Artifact Two: A True Content - Language TechArts
When we think about the content of the Language Arts, there are many things that come to mind. We think of grammar, punctuation, five paragraph essays, fiction texts, non fiction texts, inferences, figurative language, drama, poetry. We think of writing. We think of reading. We think of something called analyzing a text. At least that is what we think of as teachers. A lot of those words do not really have a meaning to our students. If they do have a meaning, they more often than not have the wrong meaning, or at least a meaning that is not what we as teachers ever had in mind. They usually are associated in our students with something along the lines of writing a lot, reading something that is boring, and testing. This should never be the place we work in in our classroom. When this is all our students are getting, we are not giving them anything. (InTASC 4e, 4j, 4k, 4l, 4n, 4o, 4q, 5i, 5q, 5r.)
When we think of the Language Arts from the place that brought us to teaching, we think of college, of being an English major, or putting ourselves on the line in a small lecture hall or a seminar where everything we think and say is new and exciting and worth arguing over. For me, I think of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus and how when I first read it I felt every cry that Lavinia could not scream and how I saw every way she was silenced metaphorically emerging in my own life. I think of Kerouac’s On the Road and how when I read it I just imagined it was my older brother and suddenly everything about him made sense, even though he is a little younger than Dean Moriarty. I think of the first time I read Burrough’s Naked Lunch and learned what a cut-up was and that what we gain and understand from the things that we read is all about what is inside of us, what we put into our reading, just as much as it is about what we get from the author. I think of when I read Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God and I realized that I had been to so many of the towns and places in the story that I could really imagine every street Janie walked down. I think of crying in the middle of class when Johnny uttered his last words to Ponyboy in Hinton’s The Outsiders. Most of all I think of all the characters and stories and emotions that I have learned to understand through my readings and how these things have enabled me to live a better life, how they have enabled me to think in different ways, how they have made me a better person. (InTASC 4e, 4j, 4k, 4l, 4n, 4o, 4q, 5i, 5q, 5r.)
Something that I have learned over the course of my internship experience is that often when we as teachers say content we mean “the stuff we teach kids in class”, or “the stuff that is going to be on the test.” When we think of it like this, we are letting go of what it meant to us when we were students. We turn it into something to do rather than to experience. Content is the stuff that is held inside something, the things that are included in a group. When we misconstrue our definition of content to be the “stuff in class” or the “stuff on the test” we are segmenting the Language Arts, we are constricting its worth, we are limiting its value and its application. While not everyone that I teach is going to become a great writer or an English major in college themselves, they deserve to find value and application in their reading. I believe that the place all content should be held is within life, every individual should be able to gain something from each lesson, each story, each reading, that is applicable to their life and can be added to their own personal content, not exclusively the content of a specific classroom, but a content that changes in their lives from day to day. It is this belief that made me decide to approach the teaching of content in a different way during my internship. This belief and a few other significant factors made this approach a possibility. (InTASC 4a, 4b, 4e, 4f, 4j, 4k, 4m, 4n, 4q, 4r, 5b, 5c, 5d, 5e, 5k, 5p, 5s.)
When I started my first day of my internship at Patterson Park Public Charter School in East Baltimore, I was not the only person having a first day. My co-teacher was having her first day too. The fact that it was our first day was probably the most significant element of my internship experience that enabled me to grow and to bloom in my own way. Because of the fact that we were both new and that she was very excited about having her classroom become our classroom I was able to introduce her to new ways of integrating technology into our teaching. The avenue of technology integration was the one which I determined was the best way to experience the content of the Language Arts in a way that every student was able to create meaning for themselves, rather than only move through the motions. When I arrived at school the first day, I had just completed a course entitled “The Paperless Classroom,” an introduction to social media and digital technologies in the classroom, and was extremely excited about finding opportunities to implement this knowledge into my teaching experience. Over the past year, I have worked in a middle school Language Arts classroom with two classes of seventh graders, separated by performance ability, and a lower performing class of eighth graders. Through the collaborative efforts of my co-teacher and I, and her willingness to experiment, we were able to design and implement an arts-integrated project-based learning technology and 21st Century skill intervention with each of our classes for my Action Research Project. (InTASC 4a, 4b, 4c, 4e, 4f, 4g, 4h, 4o, 5b, 5c, 5d, 5e, 5f, 5h, 5i, 5l, 5m, 5n, 5o, 5p, 5q, 5r, 5s.)
