JOURNAL 1

In the article, “Power of the Mashup, by Suzie Boss and Jane Krauss a spectacular way of developing student participation and interest has been put into action by combining old ideas of the past with new ideas using technology. This provides hope for teachers who find it difficult to capture student interests in such topics as Literature and History. Though they are two of my favorite subjects, they are not always the easiest to keep interesting to young children. The article describes sort of a virtual reality trip students can create as they follow a particular body of literature or historical time period. I incorporates a visually stimulating images that go with the given topic to increase understanding and interest. I have always looked for new and innovating projects when teaching to these subjects in order to maintain student interest. The ideas expressed in the article are not only fun for kids, but serve a secondary, yet important, purpose which is learning new and useful technological skills as they work on their project.

Questions:

1. How can a teacher with low technological capabilities use some of these ideas in their classroom?
That is the great part about this project. There is a website called Google Lit Trips that demonstrates how this works. It is probably a good idea for the instructor interested to create their own lit trip using a favorite novel of theirs to test and record their findings. This way the instructor can experience and predict problems students may come across during the process Instructor can learn from them their own triumphs and failures to aid his or her students.

2. What if I do not have enough technological resources to utilize this for an entire classroom?
This type of project would be ideal for an extra credit opportunity or for those overachieving students who seem to finish class work or class projects quicker than the rest of the class. Students can work on this independent project during that extra class time in teams or individually. The students creating a Lit Trip can complete a project for pleasure of for school or district wide academic competitions.