having a conversation.  While Wesch is trying to balance the idea of having 500 students in a classroom and allowing them to discover their own takeaways from history through their own means.  I think the difference is their class size can create a huge change in the teaching style.  If Wesch was able to have more intimate conversations with his students, I imagine he would be more like Turkle.

Here is a clip from John Green about what will be on the test.  #AcademicCrush

SCWAAMPy Evening Post

Blog #5 Stenciling Dissent

I read a few different articles from Rethinking Schools Popular Culture and Media because I could not find an article that spoke to me as a teacher working with emergent bilinguals.  I read Freedom Writers: White Teacher to the Rescue, City Teaching, Beyond the Stereotypes, Sticking it to the Man, More Than Just Dance Lessons, and I began reading 'And Ya Don't Stop': Hip Hop in the Language Arts Classroom.  None of these really spoke to me as a vehicle to speak to my kids.  What I want to discuss in more depth, is the excerpt, Stenciling Dissent: Political Graffiti Engages Students in the History of Social Justice.  (Page 299 in our textbook)  This caught my eye because I recently thought about buying the Che Guevara 672 page biography.  Che Guevara is infamously stenciled on shirts in an iconic stencil fashion. 



via GIPHY


Anyways, I digress.  So, the excerpt was about a history teacher who wanted to revamp his lesson on the power of protest by bringing ethnic studies to the class.  He discusses the population of his students and how they are immigrants or children of immigrants.  By allowing the students to choose their own topic for their researched-based persuasive essay, he gave them the chance to make meaningful connections to their world.  However, he realized that he had to help the students find out about these less proliferated social activists so he generated a list to help with their initial topic.  Some examples of topics include Emma Tenayuca, Fred Korematsu, and Ludlow Massarce.  All three of these topics, I am sadly not familiar with.  After the students wrote their persuasive essay, the teacher took the time to have his students make the project come to life by making a stencil of their topic.  He says, "Stencils are often used as a form of street protest, not just in the United States, but throughout the world as well, because they're easy to make, quick to apply, and can be used over and over."  The stencils give the feel of graffiti that my students often see in our school's neighborhood.  It is interesting how the teacher received negative feedback from his colleagues who were confused about why Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks were not a part of the project.  Almost as to say that these revolutionaries were not as important as others. 

I am really interested in this project about stenciling dissent because my students could collaborate with my friend, Kevin.  Kevin randomly took up spraypainting and stencils.  He has been asked to do shows and has even started selling his work.  I have included one of his most recent pieces that has different fonts from media companies making up the words, "Media made me do it."  He has the Nike and Disney iconic fonts involved and at first I did not realize it, almost to say that it was a subliminal message. 

I would highly advise reading this chapter because it has a great hands on project that is thought provoking and a memorable activity for students. 

Also, here are two links that were found at the end of the excerpt. 

Just Seeds Just Seeds is a non-profit organization creating social justice awareness through art.

Stencil Revolution is a website where you can by an arrangement of stencils or learn how to make some.  How to make moss graffiti

Blog #4 GoFormative as a Digital Tool

via GIPHY

If I had to give GoFormative an emoji rating it would look like this: 🙆😩😨

Let me explain:
🙆 This guy represents how I was excited to begin and thought that this was the answer to how I was going to teach in the future.

😩 This is my weary face when I realized it didn't save my students' work the one time I used it before.

😨 This is when I realized that I would have to pay for a subscription if I wanted the cool features such as audio responses, which would be great for my emergent bilingual students. 

Formative teaching is quickly identifying what students know and intervening so they can learn more.  My problem with that definition and this technology tool is the amount of time that it may take for students to access a computer and log into goformative.com.  While it is an interesting tool and can be used in a multitude ways, I wish it was already implemented on a learning platform like Google Classroom.  If I decided to use GoFormative, I would have to be completely committed to using it for the whole schoolyear and then I would want all the features, which costs money.  On the other hand, you can easily embed other websites like Vocaroo or Edpuzzle into your assessment without having to make accounts for those sites.  Perhaps goformative will become a bigger beast than Google Classroom.  Ironically, Goformative does not have a PowerPoint feature yet, so here is their explanation of their site in Google Slide Presentation on GoFormative. 

