Week Six: Digital Learning Day

When I initially scanned the blog posts on the NWP website one in particular caught my eye, Digital Learning Day: Collaborative Romeo and Juliet Blogging Community. I can remember reading Romeo and Juliet in my ninth grade English class and I was intrigued to see this teacher's new perspective on the unit using technology. After reading her post I realized the entire unit was based on some form of technology whether it is blogging, tweeting, or using voicestream to record students acting out the play. The unit was done in conjunction with another school that used the same projects so that students could connect with other kids reading the play. The voicestream recordings were shared between the schools which allowed for another level of collaboration and connection.

The idea of a blogging community reminded me of what we are doing right now in our Reading and Adolescent Lit class except this teacher employed it as a substitute for quizzes and had students blog from a characters point of view. In the article the teacher includes one example of a student’s blog as Tybalt which allowed for them to set up a Facebook style profile for the character with the character’s name, picture, hobbies, favorite song, and secrets and fears. I thought this was a very interesting way to get students involved with both the text and the characters’ perspectives. I think the blogging community could also substitute as a form of journal responses if you used it in a different way by having students blog as the character saying what happened during the scene or act they read in class.

                I really enjoyed reading this blog post and I thought the teacher had a lot of great ideas for utilizing technology in the classroom. If you don’t get to read the whole post here is an important quote that I took away from reading it, she describes the school that she teaches at, “Technology is not viewed as a separate entity needing a specific time to be etched into the classroom for use, in fact it reminds me a lot of the dichotomy between reading and writing; technology infused curriculum is the norm here, a natural part of pedagogy and student learning.” I think this is where we are heading in the future in terms of bringing technology into the classroom. It will soon be a natural part of teaching and not seen as something that we need to try to incorporate.