- I’ve used social media in my classroom before, but only in a
rather broad sense. For instance, I asked my students to publish one of their
multimedia projects somewhere online. I gave suggestions to guide my students
in publishing online, but still left the field way too open. In fact, I may
have just ended up confusing a few of my students! I’d like to integrate more
effectively by sticking to specific platforms that I have more power to monitor
over (a facebook group or Tumblr blogs, perhaps) because I do find that my
students are much more motivated to put out published work when they are aware
that a non-class-related audience may be reading.
Collaborative Productivity Tools
- I have never assigned the use of collaborative productivity
tools in my classroom before, but I’ve seen other teachers do so very
effectively (particularly when it comes to Google Docs). Most likely, I’d be
integrating collaborative tools by having students create group documents
online or create class notes that each student must contribute a certain number
of entries to, and would be using Google Docs to do so similarly to my
co-workers. This platform is particularly useful because all EMU students
already have EMU Google accounts and therefore won’t have to go through a big
sign-up process in order to access documents I’ve created. Instead, I’d just
drop a folder into the class Google Drive. I’ve also heard really good things
about Prezi’s collaborative tools, so I plan to look into those for group
presentation creation.
Classroom Management Software
- In terms of classroom management, I quite honestly have
never found myself managing much of the classroom anywhere but online. Because EMU integrated the Canvas course shell a couple
of years ago, I’ve made myself very familiar with using that system to add an
attendance sheet, track grades, comment on student work, and upload class files
and information. I’ve even managed to create interactive syllabi and schedules
using the Canvas system! I did find myself interested in some of the classroom
tools that we looked at in this week’s readings (particularly Google’s
platform), but don’t want to have “too many cooks in the kitchen” when it comes
to classroom management apps. I feel like even integrating two would make me
confused as to what app manages what aspect of my class.
Integrating New Literacies
- Finally, I’d like to wrap up this final blog post with a
discussion of this course overall. As I mentioned in my very first post here
back in June, I came into this class very nervous and feeling like the odd one
out because I didn’t major in Reading or teaching in undergrad and teach a classroom
of young adults. During our first unit, however, I quickly realized just how
easily I could apply the concepts of this course to my own teaching career with
minor changes. Many if not most of the apps we read about, for instance, could
be used in college classrooms as well as in a K-12 setting. I found myself
particularly drawn to the multimodality unit, because teaching multimodality in
writing is actually one of the main focuses we’re told to have in our writing
classrooms! I’ve always wanted to incorporate more technology into my classroom
but never knew exactly how to go about it. This class gave me concrete ideas,
examples, and lists of useful software that’ll make doing so much easier on me.
This month, I plan on re-writing one of the projects I’m assigning this fall to
revolve around podcasting thanks to this course.
Thanks for the great semester, and I hope you all have a
lovely 2017-2018 school year!
