treehouserock

Over this last weekend I thought a bit about the angle I wanted to pursue on this blog. I kept coming back to something that Doc. Rozema said in class about using “naturally occurring literary behaviors” on the web (facebook, myspace, etc.) to engage students in reading/writing as well as critical thinking. I really like this phrase for a couple of reasons. First, you’re taking a framework that is already in place, and using it to your educational advantage; most students already know how to maintain blogs. That knowledge can serve as a foundation for a student blogging community that utilizes rss technology to read/write and think critically about current events or other instructor-guided topics that directly relate to materials studied in class. Secondly, it applies not only to technologically driven behavior, but to elements in pop culture: music, films, plays, slam poetry, the list could go on— all of these “literary behaviors” that have been taking place for thousands of years and that students have likely participated in. For now, I’ll be exploring these literary behaviors and the ways that teachers are incorporating them into their instruction -

I’ll be using multiple RSS feeds to gather articles: Two Google News Feeds on high school literature & high school writing instruction, the education section from both the New York Times & the Washington Post, as well as an Google Blog search on high school writing instruction.