My name is Melissa Moon and I am a graduating senior hopefully at the end of the fall semester. I love reading in my spare time but I am also a big fashion lover. If I am not reading in my spare time, I like to hang out with friends and family and chase after my white, chubby Chihuahua Snowball. I love music, as I can play the flute, piano and little bit of the saxophone. I am hoping for the opportunity to teach in Japan after I graduate which I am both nervous and excited about.
I feel that media technology should play a big role in teaching, at any level because media technology will help demonstrate and allow further accompany a class. For example, in my AP English class in high school, after reading MacBeth, our teacher showed us the film version of the play which made sense to a lot of the students. For me personally, this allowed me to have a greater sense of the play and to coincide the play with the movie. Bringing in media technology in the classroom is a great way to help the students have a greater understanding of a work of literature and to also keep the attention of a student. You don't want students to be stuck and bored because they will never understand or have a desire to learn. But by bringing in some sort of media technology, students will be interested and also want to learn more about the subject.
Hi Melissa!
ReplyDeleteI agree that media technology is and should be a part of the contemporary classroom experience, but I wonder how much of a role it should play in the classroom. I think you mean technology to take more of a supportive role than front and center in a classroom, yes? I agree that media technology is almost required to keep students interested nowadays. I think at this time, it’s something not encountered very often in classrooms and is therefore still considered a novel idea. It keeps students interested because it’s a direct link between classic literary study and more contemporary life. So I definitely agree with your post, and I like the insight about keeping students engaged in the classroom using media. :)
Ani Malandish
Hey Melissa,
ReplyDeleteYou make a really good point about using technology in hand with the literature with your Macbeth example. One of the problems with a lot of the literature we read from the past is that it's difficult to understand the historical context, let alone about 1/4 of the words meanings because of the time period. I don't necessarily think that technology has made us more lazy about reading, if anything we should know more because we have more knowledge to draw from, i.e the internet. The real problem seems to be that maybe technology has made our minds more impatient. With media like movies where the frame changes every 3 seconds and everything just plays in front of you requiring little to no attention, the mind gets used to in-taking information this way because it takes less time than reading. One is going to lose a lot of the subtle detail that literature is rich with once it is rendered into movie form. Using the two types of media together though, as in your case with Macbeth, seems like a step in the right direction because it takes advantage of the technology we have grown accustomed to, along with the important historically classic texts that we want to understand to get a better grasp of the past.