Interdisciplinary teaching and learning are strengthened through the use of technology, and the ability of digital tools to connect different learning environments required for different disciplines.
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Incorporating pop culture and media into the classroom is a divisive issue amongst educators, and not without reason. While pop culture has its benefits, it could be distracting if integrated inappropriately. It can also be intimidating for an educator to relate to learners of a different generation without feeling out of touch.
However, the benefits of teaching using popular media are substantial. It helps engage learners, brings lessons off the page, and addresses controversial topics. Furthermore, it could be a fun lesson for the end of the semester or a light distraction during tense academic periods.
“We cannot sit back and let our students passively digest the material. No, instead, teachers should actively engage students in discussions about the controversial material bombarding them,” Mark Hauser wrote in EducationWeek, rallying educators to stare down music with inappropriate themes rather than shy away from it.
Hauser notes, correctly, that “clean” versions of popular songs mask the profanity but don’t modify the inappropriate themes that come with the chosen language.
Pop culture provides a great jumping-off point for discussions on ethics, morals, and current world events regarding controversial themes.
Music, movies, and entertainment inspire richer discussion than news articles. Articles require a reader to see a rolling coverage to understand and engage on the topic.
The educational consultant’s other resounding point is that pop culture lessons help educators meet learners in the middle. They relate to each other in ways learners understand. Educator Clay Morgan endorses this point.
“Lucky I know about zombies,” he petitions before detailing how he used the 2009 film Zombieland to explain the Morgenthau Plan. This strategy made a bored class come alive.
The Morgenthau Plan sounds like something dry in a heavy textbook, perfect for closing and taking a nap. Introducing the topic through the Zombieland rules of zombie apocalypse survival, in this case, Rule #4, “The Double Tap,” as Morgan does, can draw more interest from the outset.
Would Benjamin Franklin be a Facebook user? How would Abraham Lincoln’s presidential campaigns look on social media? What would the Great Fire of London or the toppling of the Roman Empire look like on Twitter?
Teach learners a lesson about digital media while deeply exploring historical figures and events. Have learners create social media accounts for important figures and events.
The task calls upon digital literacy and storytelling elements that they feel comfortable with while challenging them to think critically about history and social media.
It can be daunting to incorporate music lyrics and movie references for an educator from a different generation than their learners. Educator Tim Weedon, however, provides a three-step framework for educators using pop culture in their classrooms.
Weedon begins by casually asking learners about their tastes in music (his pet area of interest). He then analyzes the responses from his learners for relevance to topic areas covered in the curriculum course. Weedon pays close attention to lyrical content and themes, ensuring they fit the class’s age.
Using pop culture in group activities is a great way to break the ice in a new class. Weedon suggests assigning learners reading and developing song lyrics/poems in groups. You can read a full breakdown of his lesson plan on Development Education.
Primarily useful in teaching literature analysis, Weedon asks learners to analyze their favourite song lyrics and how they would be relevant to the course.
The educator subscribes to the same view as Hauser on any inappropriate subject matter. He says, “It is better to discuss the text rather than avoid the subject matter without offering any educational choices or advice.” He does, however, state that he looks closely at the chosen songs and doesn’t guarantee their use.
Once they have decided on their topics and songs, they break down the song structure through vocabulary, spelling, grammar, punctuation, sentence structure, and linguistics.
A popular and effective format for lessons is song. Educators use the melodies of well-known songs or match a popular style to teach a lesson. It takes confidence, but it is fun for educators and makes content incredibly catchy and memorable for learners when done well. I’ve been singing math lessons in my head all day on more than one occasion!
There are many resources to guide you through using pop culture in your teaching. It’s an element of pedagogy that can give an edge to your teaching and provide a deeper reference to content. Join one of the many communities online, connect with educators on social media, or dive into music, movies and tv. It isn’t as intimidating as it seems.
These are some great resources for you to explore incorporating pop culture in the classroom:
Browse Tim Weedon’s full series here: https://developmenteducation.ie/feature/exploring-popular-culture-in-education/
Visit the Popular Culture Pedagogy Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/popculturepedagaogy
“I started incorporating digital storytelling, and I saw changes in my students. I saw that they were thinking in new ways and writing in new ways and enjoying it. That is when it really started to blossom for me.” Seth Mitchell – Lisbon High, Lisbon, Maine
Teachers Are the Center of Education: A Profile of Eight Teachers – National Writing Project
“Schools are in catch up mode” for digital writing, argues Elyse Eidman-Aadahl, co-author of the book Because Digital Writing Matters. She believes school practices are outdated because “so much of school writing is consciously in the other direction” compared to professional and social trends.
