Podcast

(Assessment) The podcast project is a good one for students because it shakes up students' expectations and lays bare the process that goes into creating much of the audio they encounter on a daily basis. By seeing how audio clips can be split, cut and blended together they can detect tricks that are used to hide the seams in the audio they encounter (Reflection). The format is widely different from the standard 5-paragraph essay; students must be audibly engaging and must condense their points to account for the fact that audiences can't as easily reread when they miss something important (Integration). It stretches their brains so that they can work with ideas in a wider variety of contexts. In the future I will have students make podcasts so that they can better understand media technology (Integration).

Google Earth

(Assessment) The Google Earth technology has great potential to help students contextualize places they've never been to. (Reflection) Not only can they see what two different places look like and the distance between them (as they can with the already potent combination of google image search and google maps), they can also witness the journey from one to the other itself with Google Earth's trip planning features. This gives them a more accurate idea of the relationship between times and distances. I plan to use Google Earth to help students understand the length of the journey the Joads take in the Grapes of Wrath (integration).

iMovie

(Assessment) iMovie is a (relatively) intuitive interface and a vital tool  for expanding students' literacy. Giving students the opportunity to conceptualize, plan, shoot and edit a movie will take them into the minds of those who create the audio-visual experiences that permeate their lives. I believe it can help give students an understanding of what this technology is capable of and the subtle tweaks it can enact upon an image, thereby allowing them to better distinguish fantasy from reality when reviewing images and sounds (Reflection). As an English teacher, I plan to use imovie to teach students how manipulating sound and images is similar to manipulating words, and how both can craft our expectations and thinking (integration).

Concept Map Tool

The concept map tool we used in class seemed to have a relatively intuitive interface, but was so highly specialized that at times it felt impossible to get the program to do anything outside the box. I think the tool would be very useful to those who are new to concept maps, but for more experienced students I might recommend MS Paint so that they could experiment more with forms and ideas.

Photoshop

From an Expanded Literacy point of view the most pertinent use of photoshop lies in making students aware of its influence in their lives. Exploring what the product is capable of and comparing photoshopped images in magazines to non-photoshopped originals can help students better understand the relationship between the media and their perceptions of their bodies  and reality. This could further be used to expose students to the more general concept of "hyper-reality," sparking discussion of other examples of the principle at work.

iweb

I've experimented with a number of WYSIWYG website programs in the past; when I was a kid I used to goof around with Front Page, Angel Fire and Geocities. Like iweb these were great, intuitive programs that allow you to publish material on-line without requiring a great deal of technical know-how.

This is something more students should be made to do; the fact that it wasn't a part of my highschool education indicates that my education was already obsolete. Being able to publish directly to the web gives students the satisfaction of seeing a piece of their own work presented to the world, with the added benefit that their work can then interact and participate with the rest of the massive conversation we call the internet.

Finally, I think programs like this are going to be appealing to contemporary students who are already using applications like Facebook, twitter, etc. to create personalized webspaces for themselves. Encouraging students to use a more free-form web publishing tool allows them more opportunity to express themselves in terms of web design, lay out and the kind of information they wish to provide. It can also free students from the financial structure of sites like Facebook, which by design suck them into a web of targeted advertising, information-mining and privacy violation.

Wikis in the Classroom

I think it's important that we not only expose students to how Wikis work, but how they operate in "the wild" as well. As it stands, the Wiki is one of the most important learning tools of our generation- not for providing the in-depth and comprehensive knowledge available only in classrooms, but for giving easy and intuitive access to a wide range of topics and for making the relationships between those topics explicit with the use of hyperlinks.

Wiki-learning is conversational and self-directed, in the sense that Wiki participants choose the path they take from topic to topic and can contribute their own findings and opinions when appropriate. For that reason I hope to encourage my students not only to use Wikis in specific classroom-directed activities, but also to view the Wiki as a vital tool for sustaining their innate curiosities.