Barbara A. Sasso
For the storytelling activity, I asked students to take a field trip to the past with me: I told them of the time I took a car ride home from college with five strangers, in the dark on a snowy highway that would pass through remote farmland, all with no cell phone. This was the norm in 1978. For students today, it is a terrifying horror story. Of course, the power of a good tale is to inspire, and I didn't tell them how it ended: They needed to first gather stories of their own, come back to class, and tell them to all of us. With this lesson, students learned about life before cell phones. They took time to interact with their elders, creating bonds. This initial interaction built good peer support for group work, and created a more cooperative environment for discussions on more complex issues that would be presented later in the unit. The stories revealed a lot that is beneficial about cell phones, but also what our students lacked in resourcefulness and independence. Were their elders really that much more courageous than they? They also heard many tales of aimless, parentless wanderings through suburbs and cities and fields, emotional events with friends and of adventures in everyday life. One student reminisced about past sleepovers: "It's not that we would have pillow fights and jump up and down on the bed now, but we wouldn't be staring at our phones either. It was much more fun without them."
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No one asked me to finish
my
story, but it wasn't about me.
For an assignment to emphasize the important of memory with photographs, students carefully chose one image of the many they had, and wrote a caption to explain why this particular image was meaningful to them in their lives. We had the students send us their images and captions for us to post to an Instagram
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account. They also helped us non-native teachers set this up. This wonderful lesson in thoughtful use of images now celebrates our school year, building school spirit. What a nice way to incorporate use of students' cell phones for educational purposes!
As described above, students worked in groups as they viewed images or read sources. They helped each other complete graphic organizers to gather and assess information from both fictional and nonfictional texts, and shared their thoughts in a class discussion. These organizers helped them prepare for their formative writing assignments.
When we implement this unit in the future, we will require students to use the Internet (perhaps from their smart phones) to research and correctly cite meaningful visuals and text to use for their final papers. Some of their own sources can then be used for general class discussions. This empowers students and having their choices viewed by the class encourages them to be sure their sources are good ones.