Blog+Selections

= **Blog Selections:** =

**Selection #1:** This first selection was created on July 20, 2011 and is a justification of my instructional design. In this entry, I explain why I made the decisions I made related to choosing activities to do with my students. I used the New London Pedagological Framework and named eight principles that we had developed as a cohort in our Digital Literacies class.

Autumn’s Reflection of Instructional Design Clearly thought out instructional design is crucial to good teaching. To begin this process, I began by thinking of how technology in the form of a webpage can be an affordance, so that something else is offered to the students that they could not get through interaction with each other, with the teacher, or with written text. At first I zoomed in on the concept of “situated practice”, of which I define loosely as; immersion in authentic contextual materials. My activity titled “¿Cómo interpretas esta canción?” allows the students to use technology in the pursuit of critical understanding. They must listen to the song in Spanish about a boy from Colombia, click on words they don’t know, which in turn offers them images and definitions on the sidebar, and then interpret the song by drawing four images and labeling the images with titles in Spanish that they gained from the interactive webpage. This fits the following principles that we collectively wrote up in class today. 1) Principle 1. Design materials so that they ensure awareness of sociocultural perspective. * awareness of identities and forms: how people use forms to take up identities 2) Principle 5. Aligned with central question and purpose- conceptual 3) Principle 9. Situated practice is one means of improving literacy. Other means are necessary, e.g. overt instruction. 4) Principle 10.Smart design principles incorporate multidigital literacies ie, they point students to different forms of communication, sometimes asking them to separate them, sometimes to integrate them. In addition, in my activity design I sought out to address the concept of “overt instruction”, which I understand as systematic, analytic procedures used in alliance with situated practice which together lead to more critical understanding. I am working with identity and art forms which give voice to identity, so my activity titled, “Una imagen puede tener mil palabras” represents a combination of situated practice and overt instruction. The situated practice is involved with students clicking on a webpage that brings them to paintings by famous Spanish painters. The idea for overt instruction was borrowed from Kern’s book, in which the students are instructed to create a story map from a painting of choice and eventually create a story from a painting. This teaches the students a valuable skill of brainstorming and visual organization prior to writing. The following principles were addressed in this activity: 5) Principle 26. Activities are designed to give affordance for the student to participate and be active generators of knowledge.

6) Principle 14. Being diglossic requires a new multi-modal form of thinking. P: design activities to encourage students to do new multi-modal thinking, such as being diglossic (using different ‘languages’ and/or different sign systems (visual plus language, e.g.)

Finally, I came up with a third activity that is a culminating activity which asks them to create a Powerpoint that represents their own identity. They must choose five images and include words. A sharing process then takes place where they create a Venn diagram with a partner that compares and contrasts their own identities with their partners and also of Juan’s identity, who they met when they listened to the song in the above activity mentioned. This activity is best aligned with the “critical framing” because it allows them to be interpretative of both their own identity and the identity of others. The following principles are addressed.

7) Principle 12. Raises questions related to the frog - identities, connections, significance, politics, relationships, sign systems and knowledge, activities P: ie, develop literacies that include taking and recognizing perspectives out of varying and contrastive sociocultural contexts. E.g, they might transform a text produced by one identity into one produced by another.8) Principle 17. Design resources of digital literacy such as blogs should be purpose-based so that they become mediating devices that develop co-thinking and a reformulation of our assumptions (ie, blogs should sponsor reformulation of ideas: that is, ideas should be subject to rewriting and representation)

The instructional design of these activities allows students to interact with multiple literacies such as paintings and song lyrics, with the purposeful intention of arriving at a more critical understanding of how voice is expressed in different ways and how these art forms reflect identity. They then have to look within themselves to describe their own identities, using text and images and then must compare their own identity with their immediate community (their peers) as well as the extended world community (Juan). The activities of creating the powerpoint as well as the story are examples of transforming meaning into new contexts.
 * [|¿Cómo interpretas esta canción? - Interactive Song Activity] **
 * [|¿Quién eres? - Powerpoint Activity] **
 * [|Una imagen puede decir mil palabras.- Art/Story Activity] **

