Digital Language Arts V: “When I Grow Up…”

Continuing the last thread of using career roleplaying as a vehicle for authentic application and assessment of reading and writing skills, we present a few more ideas that leverage technology tools to serve as creative outlets for students. Keep in mind it all starts with high-quality reading material – students must be engaged with something interesting, relevant, and illustrative in order to bring out the passion and desire to produce/create/comment. It makes no sense to give a creative, technology-rich assignment to students that have no interest in the prompt material. Fire up their interest and they’ll fire up their effort!

Idea 1: Poem recitation (professional poet)

Standing up and reciting a poem of their own hand can be an embarrassing experience for students. They are sometimes hesitant to engage in the social risk of putting a voice to their own thoughts and emotions live and in front of their peers. However, technology may offer hope here. You can task students with using audio recorders for their recitations. These may take the form of dedicated hardware such as iPods with microphones or inexpensive mp3 recorders, or you may use computers with audio recording software such as the free Audacity or the built-in recorders for Windows and Mac OS X. In any of these cases, students have the ability to play back what they’ve recorded. This is essential in getting them to become more and more expressive over time; they can re-record until they are satisfied with their tone, pronunciation, rhythm, and so on. Further, when they hear their own words read aloud, they are more likely to go back and edit for greater clarity, and, as appropriate, different rhyme schemes. And perhaps inexplicably, having their recorded file played for the class may well be a source of pride to them, rather than embarrassment – having had the chance to perfect their recitation means there is far less fear of perceived incompetence. Bonus points go to teachers that find a means to post the audio files online for a greater audience to access.

Idea 2: Investigative journalism

Many students love to find out the whys of controversial issues that they care about it, whether in a large social context or near and dear to their daily lives. They may become passionate about the deteriorating environment in their neighborhood, the choice and healthfulness of the food served in the cafeteria, or the children exposed to violence on a daily basis in war-torn regions. A greater teacher will tap into and feed such passion through the selection of reading material that helps students come to deeper understandings and that offers interesting and diverse perspectives. Having been engaged with such material, students can take on the roles of investigative journalists through the creation of video reports or documentaries. Working in groups, student teams can be tasked with researching additional material to supplement their class readings, can interview key figures associated with the issue, and can produce a compelling video statement that brings everything together with their own particular conclusions. Skills of research, writing, and interviewing are combined with creativity, editing, and self-presentation. As was mentioned before, bundled video-editing software such as Windows Movie Maker and iMovie offer very powerful tools for such work.

Idea 2.5: Point/counterpoint debate

Using the same overall outline as above, students can create a video point/counterpoint debate of an issue instead of a report or documentary. This allows for divergent viewpoints in the working group to both be supported and acknowledged, and offers the further benefit of increasing the analytical thinking skills of students as each side attempts to trump the other’s arguments.

Idea 3: Multimedia newsletters

Many issues in our world are relevant and interesting to students without being controversial. Ask any student about pop culture – music, movies, video games, etc. – and they’re likely to surpise you with how much passion and insight they have. Since passion is one key to highly effective learning, why not tap into that? Task students with creating multimedia newsletters that inform and educate others about such topics. Students will exercise their writing skills not in the essay format, but in a variety of ways to persuade, inform, comment, and critique. By bringing in multimedia elements such as video clips, images, sounds and music, students gain more practice with the integration of media that is a hallmark of our current society. Tools such as Microsoft Publisher, Microsoft PowerPoint, Apple Keynote, or Apple Pages offer options, as well as do online tools such as Glogster.