The notion of writing has fundamentally changed. Outside the classroom, the writing that learners encounter is overwhelmingly digital. That’s a direction that all levels of society are moving toward at an increasingly rapid speed.
There are obvious barriers to implementing digital writing in the classroom. As with EdTech in general, that includes a lack of resources, a lack of training, and the pressure of standardized testing. However, the ever-increasing march of digital writing in our society makes it more important to teach learners, so they have the skills to match the world they will be entering post-grade 12.
A National Commission on Writing report described writing as a “threshold skill” in the workforce. In their report “Writing: A Ticket to Work,” they implore “the nation” to invest in “new and emerging technologies” to advance their writing and for assessment to go beyond multiple-choice, machine scoreable items. “Assessment should require students to actually create a piece of prose.”
The Atlantic asked, “How much can you say in 140 characters?” In 2011, they quoted Chinese artist Ai Weiwei saying, “In the Chinese language, 140 characters is a novella.” In English, however, it is far from a novella, necessitating new, truncated word forms such as “2” for too.
Drawing on the need for concise writing and the spirit of Ernest Hemmingway’s famous six-word story (“For sale: Baby shoes, never used”), the New York Times Learning Network created a learning activity designed to develop learners’ comprehension and ability to convey more with less.
Remember, digital means more than just the same words on a different canvas. As famed academic Marshall McLuhan wrote, “The medium is the message” – the format in which a message is written implicitly influences how it is produced and perceived.
A pen and paper activity is not necessarily nostalgic if it puts digital media principles into practice, as the need to be concise.
LanguageTool is an online program that detects spelling, grammar, and syntax errors. Users can tailor it to over 20 languages and specific English variants like UK, Australian, and New Zealand. Using a processor-like LanguageTool helps learners develop style and grammar skills. When learners run their writing through a robust filter, it picks up the mistakes that a standard spelling and grammar check might miss.
It is often argued that spelling and grammar checkers are reducing literacy. However, studies found that we are producing new words faster. According to a Stanford study, we’re using new words in writing more than ever. Spelling errors are becoming increasingly fatal in job applications. We are arguably more literate and less tolerant of errors than ever.
“[A spelling error] says that an individual cannot produce work to a given standard no matter how qualified they might be,” says Mencap CEO Mark Goldring.
As Seth Mitchell observed, incorporating digital skills into writing classes is a great way to build a learner’s enthusiasm for writing and engage in school content in new ways. There are many tools available to add a digital component to your writing classes and just as many approaches you could take. We’ve listed just a few techniques and practices to get you started.
If you have any tools and techniques you use or are trying out some of the ones we’ve listed in class, let us know on Twitter @learningbird.
Pair what you’ve learned in this article with our blog posts on:
As technology increasingly becomes a part of schools and classrooms, we must use these tools in the best possible manner. One of these practices, becoming more and more popular, is blogging as a teaching tool.
There are many reasons why an educator would start a class blog and many insights a learner could gain from the practice. Blogs can help boost literacy & critical thinking skills. They can bolster a learner’s digital skillset, be a hands-on lesson on navigating the online world, and foster deeper learner engagement with a topic.
There are many platforms your classroom can use, from WordPress to Weebly to Tumblr. However, before you get to that stage, you need to create a code of ethics for your learners online. You can create the code of ethics collaboratively with the class and sticky the post to the top of your blog, which acts as a lesson hub.
Okay then, let’s dive right in!
Whether you teach English, math or science, elementary or high school, you can be creative in having your learners blog to enhance their learning experience. In particular, blogging emphasizes cross-curricular, outside-the-box thinking. Here are some suggestions.
During class discussions, you probably have a handful of very eager learners discussing the book or article you assigned. What about the quieter learners? Some learners are not comfortable sharing their opinions out loud. Further, this can be a paper-free way to keep track of learners’ assignments & journal entries.
Miriam Sullivan & Nancy Longnecker studied class blogs as a teaching tool to promote writing and student interaction. According to their study, most learners agreed that they write better when they know other learners will read their posts. Why not use this (positive) peer pressure to motivate learners to write well? An essay can be highlighted as “essay of the month” and shared with the wider community!
