ARTICLES,
REVIEWS,
ESSAYS,
&
PRESENTATIONS on TEACHING
ENGLISH |
ARTICLES,
REVIEWS,
ESSAYS,
&
PRESENTATIONS on TEACHING
ENGLISH |
The Tech-Savvy English Classroom by Sara Kajder
Reviewed by Andrea Beatty
“For me, [computers bring] a shift in student attitude that marks a classroom power shift. [The classroom is] not theirs or mine, it’s ours.” -Carol Jago
In
her book, Sara Kajder shows the reader how to take a classroom that uses very
little or no technology, and turn it into a classroom of students who use
computers regularly to get the maximum benefit. The author argues that too
often teachers (including her) have been guilty of not using technology in the
classroom. As a result both the students and the teacher suffer.
Kajder believes that technology is becoming so much of a part of daily
activities that it is something that the students must learn to use.
According to the UCLA Internet Project of 2002, an ongoing study of the effects
of the Internet, reports that students are spending an average of seven hours
and thirty six minutes, online at home per week. At school the numbers
drop to one hour and thirty six minutes (Poftak 39). The author further
believes that students can really learn and do more when technology is
integrated into the classroom. Kajder argues that “technologies can be
used as effective tools when paired with the right task and users who have been
trained to use the tools mindfully, effectively, and efficiently (6).”
The
Tech-Savvy English Classroom contains
ten chapters, the first being and introduction to technology and the remainder
talks strictly about technology and how to integrate it into your classroom.
These chapters include: Where are you? Tech Boot Camp: Where Are Your
Students? Hypertext in the English Classroom, Reading the Web: Information
Literacy, Going Beyond Word Processing, Going on a WebQuest, Creating Community:
Telecommunication and Teleinformation Tools, Your-Class.com, Cyberspace,
Innovation, and Imagination. The chapters start off easy and then get more
complex with its language and use of technology. At the beginning of every
chapter, the author has a couple of quotes from different people, and sometimes
the author has quotes from her students. After delivering all of the
information in an easy to read format, Kajder ends the chapter with a section
called “Ending Points,” followed by the last section titled “Related
Reading.” The related reading section offers websites, books, and
articles that only have to do with the information presented in that chapter.
At
the end of the book there is an appendix which has all of the worksheets,
rubrics, and lessons that the author references throughout the chapters.
Each chapter is broken down into small sections with headings telling the reader
what it is going to consist of. After giving a brief introduction to the
chapters, the author has a picture beside the headings of the information that
follow, which describes what the content is going to relate to. For
example, one of the headings is called The Innovator; besides this
heading the author has a picture of a light bulb. Each chapter is
different and builds upon the previous chapter. The author breaks up each
chapter by explaining the content, and then showing how she used it in her
classroom, as well as alternate ways teachers can use these same ideas.
The
author of this book has a very approachable and easy to read style about her
writing. Kadjer explains the steps that she took to change herself from
being technologically deficient into being a tech-savvy teacher. Before
introducing new software into the classroom, the author suggests that the
teacher learn it first. She repeatedly tells the reader not to be afraid
of asking a couple of your computer knowledgeable students for help on
understanding technology. She says that teachers must evaluate their
students prior to doing any technology based activity. Once you know where
your students stand, it is a good idea to put them into groups and allow them to
answer questions while navigating on the computer. It is always important
to take the students step by step to allow them to get the most out of their
learning experience, and to avoid frustration. She explains how to use
hypertexts in the classroom to maximize learning. Kajder describes the
limitless possibilities students can have when using hypertext, especially for
presentations on poetry, and essays for example. “Just as a printed book
uses footnotes to carry additional information beyond that presented in the
regular text, a hypertext document can point to the background information that
supplements what we read on the first pass (Gilster 133).
Kajder
points out that all students need to have a rubric for each technology
assignment. She states that too often students get caught up in the
appearance when designing projects using technology that the content lacks.
