Multiliteracies in ELA Classrooms

Here is the website for the company that my friend works through, her name is Erin Kirsh and I’ve known her since I was in Grade 6. We’ve been in many a show together 🙂

Here is the website:

http://www.vancouverpoetryhouse.com/word-play/for-teachers/

I know it costs money but I would not let that discourage you!! We have to support the arts!

A Photographic work by Brendan Sangster starring his roommate Tessa Seager.

Poetry:

While stumbling through websites through StumbleUpon I have stumbled upon many websites that offer an interactive and simple way to create art. I think these resources are very helpful for those students that find the art aspects of the projects to be challenging.

here are some examples:

http://www.stumbleupon.com/su/1D1Jyz/new.weavesilk.com/?ika/

http://www.stumbleupon.com/su/AOHjDF/bomomo.com/

http://www.stumbleupon.com/su/16yexA/koalastothemax.com/?aHR0cDovL3d3dy5hbWlyaWdodC5jb20vYWxidW0tY292ZXItdGhlbWVzL2ltYWdlcy9hbGJ1bS1CcmFuZC1OZXctRGVqYS1FbnRlbmR1LmpwZw==/

and here’s my composition with Incredibox.

And here is another really seemingly useful website, but I have yet to look through it. perhaps I’ll write a review once I do:

http://d3js.org/

Our session on games got me thinking of a game I used to play as a teenager: Age of Empires. I will be teaching grade 8 humanities and we’ll be covering the medieval period/feudal Japan. The different games of Age of Empires covers civilization nearly from its inception to present time throughout its different releases. Fortunately for me, the era that I have to teach is cover by my most favourite of the series “Age of Empires: II.”

Age of Empires is a strategy game. The style of game play that I will be working with is as such: you choose a specific civilization and you begin in the dark ages with about 3 villagers and a town-centre. From there you must begin to gather recourses (food, wood, gold, and stone). In the process you can build different structures, such as houses, a mill, or a port. As more structures are build and wealth and resources accumulated, the civilization can progress through different stages. Accordingly, different aspects of the game change. New structures and materials become available as progress happens. Eventually armies can be formed by building structures that can produce soldiers, knights, archers and so on.

The different structures and the way they appear, the different people and militia and their abilities, are all peculiar to the specific civilization that one chooses.

The challenge before me now is to find a way that I could link this game to the subject and incorporate it into my unit. My options also depend on wether I will be able to have all of the students to play the video game or not. I doubt I will be able to purchase a class set of the video game for the whole class. In addition, I am quite certain I can’t have the students torrent the game. If I am limited in this way, then my remaining option is to play the game myself and project my screen for the students—which, although different, is not really the ultimate engagement for which I was aiming.

I may have an option of having each student download the trial version of the game, but I have yet to find out if they can play as the specific civilizations that we are covering. I need to find a PC in order to do that.

If they are able to have access to the game and play it, my next challenge is to find out how the contents of the game can compliment what is covered in their textbook. I am entertaining a thought or two about basing my evaluation on the contents of the game.

Do you have any ideas or suggestions regarding my challenges?

And please comment if you have any questions or would like to know more about the game.

I am also open to collaborating with someone on creating a lesson plan based on this game.

ps. I didn’t add any links or pictures in fear of copyright infringement—I have been effectively petrified—but you can google it.

“An ‘Internet meme’ is a form or concept that spreads via the Web, whether through email forwarding, viral videos or blogs.… Although they may recede from view, memes never fully cease to exist, surviving … in the ever-expanding network of servers that make up the Internet. In the realm of digital memory, what seems to have disappeared may simply be lying dormant in the recesses of a hard drive.” (Copeland, 22)

Internet memes come in many different genres. Like the quotation says, they can be email forwards, videos, blogs, and other things. These days, photo memes are everywhere. This is partially because they are so easy to make and distribute.

For example, I downloaded a meme creator onto my phone and made a meme in about 10 minutes. This meme is one of the “first world problem” memes. I used a situation that happened to one of our classmates… and she agreed to model for the picture.