There are oh-so-many possibilities for an English class to get creative with blogging. Just check out this awesome blog about idioms blending ELA, Art and ICT competencies by Jenny Young!
A key part of the scientific process is for scientists to communicate their findings with peers through scientific papers. This “communication to other scientists ensures that new findings become part of a growing body of publicly available knowledge that informs how we understand the world around us.”
But what about your learners who write papers? What is their end goal besides a grade? If it’s not published in a journal, how can the educator motivate learners to increase their science literacy?
The answer you may have guessed is to go ahead and publish it on a blog. It is also the perfect way to practice and demonstrate the peer review process, a crucial stage of scientific publishing.
If your learners have a lab exam at the end of the year, you want them to recall the experiments they did over the year and understand them. While handwritten or typed lab reports are the norm, another possibility is to have the learners write them up on their blog. The additional factors of other learners in the virtual world being able to access their results and upload step-by-step images of the experiment make their experiment more repeatable. It is a great opportunity to get into how the scientific method is carried out in the real world, that “scientists must be able to read anyone else’s report, follow the steps exactly the same way, and compare their findings to the original test.”
Use blogging as one means of using art in the science classroom. Learners learn the names of so many scientists, like Einstein, Coulomb and Newton, but who were these people? Have learners use their digital literacy skills and learn some interesting history by creating a video or recording a song about these great minds, then posting it online!
There is nothing like a blog to share your digital lessons with learners and caregivers. Use blogging to keep them all easily in the loop about upcoming assignments, recommended links for extra practice, and even share fun videos to enhance the learning experience!
How else would you use blogs as a teaching tool? Let us know in a comment below or tweet @learningbird!
In its simplest form, Explain Everything is a canvas upon which you can record your ideas. But that isn’t a description that does justice to an app rated one of the top apps for educators and has set the education community alight.
Explain Everything allows users to record audio, write, draw, and move objects while screen recording. It turns your old overheads into an engaging teaching tool, incorporating all the elements required for best pedagogical practice when using media in teaching.
Unlike other apps, recording on Explain Everything is done one slide at a time. So when the inevitable verbal hiccups strike, there’s no need to re-record the lesson in its entirety. Delete that slide and start again. No one will ever know.
You can even import your old slides into the app. Then you are free to add drawings and voiceovers to transform them into a video. Building off the teaching content you’ve already created saves you significant time. It eases the difficulty of creating presentations when you first get started.
The app works with iOS, Windows and Android devices and imports directly into Google Drive or Dropbox. That makes it a versatile platform that works with whichever hosting and sharing platform you prefer. It even works with Learning Bird. Just save your project in video format.
Make Learning Accessible Anytime
Each learner learns at a different pace (which is not necessarily a bad thing). However, the trouble is that educators often only have one period to teach a certain concept. That’s not enough time to go back to review concepts already taught. That is where Explain Everything can come in handy. Store up lessons for learners to refer to in the future, especially lessons that focus on basic fundamental concepts. Post these videos online so learners can review them as they complete their homework at home. Alternatively, leave them on the class iPad or computer and send learners to review them during class.
Save Time & Diversify Lesson Content
Every educator knows the time and effort that goes into lesson planning. Although we strive for diverse and engaging lessons for learners, there are just not enough hours in the day to devote to preparing class materials! Explain Everything allows educators to record and save snippets of their teaching and turn them into reusable segments for future lessons. In addition to saving precious time, it also allows educators to mix up their lesson formats with some video content.
Tool for Peer Tutoring
Sometimes the best way to learn is to teach. Let learners take control of their learning by allowing them to create with the app. The good thing about Explain Everything is that the simple interface allows learners from late elementary through to high school to use it intuitively with minimal training. A good suggestion would be to use the app in a jigsaw activity, allowing learners to teach bits of content to others through self-created videos.
Alternative to Oral Presentations
Have learners who are reluctant presenters in the class? Why not give them a choice between presenting live or creating a video? Give learners a voice and unleash their creativity at the same time by letting them choose the format of their presentations.
Explain Everything transforms lesson plans into engaging content that keeps learners informed and engaged. The real beauty of the app is the simplicity with which you can not only create but share your lessons. The well-developed export function lets you share presentations both as pictures and videos.