Sam's Whirlwind of Thoughts

After reading pages 136-140 in the NES book, I actually learned many things. The main thing I learned was how important Media Literacy is. The five key concepts in media literacy right at the beginning really stood out to me. I knew but didn't really think about how media communicates values (social, political, and so on). After reading this, I definitely agree that within the visuals of media there are a lot of of underlying values. For example, you see an ad for common core, obviously there are political figures that created the ad for social pleasure (or displeasure). I also learned that there are SO MANY persuasive appeals involved in visual literacy, including beauty appeal and peer approval. Like this section mentioned, "Common Sense Education contains an extensive list of digital citizenship resources and lesson plans that can help teachers learn and teach issues such as creative credit and copyright, information literacy, and other ethical and social issues involved in...

To be honest, I have read but am not super familiar with graphic novels, at least not as of recently. I do however think that they can be useful and beneficial for the secondary English language arts classroom. When we were children, we read pictures books which I believe kept our attention to the reading for longer. So why should this change as we get older? For example, before writing this weeks blog, I was assigned to read a graphic novel for another class. The book is titled , "American Born Chinese". To be perfectly honest, I was not super ecstatic to read yet another long book. But as it turned out (which surprised me) I not only rushed through it but also enjoyed it more than a lot of the other readings that I had been assigned previously for that class. Even though we are older and might think that we need to move on to full length regular novels, graphic novels might be needed to keep the student's attention to the reading. It probably doesn't help that I hav...

When looking at the two readings for this blog post, I first want to look at Common Core's standards for speaking and listening. Considering I am secondary ed and think I want to teach high school, I looked into grades 9-12. When going through and looking at the standards, I found that even though they are worded super logical, they are things that I already feel comfortable doing or have the basic understanding of. For example, under the 'Comprehension and Collaboration' section, I feel confident in "w ork with peers to promote civil, democratic discussions and decision-making, set clear goals and deadlines, and establish individual roles as needed." With that, under the 'Presentation of Knowledge and Ideas' section, I'm excited for the "... strategic use of digital media (e.g., textual, graphical, audio, visual, and interactive elements) in presentations to enhance understanding of findings, reasoning, and evidence and to add interest." G...

When it comes to the specifics of speaking and listening, Brookfield's "Discussion as a Way of Teaching" explored all the different ways of doing this. I will start by saying, I had no idea that there are so many ways to have a discussion and all the different people that are involved (or should be) in a discussion. One of the main things that stuck out to me while reading this were the specific roles that are involved in a conversation. There were 15 different roles in this section. It makes me question if we need all of these roles in order to have a smart and beneficial conversation with each other, specifically in the classroom. The "Devil's Advocate" for one, is supposed to counter the conversation that would be taking place in the current state. In class discussions that I remember having, it always made for an eye opening discussion when someone makes us consider the point we are talking about. I also found the "Questioning to Keep Discussion Goi...

After reading the PESB Standards, I was surprised at just how many standards a teacher truly has to know. I obviously knew that there are many things that a teacher has to know to be beneficial for his or her students, but I guess I never thought of how in depth the rules went. Saying that, I was happily shocked at how many of the standards that I felt comfortable with. With that however, there were also a few things that I need to look into further and/or brush up on them.  One area that scared me to see was 1.1B on semantics, syntax, morphology, and phonology. While I'm sure I do these things without thinking, I struggle to consider teaching a student about these subjects. I think I would need to further look into teaching subjects like these.  The other point that I will need to look back and think in the future on is Standard 4.B on the specific elements of Literature. I need to really think about the differing levels of knowledge from student to student. Where one stude...