Unlock with PatreonThe Problem with CI
To view this content, you must be a member of Ben’s Patreon at $10 or more Unlock with PatreonAlready a qualifying Patreon member? Refresh to
Jim Tripp – Wallflowers
Share:
Facebook
Twitter
Pinterest
LinkedIn
Ben Slavic
Get The Latest Updates
Subscribe to Our Mailing List
No spam, notifications only about new products, updates.
Related Posts
CI and the Research (cont.)
To view this content, you must be a member of Ben’s Patreon at $10 or more Unlock with PatreonAlready a qualifying Patreon member? Refresh to
Research Question
To view this content, you must be a member of Ben’s Patreon at $10 or more Unlock with PatreonAlready a qualifying Patreon member? Refresh to
We Have the Research
To view this content, you must be a member of Ben’s Patreon at $10 or more Unlock with PatreonAlready a qualifying Patreon member? Refresh to
37 thoughts on “Jim Tripp – Wallflowers”
Thanks so much for this! I have this great poster of Mariachis that the kids love to “story” about and it is still packed away!!!!! I forgot all about it!!
with love,
Laurie
Drawings – especially those drawn by the students ahead of time – have been perhaps the single most engaging innovation this year in my room.
The more ambiguous or open to interpretation the drawings the more mileage one can get out of them. I think it’s a phone and some kid yells that it’s a baby with an umbilical cord. Money.
Also old 70’s clip art works really well. Who are these people? Where are they? What do they want?
More of this next year for sure.
Dirk
The power of the visual images on memory is enormous as we know. Concrete visual images certainly stimulate the mind to create language. Remembering when I first started teaching (prehistoric times): the first thing they told us was to gather realia for every lesson (objects and material from everyday life, especially when used as a teaching aid), photos and posters being the next best thing. They knew what they were talking about. Little could they have imagined the internet. My, oh, my.
In addition to the great ideas already mentioned:
When the kids start to generate ideas, particularly in describing characters, buildings, etc., in the story, I draw (ok, that’s a stretch) what they talk about on the whiteboard. They give me tips on size, shape, location of details, and number of hairs, etc :-). There are usually arrows with words to accompany said drawings.
These drawings + words :
• provide more opportunities to “Point and Pause”
• provide more opportunities to SLOW me down,
• ensure greater comprehension and more reps
• provide more opportunities to laugh at Pathetic Profe
I often receive help from the more gifted illustrators in my classes–although half of the fun is making fun of my drawings.
For instance, when the chosen actor is “a monster” in the story instead of him/herself, the drawings on the board remove the child from the “ickiness” of being a monster. The kid just does the acting and speaking. They are not REALLY the “thing” on the board. I don’t point at them (unless they really like the idea of being hideous and gross, which, of course, is just as likely to happen). I point at the drawing. Elementary kids like the concrete.
I often do PowerPoint quizzes with my beginner beginners. Just a picture and circling questions:
Is it a ________? Yes/No
Is she running? Yes/NO
Is is a _______ or a _________? __________
Sentence about picture. True/False
Did she eat the hamburger or sit down on the hamburger? _________
You can get some pretty funny pictures to exaggerate your point.
With younger kids whose reading skills are not super solid and with kids who are being introduced to a new sound/symbol system, limited reading like this with images is great!
This discussion seems like a great opportunity to gather good “CI/TPRS” ideas for using images IN ONE PLACE (perhaps to be “pdf”ed and disseminated somewhere.)
Great stuff; like Laurie I had forgotten all about my best pictures. Back in my former life as a grammar teacher, one of the things that got me by was in taking my kids to the computer lab at the beginning of each unit and having them surf the web for me and generate all of the pictures that I would need for that unit (Pictures of a plate with food on it: Bad. Picture of Darth Vader eating a taco: Good). One of the big draws that came out of that was not just how cool the picture was (and I have gotten some excellent ones over the years), but there is intense interest in “Whose picture is that?” Again, TPRS 101: “Enough about me, let’s talk about you. What do you think about me?”
One of my favorite series of pictures (tied together with a sickness/doctor/reflexive verbs unit) was asking them to get pictures about “An accident waiting to happen.” Man, those pictures were money, and I just riffed off of those all day long. It’s nice to be able to riff as my goal now, not as simply window dressing for the grammar point. The thing is, I can’t just skim my best photos, because they want to see THEIR photos, so I’ll need to find some decent themes: What you do/don’t want to find in the trunk of the used car you just bought; what you don’t want your little sister to get for her birthday; the “true”‘ story of how Herr Black got that scar on his thumb, etc.
