Recording Our Recording Our Lives: Personal Lives: Personal Narratives, Web Narratives, Web

Sites & PodcastingSites & Podcasting

Integrating Technology Into Traditional Writing

By Caroline M. Baas

My Influences & My Influences & Some ResearchSome Research

Tom Liam LynchTom Liam Lynch’’s Story...s Story...“My school is on West 17th Street. There are several schools in this neighborhood besides the New York City Lab School, where I teach. Each morning, thousands of teenagers flood Chelsea. Some walk in silence, others chat on their cell phones or to friends. It is an energetic, pulsing sound. Again I hear an iPod cranked too loud for the early-morning walk to school.

Urban students live amid the city’s music - not the sounds of nature, but the sounds of steely machines and commerce. They carry it with them everywhere. While I imagine there are beats to all locales, this article describes how New York’s music followed some students into my classroom and infused our reading of The Canterbury Tales. What started as a collaborative project with an art class led to recording a rap album. The music changed how I teach English.”

“While Eminem doesn’t rhyme exactly [it does include] literary devices such as end rhyme, internal rhyme, assonance, consonance... […] As students began forging connections [I] thought about how offensive Chaucer’s writing might have been in his time. The rhyme, the bawdiness, the cries of social injustice, these too linked Chaucer and rap music.”

Tom Liam Lynch, English Journal

“I pushed the desks to the walls and set up the chairs in rows as in a concert hall. As the rappers from each group walked up to the microphone, the class clapped in support…”

Weeks after the recordings, we threw a CD-release party when the album [was] published. Students performed on stage before an audience of peers and parents.

That night, many students went home and downloaded the album onto their MP3 players. The next morning, students were listening to each other’s songs on their iPods. In fact, I was about to ask one young man to give it to me when he responded, ‘But Mr. Lynch, it’s Tim.’ They were listening and relistening to each other’s social and political critiques. Later that day, I saw another student share his headphones with a friend. They bobbed their heads in synch, listening to their peer’s work. One looked at the other and proclaimed, ‘Yo, that’s fire.’

It was fire.”Tom Liam Lynch, English Journal

RelevanceRelevance•We must be able to relate what we do in the classroom to what students do and deal with in real life.

•Students find much more value in something that has use to them. When they see an activity’s real-world application, more intrinsic motivation kicks in.

•Relating class material to students’ interests is also a great way to help students connect with what they do in class.

AudienceAudience•Creating real and relevant audiences for students is also crucial.

•It increases motivation because an authentic audience will be seeing the end-product.

•It recognizes students’ accomplishments.

“Students are constantly aware of audience, or who is paying attention to them. In a recent article in Teachers and Writers, Erick Gordon writes about many English

classrooms where students write for a one-person audience: the teacher. He goes onto ask,

“[I]f her audience remains the same throughout, what incentive does a student have to truly explore the idea of audience as she develops

her writing abilities?’(4). The imperative is to help students imagine their words as farther-

reaching - to see each other as ‘an audience of

intellectuals’(Rosenburg 60).”

Tom Liam Lynch, English Journal

•Lynch integrated technology into the traditional class assignment of studying The Canterbury Tales.

•In doing so, he helped the students find relevance in what they were doing, thus increasing their motivation, learning, utilization of natural skills, and sense of authentic audience.

•The students used their interests and natural skills to make rap recordings which they put onto their MP3 players and kept listening to!

•In turn, they had constant exposure to the social commentaries and literary devices presented in The Canterbury Tales.

The Personal The Personal Narrative Narrative

AssignmentAssignment

• One defining moment

• Used the writing process:

–Brainstorming, prewriting, attention to detail, peer help, etc.

• Created an entire “Process Portfolio” (Rob Petrone’s English 313).

• Details, imagery

• Therapeutic, helped others

• Sharing on a voluntary basis

Class Web Site & Class Web Site & PodcastsPodcasts

• The web site was originally created as a way to present information about our personal narratives to an authentic audience and to share our writings, thoughts, and experiences with other class members.

• Students helped to create the class web site.

• Many students know how to create web sites or how to integrate design into a web site.