I made an example of things you can use on the site.  Watch my video below.

Here is a picture of what real time work could look like:

Here is a dashboard with all the pretty things you can do with data.

I would be a little leery because I feel like this is only accessible if you have students and the account that costs money.  That is another downfall of the program; I am not able to mess around and try it because I do not have student info.  I wish they gave me a demo with student data.

Also they have a community forum where others can discuss, share, and learn new ways of using the app. 

Overall, it is an interesting website and platform, but if you decide to use it, you should commit to using it the whole year.  I say this because I think it will be important to stay constant with this for your sanity and for the sanity for the students. A part of me hopes that Google Classroom will just buy them out so Google Classroom can have all these features.  Another thought, is that this is not a quick tool unless your students are 1:1 with devices.  I think only with time would this become a quick tool for collecting formative data.  It would take lots of patience as well. 

via GIPHY

Princess Finlay Blog #3

My mom found out I was a girl when I was still in her womb.  My dad chose not to know the gender for either of his kids and when I was born I was a surprise to him.  I would be the second daughter for my parents.  My dad may have secretly wanted a son, but he never said that out loud.  Growing up, he gave us opportunities to learn from.  I learned different things that might be considered boyish in today's society.  We learned to snowmobile, fourwheel, change a tire, or change the oil. 

My dad is a firefighter and I can remember the other firefighters saying things to me when I was younger like, "where's your Barbie?"  And I would respond with "I hate Barbie!"  I was never a Barbie collector or doll collector.  I did not fancy myself as a Disney Princess when I was younger, however I am currently joking with my boyfriend that my biological clock is ticking and I have baby fever.  This led us to an interesting conversation about whether or not it was nature or nurture.  Do women actually have a biological clock because that is how we sustain as a species, or is it a myth to keep us entranced in the princess realm?    

Thinking about my nieces who are 4 and 5 years, and were obsessed with the Frozen movie when it first came out has left me feeling like a bad aunt.  They were Anna and Elsa for Halloween that year and I had to stop myself from lecturing my sister about the implications.  This past Halloween one was a bad witch and one was a character from a movie called the Descendants.  They both have implications and stereotypes supporting the female representation. 

I think about the shows I watch with them.  There is Doc McStuffins and Octonauts, which each come with their own laundry list of stereotypes they are fulfilling and rebelling against.

Day 2 A Dream Deferred

Practice makes Practice:
A Dream Deferred
Made with StoryMap

Digital Native versus Digital Immigrant

When I first heard Dr. Bogad say the terms "digital native" and "digital immigrant"  I felt that they are politically incorrect.  I feel as though because of the times we currently live in that the word immigrant and native should not be used in a light hearted context.  It opens a can of worms to create more metaphorical terminology that could potentially degrade someone who is trying to learn a new language and culture.     In the article It’s Complicated I am glad to see how they recognized the view, “From an ethnic studies perspective, the language of “natives” and “immigrants” is particularly fraught.”  (I am currently working towards my master’s in Teaching English as a Second Language.)  The implications of people being labeled as immigrant or native perpetuates a stereotype that immigrants cannot bring their own literacy skills to the new culture when they can and should.

Also, why not make new terminology for the new concepts.  For example, I love the idea of calling people either computer noobs or computer gurus.  Here are two terms that will not offend our emigrating world.  Plus, at least when I was in middle school and high school, students were given keyboarding classes to properly train us on a qwerty keyboard.  Nowadays, students are not taught how to type at their fastest rate so what does that do to how their brain is wired to the computer and future endeavors?    

Lastly, I think the implications of saying because students are brought up in a digital age does not mean they are digital natives.  For instance, this is another stereotype because it is making assumptions that all students are using computers in their free time.  This could be incredibly troublesome for someone who is actually an immigrant and has never worked with a computer in his or her life before.  For someone who is a noob to computers we could show them real world examples of propaganda or false news compared to what we see in today’s world.  For digitally literate students we could do the reverse lesson, in order for them to see how propaganda has evolved.  This is one way we can connect what we see in the real world to what we see in the computer screen.