The big trick, of course, in doing a series of photos is getting to SLOW, because everybody always wants to see what’s next (particularly if their photo hasn’t appeared yet). As a result, I’ve got to be careful to camp on the brakes and develop ways to have the various pictures interact with each other in the story.
That said, I’m jealous of Jim’s Wallflowers. Maybe I’ll post a “visitor of the week” on my bulletin board and see who keeps getting invited back into stories over time.
Great ideas folks. Thanks so much; I’m taking serious notes.
Nathan
Nathan I got two high quality LOL’s on this highly amusing post and thank you:
…TPRS 101: “Enough about me, let’s talk about you. What do you think about me?”….
…[I have] them surf the web for me and generate all of the pictures that I would need for that unit (Pictures of a plate with food on it: Bad. Picture of Darth Vader eating a taco: Good)….
While I was reading, I was thinking how valuable what you wrote is. I feel that it points to a possible future of where all of this is taking us, this expanding “thing” that we are all part of.
Images. Dang. Like that website that someone (who was it?) suggested here about a week ago:
http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/
As I read what you wrote, I felt the long years of pressure of trying to learn how stories work (I have always felt how weirdly hard stories are) lifting from my shoulders. I was saying to myself, “Shit, if this is all I have to do – throw up a bunch of pictures that the kids bring to me and riff on them until the sun goes down, then this TPRS stuff ain’t that hard!”
Of course, if Dirk does it, it’s gonna work, and then when I read Jim’s blog about how pictures are money, and then what you wrote up above, it made me think about some serious deviation of plans this spring and into next year. At the least, there will be a “Picture Day” next year. I have an artist, a tympanist and general Renaissance kid, who draws and I really need to get her into the images creation part of what we do, but haven’t made it a high enough priority. Now I will.
Starting to motormouth here. Let me tie this down. Nathan, please write a concise version of the above (just use the above and edit, adding where you can, and including, perhaps, that other website about earth photos). I can then keep that comment from scrolling into the past and, as soon as I can, get it actually on my site permanently on the home page as a link.
We who do stories would do well to reflect on what you said above, Nathan. It would free a lot of us from a linear interpretation and application of input methods (stories) to a spatial one (pictures), which could then, if it happened, then become linear. The point there being that it might be easier for us to create a story from a picture than a picture from a story.
I will also, right now before I forget, go get Jennifer’s and Laurie’s recent kick ass lists on this site and put them on the home page here under the “About TPRS” link. (Send me permission to do that, Laurie and Jennifer).
Dude, there is so much talent on this blog. Thanks for sparking the discussion Dirk and Jim (those are Commandos, by the way). I bet the people on this blog could beat the Denver Nuggets in basketball tonight. Let’s check that – I KNOW that the people on this blog could beat the Denver Nuggets in basketball tonight.
any time Ben!
with love,
Laurie
“it might be easier for us to create a story from a picture than a picture from a story.”
Yes! Particularly, I’m learning, in Middle School.
It’s not just you. Chuck Norris rocks the house.
This is great stuff! I’m kicking myself. My students, all year, keep suggesting Machu Picchu–I have several posters of it on my walls. I kept taking other suggestions because that didn’t seem cute enough (it’s on the wall after all)! It didn’t dawn on me to actually use it. Duh!
And what is it about Chuck Norris anyway? He comes up a lot, and has been in a few stories. Now I’ll have students surf for pictures and put them on the overhead for those who don’t know who he is.
Two years ago I held up a picture of a girl who, to me, looked scared to death. It was in black and white and she seemed (to me ) to be screaming bloody murder. I held it up and asked my 5th graders why she was screaming. They answered this so well. They came up with awesome reasons and stories great stories spawned. Why haven´t I done that again? Thanks so much for the reminder. It was such a fun June activity.
I have lately been taking a story and putting it on a storyboard for the kids to illustrate. What I have noticed is they like it best when they illustrate it as a class…so we have one huge class storyboard DONE BY THEM. Yesterday I projected the words onto the paper and they drew the pictures…that way, when it was finished, the pictures were there alone and they re-told from there. They are definitely not as excited to see the story and illustrations of some other class.
Thanks everyone.
I pushed submit too early on that one…hope you can understand it!
Will do, Ben. I’ll send you the summary later tonight. Thanks again for keeping all these balls in the air for us.
