Tech+Teaching: Offer students a menu of options!

If you follow the philosophy of Paolo Freire or read Eric Toshalis, if you have students of varying learning abilities in your classroom, or if you just plain want to change things up to motivate all of your students, you want to engage your students actively in their education, as your partners, with the added benefit technology. The trick, as I am learning, is to find the right tools for the job. Sometimes, those tools find us while other times we find them. I’ll give you a few examples.

In my Technology for Teaching and Learning class at the University of Minnesota, I had the opportunity to demonstrate my own mastery of literature using technology. We were given a menu of options, most prescribed with one free choice. All required some sort of technology. To show my instructor how well I know George Orwell’s Animal Farm, I compiled a music playlist in Google Slides, explaining how each of the nine songs I chose aligned to the classic. I chose this decision because I love music and have always listened to the words in search of the deeper meanings in songs. The exercise of creating this menu item required significant time as I perused my library for the most suitable tunes, and then drawing comparisons between each song and the book. THe curious thing is, the work did not feel like work. I was proud of my project and very much enjoyed selecting the tunes and showcasing my music and novel knowledge. I can imagine how much energy my secondary students might invest in similar exercises.

My second and third projects delved into digital storytelling: one in MIT’s Scratch coding program and the other in Pixton.com’s comic strip application. Scratch was arduous and, while I am glad I engaged with the platform, the challenges it presented from a non-literary (i.e., coding) angle in my opinion outweighed the benefits. I walked from that feeling that I conveyed less mastery of the novel (Animal Farm again) to my instructor than I did through the playlist. Even viewing classmates’ Scratch videos, I sensed less mastery than blog posts and other menu items people teed up.

The third item via Pixton I believe did demonstrate knowledge of the text--this time, Romeo and Juliet by the Bard himself--and it required me to paraphrase lines, cite direct quotes, and show general creativity in interpreting and relaying the play with a limited palette of comics themes.

My greatest learning from these efforts: I learned that a book report does not have to be the book report of old. Let students be creative while tapping into their creative and critical thinking skills. Give them options. If you give them free choice, have them run it by you before moving forward so you can offer helpful guidance or redirection up front. Then let them create and share. And get your hands dirty yourself. I may not love Scratch, but I am glad I gave it a go.

You can explore my menu items by visiting the “student samples” selection via the top menu. Oh, and yes, I am loyal to Freire and embrace Toshalis. Each of my students is unique, and each wants to show me what they know in ways that allow them to contextualize the material in their everyday worlds. And yes, I am a believer in offering students an array of technology-infused options from which to choose.