Ryan, Dawn, Olivia and I met to discuss the novel, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie. We all concurred that the novel was fantastic and compared it’s style to that of Diary of a Wimpy Kid, by Jeff Kinney, because of it’s use of humor and drawings to engage the reader and it’s universal appeal.  The group also reached the consensus that the novel would be best for ages 13 and up for reasons of talk of suicide, and self love.  The pervasive idea that Native American Indians were treated so horrifically, and still are in the current day and age was appalling to the group.  We were aghast that Junior had to have ten teeth removed at the same time with little anesthesia….how inhumane and gut wrenching for us to read and acknowledge what happened in the not so distant past. This led us to talk about racism against other ethnic groups as well as racism around the world. It was difficult to pull the group back  and remind them that the United States of America is not the only country that deals with racism and that it is endemic to the majority of countries in the world. This group discussion was the most intense one and brought out raw feelings and emotions from several of the participants.

WOW!  The plethora of new tech tools that I have been introduced to in just one week is totally amazing!

The first one that I interacted with was Colleen King’s introduction to: Google Spotlight Stories  

(Carrs, 2018)

This tool is a VR (Virtual Reality for those not in the know) that you can download onto your phone and interact with a story in a way that I have never done before!  Once I downloaded the app, it turned my phone into a VR viewer of the story content on Google Spotlight Stories.  By moving my phone from side to side and up and down, I could see different angles of the story.  I watched, Age of Sail, directed by John Kahrs, and as I moved the viewfinder, I could see the endless horizon of water, the entire side of the steamer, and the entirety of the long shadows cast by William and Lara as they stood on the steamer that rescued them. Yes, I am a fan and cannot wait to show it to my 5 year old niece.

The next one is Susan Strab’s find of: MLA Citation Maker (Oregon School Library Information System) https://secondary.oslis.org/@@mla-secondary

This is a potential game changer. I was the long-term substitute English teacher at the middle school level and witnessed glaring citation errors in the students’ work.  They seemed to feel that as long as they copied and pasted the website they found the information from, and usually only one source, that they had done their job of citing the source. They all knew that they needed to cite their work to avoid plagiarism; but the mechanics of proper MLA citation were not something they understood.

(Infographic World, 2014)

My initial knee-jerk reaction to this question was a distinct and firm…NO!  I clearly recall having a former student gleefully chortle about how he had gone on to Wikipedia and changed something to make it completely irrelevant and absurd while researching information for his science class. (This after I had sternly admonished my classes to NOT use Wikipedia as a reliable source for their papers!) I was completely aghast and was unfortunately not surprised that he had done something like this (yes, you would not want to meet this student anywhere ever…shivers still just thinking about him)

However, that was over 10 years ago.  Today is a new day, 2019, and Wikipedia is much improved and stricter with their policies so that kind of irreverence is quickly and succinctly removed.

After looking at the Wikipedia Instructor Basics: How to use Wikipedia as a Teaching Tool I was very impressed and actually began to change my mind as I perused potential valid uses for teachers and students at the university level.  I’m not so sure it would work at the middle school level, which is what I currently teach, although the students may be able to handle the assignment regarding adding illustrations to an article. My students are very adept at taking pictures and video.  After I had done the assignment for this class on making a multimedia book trailer and showed them one on the book, Monster, that we are reading, they wished they could use more multimedia tools to make book reports. I believe that this would be a big hit and thinking further on it, could see designing a lesson, including a field trip, around the author, Avi, since he lived in Providence at one time, and I checked and there are no pictures of his home in Providence? We could also check out other historical buildings and or streets that other famous authors lived on and bring this whole project full circle with a bulletin board display outside of the library with the pictures and novels they are associated with, and links on the school and library website to showcase their work.  also have them explain the detailed planning and thought process regarding their assignments.

Another aspect of working on the illustrations for Wikipedia that has me intrigued is, “created videos that demonstrated audiovisually what articles describe in words.” ( Wikimedia Foundation, 2013, p.4) We know that not everyone learns in the same way and that pictures are a way to describe something without words, so anyone in any language,  and for the most part of any age as long as they have the correct reference point,  can understand it’s meaning. For many people, having that audiovisual aid is crucial to their learning and may even be essential.   In fact, the brain processes images 60,000 times faster than it does text. And it’s more accustomed to processing images—ninety percent of the information sent to the brain is visual, and 93% of all human communication is visual.”  Retrieved from https://www.business2community.com/digital-marketing/visual-marketing-pictures-worth-60000-words-01126256 I can also see that this would be very beneficial for those students who are English Language Learners.

Collection Analysis

(Gonzalez, 2014)