== **Discussion of Selection #1:** This best represents my active participation in a community of thinkers because I had to align my individual choices for instructional design with what the MATSL community believed to be critical components. This is an artifact that represents the changes I have made as a learner which are evidenced in the blending of three belief systems: what I believe as an individual, what my community believes and what the researchers believe. ==

=** Selection #2: L & A's Metalanguage Talk -> Professor comment -> Student Response **= This selection is a collaborative activity that we conducted during technology class. Linda and I shared our lesson plan activities with each other and discussed how the activities met certain criteria related to overt instruction and situated practice. We were asked to then blog about our thinking in relation to curricular design and share how our design met or did not meet the critical framework pedagogy. I have chosen this selection because there are several levels of dialogue occurring. The first entry is the actual blog which shows initial thoughts that we created in collaboration with each other. In red is a response from the professor asking for more carats and below that is my response to the feedback. == **Linda and Autumn’s Metalanguage Talk**We feel that we were successful in providing both overt instruction and critical framework in our lesson activity design. In Linda’s activity about happiness and analysis of Spanish paintings, the students have to view the painting and discuss what emotions are being expressed by the painter and explain why. This is an example of thinking through language about emotional discourse. Asking “why?” is a simple way to ask students to define their thinking and assists them to reach metalanguage, as in, use language to explain why you feel the way you do, how you arrived at these emotional stances, and in turn clarify your thinking so that others may understand your perspective. The situated practice is found in the immersion in authentic materials (in Autumn’s example a Spanish song on an interactive webpage and for Linda, the Spanish paintings). The overt instruction was represented in the design of a story web to assist students in their thinking. Another example of overt instruction was scaffolding provided by teacher when they needed to list the nouns, verbs and adjectives used to describe the painting and later when they interacted with each other with google docs and share and revise their lists. This is a good example of a community of thinkers because they are co-constructing meaning together, sharing out ideas, revising each other’s perspectives and in turn individualizing their own thinking. The digital component adds an affordance in that they can have access to the authentic materials of the Spanish paintings and text and also interact with each other from their own homes through the use of a shared google doc. ==  Peterjones3000 - == Yes to emotional discourse (discourse about emotions). So interesting how we talk about emotions, so important to get a handle on it as talk. Yes to asking "why"--and to watch carefully what happens when we do. So many whys just lead to responses that don't get pulled together and made sense of, islands of understanding created out of them (often involving a metalanguage, as you say). a string of answers to "why' is not as valuable as several that can get pulled together and organized. Yes to revising lists on google docs, and creating category labels. Students start to analyze along side of us. A rhythm between analysis and use. Probably yes to the community of thinkers, but carats are needed, or these terms get vague--co-constructing needs carats; sharing out needs carats; revising needs carats; individualizing needs carats; thinking needs carats. About the digital part: carats for 'access' 'authentic' 'interact' and specifically, what about google docs provides this.  ==   autumnbangoura  == Response to request for carats in blog entry on metalanguage talk: 1) "Community of thinkers" are the active participants in the classroom. Through purposeful interaction with each other around a specific task, they share information, personal experiences, emotional stances and beliefs. They bounce ideas off of each other and one student's words may transform another student's thinking in that they may inspire them to feel the same way, debate by presenting another point of view, or request more information from each other by asking questions. Thinkers in interaction together reflect, revise and rethink. This also can be called "co-constructing" knowledge and "revising" each other's perspectives. 2) "Sharing out" in this case refers to students taking an individual opinion, for example an opinion on how to describe a painting with Spanish words, and then making these opinions public in a class brainstorming session. 3) "individualizing" is taking the shared knowledge of the class and internalizing it, picking out what's personally important, making individual connections. 