Making Curriculum Pop

As an educator and an individual I am a bit embarrassed to admit that I am quite intimidated by technology and media in my life, much less using it in my classroom. Before taking this class I had only briefly experimented with the use of technology with my students, but I am slowly coming to the realization that media can be a great resource to use in the classroom, it is really a way that can help us reach our students on a whole new level. Whether we choose to accept it or not, the reality of our world today is that media is ever-present in all our lives and especially in the lives of our students. It is so vital that we embrace any opportunity we can to connect with our students, and even better, to embrace any way that we can better educate them. For some children media such as television, internet and video games is a main pass time (as we learned from various presentations in class), which means that many children have a great understanding of it, and if we can only tap into that world I believe that we will have a better chance of reaching more of our students and will also be able to make learning more meaningful for some of them.


I was so excited with the presentation that Pam Goble created for us in which she introduced the idea of Media circles. I thought that this was a great way to integrate media into the classroom. I have always been a fan of using literature circles with my students, and this seems like a great way to build on that same idea. In the presentation we were able to really experience a media circle and participate with various jobs. We were all broken into groups and everyone chose a job to focus on while watching the movie. The jobs were all very different from one another and forced the students to take a closer look at parts of the movie. Some of the jobs listed were: connector, questioner, economist, fashion critic, etymologist, recorder, and visualizer. After all the jobs were chosen we watched two clips from the movie “Kit Kittredge: An American Girl Movie”. We then were able to meet with other people in the class that had the same jobs as ourselves and discuss and learn from one another’s comments. The next step was for us to go back to our original groups (containing varied jobs) and share what each person had learned. We then ended the session by sharing as a whole class what had been discussed and found interesting in the groups.


There were so many elements of this presentation that I found interesting. I found it so compelling that such a short clip could spark so much conversation amongst us; we each had a lot to say about the clips in regards to our jobs. This was a great lesson to me that not only film choice is important, but also the clips chosen are vital. The jobs that were given to the students were also great in my opinion, they not only got us more involved as students but learning about the jobs themselves was an educational moment. I can only imagine how much the student playing the role of the economist learned just from this one lesson! I was also really interested in how the whole session was set up. I thought it was really a great idea to have the students move from group to group first creating ideas and comments with students who had the same job and then reporting their findings to their other group. This really insists that the student become a collaborator with the first group and then become somewhat of an expert in their field when reporting their findings to the next group. Not to mention that it gives the students a chance to move around throughout the lesson.


Even though this example of a media circle was geared towards upper elementary grades I can definitely imagine using a varied form of it for primary grades. Pam Goble also gave us a simplified version of a media circle geared towards primary grades that was somewhat of a work in progress. She suggested asking the students to pay attention for: people they saw in the movie, places they saw in the movie, things they saw in the movie and words that were fun and interesting heard in the movie. Though I think that this kind of activity could be useful I think that it strays too far from the idea of a media circle; not giving students individual jobs in which they can focus on is a big draw back in my opinion. I actually had a chance to try this out with a second grade classroom recently and my group and I tried out some jobs for the students that were a simplified version of what we tried during the presentation in class. We also chose the jobs according to what best suited the movie we showed, which was a Pixar Shorts film titled “For the Birds”. I was really impressed that the students were able to handle the jobs we assigned to them and were also able to generate wonderful conversation based on their findings.


I am really excited to continue using media circles to enhance my students learning experiences. I would probably begin by introducing the students to literature circles and then move them into media circles to help aid their understanding of the experience. I believe that media circles are a great way to get students to begin to think critically about texts, whether that is movies, books, music etc. I think media circles has guided me out of my fear of using media in my classroom and helped me see that it is doable!




And this is where to order the PIxar Shorts Movies. They are really great to use in your classrooms!

Here are some great websites about Literature circles, I like to use these to give me ideas for jobs and activities to create for media circles:
* Read, write and Think about Literature circles
*
Literature circles resource center
*Web English Teacher on Literature Circles

Here is an interesting article about showing films in classrooms, check it out:
Showing Flicks in the Classroom

This website offers a variety of "Movie permission slips" you could use in your classrooms, with some interesting information too:
Movie Permission Slips

Here is an interesting article about Digital Storytelling used in the classroom:
Digital Storytelling

I found this article a great way to look at using movies in the classroom in order to help ELL students improve their language skills, check it out:
Movies in the ESL Classroom

This website explicitly explains how we can use movies in the classroom, with several teaching ideas and the step-by-step process:
Using Film in the Classroom

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