Tech x English, a Contemplation on Tyler's discussion and what it means for my Early Years Classroom

 "The more you read, the more things you know, the more that you learn, the more places you will go"

- Dr. Seuss 

  

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 When I think back to my own high school English courses, I honestly don't remember much about them. I can tell you that I read Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar, Hamlet, Fahrenheit 451, and did a unit on poetry but that's about it. In my grade 12 social studies course, I remember writing diary entries as if I were someone trying to come to Canada through the underground rail road. I can tell you that I did these things but I don't remember much about anything I read or wrote. I could google these books and tell you what google tells me about it but that would be lying which is not something that I want to do. That being said, I don't want to blame everything on my teacher's. I could have looked over the information more after the fact.  What I can say is that I don't believe that I had many authentic learning experiences since I don't remember much of the content that I learned. It's been six and a half years since I graduated so I don't expect to remember everything, however, I wish that I remembered more than I do now. This past Monday, I had the pleasure of having Tyler Letkeman as the guest speaker in my internet for educators course. He is an alumni of BU and is currently a high school teacher at Vincent Massey School in Brandon Manitoba. Like many other teachers, he has had to adapt the format of his classes due to the ongoing pandemic that's affecting the entire world right now. With that has come an increased reliance on technology and social media in particular. He desires to make learning authentic for his students and uses technology/social media to make this happen. In the rest of this blog, I will share a few things that I took away from Tyler's discussion and discuss how I might integrate technology and specifically social media into my own classroom. 

   

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First off, I would like to thank Tyler for taking the time to talk to us. Teaching through a pandemic is exhausting with the added pressures at work plus all of the unknown's that come along with living in through this tumultuous time. I appreciated hearing about activities that I could practically put in my classroom. Prior to this talk, I knew that I could use online platforms such as tumble books to share books with my students or use YouTube to share someone's perspective on a piece of literature. What Tyler does in his classroom had me very intrigued. He shared about how he uses social media platforms as a way to allow students to share what they know. For example he has his students "make social media accounts" for characters from classic novels. The characters will post and then other characters from the literature piece "comment" on the posts from their perspectives. If my own English teachers had approached literature in this way, I guarantee you that I would be more engaged in my learning and remembered more about what happened in the stories. Secondly, he does writers workshops with his students and he lets each of his students choose their best piece of work to be published into a real book. These books are then put into the school library. This demonstrates to me that Tyler knows his students literature pieces are more valuable than just to be written to get a grade and then thrown out into the recycling bin a little while later. Never in my school career did I have any of my work published and my own work ended up in the recycling bin too. The last thing that stood out to me was Tyler's understanding of the pressure that his students are facing right now with the ongoing pandemic and not being able to do their normal activities. Like Tyler, I struggle at times as an adult to deal with the reality of life right now. I can't imagine how much harder it is for our students. During this time, we have to have compassion on our students and what they are going through. At this point, the well being of our students is far more important than getting through all of the content. 

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The ideas Tyler  said were wonderful and if I was teaching a high school English course, I would implement the social media aspect in a heartbeat. On a short side note, I have always wanted to teach a high school creative writing course even though I am in the early years stream and love watching young ones learn something new.  Tyler's conversation got me thinking more about how I could make more authentic learning experiences in my own early years education classroom. In my past two placements, both teachers have implemented the writers workshop into their school day. The students followed the basic writing process which is prewrite, draft, revise, edit, and publish. One teacher had a buddy edit in place while the other took a small group of students aside each day to edit their work. Since I wasn't in the classroom the whole year, I have never seen whether or not they did anything with their students writing. In my most recent placement, the teacher had each student place their best piece of work into their portfolio for report card time. By creating a class book and placing it into the library, it adds validity to their writing process! For early years students, I think that this would be a beautiful opportunity to have my students not only write their own story, but illustrate it as well. Many early years students in my student teaching placements have loved to draw and create so this leads me to believe that this would be an authentic learning experience for my future students. I have also thought of one other way to help use social media in my ELA class. One of the morning routines that was established in my first placement was a morning message. One morning, the students would have to correct the morning message that their teacher had written. The next morning, the students would have to fill out the missing words. What I could do is do a morning message in the form of a tweet on twitter or a post of Facebook. I could pretend to be different characters from movies/tv shows that they know or even other teachers in the school so that the students get different perspectives in the morning but also expand their vocabulary. Right now I am going to pretend that I am Chase from Paw Patrol and write a morning message to students in Miss. Bueckert's grade two classroom in 140 characters or less! Please note that the spelling errors are on purpose in the following message so that I could show you how I would make it like a tweet. Also, ideally, I would have a border around it and make it look as authentic as possible. 

Hi Grade 2's

     Welcome bo class! I heard that you wil b doing a science experiment with skittle in water today. Have bun and stay safe!

Love @chase

In this particular tweet I created, students will find several spelling mistakes. It also gives me an opportunity to chat about the word experiment and what it means. Lastly, I think that this would be excited to have a morning message written by one of their favorite characters. I could also go a step further and google tweets by real people that have misspelled words. The one drawback on this one is that I may not be able to use them depending upon the complexity of the words in their tweet. I have some examples linked here. Do you have any ideas about ways I can integrate social media into my early years ELA classes? Drop them below or feel free to share your thoughts/experiences in the comments below.