This week, I struggled with being able to motivate myself to use the internet. As I am sure everyone who assesses the internet this week is aware, it is not a fun place to hang out right now. No matter what side you chose during the election, we are all seeing hate spew from every seam of social media. Personally, upset and dismayed at the election results, I decided I would stay off social media until friends and family stop commenting. I began searching the internet for tools to use or my assignments, and still found that I could not escape the constant reminder of what our nation has become. Since I work in a virtual environment and attend school in a virtual environment, I found myself unable to escape the news stories and posts I wanted so desperately to ignore.
Never experiencing anxiety caused by in internet, I was unsure how to handle this situation.
This got me thinking... If an adult such as myself is finding it difficult to stay positive with all of these constant reminders of our nation’s discontent, how are our teenage virtual students handling this? Students who attend virtual school are forced to use the internet daily. Students attending regular school can escape the negativity if they choose to. I am interested to study how times of great tragedy affect virtual students vs brick-and-mortar students.
I believe this is where curriculum curation can be absolutely heroic. While we can’t change a student’s default homepage results, we can change which websites they are forced to visit while completing one of our assignments. I took note of which pages I used that contained links to pages with negative ads, news stories, or blog posts during the creation of my digital story. It was almost all of them. There were very few pages I had preselected that totally filtered out the possibility of seeing a news headline with a link to negative content. This made me aware of the importance of selecting resources with no changing ads or rotating links. I will need to spend more time searching for these resource and making changes to my curriculum page.
As far as my educational concerns, one aspect of this activity I personally struggled with was deciding how to narrow down my digital story. The historical person I chose accomplished so many important things. It was difficult to choose what to include and what to leave out. This lead me to believe my students would also struggle with pulling out the appropriate amount of information. “But it’s all important if it happened to them in their lives!” I can already hear my students complaining…. I will need to provide them with guidelines to the specific type of life-event they should provide in their story. Since they are only in 5th grade, they are still struggling with the concept of main idea and relevant details. They are not coming into the assignment with a background in history, like I am, so they will not know which life events are relevant to their historical figure’s importance in history. I will need to figure out a way to solve this problem before they tackle the project. One possible way to solve this problem is to provide a link to a web resource that lists their person’s most important accomplishment and ask them to ‘work backwards.’ I will ask the students to list a few events and cross off the ones that do not have a direct correlation to their memorable accomplishment. With some explicit instruction and guided practice, I believe this is feasible. Another possible solution to this problem is to provide the students with a “student friendly” version of the rubric I will use to evaluate their assignments. After allowing them to read the wiki curriculum page and explaining the assignments, they will work with a partner to score each sample digital story. We will then discuss their ratings and why they think each one deserved a certain score. This will hopefully provide them with an idea of what I am looking for in their digital storytelling projects.
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