This project came into existence for several reasons. The first was my coursework. The second was my co-teacher's excitement and trust. The third was the fact that our school was wireless and had a very lonely laptop cart begging for us to use it for something other than reading tests. The fourth was that we had a motivation problem and we felt that we were not getting to our students in the best way possible. Many of our students were complacent, bored, not interested in completing their work, and tired of the grind. We noticed the flicker of excitement whenever the laptops were in our room, and then the subsequent disappointment in their voices when we would announce that they were for testing. With all of this as inspiration we decided to start with class blogs so that our students would be able to get their coursework and materials through online access. The success in this, as we saw it, was that our students would no longer have excuses for not being able to get their work. However, I realized that this goal alone was something that served us as teachers more than it served our students. Furthermore, it was a one-sided communication system. In other words, the students were only able to obtain instruction from the teacher, not interact in instruction with the teacher and their peers. While it was an important technology skill to learn, it was not a means of connecting content to life, it was just a way of obtaining and returning information to and from a single source. (Evidence: 8th Grade Class Blog, 7th Grade Class Blog.) (InTASC 4a, 4b, 4c, 4e, 4f, 4g, 4h, 4o, 5b, 5c, 5d, 5e, 5f, 5h, 5i, 5l, 5m, 5n, 5o, 5p, 5q, 5r, 5s.)
At the same time I was realizing this I had begun teaching the eighth grade class myself and had designed what I know in retrospect was some overly confusing and complicated online projects that my students did not have the technological literacy needed to be successful. This first project was designed as an introduction to web based research using primary and secondary sources as well as a technology literacy diagnostic. Over this two day lesson set, students learned the basic differences between primary and secondary sources, they learned how to navigate basic pages on Google Blogster, they learned how to fill out an online form for submission, and they learned how to get really frustrated with technology. After reflecting on this diagnostic, I determined that what I needed to do was create a scaffolding for students to build their technological literacy skills as well as their 21st Century skill set of communication, collaboration, and critical thinking through the integration of technology into our classroom. The other thing that was needed was a more concrete way of sneaking content into fun and creative activities. This project would have been a fun and creative experience for a student who was able to get as far as the creation of their Glogster, however few of the students had the technology literacy to successfully complete that part of the project. (Evidence: Technology Diagnostic Lesson Task Sheet.) (InTASC 4a, 4b, 4c, 4e, 4f, 4g, 4h, 4o, 5b, 5c, 5d, 5e, 5f, 5h, 5i, 5l, 5m, 5n, 5o, 5p, 5q, 5r, 5s.)
After reflecting on these lessons and the student frustrations I concluded that by identifying specific skill areas where student weakness could be identified in the realm of technology literacy and designing projects that would build student confidence as well as infusing the content of Language Arts into these life skills we could meet with success in our aspiring paperless classroom. Over the following months I incorporated bi-weekly technology projects that scaffolded transitions from web-based research to digital design and publication that built up student skill sets and confidence with technology, all the while enabling students to experience content in a valuable way. The ultimate purpose of these projects was to increase student engagement and interest in processing the classroom content. While students completed several individual assignments through the use of technology, I focused on tracking their improvements through multi-day projects where the students incorporated what they learned into a product of some kind. For example, the first of these was an Author Research Brochure Project. I created a research guide graphic organizer and compiled a reliable sources collection for students to use to research the author of various class novels and then record the information necessary for their brochure. Students completed the research guide and recorded their sources. Then they created a traditional paper brochure that summarized their research and required them to utilize various text features. By breaking this assignment into digital and paper aspects students were able to focus on one technology skill at a time while still working on the traditional standards-based content knowledge of resources, text features, citations, writing skills, and summarizing skills. This greatly reduced student frustration and greatly increased student participation and engagement with the content. (Evidence: Research Guide Graphic Organizer, Reliable Sources Guide Sheet, Author Research Brochure Examples.) (InTASC 4a, 4b, 4c, 4e, 4f, 4g, 4h, 4o, 5b, 5c, 5d, 5e, 5f, 5h, 5i, 5l, 5m, 5n, 5o, 5p, 5q, 5r, 5s.)
