On My Current Digital Teaching Activities...

I've got a lot of ideas on how to use some of what we've been talking about in class in my own class, getting it all together is another mater, of course.

Let me tell you what I am doing right now.

My ELL English class (high level ELL students who aren't quite ready for a regular English class) is working on writing in preparation for the BST. We are spending some time on five paragraph essays since I've got to get these kids to pass, but we are also spending a lot of time on a digital writing project.

I started by having all the kids make a time line of their life. It had to include the ten most important events that they were willing to share with the class. I included the comment about "willing to share" because some of these kids are refugees fleeing from some terrible things, and i don't want to make anyone uncomfortable. However, with that said, I also encourage the students to choose important "difficult" and "sad" things, not just the ten best things that ever happened to them.

Next, we went through a series of writing exercises on story telling. Then they had to choose one of the events from their life to create a story about. They started by hand-writing their stories, but eventually they had to move to a computer and type. This is the arduous portion of the lesson. Most of the students have used a computer to surf the internet and watch itube, but few have ever typed something. I made up several lessons on word processing skills and made them as interesting as I could.

Finally, I am now having them create blogs (I created them and invited the students to join later) and post their short autobiographies on their blogs. It took days to sort out signing up and setting up their blogs to look like they wanted. Of course, these blogs will not have their real names on them and will be set up as private when I create them. Next, they will have blog partners that will comment on their autobiographies, and I will post feedback for their autobiographies. We will continue to work and edit these stories until they are pretty polished.

Lastly, when this is all done, I am going to take volunteers who would like to share their stories with my other classes at the school. Depending on how many volunteers I get I may have to offer extra credit or some such thing. There is a good amount of prejudice and animosity from the American students toward the ELL students at my school. My other English classes will have to read the ELL students electronically published autobiographies and post comments (after some scaffolding about appropriate comments). Hopefully, these very honest and intense stories will help my regular ed students empathize with their foreign born peers a little more.

Also, showing my regular ed students the on-line work of my ELL students will hopefully create some excitement about digital writing and kick off a unit for them in which they will be researching the work of a poet of their choice (and the definition of poetry here is pretty broad) and create a blog about that person.

It's not the most high tech of assignments. Just blogs, you know? But it is something they can do, that they have never done, and will really stretch their computer skills. It has also gotten them pretty exited about writing...