Mod Notes / Learning Curation / Essential Question - It's All Happening!

Module 4: Learning from Multi-Modal Texts: A Look at New Literacies

The readings for this week were once again fairly inspiring (why am I surprised?) and gave me a chance to frame some of these ideas around my essential question. This week focused on bringing different forms of modality (or multi-modal) to our texts to make our lessons more dymanic. I really enjoyed that Grisham's article "Love that Book" as it introduced both

"Literacy" from
desisaysblog.wordpress.com

bringing multi-modal texts into the classroom as well as having students generate multi-modal responses. Reading this article started generating ideas about how to bring this into my own classroom such as doing an audiobook read-aloud in class.  Perhaps instead of a class-wide novel we could have fifteen minutes a day where we collectively listen to an audio book - something that really brings the story to life like Neil Gaiman's Graveyard Book. Logistically this is tricky because they are long -but we could also listen to one chapter and then the students could narrate their own audio book chapter. 

Allowing a multi-modal approach both in the classroom and the Learning Commons would provide more options for students to get hooked on reading; if a student falls in  love with reading graphic novels instead of novels who am I to dissuade them? A key part of this is ensure that the Learning Commons contains a variety of both genres but also modes of literature: novels, quick-reads, graphic novels, audio-books etc. should all be available for students and staff. 


The Learning Curation prompt this week was also neat:
Take a resource you really like and find multi-modes of text, forming a short collection. It can be any combination or grouping (picture book, graphica, novels, digital content, video, web tools, etc.). Tie your grouping together with a short rationale of its theme, big idea, the literacies it addresses and what you can do with the resource.  Reference the readings that influenced you.

Building off the work mentioned above - The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman, there are

"Identity" from
thegood.co/identity

themes of good vs. evil, as well as identity, compassion and forgiveness to explore. In my teachings I would focus on the theme of identity - and the resources chosen below would reflect that - however an idea for a student project could be to explore another theme of the story and find a resource that reflects that.

• I would pair this story with the short story "Harrison Bergeron" by Kurt Vonnegut - which has been adapted into the short film 2081. Depending on the grade level of the students I could choose either the short story or the film (the film isn't graphic but would be meant for an older audience - a lower-level English 11/12 class would be suitable). 
• Red: A Crayon's Story by Michael Hall is designed for younger grades but focuses on the theme of identity so well, and with excellent images, that it could be included for older grades as well. 
• I would definitely incorporate some technology into the students' representation of their own learning; I was intrigued by the article by Barton & Trimble-Roles where students were able to use PicCollage and iMovie to generate their own multimedia products. I also appreciated the extremely late introduction to Glogster and the neat features it offers (through Grisham's "Love that Book" article) - admittedly, I had previously thought Glogster was just another Blog website...

I envision either teaching these works together as a theme unit, or in the Learning Commons displays around specific themes - and identity would certainly be one of them. Identity is such an important theme at all ages but specifically during adolescence where identity is becoming more formed. One of the potential Big Ideas for these resources is that our identity is uniquely us - and should be represented in a unique way. A focus around these resources is that the theme is being represented in different ways through different modes; to follow that, students would represent their own learning of identity and these works in a variety of ways. I really appreciated the multi-modality approach and feel that this can only better our teaching and learning. 

Resources

•  "2081" by Jow Crowe, Revolution Science Fiction, Retrieved Sep 12, 2018. 
• Barton, Georgina & Trimble-Roles, Rebecca.  (2016). Supporting middle years students in creating multimodal texts with iPad apps. Literacy Learning: the Middle Years, 214(3) i-vii.
• Glogster [software] (2018). Retrieved from glogster.com on Sep.13, 2018.
• Grisham, D. (2013). Love that book: Multimodal response to literature. The Reading Teacher. 67(3), 220-225.
• Hall, M. (2015). Red: A Crayon's Story. New York, NY: Harper Collins. 
• iMovie [software]. (2018) Retrieved from apple.com.ca/imovie on Sep.14, 2018
• PicCollage [software]. (2018) Retrieved from https://pic-collage.com/ on Sep. 12, 2018. 
• Vonnegut, K. (1965). "Harrison Bergeron." Retrieved from http://www.tnellen.com/cybereng/harrison.html on Sep. 12, 2018.