I know that most of us English types get the NCTE Inbox e-mails, but, regardless, I have to link to this article from The Herald that they included this week titled “Don’t Let Them Take Ad-vantage.” The article is about a fourth-grade teacher who brought in a media literacy specialist that she met at a teaching conference to deliver a lesson on deceptive techniques in advertising pieces. I’m truly impressed. If only cases like this weren’t singular and newsworthy, but instead the norm. If that were the case, by the time we got students in our middle and high school English classes, they’d probably already be working on some clever culture jamming projects like this one.
If school literacy is moving toward “reading the world as text,” then media literacy studies are imperative, whether they’re in ELA, communications, electives, or wherever. I mean, I’m not advocating for widespread youth cynicism and dissent and insubordination exactly, but, a little healthy mistrust and a critical eye for the details obviously would help Americans start to fit the bill and be considered good, active citizens of a democracy. Plus, I’d certainly rather have a classroom decorated with adbuster-like posters and images than lame dioramas about The Great Gatsby and the roaring twenties. Bravo, Orchard Park Elementary!
I don’t even know if any of the people who check this blog knew that I had another blog, but I do, and I’ve decided to move it (Andy and His Ephemera, which I formerly used blogger to host) over here to WordPress. There are lots of reasons. First and foremost, I think I’ll blog more because being able to manage both of my blogs on WordPress with the same account is super easy. The WordPress layouts are cleaner looking, and I really love the easily customizable headers. Blogging here at Digerati Boombati using WordPress really grew on me in the past few months, so moving my personal blog over was inevitable.
If you’re interested, I’ll probably be posting about a bunch of random stuff: music, books, movies, internet crap, maybe some of my favorite tv shows like The Big Bang Theory (if the writers’ strike ever ends), pictures, posting links and youtube videos, lame personal reflections, etc. etc.
I had been planning for a few weeks to make a webquest on Zusak’s The Book Thief, as some of you know. My idea was to create an opportunity for students to explore the power of language, which is a major theme of the book, in some poems, art, music, videos, etc. etc. whatever. Conceptually, it sounded easy enough. But, I’ve realized that I don’t know a damn thing about poetry or art, so finding stuff to work with was fruitless. And searching by titles with terms like “power of langauge” doesn’t bring up anything worthwhile. Anyway, I’m still interested in working with this idea, just not in webquest form. Most of the other stuff I thought of using is in book form anyway, so it doesn’t really fit with a webquest as far as I can imagine. I really wanted to include a digital version of Dr. Seuss’s Yertle the Turtle, since Yertle is a satirical Turtle version of Hitler, but no luck. I could only get the text part.
So, after seeing a presentation on the program Comic Life by one of my classmates, Laura, who is an awesome teacher and person, I was anxious to get to use the program. I read a bunch of webcomics on a daily basis, one of which, Michael’s Exciting Life, seems to use Comic Life since it’s a photowebcomic, which I never knew until I saw Laura’s presentation on the program. Wanting to play around with the program, I did go into the lab last week and do exactly that. I took the photos from my trip to the NCTE Convention off my flickr account and made a two page comic, which you can read HERE. It’s not that great or that long, and it needs a better title. Oh well, though–just a first test run. I got a copy of Comic Life for Windows for myself, so now that I have a short break before student teaching, I’m going to try to come up with some ideas for designing my own semi-regularly updated photowebcomic involving stories which me, my girlfriend, and some friends or family members will act out—something sort of in the vein of Michael’s Exciting Life. Maybe eventually I’ll be able to get my students help me with it and have them become contributors or creators themselves.
After playing around with Comic Life, I realized that having students explore the various genres and formats of comics online, since there are so many free and great webcomics to read online, my favorite of which is Dinosaur Comics (I can never plug it enough!), generate some encyclopedia style entries and favorites lists and post them on a class wiki, then create their own comic, using a webquest as a guide, might be a good idea. So, I made that on Thursday morning before we were supposed to have class. You can access my webquest HERE. It’s still a little rough, but I’m going to be adding to it as I think of more content. Let me know what you think or if you have any suggestions. I’d appreciate it.
Wow, I just found a trailer for a movie titled King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters that looks awesome. I thought I’d pass it along because it comes out on DVD in late January. The film is about the two best Donkey Kong players ever in a head-to-head battle twenty years after the game was at the height of its success. Looks like an instant classic.
I decided to use Google Pages to make a webpage for myself, rather than using iWeb in the Mac lab on campus. I admit, iWeb is much cooler. But, for some reason awhile back I lost all of my saved work in iWeb, and I don’t know why. I still have the domain file on my student drive, but iWeb won’t load the content. Ray and I tinkered with it and concluded that the saved work will no longer work. I was annoyed at first, but now I don’t really care because I wouldn’t have been able to update the webpage made with iWeb anyway. I don’t own a Mac, and though I want one, I probably won’t get one for a couple years since I just got my laptop last year. I’m also not going to be at Cortland too often now that I’m nearly finished with my graduate classes and will only have to come back for student teaching colloquiums.
Anyway, my webpage can be acccessed HERE. I’m not too happy with the structural limitations of the layout, but I did the best I could with it. The Google Pages layouts really just resemble narrow blog templates, and I wish that I could widen it. I actually could widen it if I had bunches of time to experiment with editing the html code, but I don’t have the time right now with papers, projects, and an exam on my plate. The upside of Google Pages is that they don’t put ad banners on your pages like Free Webs does, and they also give you 100 MB of free space, which is significantly more than Free Webs.
Making a webpage for myself doesn’t seem nearly as cool nowadays as it did a few years ago because we’re already so connected in so many other ways: Flickr, Facebook, Del.icio.us, blogs, Twitter, etc. Amateur-made free webpages seem boring to me now without the capability for friends and colleagues to comment and interact with your work. I mean, webpages are still useful as a hub for organizing our linked internet trails which are now a mile wide, but, I’m still more likely to spend time reading and commenting on someone’s blog or Facebook feeds than I would be to click around on a rigid webpage that is the antithesis of web 2.0. My Flickr and last.fm badges and my del.icio.us tags automatically update on my webpage, and I could add more widgets, but I don’t like the idea that every living, constantly updating thing on my webpage has to reside in the sidebar, resulting in an overstuffed sidebar and a boring main section. And for that reason I didn’t put much in the sidebar. Ah, I don’t know. /rant