Furthermore, to emphasize just how quick and easy memes are to use and how important it is to teach students to use and create memes carefully, here is a little story. For those of you who are familiar with meme characters, you may know that there is one meme character named “bad luck Brian.” Brian is a normal kid from a high school who happened to have an awkward school photo taken. One of his classmates got ahold of his photo and created an internet meme out of it. Brian never agreed to be in a meme, but now his face is known by millions of people and there is no way for him to change that. Here is one of the memes about him:

Actually, there are many meme characters already in use. Here is a photo of some of them… it is inviting you to use the characters to create your own memes.

And here is a video of where some of these faces came from:

Where did the Meme characters come from?

If you are interested in creating memes for possible classroom use (or even to teach children appropriate use of memes) here is a website you could use:
http://memegenerator.net/Meme-Creator

And the iphone app I used to create Melissa’s “first world problem” meme is called “just meme it”

-Katie

………………………………
COPELAND, C. (2011). MUTATING MEMES. Afterimage, 39(3), 22-23

Funnyjunk contributor: TexasChainsawDisco (2011). Meme Faces. Funnyjunk. http://www.funnyjunk.com/funny_pictures/1698834/Meme/

Mobil contributor (2012). Bad luck Brian. Mobilbeta. http://memegenerator.net/Meme-Creator

Youtube contributor: Duffbeer96x (2012). The origins of meme. Youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z07TAM5Cc3A

So I played around with a few of the suggested Web 2.o tools for teachers.

The first is a warning sign from www.warningsigngenerator.com and the second is a Bitstrips Comic. The comic would be a lot of fun for students to show an idea or interpretation of something in a single frame. It was also a lot of fun to create the avatars… The comic is entitled (and I didn’t make this up, it was one of the options of the site) “Melissa and Brendan make poetry with their bodies”. Enjoy!

I’ll be teaching three different Shakespeare plays during my long practicum, and I thought of different ways I could start off each unit. I thought I’d try my hand at Animoto, and initially, the plan was to do a fun, short video about strange biographical facts about Shakespeare. Unfortunately, the free version of Animoto really limits the amount of text per slide, so then I had to scrap that idea. Then, I recalled that Shakespeare invented a large number of words, and so I thought I’d do a short video of twenty words invented by Shakespeare. Turns out there’s a limit to ten slides in total. So with very few options left, I created a short video with four words invented by him. It’s a little underwhelming, but it did give me an opportunity to play around with an alternative mode of representation. I think perhaps I’d use this tool with students instead, to come up with a short presentation about an act they read, or perhaps have them take pictures of things they think represent a specific play and use Animoto to create a small presentation about those images to promote visual literacy.

Try our slideshow maker at Animoto.

– Kiran A.

As part of my work as a Children’s Librarian with the Vancouver Public Library, I recently attended an informative presentation on the topic of technology and homeless youth, by researcher, Jill Woelfer.  The topic that day was specifically focused on the role of the public library in the lives of homeless youth.  But the data presented came out of Woelfer’s major area of study “the role of information systems in the lives of homeless young people”.  I’d like to share with you some of the highlights of the presentation, as it relates to our ongoing dialogue about how youth engage with various forms of multiliteracies.

Jill Woelfer is a Fulbright Fellow, a PhD candidate in Information Science at the Information School, at the University of Washington, in Seattle. If you are interested in more information about her distinctive and relevant research please the Information School “People” page at: http://ischool.uw.edu/people/phd/woelfj

For her study, Woelfer interviewed 202 young people (101 from Seattle, 101 from Vancouver.)  There were 122 males, 75 female and five participants who self-identified as transgendered.  (Woelfer was careful to point out that the number of transgendered youth was proportionately high.) The other number that was quite interesting to me is the disproportionate number of female to males. Woelfer didn’t speak to this statistic, but I wondered if this is reflective of the fact that so many young women who are homeless/at risk of being homeless are recruited into the sex trade industry and therefore not counted amongst those being “homeless”.)

The participants were representatives of various ethno-cultural groups including, Indigenousness peoples, “mixed-race” individuals, and African Americans (in Seattle).  But the majority, in each country, were Caucasian. (Woelfer found this to be surprising; as did I.)

Woelfer’s data was poetically framed within the context of the “ordinary vs. the extraordinary”. (Woelfer, 2012).   For example:  It is ordinary for a youth to access music on his or her iPod; while it is extraordinary for that same youth to have little access to the electricity to charge her iPod. It is ordinary for a youth to download free movies to his or her laptop; it is extraordinary for that individual to not be able to charge her laptop where he or she sleeps at night.

