Bringing Literature to the Digital Natives

Today two great examples of teachers using technology to bring literature alive!  The first is To Kill a Mockingbird Meets the 21st Century.  Here's what the teacher said in the article:

“So how to you take a classic book and make it relevant to kids today?  You include Facebook, Twitter, and IM into the project.  My 8th graders ate this project up!  If you want to see if your students truly have a grasp of character development, have them write tweets as that character.”

The second was a video on YouTube...a book trailer for The Scarlet Letter created by students in an AP English Class.

Do you think these students will ever forget these books? I don't! I only hope the media specialist was instrumental in these projects. If not....well...

Happy Teen Tech Week!

And you thought it was just spring break at UCF! 

Teen Tech Week 2010 is March 7–13.

The 2010 theme — Learn Create Share @ your library — encourages creativity and positions the library as a place to safely explore the many types of technology available at libraries, including DVDs, music, gaming, video production, online homework help, social networking, tech workshops, and more.

For more information on Teen Tech Week, visit www.ala.org/teentechweek.  You'll find lots of programming ideas and resources that you can use now or any time!

PhotoPeach

If you aren't familiar with PhotoPeach, here's a great example of what you can do with it (on a topic related to this class, of course!)

Genres of Fiction on PhotoPeach

In the "story mode," you can add captions, music and questions to your images. There's also a "spiral mode" that is kind of cool. Think booktalk. Think book trailer. Think non-traditional book report. Think BLOG post for this course! Try it with some of your own images. It's free.

It's About Time

One of the two new Barbie dolls will be a computer engineer.  From BitTech News:

Computer Engineer Barbie comes equipped with everything a modern geek girl needs: "a Barbie® smart phone, fashionable laptop case, flat watch and Bluetooth earpiece," alongside the aforementioned laptop making her "ready to conquer the day's tasks on the go or from her desk."

For those who are afraid that Barbie's journey into the world of computer science would mean she would have to give up on her noted sense of fashion, good news: Computer Engineer Barbie comes dressed in "a t-shirt featuring binary code and [a ] computer/keyboard icon along with a pair of black knit skinny pants," designed to be "representative of a real computer engineer."

Better yet, those deciding to buy Computer Engineer Barbie get "a special code to unlock exclusive online game content on Barbie.com," in order to "further experience the reality of being a computer engineer" - which is to say, playing on-line Flash games.

In all seriousness, the latest Barbie to come out of the Mattel factories has the thumbs-up from some pretty influential people in the computer science industry: no less than Nora Lin, the president of the Society of Women Engineers, believes that "as a computer engineer, Barbie will show girls that women can design products that have an important and positive impact on people's everyday lives, such as inventing a technology to conserve home energy or programming a newborn monitoring device."

Off to a Good Start

I wanted to share this VoiceThread with you...created by a teacher to help foster the love of reading and books.

I couldn't have said it better!