After the success of this project, I concluded that it was greatly beneficial to the students to play off of their middle school desires to impress their peers with their work. For the next project, I incorporated the current class text with creative writing and publication. Our class read and analyzed the figurative language used in memoirs of an author's childhood and then wrote their own memoirs using the author's as the model. Students evaluated and edited each others' memoirs as we worked through the writing process. I then created a publication template for the students to complete and edit as their own. This process enabled the students to begin learning how to visualize in the digital publication interface experience of word processors while still giving them control over their content and presentation. Additionally, this project was published, printed, and put on display for peers to read, thus creating a motivation for confidence and pride in their work. Students were able to immerse themselves in the writing experience as well as in the publication experience, while working on conventional content skills such as writing, grammar, style, tone, mood, figurative language, point of view, in a way that they could use in their everyday lives, not just in the Language Arts classroom. (Evidence: Student Draft of Memoirs, Student Published Memoirs, Newspaper Template.) (InTASC 4a, 4b, 4c, 4d, 4e, 4f, 4g, 4h, 4o, 5b, 5c, 5d, 5e, 5f, 5h, 5i, 5l, 5m, 5n, 5o, 5p, 5q, 5r, 5s.)
The other major element of digital technology that was integrated was the use of the Baltimore City Public Schools TSS Blackboard system. All students now have individual access to a secure digital classroom where they are able to interact in discussion boards with their teachers, their peers, and other members of the school community. Students are also able to submit assignments and work on their projects through this database system. This enables students to engage with the content in the classroom and outside of the classroom as well as across barriers of space and time. Students no longer have to be in a single room with a single set of people to explore their novels and other work, they have the tools to explore at any time. This aspect of the intervention could be considered the most obvious and important aspect of where I was able to create and utilize a place where content extends outside of school, where it is left without boundaries to all of those involved. (Evidence: TSS Blackboard Screenshot.) (InTASC 4a, 4b, 4c, 4e, 4f, 4g, 4h, 4o, 5b, 5c, 5d, 5e, 5f, 5h, 5i, 5l, 5m, 5n, 5o, 5p, 5q, 5r, 5s.)
While these major projects focused on integrating technology and the arts into the Language Arts curriculum in very structured and large scale ways, they were not the only ways that students experienced the 21st Century Skills of collaboration, communication, and critical thinking. Many smaller projects using technology were successfully implemented as well. Many times during the reading of a novel, students created letters, newspaper articles, and journals in order to explore the differing points of view of different characters while simultaneously improving their writing through peer-edited drafts and final publication. Students participated in online discussion forums where they were able to share and respond to their peers in real time, thus giving the quieter voices of the room a venue to be heard. This also enabled students to further develop their critical thinking skills by exploring the responses of their peers in real time as well as building upon each other's interpretations to reach higher planes of analysis. Students were taught how to peer-edit each other’s work in a collaborative way and over time their comments became less superficial and they began to push each others’ ideas further into the texts and farther out into the world. Additionally, by incorporating information and skills that are generally viewed as outside of the content of the Language Arts into the content of the class experience, I was able to engage students from many different areas of interest including computing, technology, science, and social studies by utilizing materials from each of these disciplines with a linguistic twist of value and application. Overall because of this intervention and more specifically the scaffolded design of the lessons, lesson materials, and venues for student understanding and participation, the students were able to learn in new ways that brought individual meaning to the Language Arts that they could take outside of the classroom. (InTASC 4a, 4b, 4c, 4e, 4f, 4g, 4h, 4o, 5b, 5c, 5d, 5e, 5f, 5h, 5i, 5l, 5m, 5n, 5o, 5p, 5q, 5r, 5s.)
These types of project-based learning technology interventions continued throughout the year for a wide variety of different aspects of the Language Arts content in a wide variety of creative ways. Data has clearly demonstrated student gains in technology literacy in accordance with the Maryland State Standards for Technology Literacy. More importantly, there have been tremendous gains in student interest and excitement surrounding their classwork and lessons as demonstrated by the increase in completion of student work and class participation. Student motivation and success has been directly impacted by my technologically advanced and creative application of content. This intervention has completely changed the way our classroom operates and is a model system for reaching students and enhancing their learning experiences in our modern world. This project was presented at the Harvard Graduate School of Education Research Conference in April of 2012. (Evidence: Technology Intervention Student Project Scores, Technology Intervention Student Self-Reported Progress.) (InTASC 4a, 4b, 4c, 4e, 4f, 4g, 4h, 4o, 5b, 5c, 5d, 5e, 5f, 5h, 5i, 5l, 5m, 5n, 5o, 5p, 5q, 5r, 5s.)
