Lesson Plan #1

This lesson would most likely be expanded into a unit plan. The lesson assumes students are familiar with blogging and that they have completed reading The Giver. The lesson could also be extended into a journaling activity with students imagining what it would be like to live a day to day life in the utopian society created in The Giver and writing about that day to day life.

Overview

After reading The Giver, students design their own utopian society, publishing the explanation of their ideal world on a blog. As they blog about their utopia, students establish the social structure and habits that citizens will follow in their utopian societies. They begin by brainstorming ideas about what a perfect society would be like and then, in groups, begin to plan their project. Over several class sessions, students work on their blogs comparing their work to a rubric. Finally, after students visit one another’s blogs and provide constructive and supportive feedback, they reflect on their own work.

Grade Level

6th grade

Materials

Computers

Blog hosting site (i.e. blogger, livejournal etc.)

Standards (from Iowa Core Curriculum)

Students use an effective writing process.

Students use knowledge of purpose, audience, format, and medium in developing written communication.

Students incorporate technology as a tool to enhance writing.

Students collaborate with peers, experts, and others using interactive technology.

Objectives

Students will create a utopian society with at least 3 established guidelines for the social structure of their society and habits (practices) that members of the society conform to.

Students will critically analyze and reflect on their peers' utopian society blogs and provide constructive feedback for their peers.

Students will reflect and blog about their own experiences and "ah-ha" moments throughout the experience.

Procedures

The topic of utopian societies will be introduced to the students through the reading of the book "The Giver" as students read the class will learn and discuss how the society in the book works.

Once the book is completed students will participate in a brainstorming activity to help them create their own utopian society using these questions:

• If you could live anywhere in the world where would you life? Why?
• Describe your perfect life...What kind of house would you have? What would you do everyday? How would you make money? What would you do for fun? What rules would you follow?

Using these questions, students will then break into their groups and have a group brainstorm about the society that they would like to create. The students will then be asked to create a 5 day plan for what they need to accomplish each day in order to finish their project. They will also be given a rubric so that they know what is expected for the final product.

Assessment

Students will be assessed from a rubric provided to them at the beginning of the project.

Adapted from this lesson on ReadWriteThink

Reflection for Week 3

I remember when I got my first blog, back in the "old" days before facebook, when xanga was king. If you were anyone worth knowing, you had a xanga. People would yell times in the small, cramped junior high hallway. I remember listening for the voices, waiting for the ones I recognized, the voices of friends or my silly crushes. Once the time had been established, it became a waiting game until that glorious hour arrived. We were a community in the classroom and a community online. At that magical pre-determined time, dozens of us would sign on to AIM (AOL instant messenger) and a whole new game would start.

I still marvel at how well I could keep up. I would be writing on my xanga about the days events, gossip and newest crushes, while simultaneously chatting on aim with at least a dozen different people. How I could keep track of all the screen names and conversations, I'll never know. That was my life though, missing out on one of these gossip sessions could seriously damage your social life, you were out of the loop and would spend the next day reading everyone's blogs trying to catch up.

The evolution of social networking eventually silenced our frantic typing on xanga, and moved us to myspace and then finally to facebook (back in the days where you had to have a college email to have one). But, blogging has always been a backdrop for all of the sites, there are many facebook groups that link back to blogging communities. When someone goes overseas they instantly post a link on their facebook guiding readers to their blogger or wordpress, encouraging others to comment or read their adventures there. The blog is still sacred, even though facebook fully has the capacity to be a blog with it's Notes, people still gravitate toward creating a new site for their writing. It feels more private, less cluttered and a bit more safe. Which is exactly what the E-school News article said, "MacKenty also praised what he called the “purity” of blogs as a communication tool, saying, “It’s not about…who you are, or the color of your skin–it’s about what you have to say. There’s something utterly beautiful and noble about that.'"

As someone who has created multiple blogs for personal use as well as for use in my reflection through teaching, I instantly can see their value. I think that the "The Use of Blogs, Wikis and RSS in Education: A Conversation of Possibilities" article really summed up well how blogs can be used in an educational setting. My emphasis in elementary education is in English/Language Arts and I actually started college as a journalism major, with a fire for writing that, wasn't quite satisfied by re-wording police reports. There is a serious lack of emphasis on writing in schools, in both of my practicum settings (one in West Des Moines and the other in Perry) the students spent little time writing, if any at all. I asked my cooperating teacher in Perry about it and she simply dismissed it as, "something that they'll do later, we don't have time for it now."

Needless to say, that statement made me a little upset. These kids will soon be junior high and high school students, and expected to write papers. If they have never put pencil to paper (or fingers to keys) how can we expect them to be excellent writers overnight? It's unfair to them. I really hope that in my student teaching I can use blogs in some way, I get excited when I think about how students can use them to post writings or journal or peer review work. Using computers is incredibly exciting to them and being able to network through these blogs with other schools make the possibilities endless.

I think that educator's can jump on the bandwagon as well, reading other teacher's experiences through this online medium can really help teachers bounce new ideas off of one another or adapt lessons to be used in their own classrooms. Wikis can also be used to create smaller communities in classrooms, schools and link with students across the country. It's a technology that's as limitless as the human mind.