I decided to do a BLOG on blogger.com rather than myspace because I already have a personal account with myspace and wanted to be able to compare them. Although this site was very easy to use, I like the myspace because it has more variety and because I am familiar with its layout. The templates for blogger.com seem to be very restricting where as myspace has thousands of different layouts and no two pages ever look the same.
This RRC was interesting because it allowed me to search for websites that connect to my content that I can use in the classroom next year. With Regent's Living Environment, I feel it is pretty hard to find popular culture that connects to the content. Animation, corny songs and interactive web sites were most of the information out there.
I realize next year I will most likely be teaching Living Environment which is why I wanted to explore within this subject. Unlike the Living Environment course, AP would have more connections between the content and popular culture due to the more in depth nature of the course. Fad diets could be researched to connect what the students see celebrities doing and how those diets affect the storage of nutrients in the body. Also, steroids in athletics could be examined to see exactly what steroids are being used in addition to how they affect athletic performance due to their impact on the body.
A BLOG could be very useful in the classroom to direct students to interactive website and connect to their out of school literacies (Hinchman, Alvermann, Boyd, Brozo, Vacca, 2004). By having students listen to a song and watch an animated movie on mitosis, the students use different "texts" to facilitate their learning and accommodate different learning styles.
The activities on my BLOG are multi-modal because its uses "new forms of communication media" to engage students in learning difficult and often dry material (Love, 2005). Also, by having students create their own BLOG and post biology related content on it, they are now redesigning the activity to "construct new meaning" (Love, 2005). Students could post information they explored on the internet relative to the Living Environment course on their BLOG and explain why they find the activity helpful to engage their classmates in learning as well.
References
Hinchman, A., Alverman, D. E., Boyd, F., Brozo, W. G., Vacca, R. (2004). Supporting older students' in-and-out-of school literacies. Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, 47(4), 304-311.
Love, M. S. (2005). Multimodality of learning through anchored instruction. Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, 48(4), 300-311.
2 comments:
I really enjoyed your blog. Having an English background, finding websites were pretty easy for me to find to link to my content area but I imagine it was pretty difficult to find age-appropriate and student friendly websites.
I liked the interactive-ness of the first site (biology in motion). It was very student friendly and if I were a student in your class it would be an easy way to get my questions asked if I weren't in school. I always fear that my students will get lost when they are not in the classroom and have no one to speak to for guidance, this website really would quench a lot of my fears because there are so many places to go to seek advice.
For the AIDS website, I guess I would want to know exactly what you planned on doing with it in your classroom. Would you use it as an enhancement? Or for more sources to give to your students? Would you use it for interactive means? Although I was a bit thrown off by this website, I think it could be used well in Critical Literacies and helping your students question what they are reading. There is so much discrimination when the topic of AIDS is brought up and while I do not know if the website can be utilized to examine the many facets, both social and scientific to the disease.
I love the brainpop site! It's so exciting! Very informative and I like that it's animation doing the teaching, not just a person videotaped answering questions. Besides Bill Nye I can not think of any kid friendly science guides. And as teachers at the high school level we walk a thin line between coddling and being over the top with our explanations.
I don't even know how you could have done it, was possibly incorporate less "school" like activities and websites. Building a bridge for science is hard, but I wonder if there are websites out there that appeal to student's pop culture a bit more. You did a nice job though to keep it away from teacher-y websites and none were too boring or something that a kid would shy away from. This seems to be tuned into pop culture for you, it represents your work as both a graduate student and teacher but I wonder if they "school-yness of the sites would scare them off and deem it too close to school. Although, the songs disprove that statement a bit, students (or at least many that I have interacted with) try to make words up for various songs that are popular for them and I am sure they will recognize many of the songs from the website.
The sites you've chosen here seem like they would be excellent ways to introduce multimodality into your lessons, in an environment that should be comfortable for most students. The videos on cells alive are a lot more helpful than the illustrations I remember from my old biology text book.
Greg's Science Song Music is a very interesting way to bridge pop culture and science. While it's not that new of an idea to rewrite lyrics for the classroom, I think that the wide variety of songs available might show students that science can actually be fun to think of outside of the context of the classroom.
I was wondering how you would approach critical literacy with these sites, especially as science tends to shy away from critically reading against things that are considered fact.
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