I believe that content for me means something different than it means for my students. Deep down I think that I always knew I was going to major in English in college, that I was going to become a teacher. That is why for me it was easy to fall in love with stories and characters and think inside their minds to find answers to problems in my own life. That is not the case with all of my students. It is not that I do not believe that it is important to try to get kids to love to read and love to write but that is just not the reality of attraction for everyone. Through this intervention I learned the value of accepting differences in interest and the ways in which those differences can still be united in a successful and valuable learning experience for all. I am confident to say that every student in each of my classes has learned many skills that they will be able to use in the rest of their lives due to this technology and arts integrated content intervention. What is secretly more important to me is that they have created products, read stories, met characters, and written words that they will always remember as they become woven into the most important content of all - the content of their lives.
When we think of the Language Arts from the place that brought us to teaching, we think of college, of being an English major, or putting ourselves on the line in a small lecture hall or a seminar where everything we think and say is new and exciting and worth arguing over. For me, I think of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus and how when I first read it I felt every cry that Lavinia could not scream and how I saw every way she was silenced metaphorically emerging in my own life. I think of Kerouac’s On the Road and how when I read it I just imagined it was my older brother and suddenly everything about him made sense, even though he is a little younger than Dean Moriarty. I think of the first time I read Burrough’s Naked Lunch and learned what a cut-up was and that what we gain and understand from the things that we read is all about what is inside of us, what we put into our reading, just as much as it is about what we get from the author. I think of when I read Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God and I realized that I had been to so many of the towns and places in the story that I could really imagine every street Janie walked down. I think of crying in the middle of class when Johnny uttered his last words to Ponyboy in Hinton’s The Outsiders. Most of all I think of all the characters and stories and emotions that I have learned to understand through my readings and how these things have enabled me to live a better life, how they have enabled me to think in different ways, how they have made me a better person. (InTASC 4e, 4j, 4k, 4l, 4n, 4o, 4q, 5i, 5q, 5r.)
Something that I have learned over the course of my internship experience is that often when we as teachers say content we mean “the stuff we teach kids in class”, or “the stuff that is going to be on the test.” When we think of it like this, we are letting go of what it meant to us when we were students. We turn it into something to do rather than to experience. Content is the stuff that is held inside something, the things that are included in a group. When we misconstrue our definition of content to be the “stuff in class” or the “stuff on the test” we are segmenting the Language Arts, we are constricting its worth, we are limiting its value and its application. While not everyone that I teach is going to become a great writer or an English major in college themselves, they deserve to find value and application in their reading. I believe that the place all content should be held is within life, every individual should be able to gain something from each lesson, each story, each reading, that is applicable to their life and can be added to their own personal content, not exclusively the content of a specific classroom, but a content that changes in their lives from day to day. It is this belief that made me decide to approach the teaching of content in a different way during my internship. This belief and a few other significant factors made this approach a possibility. (InTASC 4a, 4b, 4e, 4f, 4j, 4k, 4m, 4n, 4q, 4r, 5b, 5c, 5d, 5e, 5k, 5p, 5s.)
When I started my first day of my internship at Patterson Park Public Charter School in East Baltimore, I was not the only person having a first day. My co-teacher was having her first day too. The fact that it was our first day was probably the most significant element of my internship experience that enabled me to grow and to bloom in my own way. Because of the fact that we were both new and that she was very excited about having her classroom become our classroom I was able to introduce her to new ways of integrating technology into our teaching. The avenue of technology integration was the one which I determined was the best way to experience the content of the Language Arts in a way that every student was able to create meaning for themselves, rather than only move through the motions. When I arrived at school the first day, I had just completed a course entitled “The Paperless Classroom,” an introduction to social media and digital technologies in the classroom, and was extremely excited about finding opportunities to implement this knowledge into my teaching experience. Over the past year, I have worked in a middle school Language Arts classroom with two classes of seventh graders, separated by performance ability, and a lower performing class of eighth graders. Through the collaborative efforts of my co-teacher and I, and her willingness to experiment, we were able to design and implement an arts-integrated project-based learning technology and 21st Century skill intervention with each of our classes for my Action Research Project. (InTASC 4a, 4b, 4c, 4e, 4f, 4g, 4h, 4o, 5b, 5c, 5d, 5e, 5f, 5h, 5i, 5l, 5m, 5n, 5o, 5p, 5q, 5r, 5s.)