The visualization of the message sent via the language is CRITICAL. For many students, maybe all on some level, visualization=comprehension. Visible=Comprehensible. :o)
with love,
Laurie
the huffington post had a series of the silliest cross-stitch projects ever: i took their image of a cross stitch of chuck norris on the total gym and made it my desktop picture. chuck has been the default “how do we end this story” character for us for three years now. very effective.
Some high-interest reading material: Chuck Norris facts!
En francais:
http://chucknorrisfacts.fr/
En espanol:
http://www.frikipedia.es/friki/Anexo:Hechos_sobre_Chuck_Norris
…and for some reason, in one of my middle school classes a story is never over until someone says…”Il y a une explosion et tout le monde est mort sauf Chuck Norris” (there is an explosion and everyone is dead except for Chuck Norris). Even though Chuck Norris hasn’t appeared in the story yet.
Dirk said: “The more ambiguous or open to interpretation the drawings the more mileage one can get out of them. I think it’s a phone and some kid yells that it’s a baby with an umbilical cord.” This is great!
And where can i get a picture of Darth Vader eating a taco??!!
P.S. Did you guys know?… when Chuck Norris falls in the water, he doesn’t get wet. The water gets Chuck Norris. 🙂
Liz, did the kids draw the storyboard scenes during the CI right there as the story unfolded? Bryce was in today and we were talking about how them doing that would cause a bit of upstaging of the CI, since the visual mode is so dominant in humans. In one of my classroom, there is big rolling white board, and Bryce suggested putting an artist behind the board, out of view of the class, drawing the entire thing out to be revealed to the class later for a retell. If that makes sense. My question is if your drawing activity Liz does in fact interefere with the CI in what you describe above. How to get drawing into the class. We all know the six panel activity, but if anyone has any thoughts on this I would welcome them. Even a clarification of the six panel activity, which I haven’t used in so long I’ve forgotten what it is.
The deal on Norris is the clean cut beard. It is really clean cut. He’s a bad ass guy but his beard is just right, nice and trimmed and close to his face. That is why he is such a compelling guy, in my opinion – the beard.
Don’t forget to talk to the school’s art teacher. Sometimes they can easily incorporate different types of student drawings in their classroom that can be used later in the FL classroom. Plus, you can get an idea of what they are doing in art class and how it might be used. One class of students came out of art class with super colorful kites. Imagine who owns it, where they can use it, what the weather is like, what happens to it… the possibilities are endless.
Some of my male students love using paint programs or sites where you can create stuff and then print it out. One group went crazy creating their own Miis. We had instant characters for stories!
For those that would like famous paintings, the Louvre and other museums have paintings on-line too. I don’t have access to posters and such so I have to depend on the internet. I prefer Renoir because his paintings of people lend themselves really well for stories too.
My kids usually give me pictures – but check out this one, googled from “dad dragging son”:
yekrang.mihanblog.com/post/57
This one started off an entire story before I could even properly load it today.
Chuck Norris actually GRADUATED from our high school (I’m not kidding!) so he is, like, SUPER POPULAR in my classes!
I love the idea of generating stories from pictures. Can I please get some concrete ideas for getting whacky and fun pictures to talk about? I don’t have an LCD projector or smart board but maybe I could project them on the TV….I checked the teacher supply store…nada. If you have your kids find them on Google images or something, how do you collect them?
Bobbi, I happen to have an LCD projector in class, so I can put pictures up right away if the situation arises, but I try not to do that much anyways. I would much rather have a hard copy picture that I can hold and move around the room with, or pin up to the board or wall while not in use. Plus, I don’t have to dim the room to see the projector.
However, today I found the perfect picture of Richard Simmons on the fly in less than 30 seconds (LCD was already on… another disadvantage of projected pics being start-up time, unless you’re already set to go with it). It was a suggestion from a student-generated script (SGS), one of the words being “curly.” He had his hands on his face like he was really surprised, so we were able to talk about why he was surprised (also excited and scared at the same time). Tomorrow we will continue with the story since it was going so well, but I will just print out a picture for that.
(Also, just thought of this, I can use the people pics to put in front of actors’ faces when they enter our stories… might need to try that tomorrow)
You’re so right Ben… totally the beard.
My LCD projector bulb is dying, and there are no more bulbs for this projector in the school. Help!!! This is already a replacement for the projector whose bulb died last year. My kids send me pictures when they find them, or when they take them. I use pictures. I don’t have a color printer, and I have lost most of my good prints.
