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Facebook at School

November 20, 2008 By 3 Comments

What goes around, comes around … and goes around again. And when we’re talking about social media, it seems the speed of that cycle is just that much faster.

For example, Facebook is already retro. At the end of our last school year — that would be June of this year, only five months ago — I heard students saying, “Facebook! Oh that’s sooooo 10 minutes ago!” There must have been a change of heart over the summer, however, for it now seems to be enormously popular with that same crowd.

Facebook is one of those tools that I have wanted to incorporate into the classroom, but I’m finding my efforts to do so frustrated.

Before I go any further, I will state emphatically that I have no interest in becoming Facebook “friends” with students, a move that in my opinion would be completely unprofessional.

There are a couple of ways that I have tried to use Facebook as a tool for building students’ ability to make connections between texts and their world. First, I like to ask them to build a Facebook profile for a main character. Take Macbeth, for example. Students learn a lot about the Thane by building him a Facebook profile and thereby asking questions like, “Who are his friends? What groups would he join? What would be on his wall?”

The second main use I’ve found for Facebook is as a tool for students who are building media campaigns. Creating a Facebook group and event for imaginary media campaigns is a natural choice for students. Doing so helps them reconsider questions like who their target audience is and what images best communicate their ideas.

But I’m finding my efforts to use Facebook stymied by school internet security. (More on that another day.) In short, I can’t access Facebook in the classroom or lab. This means that students can’t present their online Facebook work, and I can’t evaluate it. And since becoming a ‘friend’ with a student is not an option for me personally, I’m not going to be able to evaluate it outside of the classroom, either

So I guess that what I’m looking for now is a blank electronic template that looks like a Facebook profile. Perhaps a template that is created in PowerPoint and links only from slide to slide rather than to actual online groups or friends. If done well, the students might really enjoy the activity.

Or maybe I could go back to paper and pen. Or to quill and ink. Or perhaps chalk and slate.

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Image by Jacob Botter

Filed Under: 21st Century Skills Tagged With: , , , , ,

Alternatives to the five-paragraph essay: Series Introduction

October 29, 2008 By 6 Comments

This semester I have been thinking about, reading about, and looking up alternatives to the five paragraph essay. I feel that I’m at a good point in my learning to take stock of what I’ve discovered and invite some feedback.

It probably comes as no surprise that I have become disenchanted with the five paragraph (or 32-sentence) essay. Why? I believe that thoughtful writing is a critical skill that we teachers have the opportunity to encourage our students to develop. I do not believe that every piece of thoughtful writing can be expressed in five neat paragraphs: introduction, three arguments, and conclusion. I believe that the structure of writing should emerge from the ideas and assist in expressing them, rather than strong-arming them into a neat format that, coincidentally, is easy to mark.

Five-paragraph essays are tidy; emerging thinking is not. I wonder if by relying on formulaic writing we are insulating ourselves from the messiness of teaching students how to develop and express an opinion? Teaching a form is relatively easy: a couple of fill-in-the-blank forms go a long way to completing the lesson. Encouraging students to develop and express their ideas is entirely different.

So in the upcoming days, I’ll examine alternatives to the five-paragraph essay that I’ve encountered. Some of these alternatives I’ve tried out in some fashion; some I haven’t yet.

Here’s what’s in store:

  • Collaborative essays
  • Scripted dialogue
  • Reading narratives
  • Multi-genre papers
  • And what I’m calling “The Organic Essay”

One final note: Many of you will recognize Bruce Pirie’s fingerprints all over this series. It would be hard to overestimate the impact that his writing has had on my own teaching practice. If you haven’t read his Reshaping High School English or Teenage boys and high school English, I cannot recommend them highly enough. (If you’re an Ontario teacher, you can borrow a copy from the Ontario College of Teachers library — if I don’t have it out at the time, of course.)

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Image by tosaytheleast

Filed Under: Writing Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Lesson Debrief: Political scandals introduce "An Ideal Husband"

October 1, 2008 By Leave a Comment

I decided to mix things up a bit in my Grade 12 English (College level) course this semester, and am using An Ideal Husband as our modern drama instead of my usual Crucible.

We started by talking about what constitutes a scandal. We watched a video clip about Agriculture Minister Gerry Ritz’s recently infamous comment regarding the Listeriosis outbreak. The clip showed the political mileage that the opposition is getting out of his “death by a thousand cold cuts” pun.

It turns out that seventeen year-olds are not easily offended or outraged. Even the glimpse that they took at the deathby1000coldcuts online game hardly raised an eyebrow.

Students were given the task of researching a modern North American scandal. In groups of 2-3, they spent an hour finding information about one of the following:

Their job was to introduce the scandal to their classmates in their own words in less than a page.

On Day 2, students created a brief timeline of the main events of their scandal and then each wrote a paragraph answering the question: “Was it really an awful or shameful thing, or was it merely sensationalized?”

Finally, students posted all of their work on the class wiki.

What worked well

  • Students were eager to research these terms and names that they’ve heard, wanting to defend Mulroney or denounce the Liberals with the Gomery Inquiry. (The school seems to be in a staunchly Conservative riding.)
  • Hearing exclamations like, “So that’s what Watergate was!”
  • The variety of websites that students encountered, many of them news and history sites.
  • The exercise of paraphrasing challenged the students to understand the material and communicate it clearly.

What needs work

  • The wiki and the school server continue to butt heads, and many of our attempts to edit pages on the wiki were rejected. This may be a Wetpaint issue, as I haven’t had any problems like this with Wikispaces.
  • The students who researched Iran-Contra are still scratching their heads.
Filed Under: Lessons Tagged With: , , , ,