This project came into existence for several reasons. The first was my coursework. The second was my co-teacher's excitement and trust. The third was the fact that our school was wireless and had a very lonely laptop cart begging for us to use it for something other than reading tests. The fourth was that we had a motivation problem and we felt that we were not getting to our students in the best way possible. Many of our students were complacent, bored, not interested in completing their work, and tired of the grind. We noticed the flicker of excitement whenever the laptops were in our room, and then the subsequent disappointment in their voices when we would announce that they were for testing. With all of this as inspiration we decided to start with class blogs so that our students would be able to get their coursework and materials through online access. The success in this, as we saw it, was that our students would no longer have excuses for not being able to get their work. However, I realized that this goal alone was something that served us as teachers more than it served our students. Furthermore, it was a one-sided communication system. In other words, the students were only able to obtain instruction from the teacher, not interact in instruction with the teacher and their peers. While it was an important technology skill to learn, it was not a means of connecting content to life, it was just a way of obtaining and returning information to and from a single source. (Evidence: 8th Grade Class Blog, 7th Grade Class Blog.) (InTASC 4a, 4b, 4c, 4e, 4f, 4g, 4h, 4o, 5b, 5c, 5d, 5e, 5f, 5h, 5i, 5l, 5m, 5n, 5o, 5p, 5q, 5r, 5s.)
At the same time I was realizing this I had begun teaching the eighth grade class myself and had designed what I know in retrospect was some overly confusing and complicated online projects that my students did not have the technological literacy needed to be successful. This first project was designed as an introduction to web based research using primary and secondary sources as well as a technology literacy diagnostic. Over this two day lesson set, students learned the basic differences between primary and secondary sources, they learned how to navigate basic pages on Google Blogster, they learned how to fill out an online form for submission, and they learned how to get really frustrated with technology. After reflecting on this diagnostic, I determined that what I needed to do was create a scaffolding for students to build their technological literacy skills as well as their 21st Century skill set of communication, collaboration, and critical thinking through the integration of technology into our classroom. The other thing that was needed was a more concrete way of sneaking content into fun and creative activities. This project would have been a fun and creative experience for a student who was able to get as far as the creation of their Glogster, however few of the students had the technology literacy to successfully complete that part of the project. (Evidence: Technology Diagnostic Lesson Task Sheet.) (InTASC 4a, 4b, 4c, 4e, 4f, 4g, 4h, 4o, 5b, 5c, 5d, 5e, 5f, 5h, 5i, 5l, 5m, 5n, 5o, 5p, 5q, 5r, 5s.)
After reflecting on these lessons and the student frustrations I concluded that by identifying specific skill areas where student weakness could be identified in the realm of technology literacy and designing projects that would build student confidence as well as infusing the content of Language Arts into these life skills we could meet with success in our aspiring paperless classroom. Over the following months I incorporated bi-weekly technology projects that scaffolded transitions from web-based research to digital design and publication that built up student skill sets and confidence with technology, all the while enabling students to experience content in a valuable way. The ultimate purpose of these projects was to increase student engagement and interest in processing the classroom content. While students completed several individual assignments through the use of technology, I focused on tracking their improvements through multi-day projects where the students incorporated what they learned into a product of some kind. For example, the first of these was an Author Research Brochure Project. I created a research guide graphic organizer and compiled a reliable sources collection for students to use to research the author of various class novels and then record the information necessary for their brochure. Students completed the research guide and recorded their sources. Then they created a traditional paper brochure that summarized their research and required them to utilize various text features. By breaking this assignment into digital and paper aspects students were able to focus on one technology skill at a time while still working on the traditional standards-based content knowledge of resources, text features, citations, writing skills, and summarizing skills. This greatly reduced student frustration and greatly increased student participation and engagement with the content. (Evidence: Research Guide Graphic Organizer, Reliable Sources Guide Sheet, Author Research Brochure Examples.) (InTASC 4a, 4b, 4c, 4e, 4f, 4g, 4h, 4o, 5b, 5c, 5d, 5e, 5f, 5h, 5i, 5l, 5m, 5n, 5o, 5p, 5q, 5r, 5s.)
After the success of this project, I concluded that it was greatly beneficial to the students to play off of their middle school desires to impress their peers with their work. For the next project, I incorporated the current class text with creative writing and publication. Our class read and analyzed the figurative language used in memoirs of an author's childhood and then wrote their own memoirs using the author's as the model. Students evaluated and edited each others' memoirs as we worked through the writing process. I then created a publication template for the students to complete and edit as their own. This process enabled the students to begin learning how to visualize in the digital publication interface experience of word processors while still giving them control over their content and presentation. Additionally, this project was published, printed, and put on display for peers to read, thus creating a motivation for confidence and pride in their work. Students were able to immerse themselves in the writing experience as well as in the publication experience, while working on conventional content skills such as writing, grammar, style, tone, mood, figurative language, point of view, in a way that they could use in their everyday lives, not just in the Language Arts classroom. (Evidence: Student Draft of Memoirs, Student Published Memoirs, Newspaper Template.) (InTASC 4a, 4b, 4c, 4d, 4e, 4f, 4g, 4h, 4o, 5b, 5c, 5d, 5e, 5f, 5h, 5i, 5l, 5m, 5n, 5o, 5p, 5q, 5r, 5s.)