I am addicted to my LCD. We write stories together, I project song lyrics, we change perspective together in the stories, and kids bring their PP stories (today a kid shared a PP story about the young Pushkin, who met a sea monster and that’s why he went home and wrote stories about the sea…she had her friends dress up to be photographed for this adventure in various locations including a lake front area, and it only now struck me that there were only two true facts about the man in the entire story)–I can’t live without the LCD!!
This started to be an answer about where to get good pictures. Tell the kids to send them to you or bring them to you. As soon as they know that you’ll actually use them, you will be overrun. I guess I’m going to have to follow my own advice, but tell them that I need hard copies.
Since garage sale season is beginning……posters are great because they are large!!! You may also be able to get/buy movie posters from local movie theaters. I keep a box in my room that kids can put pics from magazines in. They find the FUNNIEST things!!!!
Pictures of my own high school years have also been pretty popular. I have a pic of a boy I had a crush on in grade 9 that we always start with when we do Selena’s Bidi bidi ….which is funnier yet when they see the pic of me in grade 9!!! If you can get other staff members to lend you a pic that you can make a copy of you are really in business!!
Some districts have the capabilities in-house or at a Teachers’ Center to create posters for you.
Student designs/drawings are by far the most powerful. They don’t even have to be your students. If you speak with the art/photograpy teacher and get permission from the student you may find a wealth of pieces at your fingertips.
I keep my 8 x 10 or smaller pics in plastic sleeves in three ring binders. Over the years I have literally collected hundreds of them. When I retire I’ll bring them to a conference and divvy them up tee hee
with love,
Laurie
I’m just catching up with things here…these comments are gold! I want to print them so they don’t get lost…
Thanks so much for the great ideas, especially for all grade levels. I’m taking some serious notes and have some serious research to do to get my posters in order…
Ben, I love the idea of the artist behind the rolling white board, drawing as the story spins out. Brilliant.
My middle school classes love Chuck Norris, Darth Vader and then variations of other people. For example, did you know Lebron James has white twin brother named Leblond James? It’s true. And Tom Brady has a brother named Brady Tom. He’s black. I can’t make this stuff up (but they can!).
This just gets better. Ben, I admit my ignorance–I don’t understand what you are going to do to keep this blog from getting buried. Can you (or someone) explain that a bit? I’m tempted to just cut and paste, but even then, I tend to loose these files I create from cutting and pasting.
Doug, for example, to echo what you said, there is a blog by Bryce for tomorrow on the input/output discussion that is solid gold. It should never scroll into the past, ever. Or, for that matter, Michele’s blog on Katya’s visit to Alaska is also too important to lose (it will appear here later today). I have thought of taking stuff like that and making it a link on the homepage of this site, but, I am afraid that the site will get saturated with too much information.
The Zen response, for me, is to just let the stuff go, be thankful for it (stuff like the recent picture discussion Jim got going) and take a deep breath and remember that we cannot capture input based instruction ideas as per some formula or memorized set of ideas about instruction.
Rather, we are learning that teaching languages is really
-a process,
– a response to a series of moments with the kids,
– a “being with” our students that transcends and supercedes mere mental acquisition of the language (the book, verb conjugations, etc.),
– a trusting in the stupendous fact of the moment of L2 we are in,
– the opposite of controlling and grasping and constricting, but is rather, as we have said here many times, FLOW.
We cannot bottle this stuff, we cannot sell it, we cannot own it, we cannot stop it from expanding into its next form, and we should therefore, in deepest gratitude to those who have started this stuff off in the ’80’s and ’90’s (Krashen, Terrell, Asher, Carol Gaab, Jason Fritz, Karen Rowan, Diana Noonan, Blaine Ray, Susan Gross, etc.), be ready for the next picture, the next professional moment when we realize internally as we face our classes that those kids right there in front of us – the Stellar Cast that Thomas wrote about in his blog yesterday – is what we are working with. We are working with kids, not the language. To echo Susan’s great line, we are teaching kids language first and a language to kids only secondarily.
So, I hear you on wanting to find a place in our minds, in our computers, in anything mental, to never forget stuff like we read from Laurie and Jody and Jim Tripp and Dirk Frewing and inspired teachers like that (wait till you see Bryce’s post tomorrow!), but we can’t, in the end. We have to live today, not tomorrow. Teaching languages is much more than a mental activity, but one of the body and heart as well. Just look at Jason when he teaches. My gosh, it is all a blend of mind, heart, and body, with a wonderful quality that I can only call happiness thrown in there. That kind of input instruction is poetry disguised as education. That is what we want to become.
