Kist- Reflection

Overall, I learned that there are so many different texts I have available to me as an English teacher other than print. I am very interested in using wikis, films, and video cameras in the classroom and love the ideas presented in Great Films and How to Teach Them by William Costanzo. I like wikis because they are easy to use and work well when creating literature circles. I love the idea of teaching literary elements using film because I feel students can easily see how these terms are applied when using film. I also like the idea of using video cameras because students can make movie trailers for a movie based on a novel which would summarize the text they read in class, or they can even act out chapters of a book or scenes of a play and record their work. I feel that students would be more interested in class projects and assignments if they are able to use different technologies and texts in the classroom.

I don't think I would have my students do a scene by scene analysis of a film, but I do like the idea of asking students questions of how a certain scene is essential to the film as a whole. I also like the film activities we completed in class and feel that they are completely relevant in teaching about different texts.

I also really enjoyed creating the multi-genre autobiography this semester and I feel that if students create one of their own, they would see how important different texts are in their lives. (I would probably assign this project at the beginning of the year.)

I found the wiki page to be helpful in thinking about what kinds of texts and technology to incorporate into the classrooms; however, I would have liked to take a closer look at the standards and create my own lesson plan. It would have been nice to go through the steps of creating multi-modal lesson plans or even a unit.The canonical wiki project was a challenge for me to create in that my assigned text is relatively new, but I was proud of myself in the end and I feel that our class wiki will prove to be an excellent resource when we are teachers.