Module 4

[Chris Warschauer]

1.Reflection Question: What challenges occur when students are empowered to create online "text" and share globally with others?

I think there are a variety of challenges that exists when we try to get our students to create online "text".  The first challenge is ensuring the students and teachers have the proper training and professional development to take part in the online creation.  As teachers, we should be looking for opportunities for ourselves and our students to become equip with the knowledge and skills to create proper online materials.  This would include understanding the multimodality of text and how we want the text to be represented to the outside world. 
While providing training and professional development we must also consider guiding our students to appropriate venues to create this text.When I think about my students and what role they play in creating online "text" right now, I would say that the majority of them are mainly consumers of technology.  The producing and creating that they take part in online is primarily through social media, such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. We need to show them, as I've seen in the past two trimesters that there are so many internet resources and helpful websites that you can create with, instead of just reading and consuming. 

2. Response to readings: I really enjoyed the article by Gunther Kress which talks about our paradigm shift in learning from just text, and lecture notes to multi modal visual, virtual, and interactive digital literacies. He discusses Social Semiotics in the sense that as teachers who create , for example, a visual power point presentation complete with diagrams and videos, we as teachers must be aware of the meaning we want students to get from that presentation and how the cultural lenses we see the world can affect our understanding and placement of meaning. For example, if I am talking about global trends in population and just have a table of the countries of the world and their populations, their understanding might differ if I represented the data in a more visually appealing and relateable way, like the picture below. I think visual illustrations like the map are examples of how new modes of teaching can affect students understanding and motivation towards the subject. http://i.imgur.com/1plsHRL.png

3. Module 4 storiify- https://storify.com/christophwarsch/online-content-construction

4. Module 4 lesson plan: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Crk5bX8KyR5gDx6MOTfnGM9hm-MAoZHzi-rVLDvHZBA/edit?usp=sharing

[Ian O'Byrne]

Good work Chris,

I like your focus in your lesson plan. Make sure you embed this work, and the associated supporting materials on your website/blog. You want to make it easier for people to follow/share your work.

Badge awarded.

-Ian