We can’t let the AP exam drive our instruction away from the sacred responsibility that we have as teachers to put the kids first, and to treat for them today. Because, although I am not an expert on physics, I do believe that tomorrow never comes.
It is definitely frustrating to “lose” posts, but I find that I can scroll though past blogs here and find inspiration anytime I need it.
Michele, how did you come up with the idea of googling dad dragging son? Did it come from you or your students? From structures or imagination? so much potential!
Doug, one thing I have done to keep from losing these great posts is that I have made myself a google site. When I can keep up with it, it’s a great help. When something comes up that I really don’t want to lose, I link it from my site, to the topic where I can find it again. I have a page for embedded readings where I collect the links for everything related to that, for example. And I try to write a line under the title that reminds me of what treasure lies within, if I have time. If it’s something simple, I just summarize it right on the page and skip the link. Warning though, the links do change… at the beginning of the school year, I was convinced Ben was going back and deleting some of the blogs I needed most from the site! the links kept coming up with the file not found message. After I stopped panicking, I realized that there are temporary and permanent links, and I was able to locate the posts just by searching the title on Ben’s blog.
I often do these as reading activities. A student will read the text in the TL and another will stand up and draw it. I guess the drawing does upstage the CI…a bit. I like to continue with the CI while someone is drawing, though…ie, ¨oooh the boy has huge eyes!¨ or ¨oh, I had no idea Sally is a blonde!¨ I also have to encourage them to draw quickly. Again, my students are elementary students…sometimes we sing a song while someone is drawing
I LOVE the idea of having a student draw where no one can see, as the story is unfolding. This is fabulous. I wonder if it would add interest to pick a new artist for each scene…
The real point I was trying to make was that these personal sketches were better and more memorable than any sketch I ever did for them…they were happier and more engaged to see a classmate create a character. (Oh, and the drawing of a boy running to the local grocery store when created by a kindergartner is the best…it could make your day)
I get lots of pics from failblog.org and pictureisunrelated.com – TONS of funny stuff.
Do you need a woman carrying a giant ear of corn up an escalator? They’ve got it.
Darth Vader at the Renaissance Festival, wearing a kilt? It’s there.
Large pink fuzzy animal running on the beach? Yep.
Bryce’s idea of turning the white board around is wonderful, no doubt, and I will use it a lot. But the student who was going to do that today chose rather to draw in her notebook. The reason is that she owes her art teacher a final art project due May 21. Her idea was to ask the class to agree to do one long ass story and each story we do will provide a chapter that she can illustrate. The girl was antsy to get drawing but I kept them in PQA for 137 reps on “feels like a dork” because my thinking now, after Bryce’s visit yesterday, is that we do PQA much more than we think we should. Finally, when we started the actual story, a girl with the American name “Don’t Worry About It” goes to a psychiatrist, Dr. Faire Peu, and tells him that she feels like a mass murderer, and he tells her that generally when a person feels like a mass murder, they buy a taser. She goes to Tasers R Us but tasers there cost an arm and leg, so she goes to Discount Tasers and gets a black taser for only her left arm. I noticed two things from this usually quiet girl as she drew and listened – first, she made more suggestions and they were brilliant right to the end where DWAI, who, because she has bought a taser, no longer feels like a mass murderer but instead feels like one of the Seven Dwarves. Secondly, the (four) drawings that she did in her notebook during the story, were pretty cool. (I remember all this stuff because one of my superstars wrote it all down in English on a colored piece of cardstock for me to turn into a reading in Word for tomorrow, which in this case is going to turn into a truly big embedded reading because in each class we will place Don’t Worry About It in different situations – I’ll just go to stories I haven’t yet used from Matava’s scripts to keep each chapter different but with the same characters.) One of the drawings was of DWAI at the second taser store paying for her taser with her left arm. This illustrated book will be good. My artist will have heard a ton of CI, drawn some lovely supportive pictures of the action, other classes will like to read this story one day, and the class wants to sell the book, which I will bind. Lots of teachers do this, of course, but I never really have. This whole thing of putting art into our stories really has no end.
Ben, I think I misunderstood or mixed up blogs. I thought I’d read somewhere here that you were going to do something with the link so it doesn’t scroll away (don’t have a lot of time to look back, but can’t find it skimming–Did I dream it?) I understand and appreciate the zen-like process of the blog–one of the things that keeps me coming back and which is so well demonstrated by this blog. The ideas just keep building on themselves. It morphs and grows, takes different directions. Although I would like to have this blog around to look back at in the distant future, at this time of the year, I need help with even the things that would usually stick longer–like next week when my 8th graders get back from D.C. and I try some of the things with them–without too much digging around (I’ve done this several times–want to reread something, can’t think of the blog title–don’t have time to dig around–its gone). I think I have that solved–it’s right in front of me, taped to my computer speaker–Jim Tripp–Wallflowers. No need for a fancy technological solution.
