Week 1 Blog Entry

Welcome to my blog!

Part 1:  Introduce yourself to us. Tell us about your current and future professional goals.

Howdy! My name is Stephanie Weber. I have been teaching high school for fourteen years and coached volleyball at the varsity level for twelve of those years. I am happily retired from coaching life now and very much enjoy the extra time I get to spend with my husband and our toddler! I'm an English teacher and have taught Pre-AP English I, AP Language & Composition, and English III. I love teaching literature and literary analysis (if I had to choose favorites); the rhetorical analysis section of the AP Lang coursework is definitely my jam! I am a Georgia native but spent the majority of my teaching career in McKinney, TX. 

I am currently teaching in the Tulsa, OK area, Collinsville to be exact, after my husband's job transferred us two years ago. I miss having easy access to great Tex-Mex but we love our small town community, neighbors, and friends we've met so far. I have really enjoyed being a student again while I work through this program! My current goals are to finish this degree and hopefully teach some dual credit classes while continuing to teach at my current high school. Beyond that I would love to eventually continue my education with a doctorate program. My future goals and aspirations would be to create curricula for a district or curriculum company, but my ultimate dream is to be a professor at a college or university teaching English or Education classes. We shall see!

Part 2:  Review the ISTE standards for students and your state’s content standards.  Select a topic or group of standards from the discipline and grade level that interests you or that you plan to teach in the future and respond to the prompts below. 

Creative Communicator indicators 6.a and 6.b ask students to choose the appropriate platforms and digital tools for meeting the desired objectives of their creation or communication and to create original works or responsibly repurpose or remix digital resources into new creations (Kolb, 2020). These two indicators stood out to me because of where my students are in our mythology unit. After reading the Odyssey in my Pre-AP English I classes, my students will create their own unique and original epic hero, god, goddess, or monster and design a visual of that character and write an origin story of their creation. They will synthesize information from our lessons and their completed study guides as well as our epic poetry literary devices chart to digitally create a character that incorporates elements from mythology and epic poetry. 

This lesson also supports Oklahoma Academic Standards for English Language Arts 9.2.W.4 - use resources to edit for grammar, usage, mechanics, and format in order to finalize drafts for publication and 9.3.W.1 - compose narratives reflecting real or imagined experiences (Oklahoma Academic Standards, 2021).Using Canva, Google Slides, Adobe Photoshop, Procreate, or other approved media, students will design and submit their original artwork that showcases their character. My favorite part of this assignment is they will also submit the visual and written component of their assignment (the origin story) to be shared via Padlet for a virtual gallery walk with their class and other class periods. This allows students to view their peers' work from other class periods that they would otherwise not have access to. Students are encouraged to ask questions and have discussions with their peers as they explore each other's original creations and written work.

Part 3:  Discuss your insights for the lesson idea you provide above from your reading of Kolb’s Triple E Framework and provide support for your idea from her work.

Considering Kolb's Triple E Framework as I reflect and prepare to implement this lesson this week with my students, I broke the lesson into the three aspects the framework follows:

Engagement - Students are engaged in the lesson by eliciting prior knowledge (Kolb, 2020) as they reflect on our mythology unit and apply what they have learned to the creation of their character and in the writing of the origin story. This should help them be invested in the lesson because they get to take what they have learned from the text and apply it in a creative way as they come up with original art and writing.

Enhancement - Each student will share (Kolb, 2020) and present their visual and written work and teach the class about their mythological character and creation story. Students will actively listen and question their peers about what they have designed. 

Extension - At the completion of this assignment, students will participate in a virtual gallery walk where they can view the written and visual components of their peers in other classes and engage in authentic discourse (Kolb, 2020).

References

International Society for Technology in Education. (2024). ISTE standards: For students. ISTE. https://iste.org/standards/students

Kolb, L. (2020, December 9). Triple E Framework. Triple E Framework. https://www.tripleeframework.com/‌

Oklahoma State Department of Education. (2021). Oklahoma academic standards for English language arts. https://sde.ok.gov/standards-and-curriculum