> In January, I will be making a presentation
>to our upper school English department who are mostly skeptical about
>the idea of one laptop per student. I want to show them some great
>lessons that English teachers in other schools have done with a 1:1
>program. These lessons could be for just plain laptops or for tablets.
>If you know of a great lesson, could you send me a brief description?
I wrote the following for an upcoming book and I hope it helps illustrate
some possibilities:
"Presenting The Grapes of Wrath with Multimedia
Here is an outline for an interdisciplinary introductory presentation on
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck.
1. Begin with an historical introduction to the Great Depression using
public domain images available via the Library of Congress American Memory
exhibition: http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/fsowhome.html. Select a few images
to include in a PowerPoint slide show and add a question or two to each
slide that will encourage students to analyze and discuss the emotional
toll of the Great Depression.
2. Direct students to read personal histories of Americans living during
the Great Depression, such as those found at The New Deal Network:
http://newdeal.feri.org/index.htm and PBS's Surviving the Dust Bowl at
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/dustbowl/. If your students are teenagers,
consider having them read the stories of teenage hobos who were "riding
the rails" in the 30s: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/rails/.
3. Listen to actual audio interviews of Americans who lived during the
Great Depression. Visit the Library of Congress's "Voices from the Dust
Bowl" collection at http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/afctshtml/tshome.html for
mp3 files.
4. Listen to a "Fireside Chat" by President Roosevelt and discuss what
impact these chats had on the American public. You can find select
Fireside Chat audio recording at the American Rhetoric Web site:
http://americanrhetoric.com/.
5. Use Google Earth to follow the Joad family as it travels to California.
A Grapes of Wrath "Google Lit Trip" is available from:
http://web.mac.com/jburg/iWeb/GoogleLit/9 12/9-12.html (Learn more about
Google Earth in Chapter 4, Guided Inquiry).
6. Watch the trailer for the 1940 movie The Grapes of Wrath starring Henry
Fonda available at http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0032551/trailers. Obtain
the DVD and watch select scenes from the movie."
Students could also research literary criticism of the Grapes of Wrath in
the Thompson Gale Infotrac "Contemporary Literary Criticism" e-database.
They could create their own story about "a day in the life of a hobo" and
publish it on a blog. They could peer-edit the stories in class using MS
Word's Reviewing, Document Comparison, and Readability Statistics
features. They might use Word to format a literary magazine of their
stories and print them. They could even record their stories with Audacity
or Garage Band and create a radio show about The Grapes of Wrath, and the
Great Depression.
You can listen to an excerpt of a radio show on the Depression that my
students and I created a few years ago:
http://nobles.typepad.com/caitlin_cassidy/files/hobo_excerpt.mp3.
Tom Daccord
Academic Technology Advocate/History Teacher
Noble & Greenough School (Dedham, MA)
thomas_daccord@nobles.edu
Web Sites:
Best of History Web Sites
http://besthistorysites.net
Center for Teaching History With Technology
http://thwt.org
Teaching Literature and Writing with Technology
http://thwt.org/writingandlit.htm
edtechteacher (blog with Justin Reich)
http://thwt.typepad.com/edtechteacher/
Books:
Best of History Web Sites (Neal-Schuman Press)
http://www.neal-schuman.com/db/9/599.html
Classroom-Tested Ideas for Teaching with Technology (M.E. Sharpe)
(formerly, Teaching History & English With Technology)
-May 2008
[ For info on ISED-L see http://www.gds.org/ISED-L ]
Submissions to ISED-L are released under a creative commons, attribution, non-commercial, share-alike license.