Therefore, she grades multimedia tasks eighty percent on content, and twenty
percent on glitz. She has her students reflect on the multimedia
assignments and includes handouts and ways in which to do this in the appendix.
The author explains the importance of search engines and domains. She says
it is important to note that just because the domain name indicates that the
site has a government or education tie doesn’t mean that the information is
automatically credible. She breaks apart web addresses and explains the
importance of each section of it.
The
author describes how the using the internet for assignments is not only fun and
aids in learning, but it also can be used to meet the National Council of
Teachers of Technology standards according to the International Society for
Technology in Education. The author states “if I were planning an
activity for students to work with a digitized video of poets reading their
work, it would target both the NCTE standards, addressing strategies used to
comprehend, interpret, evaluate, and appreciate texts (standard 3), and the NETS
for students, describing the use of technology tools to enhance learning and
promote creativity (Kajder 25)
Kajder
explains to the reader how important keywords are when doing internet searches.
She gives tips on how to maximize people’s search results, and how to exclude
unwanted information. She gives many recommendations on how to search, as
well as what search engines to use. The author knows from experience how
important it is to have the students research the topic and build upon their
work. A Chinese proverb states that “Tell me and I forget. Show me
and I remember. Involve me and I understand.” This is the same
idea that the teacher must present when incorporating computers into his/her
classroom. The students need to be able to actively participate to fully
understand.
The
author explains how important the teacher is to relay the information to the
students, and to always explain as much as possible. Kajder says that the
students need to be able to distinguish good information from bad information.
The only way that they will be able to distinguish this is to teach them what is
high-quality and what is low-quality. She stresses that teachers need to
tell the students the importance of evaluating the material they find. She
has the students evaluate the web sites that they use by using a handout that
she made up; this handout is in the appendix.
The
author told about what she does in her classroom to take an assignment such as a
paper and turn it into a work that was created and taken through all of the
steps of writing solely on the computer. She described how the pre-writing
in her classroom consists of five minutes with the monitor off, and then turning
the monitor on and allowing the students to let their thoughts run wild.
When working with a whole-class prompt, she does an activity where the students
work collaboratively to pre-write. She stresses the important of
prewriting especially when working on computers because too often it gets
skipped. “Prewriting activities that help students to move from thinking
to writing are essential. Such activities should be structures to help
students integrate alternative perspectives into their arguments and ideas
(Felton 675).” She puts the students into groups, and they work at a
station typing their thoughts on a keyboard while working together and passing
the single keyboard around to one another.
Kajder
describes how much help the cut and paste option on a computer can be to revise
and edit. “Real writers can’t help but cross out, start over, and move
things around, and a computer’s word processing facilitates this activity.
Only a few keystrokes are needed to delete, copy, move and rearrange text
(Strickland 66).” When an activity allows it, the author has her
students use spreadsheets, create tables, find pictures, inset graphics or
digital images to enhance presentations, create brochures, newspapers, and class
booklets to share with the community, publish their work on the web, and create
an electronic portfolio. Also, her students are required to reflect on
their work in a writer’s journal that they save on a disk or some other
source. Technology can be incorporated into the classroom basically every
day to enhance learning.
The
author describes how to use web quest, an instructional model developed by
Bernie Dodge, a professor of educational technology at
Communication
among a group of people such as the classroom is important to enhance learning.
The author describes the importance of e-mails, message boards, chat rooms, and
homework pages such as www.blackboard.com,
to communicate among the class. She takes her students on virtual field
trips, and virtual museums via the internet. She projects them in front of
the classroom, and the whole class gets involved. She feels that through
doing this she is building on her community. Also, she warns about the
dangers of using the internet and tells the reader to make sure that the
students are aware. She shares some real examples of how students can use
the computer for the wrong reasons and how important it is to be aware.
