Digital Literacies

“Learning From Those Who Already Have”

The first site I looked at took a modern take on the Shakespearean play Romeo and Juliet and had the students make it in a modern setting of the technology incorporated. The plan then had the students use that technology be placed and redone in one of the play’s scenes. I adored this because this, like connected learning, is making something overly educational and making it more applicable to the students lives. It helps them make that bond to add a sense of themselves into the unit. Rather than reading a play with language that is way out dated the teacher made the play understandable and resets it to be something that the students could see happening in their own lives. This also adds a larger sense of creativity, like connected learning does. They still have to have an understand of the play to change it but it allows for the students to take the reins on how they would recast the play in order for it to be modern.

The second was taking people of the Revolutionary War and making Facebook profiles around them. Every child in this generation has that knowledge of how social media is operated and spends a lot of their own time perfecting their social media, which is why this lesson plan is so brilliant. A huge impact of this generation is the manipulation of social accounts. By taking that and having the students create one for a historical person, using it to post picture with hashtags that that person would, creates such a further understanding of the things learned in class and yet still adding that touch of connected learning, that makes the project a sense of a passion. It allows the sense of being openly-networked especially between their community because their community is the social networking they do every day every hour.

The last was comparing the route of political news in both the time of Anne Frank and the route of political new in this time now. Because the students are looking at the same pathways this really hones in the ideas of connected learning of a shared purpose. They all are hunting for this identification of how news traveled. It also helps because they all began with the same book. They all know where they began and where the will end with the project, which I really enjoyed.