The participants had technological devices such as cell phones, laptops, and music players. But though they owned such devices they often faced unique accessibility issues.  One of the common threads throughout the presentation was the issue of access to electricity.   (Something many of us never consider.) Simply finding a place to charge their phone/laptop/music device is an obstacle. Finding an outlet to recharge their devices and finding Wi-Fi access proves to be a constant challenge.  The usual places that many people gain access to free wireless (cafés, restaurants, etc.) are off limits to them because eventually they will be accused of “loitering”.

Personal Stories from the youth that stuck with me:

1. A young woman describes her daily visit to the library. She uses her 1.5 hour on the Internet to stay in touch with friends and family (via Facebook and email) and downloads movies, while her friend goes to another area of the library where she can use a plug to recharge her laptop. Then the girls go “home” to a “tent city” in Seattle and they watch movies together until their battery runs out.
2. A young woman explained how she was in an abusive relationship and everyone in her family was worried about her when she went to live with the boyfriend at his friends’ place. In this dwelling, they had no electricity or heat.  The young woman explained that her boyfriend was “doing the whole isolating [me] thing” and wouldn’t let her leave the house. The couple heard from a friend that her mother had posted a plea for information on her daughter’s whereabouts on Facebook, and warned that she would be calling Missing Persons if she didn’t hear from her daughter that day. Because of this warning, the boyfriend “let hour out” and she went straight to the library, just to write to her mother via Facebook.  (She eventually got out of the relationship.)
3. A young man got rid of his iPod because he felt that his behaviour, his obsession associated with his music and downloading, had become “an addiction” and he was trying to live addiction free.
4. A young woman had to create two Facebook accounts so that she could secretly stay in touch with her younger sister who was still living with her parents, from whom she had fled.   She was concerned for the safety of her sibling and the multiple Facebook profiles enabled her to “keep an eye on [her] sister” without her parents surveillance.
5. One young man had 20 library books in his bag when he was interviewed.  He had nowhere to sleep at night, but he carried those books around.

These youth accessed technology at the library for the following (un-ranked) reasons: social connections/job search/resume assistance/housing search/accessing community organizations/health sites (clinics, etc.)/self-education /Library services/resources (some participants surveyed took 1-2 bus rides just to get to a public library branch)

IMPORTANT DETAILS TO KEEP IN MIND

• The youth that were interviewed for this study “looked like “college kids”.  They dressed the same, had the style of clothes (many had new and expensive donated clothing) the same taste in technological/recreational activities, etc.)
• Their access to technology during the day is integral to their stabilization process and moving out of homelessness. (Shelter policies state that the youth are not there during the day; they are expected to be out of the shelter, “working on their [work/school/accommodation] plan”. (Unless, Woelfer noted, there are specific additional challenges the young person faces, such as extremely low IQ, or debilitating disabilities.)  So even though there are stipulated hours of daytime absence required for residence in shelters, their Case managers expect the youth to have access to computers and the Internet during the day.  This highlights the need for daytime access for homeless youth to technology/computer/Internet access.

I was reminded during this presentation of the myriad “unknown” in the lives of our students.   As educators, we must be highly aware that anyone in our class could be homeless, in transitional housing, or at-risk of homelessness. We might never be informed of the situation.  The school counselor may never be informed.  It’s a possibility for which we should be mindful.

I complete this post with the following information from the Covenant House (youth shelter) website, for those of you who would like additional information about homeless and at-risk of homelessness youth in Vancouver.

How many homeless youth are there in Vancouver?

The number varies depending on the time of year and how homelessness is defined. However, it is generally accepted that on any given night there are between 500 and 1,000 homeless and at-risk young people on Vancouver’s streets. A street-involved young person can be someone who is absolutely homeless (no address), someone who is “couch surfing” by moving from one friend’s to another, or someone who is still living at home but getting involved with life on the streets. (Covenant House site)

Our Mission

Providing love and hope to Vancouver’s street youth.

We help youth aged 16 – 24 who have fled physical, emotional and/or sexual abuse, those who have been forced from their homes or those who have aged out of foster care.   (http://www.covenanthousebc.org/about)

Works Cited:

“Jill Woelfer | Information School | University of Washington.” Jill Woelfer | Information School | University of Washington.  2012. Web. 30 Nov. 2012.