The
last step to becoming tech-savvy for the author consisted of making a class web
page. On this page she posted homework assignments, class announcements
and information, and some limited resources to help students prepare for the
coming exams. She describes how the students continually help her to
improve the page, and got really involved with it and in the classroom as a
whole. The author warns teachers though that they have to make sure their
website can be found. This is why you have to add-meta tags to your page.
Through using all of these ideas, the author hopes to teach her students
to become tech-savvy. With the increase of technology in the world, Kajder
feels it is important to keep up. According to Lee Odell, a Professor of
Composition Theory and Research and associate dean of Humanities and Social
Sciences at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, the meaning of writing has been
expanded. “Today writing includes the ability to integrate visual,
textual, and oral messages; a writer is increasingly going to have to use all of
those communicative tools to convey a message (1).” Kajder gives
insights in her book to prepare teachers for this ever changing world.
This
book is useful for English teachers, especially when they want to enhance
learning and participation. Sara Kajder takes the reader through her
struggles and adventures of becoming tech-savvy, showing everyone that they are
capable of doing it. She describes how to do everything that she brings
up, and always gives examples and a handout or assignment in the index.
Students can benefit from this by using these ideas and resources that the
teacher presents. It will allow for the students to search, research, and
build upon their learning by doing it in a fun way. Students will have to
navigate and search for themselves, storing the information in their long-term
memory. Students will enjoy doing the tasks, while at the same time
learning always in a unique way.
This
book has several features that are unique. The author puts quotes at the
beginning of the chapters to introduce what the text is getting ready to
describe. Next, the author breaks up each section into smaller sections
that even further detail the experience. She describes personal activities
that she has done, gives their outcomes, and handouts to go along with each
lesson. One unique lesson involves taking the students on a field trip,
virtually. The author hooks up her computer to an LCD projector and
transports her class into a different time period. One of the field trips
that her class took was to
Another
unique lesson involves using hypertext in poetry. One way that the author
used this was to first allow the students to explore
The
author definitely has many more strengths than weaknesses. First, the book
is a smooth and easy to read and understand text. The pictures and set up
of the pages makes the book straightforward to read. The author speaks
directly to the reader in a voice that although speaks of difficult information
allows the reader to fully understand. She has an appendix at the back
that corresponds with the different lessons that she explains. One
weakness that I found is that at times I felt like I was reading something that
was elementary. The author describes things such as e-mail and mouse click
which are concepts that I am overly familiar with. Sometimes I felt like
she was teaching too much of the basics, things that I would assume people
already know. However, due to the fact that this book acts as a guide to
computers and incorporating them into the classroom, many people that read this
book many not know the simple things.
Ultimately,
I found that this book was a great read for any English teacher in grades seven
through twelve. I was surprised how useful this book will be in the
classroom. The activities are unique and well described. I like how
the author took the reader through her steps of becoming tech-savvy. I can
see now how important it is that I incorporate technology into the classroom to
enhance learning and to get a greater response from my students. The
author opened me up to new ways of using the internet through this book.
Kajder incorporated multiple websites, including the one for the book, as well
as articles and other books to even further develop technical skills. I am
walking away from this with a greater knowledge of technology, as well as many
new and exciting activities that I can incorporate into my classroom.
Works Cited
Felton
Mark K., and Suzanne Herko. “From Dialogue to Two-Sided Argument: Scaffolding
Adolescents’ Persuasive Writing.” Journal of Adolescent & Adult
Literacy 47:8 May (2004): 672-683.
Gilster,
Paul. Digital Literacy.
ISTE
(International Society for Technology in Education). 2000. National
Educational Technology Standards for Teachers: Preparing Teachers to Use
Technology.
Kajder,
Sara B. The Tech-Savvy English Classroom.
Poftak,
Amy. 2002 “Net-Wise Teens: Safety, Ethics, and Innovation.” Technology
and Learning 1 (23): 36-49.
Strickland,
James. From Disk to Hard Copy: Teaching Writing with Computers.
Words Work
Network. "Interview with Lee Odell." (2002): 1-10.
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