The other major element of digital technology that was integrated was the use of the Baltimore City Public Schools TSS Blackboard system. All students now have individual access to a secure digital classroom where they are able to interact in discussion boards with their teachers, their peers, and other members of the school community. Students are also able to submit assignments and work on their projects through this database system. This enables students to engage with the content in the classroom and outside of the classroom as well as across barriers of space and time. Students no longer have to be in a single room with a single set of people to explore their novels and other work, they have the tools to explore at any time. This aspect of the intervention could be considered the most obvious and important aspect of where I was able to create and utilize a place where content extends outside of school, where it is left without boundaries to all of those involved. (Evidence: TSS Blackboard Screenshot.) (InTASC 4a, 4b, 4c, 4e, 4f, 4g, 4h, 4o, 5b, 5c, 5d, 5e, 5f, 5h, 5i, 5l, 5m, 5n, 5o, 5p, 5q, 5r, 5s.)
While these major projects focused on integrating technology and the arts into the Language Arts curriculum in very structured and large scale ways, they were not the only ways that students experienced the 21st Century Skills of collaboration, communication, and critical thinking. Many smaller projects using technology were successfully implemented as well. Many times during the reading of a novel, students created letters, newspaper articles, and journals in order to explore the differing points of view of different characters while simultaneously improving their writing through peer-edited drafts and final publication. Students participated in online discussion forums where they were able to share and respond to their peers in real time, thus giving the quieter voices of the room a venue to be heard. This also enabled students to further develop their critical thinking skills by exploring the responses of their peers in real time as well as building upon each other's interpretations to reach higher planes of analysis. Students were taught how to peer-edit each other’s work in a collaborative way and over time their comments became less superficial and they began to push each others’ ideas further into the texts and farther out into the world. Additionally, by incorporating information and skills that are generally viewed as outside of the content of the Language Arts into the content of the class experience, I was able to engage students from many different areas of interest including computing, technology, science, and social studies by utilizing materials from each of these disciplines with a linguistic twist of value and application. Overall because of this intervention and more specifically the scaffolded design of the lessons, lesson materials, and venues for student understanding and participation, the students were able to learn in new ways that brought individual meaning to the Language Arts that they could take outside of the classroom. (InTASC 4a, 4b, 4c, 4e, 4f, 4g, 4h, 4o, 5b, 5c, 5d, 5e, 5f, 5h, 5i, 5l, 5m, 5n, 5o, 5p, 5q, 5r, 5s.)
These types of project-based learning technology interventions continued throughout the year for a wide variety of different aspects of the Language Arts content in a wide variety of creative ways. Data has clearly demonstrated student gains in technology literacy in accordance with the Maryland State Standards for Technology Literacy. More importantly, there have been tremendous gains in student interest and excitement surrounding their classwork and lessons as demonstrated by the increase in completion of student work and class participation. Student motivation and success has been directly impacted by my technologically advanced and creative application of content. This intervention has completely changed the way our classroom operates and is a model system for reaching students and enhancing their learning experiences in our modern world. This project was presented at the Harvard Graduate School of Education Research Conference in April of 2012. (Evidence: Technology Intervention Student Project Scores, Technology Intervention Student Self-Reported Progress.) (InTASC 4a, 4b, 4c, 4e, 4f, 4g, 4h, 4o, 5b, 5c, 5d, 5e, 5f, 5h, 5i, 5l, 5m, 5n, 5o, 5p, 5q, 5r, 5s.)
I believe that content for me means something different than it means for my students. Deep down I think that I always knew I was going to major in English in college, that I was going to become a teacher. That is why for me it was easy to fall in love with stories and characters and think inside their minds to find answers to problems in my own life. That is not the case with all of my students. It is not that I do not believe that it is important to try to get kids to love to read and love to write but that is just not the reality of attraction for everyone. Through this intervention I learned the value of accepting differences in interest and the ways in which those differences can still be united in a successful and valuable learning experience for all. I am confident to say that every student in each of my classes has learned many skills that they will be able to use in the rest of their lives due to this technology and arts integrated content intervention. What is secretly more important to me is that they have created products, read stories, met characters, and written words that they will always remember as they become woven into the most important content of all - the content of their lives.