Oh…….and before I use up my entire prep, thanks for the reminder about focusing on the process. Reading that in PQA, or TPRS in a Year…don’t remember which now–but that helped me immensely with my TPRSing and continues to–it is often a matter of remembering–not getting swayed by parental demands or my “training” to want to push ahead. It is good to have that reminder at this time of year. Reading about others in that process also keeps me coming back here. What an awesome community. Thanks for doing this Ben.
Nice Ben, differentiated instruction on several levels! And Liz, I really like the idea of having the students read and illustrate at the same time… nice break for the teach.
I haven’t had anybody too interested in illustrating during stories lately, so I have been saving my stories until I have enough to have the class illustrate them (in pairs or individually). This way, students also get a review as they re-read their assigned story before illustrating.
These illustrated stories can also be used, if desired, as review material for output assessments. Last semester I had upper level students practice re-telling stories we had done in class that semester. When the day came, I showed them the illustration and they told me what happened based on what they see.
Oh, and a class photo at the front or on the cover of the “story binder”, possibly with some students “in character”, is a big sell for potential readers.
Does anyone post these Word doc stories online for parents and other students to view? I have wondered about doing that, with some twext for non-Spanish audience, but have worried about confidentiality/trust issues. Any thoughts?
Jim, I keep all the stories for each class on a lengthening document all semester, uploading it to my school web page so that kids can download the latest version when they want.
And Ben, your idea to have one character go through all of Anne’s scripts is perfect for my wish to write another easy reader for my kids. Wow. I’m going to have my exchange student start on that. She’s run out of assignments lately. She can work on getting all the kids and their current lifestyles into the story! A chapter a day–that’s not too much to ask, is it?
I found one more picture idea, and just tried it with my first-year kids. Each kid brings in or cuts out two pictures from a stack of magazines (they have to cut out a picture within their first five “flips” of the pages because otherwise it’s a waste of time) and gets together with a partner. They put all four pictures down on one desk and have three minutes to come up with a plausible story line (this is for fun Friday output). The first time, they can’t think of anything much beyond the names of the characters and who they are. The teacher has pairs share. They switch partners and pictures and go again. This time, there’s more chatter. By the third time, they’re anxious to share their stories and they’re really getting creative. I put up a structure that they have to work into the story each time. Since they hear it ten times, they’re getting good input.
I totally forgot about this game this year. I’ve been avoiding output, but as my kids showed me today, it’s high time and they’re ready!
I live a block from Columbine High School and have worked a lot with their WL team. They tell me that any writings by a kid which are not approved and thought about by the teacher first for any implications in that writing can ruin careers. They would know. Any teacher can end up in a courtroom anytime over writing or images, online or just in a paper for English class. Any image of a kid that has not been approved by a parent/school/whatever before being put online is therefore a bad idea. Just imagine that some crazy stuff that the kids come up with in a story is posted online and then some kid does something insane that a motivated lawyer would try to connect with that story. I think that some of us are a bit cavalier about this. My personal decision, and my personal opinion as well, is that getting involved with the internet in our instruction just makes my life complex. I have to do so many extra tasks, and the learning is not commiserate with the efforts involved. That is just my opinion Jim, and how I have decided to do things. If you think about it, we teach the sound aspect of language first, which then leads to output, and input must be done in the classroom first and foremost, except for those many self motivated kids who learn the language not just in our classrooms but online via music, etc. as well. I’ve got one first year student who must spend ten hours a week online with French, judging from his current level of speech. I call, therefore, for caution in mixing online stuff with our classes. This technology can swallow us up. It is so pedagogically attractive because it can do so much, but, if some sophisicated study were done to measure actual outcomes/gains, they would be, possibly, rather pathetic.
That’s a sobering blog Ben–and much appreciated. It is amazing how quickly students will test the line of appropriateness, and in projects I have to put in a “No Violence” clause always, but have let the line blur a bit recently. This gives me reason to rethink that, for sure.
It’s silly, but here’s an addition to the Chuck Norris phenomenon. It popped up as a headline when I signed off my email–things internet has ruined or not ruined:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/36741144/ns/technology_and_science-tech_and_gadgets?Gt1=43001&pg=16#Tech_PCWorld_InternetRuined