Digital Language Arts IV: “Why Do We Have To Do This?”

One way to think about authentic work and authentic assessment is to frame them in the context of allowing students to roleplay in various careers. By doing so, students can learn to see their work in the context of the larger world, can better understand connections between disciplines, and can combine knowledge and skills from different areas of their school experience. They will also become more engaged and can even help engage their peers.

Consider the ideas below. Each can be used for assessment, review, or practice. Each involves reading and writing skills. Each can be posted online for various purposes, whether for review, for commenting by a larger audience, or as a showcase.

Idea 1: Recorded interviews of characters

How can students demonstrate that they understand a character’s outlook, motivations, and experiences in a novel? Have pairs of students write and perform an interview between an outside observer and a character from the material. The interviews can then be recorded as podcasts or in video form using such tools as Audacity, Garage Band, Movie Maker, or iMovie. Be sure to emphasize to students that someone that has never read the novel should be able to learn all of the most important insights about the character from the interview. For advanced work, students can write multiple interviews of the same character from different times in the novel, each representing a different part of their character arc. The interviews of different pairs of students, each from the same novel, can be collected and hosted online so that all students can use them as review material.

Idea 2: Multimedia advertisements for a novel

Students generally understand material when they are able to effectively entice other students to read it. Let students act as advertising executives by having them create multimedia advertisements for a novel. These might come in the form of radio commercials, television commercials, movie trailers, or kiosk-style presentations. Plot, theme, characters, and other important elements should be addressed by the advertisements. In addition to the software tools above, students can use Photo Story, PowerPoint, Keynote, Glogster, or VoiceThread.

Idea 3: Interactive sequels to novels

If you grew up in the 80s… or maybe even if you didn’t… you surely remember the Choose Your Own Adventure series of books. These engaging books allowed readers to make decisions that affected the plot – go through a door to face a magical dragon head-on, or circle around to retrieve a golden sword. The concept is perfectly suited to the electronic interactive tools available to students today. Have students become authors by creating a sequel to a novel wherein they take the main character and lead him or her through various further experiences. Using the technique of linking in such tools as PowerPoint, SMART Notebook, or any webpage editor, students can create multiple if-then decision points. Emphasize to students that they should write the character in ways that demonstrate that they understand the character’s outlook, motivations, and prior experiences, just as in the interviews above. For advanced work, students can include audio or links to external resources such as Google Earth to make their work even more engaging.

These three ideas are merely a snowflake on the tip of a huge iceberg. We’ll present more ideas for authentic application and assessment. Stay tuned.