It’s Saturday, and I chose sleep over the 8 AM sessions; but I’m out of bed for Hilve Firek’s session, “Tech in the English Classroom: Winning Hearts and Minds.” We folks in the back of the room have been called forward, so I’m off…

And now I’m in the first row…There’s actually no one else in the front row, not on my side anyway. On the other side, there’s the speaker, the program chair, and the president. Apparently I am an imposter.

Sessions I’ve noticed seem to start with personal stories of “how I got here.” I guess that I knew that, but somehow today’s session and yesterday’s have made me realize this. Hilve is talking about how technology makes revision less tedious for students. Those who were resistant to revision when it meant literally “rewriting” it were far more willing to revise when computers simplified the process and removed the tedium. Beyond that, there’s the lure of the computer. She tells the story of a group of 9th graders who volunteered to play on the computer—by writing a newspaper. Additionally, computers can be more interesting to boys than writing on paper with pens. “What improves test scores isn’t technology and computers but technology allowing students to have a positive experience in the classroom.” She showed a student film: Star Wars Macbeth. It’s a cute film, but it completely and totally violates intellectual property rights. They have stolen clips from the film, and the entire soundtrack for the film is taken from the movie. Great work for high school students really, but I’m very disturbed that there’s no attentoin to the intellectual copyright issues. How can we expect students to document their work in research papers when we allow this kind of intellectual theft? Perhaps there will be something in the credits, but with the entire soundtrack for the piece taken, I’m bothered. They’ve also taken scenes from the movie and spliced themselves in, scattered them in as background. I’m not sure that I could call this satire, so the amount of stolen property here can’t be excused that way. The video is 5 to 6 years old, but she positions it as a “great work.” The movie is available online with outtakes, trailers, and so forth. It was filmed at school during the two weeks of holiday break in December. Turning to the audience, Hilve asks folks to brainstorm what the project helped students learn. She talked about popular culture being a way to get students excited and involved in classroom activities. Her big question here is “Why bother?”—both why we as teachers should “bother” to do these sorts of projects in the classroom, and why students “bother” to participate in these projects. Why do students buy in. Great. She just also divulged that it was done with a “bootleg copy of Adobe Premiere.” I don’t understand why this intellectual property issue doesn’t matter… Next, using The Boy Who Drew Cats. This presentation does include a legal disclaimer. The project integrates sound and is nonlinear. Basically, it’s a “read your own adventure story” taking advantage of the hotspots in PowerPoint. This sort of project asks students to pay attention to audience, as they have to think about the choices that the viewer will make. She does mention that “they are paraphrasing a folktale. We talked about how they can’t just take the text, they had to put it in their own words.” [so why does intellectual property rights matter with this, but not Star Wars?] The project does show typical student issues with overuse of the bells and whistles that the PowerPoint. The issue I see is that it’s not really a “choose your own adventure story.” It’s a story that asks students what happens next, and tells them that they are wrong if they make the wrong choice. The artwork is all clipart [which I assume was free?] Again, she asks the audience in the presentation to identify the learning that took place. Claire Lamonica asked her to talk more about how the project worked. Hilve talked about the importance of planning. She makes the students sketch out their story on paper first, before she lets them go to the computer. [Not sure that I agree with this premise. Multimodal composing is different in many ways, but she has forced it into a traditional paper-writing process structure.] Q&A: questions on where to find sound files, where to find clip art, overview of her book, [and I so want to ask about the intellectual property issue, but we are out of time…]

Tags: English language arts |
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