• Students who do not know how to create web sites still regularly use the internet so the concept of a site is very relevant and familiar to them.Web SiteWeb Site

Web SiteWeb SiteLogisticsLogistics

• Integrate time for the web site into daily lessons during the unit(s) you plan to use the site for

• Plan Media Center/computer use time wisely. Sometimes it is hard to come by because of demand.

• Designate certain students to be in charge of certain tasks (taking pictures, composing web page titles and labels, creating a timeline, etc.)

• Web site creation will require extra time on the teacher’s part. But…it’s well worth it!

• Podcasts gave students a way to share what they had accomplished in the Personal Narrative unit.

• Again, making podcasts allowed students to share with an authentic audience.

• Podcasts are increasingly being used on iPods, which are pieces of technology that the majority of my students own.

• Students could decide what they wanted to share: a piece of their narrative or a metacognitive discussion of their experience with the writing process and how they were influenced as a writer and/or as a person.PodcastingPodcasting

PodcastingPodcastingLogisticsLogistics

• It can be a challenge to find time for recording podcasts in the midst of a busy unit.

• Designate students to help you decide on logistics and what other students can do while others are recording.

•The podcast recordings can also be done during the unit following the Personal Narrative (and then revisited).

• Equipment needed - Microphone, Audacity (free on the web), sound file converter

Integrating Technology into Traditional Writing:

What it Did For My Students

Increased Motivation Increased Motivation through Relevancethrough Relevance• My students were born into the age

of technology.

• Automatically, using web sites and listening to recordings is relevant to them.

• Talking about their own lives and sharing their experiences with an audience also makes the web site and podcasts relevant for my students.

• Students get a chance to share with others and hear others’ experiences.

• Students can use this technology know-how in the future.

Created an Authentic Audience• Parents, siblings, and friends can visit the web site and listen to the podcasts

• “Podcasting […] gives students a real audience. My students write their podcasts for an adolescent audience, creating short and appealing podcasts…I also think podcasting could reach out to a lot of students because it’s giving them so many choices. They get to choose what they say […] the pacing, the tone…”

Robert Rozema, English Journal

• Appealed to numerous learning styles (visual, auditory, etc.) and appealed to personal interests of students.

• Increased participation because the creation of a class web site and podcasts represented something “new” and “exciting” in a school context.

“It made the actual writing process seem less like a boring task and more

like something we’d do in our free time.”

English 11B Class Web Site

http://www.freewebs.com/english11bfirst

BibliographyIMAGES BY SLIDE• Slide 1 http://www.hackaday.com/media/2006/10/mic-podcast-had.jpg• Slide 2 http://www.professorstoschools.uiuc.edu/images/technology_v1.JPG• Slides 3 and 4 http://www.needhamfatica.com/blog/uploaded_images/podcast-723248.jpg• Slide 5 http://www.podcastforteachers.org/preview.jpg• Slide 6 http://www.weblogsinc.com/common/images/9131583261525783.JPG?0.47751755781807936• Slide 8 http://download.101com.com/wa-mcv/cam/images/Podcasting_3.jpg• Slide 11 http://www.itec-ia.org/documents/image01.jpg• Slide 12 http://www.goldcoast.com.au/images/2007/07/12/technology.jpg• Slide 13 http://www.professorstoschools.uiuc.edu/images/technology_v1.JPG• Slide 14 http://www.classcaster.org/resserver.php?blogId=41&resource=studentmicrophone2.jpg• Slide 15 http://www.complexitygroup.com/page8/files/page8_blog_entry0_1.jpg• Slide 16 http://www-pe.pbs.org/mediashift/files/Podcast_CTAP_small.jpg?Log=0• Slide 17 http://www.connect-learn.net/images/p07.jpg• Slide 18 http://www.sos-childrensvillages.org/podcast/podcast.jpg• Slide 19 http://www.cameraposition.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/03/strand_ipod.jpg

TEXTS

Lynch, Tom Liam. “Illuminating Chaucer through Poetry, Manuscript Illuminations, and a Critical Rap Album.”

English Journal 96.6 (2007): 43-9.

Rozema, Robert. “The Book Report, Version 2.0: Podcasting on Young Adult Novels.” English Journal 97.1 (2007):

31-42.