4) "Authentic" refers to that which is real. In this case, authentic materials are texts and paintings made by Spanish speaking artists and writers so that the cultural component is emphasized and blended with the development of language. Google docs is like a cyber round table discussion, but the speaking rights are even more even because the students cannot interrupt each other and do not have to raise their hand and wait to be called on so it creates an environment perfect for "sharing out" in a "community of thinkers". :) Discussion of Selection #2: I have chosen to include this blog selection because putting "carats" on my thinking is one of the ways in which I have succeeded in meeting my true north. I must admit that I have always been a writer that knows how to "beautify" my writing by plugging in key concepts and pretty words. I have jokingly nicknamed myself "la reina de la mierda de los toros", which is an ability to write in such a way that I may easily convince someone that I know what I am talking about, when I actually do not. The discourse pattern above represents a shift in this pattern of thought where I am asked to draw out what I really mean. While I was writing the response to my professor's comments I really had to think about what "community of thinkers", "co-constructing", "revising","sharing out", "individualizing" and "authentic" mean. The end result was that I was more satisfied with my own personal understanding of these concepts. == - == Selection #3: The third blog selection from my Tumblr page which I have chose to highlight is a design of a lesson plan activity which integrates the use of technology. I chose this as evidence of my thinking because I ended up using this activity in my Project Understanding and I continually built upon it as I designed it. It is an activity blending the study of identity and expression through visual art and the students are asked to create a PowerPoint as a visual representation of their own identity. The ways in which this activity grew relate directly to the ways in which I grew as a learner. == ¿Quién eres? 1. Hacer un Powerpoint de 5 páginas que representa tu identidad. 2. Usar imagenes del Internet y palabras descriptivas para cada página. 3. Usar colores que representan tu personalidad. 4. Presentar tu Powerpoint a la clase. 5. Cuando los otros estudiantes están presentando, escribe una oración completa que representa una parte de la identidad de tus compañeros de clase. Ver los ejemplos abajo. //A Maria, le gusta su familia.// //A Nick, le gusta jugar al fútbol.// 6. Escuchar la canción de Juan otra vez. __ [|Canción de Juan - niño de Colombia] __ 7. Escribir cuatro oraciones sobre la identidad de Juan. 8. Con una pareja, dibujar una digramma Venn que representa la identidad de Juan, tu identidad y la identidad de tu pareja. 9. Interpretar las simultudades y las diferencias con la clase. = ** Discussion of Selection #3: This blog excerpt best represents how I integrated concepts from all three courses to build my expertise in curricular design. I actually built this activity up further when I wrote my rationale and I have included an excerpt below from my rationale which explains the changes and extensions to the activity so that it represents building a community of thinkers. I puzzled with the concept of identity and how to teach identity and finally settled on a simple formula relating to three simple questions: Who am I? Who are we in this community? Who am I in relation to this community? I intentionally shifted my lesson plan activities to push the students towards answering these three questions. ** = = = When the students construct their own identities through performance tasks designed to encourage them to engage in self-reflection, they are also asked to publicly share their “identities” with their classmates. They first ask themselves the question, “Who am I?” when they complete their PowerPoint presentations on self-identity, and then later in interaction with others where they share and compare their own personal expressions of identities, whether in pairs, small groups or whole class discussions in presentations, they are asked to contemplate the question “Who are we?” and then ultimately arrive at the final question, “Who am I in relation to this community?” This demonstrates how the classroom is a community of thinkers, co-constructing new understandings of concepts and building independent understandings from listening to the points of view of “others”. The “others” are the Spanish artists, song composers and writers, as well as the teacher and the classmates that make up the community. This represents the complexity of languaculture because they are studying relationships between the artist and the messages that paintings carry about identity. They are connecting their own identity to a painting that speaks to them and then interpreting the significance of the painting by putting the visual form into their own personal expression with words. This connection may take the form of relating to another’s point of view, expanding their own personal point of view about identity from hearing another’s idea, agreement, disagreement, questioning and justification. When they finish their PowerPoint presentations, they are asked to focus on one question that they can ask classmates related to identity and then take this information to create a bar graph of the classroom opinion related to their question. For example, they may ask students, “What is your favorite class at school?” and they would then create a visual representation in the form of the graph, which allows the students to see one characteristic of the class identity.