Many of us agree that we need to align our classroom activities with the digitally literate lives our students lead. Yet we still hear of many classroom simply focusing on technology integration.
Simply put this is a mistake. When we look at the shift from page to pixel in terms of technology integration rather than an ever shifting and dynamic text we create a horse race environment where technology never improves learning.
It's like the old Orbitz commercial where a refund is delivered by hovercraft instead of mail.
Just because you have technology does not mean you need to use technology. Instead always ask yourself, "How do these emerging text enhance or inhibit my pedagogical goal?" Do not simply use a hovercraft because you have one.
Multimodal Poetry
One area that I have been working on for the past five or six years is to integrate digital texts and tools into my teaching of poetry. There is something rewarding about using the oldest genre of litertature with the newest forms of text.
I also think poetry, as a potter's wheel of the soul, is a great place to shape ideas about design effecting meaning making. Each word, phrase, stanza, image, or metaphor continuously redesign meaning as a new audience stumbles upon the poem. The rich words and guttural reaction to poetry allow for a conversations around topics such us color scheme, image placement, font, etc.
Finally I have too often seen poetry taught so poorly that generations of new writers may have never discovered their poems from within. We do not let students work with one poem over time, or to play with meanings. Instead the focus in on literary elements, i.e. find me a one poem with a metaphor, one poem with alliteration, etc.
The humanity is lost in the hunt for the mechanics
Celebrating Poet Laureates
It was decided then that at each year at NCTE we would submit a proposal to celebrate the work of a Unites State Poet Laureate through multimodal poetry so we could get away from what Billy Collins (our first featured poet) called teaching children, "To beat the meaning out a poem with a hose."
In 2009 we highlighted Billy Collins by exploring new ways to respond and author poetry with images.
In 2010 we featured Kay Ryan and went through #Twitpoems and multimodal retellings with iMovie.
This year, in Chicago, we brought in the works of W. S. Merwin and connected to using poetry to make the world a better place. That is our definition of critical literacy-words in action to change or question the status quo for the greater good.
W. S. Merwin and Poetry for Change
W. S. Merwin is also an interesting choice as he has developed a natural suspicion to many things digital. We wanted to show that there is just as much poetry in the design choices students make as in the words they add or leave off the page.
Basically we read some Merwin poems as mentor texts. Next we took ideas from Probst and concentrated on converting prose to poetry. Students had to choose a social justice issue. Then we took he project into two separate directions.
One group of students completed an internet inquiry topic around their issue. They wrote a collaborative paragraph. Next they highlighted important words or phrases in the paragrpah and used those a basis for a poem. Students then, using Audacity and iMovie, created a multimodal version of their poem.
Another group of students went out into their world to find a social issue. They collected cell phone pictures to document the problem. They then searched for similar images online. Using search engines they connected back to the websites that hosted the images and "found" texts they wanted to use in their poems. They then used iMovie or MovieMaker Live to create the poem.
Moving Forward
Poetry has been a great avenue to explore multimodal design elements. We hope to continue our work at NCTE next year, or by simply sharing our work with other teachers.
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