After my first year of teaching, I was offered the opportunity to trade one of my sections of eleventh grade ELA for a journalism elective. I had worked at Rhode Island College's student-run newspaper The Anchor for three years as an undergrad so I felt like I had enough experience. The high school where I teach had only a very small student-run newspaper and so there was a lot of freedom for me to take the newspaper and the elective in any direction I wanted. The excitement started to fade after I realized that with great freedom, comes a lot more work. I struggled with a combination of things: too many ideas, not enough focus, and a “staff” of students who were all graduating with almost no interest from younger grades for joining the after-school club. Since then, I have spent the past four years reinventing the course every semester, hoping that something finally clicks!
There are some aspects of the course that I am happy with, like our weekly Socratic seminars on student-chosen news articles of local, national, and/or international relevance. However, something I want to change is how my students create and share the news and issues happening in our school and town community. Something I believe is that kids are engaged when their classwork assignments have a meaningful and authentic purpose, medium, and audience.
Currently, we have a WordPress site that is overwhelming, difficult to use, and challenging to update frequently. Instead, I want to create a class and student-run “newspaper” using Blogger. Students already have gmail accounts through the school, and the Blogger platform is more user-friendly, and I can toggle permissions in the settings so that students can use their own email account to publish articles to the shared blog. I think this will help build the classroom community and also help my students reach a greater audience with their writing!
No comments:
Post a Comment