Keepin' Up with the Students

“I keep my students engaged by using relevant information and include topics of interest within my classroom.” Most teachers, especially new ones, would commonly agree with this statement, which of course, is great. However, if students are reporting on the most recent Justin Bieber court case or debating on whether or not athletes should be suspended for steroid usage consistently with paper and pen, is it really all that relevant and interesting? If even high-stake tests, such as NWEA, are conducted on computers, we as teachers really need to step up our game.

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Students today are probably more tech savvy than most teachers; in order to “keep up” with them, teachers should incorporate various digital literacies within their classrooms. As a special education teacher, I am frequently introduced to innovative reading apps and other programs that are designed for students will unique needs. While these various kinds of digital literacies work well for the intended students, I do not understand why students in the general education classroom are not also given these resources, seeing that they too could benefit from them. In fact, one of my favorite lessons in a self-contained classroom derived from Edmodo discussions. Even though these students were not physically in the same room as other English I students, they had an Edmodo discussion with the other students where they both talked about the books they read and their opinion on the book. Although the task was pretty basic, both classes enjoyed being able to use IPads and having dialogue with someone they are not usually in class with. They also enjoyed responding to others’ posts and asking further questions about their partner’s book. Especially for the students that did not like to talk out loud, online discussions helped them feel like they had more control over what they are saying and helped alleviate stress because they were able to have enough thinking time, along with being able to edit what they wrote.

I still remember being excited to go to the computer lab as a high school student to research a topic. Not only was it nice to have a change of scenery, but most importantly, I was actually able to use Internet which contained a multitude of resources, instead of just a textbook or encyclopedia, which were the only resources we had in our classroom. Although I realize it isn’t possible to hold class in one’s school computer lab daily, it is important for teachers to build connections between student learning and technology, whether it be for projects or homework (if possible).

While most schools have computer labs, some schools still do not have an adequate air conditioning system, let alone a working computer lab. In these situations, teachers need to think out of the box to include digital literacies within their classroom. When I taught Romeo and Juliet for the first time, the English computer lab barely had more than five working computers for my thirty students. Not all of my students had internet on their phones or at their house, so instead of making them all find time to go to the library to create character Facebooks, I showed an example of a different literacy character’s “profile” from a past book we read on the projector. After looking at the Facebook example, each group received a large poster paper that was used to design a Facebook page for their assigned character. Although I did not use the actual digital version of Facebook, I still incorporated the aspects from the website that most students were familiar with, which they enjoyed doing. To be honest, I almost liked doing this version more than the actual online version I did the following year because this allowed my students to not only mimic something they used frequently, but also allowed the artists in my classroom to draw/paint their “profile pictures,” “cover photos,” and “shared” pictures, all while reviewing the play and conducting character analysis.