In the video Poetry Work Stations, I observed an English Language Arts lesson that was based on poetry. Throughout this video, there were three different work stations that combined poetry with the use of technology to go into greater detail the meanings of different poems.
The first work station was the iPad work station which involved “poetry emotion” videos. The students were able to choose a poem to watch and then they were able to use their poetry reflection questions and sticky notes to reflect on the poem and analyze and think about what the poem meant to them. A student said that watching a video and having a visualization of a poem made them think about the poem in a different way. The student explained deeper that sometimes reading a poem doesn’t provide a lot of meaning to you, sometimes, you are just listening to words. But, having someone read the poem to you really gives you a clear visualization of what’s really going on.
The second work station was the blogging work station. In this station, students had a choice between a humorous or serious poem and they were to reflect on the poem as well as post their ideas and questions on a blog. Not only were the students able to post their questions, reflections, and ideas, they were also able to comment on their classmates posts as well. Students would comment things such as “this made me feel”, “I thought”, etc. This was a way to integrate technology in a way that students don’t normally do.
The third work station was the podcasting work station: In this station, students were trying to be the poet or put themselves in the shoes of the poet. As a “poet” students were able to create a video show, interview, radio podcast or a regular podcast. This was for the students to share their thoughts or reflections about the style of the poet and to also reflect on their poetry/poem.
Each of these three stations would not have been able to be accomplished without the use of technology. By integrating technology into this lesson, students are able to deeper understand different poems as well as different poets. In this case, the integration of technology will make the students smarter. Many times, poetry is a small, brushed upon lesson in the classroom. With the different technology and the way, it is used in this lesson, it really makes the students think about the poems, think about the poets writing the poems, visualize the poems, and comment on what their classmates think of the poems as well. This lesson would not be nearly as beneficial without the use of technology.
Another benefit of integrating technology in this lesson is it also forms as a monitoring function for the teachers. Even though the teacher is able to walk around throughout the lesson, each station is able to be monitored throughout technology. Students are able to save their work and teachers can check their work later on to see where each student is at as a type of formative assessment. The teacher is also able to read students questions as well as read the blog posts and comments of each student. Since there are three different stations, the teacher isn’t able to be at all of them at the same time. This is why the use of technology really helps the teacher out by monitoring each student’s work and progress throughout the lesson.
In this lesson cognition is distributed between and among students and the technologies they learn with. By taking poems and using technology to dive deeper into the poems meaning and visualizations that come with the poem, students are able to relate and better understand where the poet is coming from and what they mean. The students understanding of the poems would not have been developed without the relation to technology.
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