(15) Final Project: Medieval Ballad

Medieval Ballad Matrix

“I think that ballads are always something where I can really become one with the audience,” Namie Amuro, Japanese musician and actress.

This lesson plan primarily focuses on increasing ninth to eleventh grade students’ understanding of medieval ballads. In the original lesson plan, it was a whole unit that spanned on for at least a week and incorporated modern interpretations of ballads, as well, but I decided the first half, centered on specifically medieval ballads, was cohesive enough to stand on its own, yet had just enough holes for me to modify with my own additions of technology, taken from my interactivity three group list. I think the end result is very interesting and something I would love to try in my own class. Surprisingly, some of the best technologies were subtle rather than bombastic and worked really well, despite that.

Row One (Access): Much of the introduction to this lesson requires direct teaching, lecturing, a general class discussion and individual work. I use SmartBoard, its overhead projector and/or PowerPoint to ameliorate my lecture, so there is visual, oral and auditory reinforcement for students. I can also write notes on my chalkboard to satisfy this same purpose. I open the discussion up by asking students what nursery rhymes they remember from their childhood and activate their prior knowledge. They are given examples of ballads through employment of the internet and/or use their physical anthology. Students start to compile a checklist of ballad characteristics that I use to informally, formatively assess them. They are required to find textual evidence as per the NJCCCS standard to select common characteristics. Technology is used in abundance, effectively and productively, throughout this section, in accordance with the NETS-S.

Row Two (Analyze): This section opens up with a quick review, for which the non-digital technology, the ballad checklist, is used. This helps students dissect and analyze facets of a ballad, like complexity of characters, connecting back to the NJCCCS reading standard listed. Students are then asked to scaffold off of the aforementioned section and research ballads on their own on a computer. They use websites like Early Child Ballad and No Fear Shakespeare to understand what ballads entail, as well as gleaning basic understanding from Wikipedia, all the while taking notes on Notetaker software. This meets the NETS-S requirement of using technology to locate and collect information from various sources. The NJCCCS speaking/listening are satisfied after research, whereupon students are placed into small groups and asked to collaborate and pick a ballad to create a skit out of. This will be their homework. Meanwhile, I assess them based on the notes they took in Notetaker.

Row Three (Communicate): The night before this class, students collaborate online with Class Jump, a web-based discussion board for classrooms, which works to reinforce a positive view of technology that can be used for education and collaboration, as the NETS-S standard desires. I can check their logs there for another assessment. Together, they write a script, perhaps using Microsoft Word to minimize surface errors, that imagines a detailed scenario to go along with their chosen ballads. They can refer back to their checklist for support. I collect these scripts and grade them; if all goes well, students will have satisfied the NJCCCS writing standard in this row.

Row Four and Five (Evaluate and Produce): I merged rows four and five because I felt they went hand in hand, with the students’ evaluation being a direct result of their production. In this part, students actually perform the skits they created. The whole class is given a group assessment sheet to gauge how this production occurs and students will know to revise their writing, according to the NJCCCS writing standard, based on the reaction. Their skits will also be recorded and played back on software like iMovie, so they can see for themselves how their presentation looks, through more objective eyes. If their organization in the script is cohesive enough to meet the NJCCCS writing standard in the produce part, they will likely perform perfectly fine. In regards to the speaking/listening NJCCCS standard in produce, seeing themselves perform ‘makes strategic use of digital media’ in order to self-assess. The class, meanwhile, uses the speaking/listening NJCSS standard in the evaluate section to see if they can adequately critique the performers’ use of rhetoric, strength argument and validity of evidence. A TV or computer monitor is used to replay the recorded skits for further assessment. A grade is assigned based on the final result, as well as participation prior.

Original Lesson

(14) A Creative Writing Website

One of the websites I linked for Interactivity #3 was fictionpress.com. This is an interactive fiction website where amateur writers create free accounts and share stories for other users to critique. This website is important to me for several reasons. I've noticed that I have a firmer grasp on grammar than even some fellow English majors. This isn't, unfortunately, because my teachers were so much better than theirs - though they were definitely amazing and one reason I decided to follow in their footsteps. Rather, appropriating the techniques of popular writers on websites like this and even published authors helped me improve my own skills.

