Portfolio Assignment

At the beginning of the semester, I entered my English 333 class dreading the fact that I had to write essays; at least that is what I imagined. I have never felt comfortable enough to tell myself that I am a good writer and I had never considered my self one. To my surprise, I found out that English 333 was not the class that I had anticipated. I discovered throughout the semester that this was not at all the typical English class where you have to write several convincing essays in order to pass the class. Instead, I met with Professor Peter Kittle whose ideas of teaching writing I really liked.

I encounter a different ways of creating writing that was not fearful for me. We started the semester using the book titled, “What video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy,” by James Paul Gee. In his book, Gee explain about learning in different modalities and used video games to make reference to his point. From the book we also learned many of ideas that Gee called “principles,” which are the ways in which learning takes place. Gee compared the literacy learning that takes place while playing video games to that in classroom settings; which he disagree with the second one arguing that in schools teaching literacy has become non-effective.

Our first big assignment was our digital document. We created a digital document using Gee’s ideas and learning principles. I created a digital document or digital movie, about learning how to eat better and take care of my own health. To create my digital movie, I incorporated multimodalities of learning. For example, I used visuals using pictures and audio by narrating my story. This was definitely a much enjoyable way of literacy.

Moving on from Gee’s book, our class got into groups of four to work on several articles related to teaching writing. The articles were very long but very informative as well. I founded interesting the idea of letting students choose their own topics when writing. This gives students the opportunity to elaborate and be more passionate about their writing. Of course, there were many different ideas on these articles that we created a memorandum, pretending we were school teachers and making suggestions to the school principle of what kinds of teaching writing programs should be implemented at the school. Other ideas found in these articles were: modeling, using prior knowledge, and personal choice.

In this class we took advantage of using many different learning modalities. Of these was the use of technology; we used the computer and the internet to share ideas and information within our class. We created this blog to posted analysis and ideas that had been discuss in class or in the reading assignments that we had. In addition, we also created a wiki account were we analyzed the several articles on the teaching of writing and shared our comments to our group members.

One of the last things we did this semester was to read the book called, “Nonfiction Matters,” by Stephanie Harvey. Her ideas of using nonfiction materials and teaching students the value of nonfiction in their writings, gave rise to our last class assignment which was writing a lesson plan. This lesson plan I did it with my classmate Nou Thao. We decided to create a lesson for a 7th grade class using the Renaissance time period to create a nonfiction writing assignment. I believe that our assignment was very creative and at the same time was a great writing experience that acknowledges the standards relating to the 7th grade curriculum.

Overall, all that we did during the semester has definitely impacted me as a future elementary school teacher. I have learned many ideas that I will put into practice when I became a teacher. From this class I will take many ideas like: using multiple modalities when teaching in order to reach every student, giving students some freedom when choosing topics for writing but at the same time guiding students into where I will want to go with their writing, the importance of modeling what is expected from them and most of all showing students that I care for them.