Looking Back: At the beginning of this semester I remember looking at the syllabus and thinking "wow, so much work to do for this class how will I ever get it all finished?" I have to say that I was surprised at how difficult some of the assignments could have been if I didn't do the readings or pay attention in class, and I felt like some of the assignments could have been shortened for the benefit of the students in the class as well as the professors grading it. I understand that college is supposed to harder, and as we are entering now into our third block of education classes we are coming to the end of our education here at Kent State, but I felt like having all the assignments, or should I say the majority of them, due in the last month and a half of class put a lot of pressure on me to get things finished.
As for looking back on my past blogs, sometimes I cringe reading them. I was never really into blogging as a teenager, because I felt like every time I would blog about something there was always that one person who would shoot me down and make me feel bad for what I said. I even got into a fight once at school, verbal not physical, with a girl because I said in my blog that she was right about something. Ridiculous, I know, but I just didn't want to anger people anymore so I stopped caring. Until this class I hadn't even read a blog again. I think that some of my blogs weren't as critical as I would have liked them, and a lot of it is just opinion on the article or ways to use it in the classroom which was my goal, but I think I could have had a more critical eye about them. I do think I will at some point use blogs in my classroom, but it depends on what kind of school I teach in. Some students don't have a home computer, and some schools don't even have school computers. I eventually started to like blogging a little bit, but I would want my students to write in depth blogs about the books they are reading for my class, what they like, don't like, understand, don't understand, major themes, literary devices, you name it I would want them to blog about it. At times I found the blogging to be nerve racking, because honestly I don't have a lot of time to be sitting on the computer and typing up a blog, but sometimes I found it therapeutic to get what I felt out in the open.
Multigenre Autobiography Assignment: I actually really enjoyed doing this assignment. It was hard to think about all the different texts that influenced my life through the years, and it was even harder to think about how I would use them when I am teaching, but I would use this assignment in my classroom for the initial getting to know the class phase. I think at the beginning of the year some teachers just like to delve into the hard standard type materials, but I would like to ease my students into learning, and I would even put a spin on this project maybe having a list of classic literature for them to chose one they would like to read and explain to me why we should read it in class. I really like this activity because the students get to put what they want in it, and it gets them thinking about books, television, movies, video games, and music as texts.
Film Study Guide: I absolutely loved the Costanzo book about films and using them in the classroom, and initially I liked the idea of the film study guide, but when I started actually doing the assignment I found out I really disliked it a lot. The first part of the assignment and the last part of the assignment were good I think because it got me thinking about the movie itself not just if I liked it or the actors in it. The shot by shot analysis was redundant I think. My scene only had 10 shots in it, but a lot of my peers told me they had at least 25-30 and writing all of those scenes out was time consuming and I think it was hard to know when one scene ended and another began after awhile. What I would do with this part if I were to use it in the classroom is to cut it to only doing 10 shots for the shot-by-shot, and discuss how to know when a scene ends again before the assignment is due so the students understand. I don't think I would use this in a regular classroom though, because I want to focus more on literature and the films themselves and less on the logistics of film making. I enjoyed this part of the class so much, but I don't think that I would use the film study guide unless I was teaching a film study course.
Another thing that I liked about this part of the class was story boarding. The activity we did it in class when we got together and made a story and drew the pictures of it in sequence was very beneficial for me because I believe it showed how a story is written and gets the students on taste. I would definitely use this when talking about a novel we had just finished, especially a classic where some students could be lost. I would use this activity to ask student to go through and pick out one major scene or action in the book and story board it. I think the students would better understand the book itself.
Overall: In the end, I think I learned some things that I would use in the classroom. I would say though that I would combine the Educational Technology class with this class because they kind of teach the same premise. I liked learning about how to use technology in the classroom besides just PowerPoints and watching a movie as a reward, and I will definitely take what I have learned and apply it to my own teaching.