I also love fictionpress because, as well as being an English educator, I think of myself as a writer. I write short stories, novellas, poetry and have attempted (but have no patience for) longer stories. Along with teaching more formal writing, I am interesting in taking on creative writing classes, too. One thing I think would be fun to do for my creative writing students is to create a website like fictionpress for them, focused on only my students rather than anyone with access to the internet. Workshops are a major component of courses like this; students share their stories with classmates, everyone reads, everyone offers a like and a dislike in class, and everyone writes about a half a page of cohesive comments, along with margin comments throughout. If, instead of doing this in class, or as well as doing this in class, students posted to this website and received critique that way, they would leave a permanent (ish) imprint of their developing work online, for them to come back to and evolve from even upon losing hard-copies, but they'd also keep the feedback they need.

This would be an informal testing procedure for me, too. In my own creative writing classes, my professor is often clueless when students don't read their classmates' stories, but if that information is available online, I can see that every student has posted and weight what it is that they did comment.

(13) Cumulative Progress Indicators

Helpful resource!

In my assessment for learning class, our final assignment requires use of cumulative progress indicators. Our professor thought we had all already heard about it, but I could not recall having done so and I was very confused while doing my assignment. Although he tried, our professor only gave a basic explanation that I couldn't really understand, and it certainly didn't have all the CPIs. Thankfully, I found this great website that gives examples of CPIs in several subjects, so not only can I create an English-oriented lesson plan now, you can all create lesson plans in your subject areas with CPIs within reach. I hope you enjoy this tool I've found.

(12) Edutopia

Source: here.

There are many interesting resources available for teachers online. It's simply a matter of looking for them. Edutopia, a website published by The George Lucas Educational Foundation, is one of these. Lucas is, of course, a legend for his contribution to science fiction, the Star Wars franchise, and technology is one facet of science. The link above offers some tips for how technology can be incorporated into an English classroom. Of the many listed, I am particularly fond of the blog idea and that involving Sonic the Hedgehog, which is somewhat similar to the Halo Odyssey video I posted about - an innovative new look at an old epic. As for the blog, I created a fantasy class blog for one of my projects last semester. Although there were no students to actually test drive it, I set up what I thought were user-friendly tools for eventual students to employ, and it was very fun for me, so I imagined it would be for my students, as well.

(11) Halo Odyssey

Last semester, I took a class somewhat similar to this one, about digital rhetoric. It discussed remix culture and how people can use the web to create new things out of old. When researching for it, I found several intriguing 'Halo Odyssey' projects. An example of one is embed above. Many of these projects were created for English classrooms like the one I will someday have myself. I think what's beneficial about these, although it's evident students have a lot of leeway, is that it's a fun assignment. Students get to manipulate characters they'd probably be playing, anyway, in order to get into the scope of their reading. I would allow my students to create projects like this. Would you?

(10) WebQuest

I am sad to say that, until recently, I did not investigate the teaching tool WebQuest. I decided to now and found out some of its very wonderful benefits.

1. Teachers are the ones who create groups on WQ, although others can, so they provide the sources. There are a plethora of these, from simple documents to spreadsheets to links.
2. The work done is very group oriented and creates a safe space for even shy students, who do not typically involve themselves in class, to participate in group discussion.
3. There are also tasks/assignments to be done on WQ, which scaffold learning with whatever source provided as the brickwork.

In these ways, WQ can increase critical thinking, but does not help with rote memorization skills involving fact or definition recall. I can, however, imagine myself using it in my classroom.

(9) Robo-Readers

(link to study)

An interesting study by the University of Akron dissects the effectiveness of virtual essay graders and whether they are better or worse than human graders. This study is very integral to English education because it impacts English teachers' jobs. My father used to jokingly say, someday robots will fulfill all needs and humans will be out of work. This may be part of the issue. If a robot can grade students' essays with the same or better results than a human educator, then the skill sets of that educator will be taken for granted. However, that isn't the only cog in the machine. Robo-Readers are praised because they are said to be more objective. The problem with this is that there haven't been nearly enough comprehensive studies over a long period of time that assess the practicality of this. In fact, the supporters and supposed scientists of these RRs may even doctor results. On page nine of the document, it states that several online graders defied state mandated terms when analyzing essays. Although it may save me time to use RRs like this, some level of subjectivity can be appropriate when reading through students' work. There's a strength of content and aspects of their personality that their essays appropriate and these must be appreciated. Like Microsoft Word, it's probably that these robots check for certain key terms and basic grammar continuity. Students may quickly figure this out and, as explained in my last entry, learn to beat and cheat their tests. Further studies must be done on these RRs before they become more heavily used, if they ever do.