(3) Interactivity #3

Spreadsheet: HERE.

Despite being very large, my interactivity group authentically collaborated as much as possible. Girard and Lizz set up a Google spreadsheet and contacted the rest of us with it promptly. We replied back to their emails with the address we employed when first creating our blogs. From then on, it was a matter of adding appropriate info to the spreadsheet. What I especially enjoyed about the process was, I could see changes my group members made as they were making them, meaning I had that much more insight into their thought processes without being face to face with them. Meeting in that way was troublesome because we had so many members with so many varying schedules, which made the group spreadsheet's features that much better. I believe everyone worked in a timely manner and put thought into their technologies. I operated by arranging my technologies according to the stages of pedagogical development and it seems everyone else did, too. For each stage, about two to three technologies were added (i.e. EBSCO Host + JSTOR for content management, Google docs for collaboration).

The list we've created will, I have no doubt whatsoever, be a wonderful tool for my future student teaching, fieldwork and classroom experiences. Not only did I list technologies that helped me shape my life, I have concurrent additions by peers, so I can see what they consider important when teaching in an English classroom. For example, a technology I listed that I don't think anyone else would have added is the website Fictionpress. It's a gathering of amateur writers and poets who give one another feedback and glean from that feedback ameliorated skills. This interaction could be an innovative way to increase students' love of writing; it certainly had that effect on me. On the other hand, many of my group-mates had technologies I didn't think of. Mike Cadmus mentioned digital storytelling. Where Fictionpress is a traditional means of narrating and expressing ideas, digital storytelling creatively endorses multiple-modalities, something which was discussed in a digital rhetoric class I took last semester. Students are more likely to be riveted if they are allowed to write a story, make a movie, create an online presentation, or anything along those lines, rather than simply composing an essay. I will definitely be saving a copy of our list for further use in future lessons.

(2) Interactivity #2

Instructional films in the 1900s were used by educators to propagate specific social agendas, just as certain texts in literature classrooms and schools today are employed to, for example, promote democratic values, as Montclair State's Portrait of a Teacher dictates.

Sources: Image is from Google. Portrait of a Teacher is paraphrased.