In And Out Of The Classroom

As an educator who also loves to create content in their free time, there is so much that I can take from this class to add to my professional and personal life.

In the classroom, I have gained so much knowledge I can now impart onto my students as well as my fellow educators to make everyone's lives easier and more comprehesive/understanding about the media we are comsuming.

Outside of the classroom, I have learned how to market and create my various forms of content with a purpose and a game plan; that is invaluable and does so much to improve my abilities as a creator trying to make an impact.

Applying ENG-W 318 To My Professional Life

I want to carry these skills with me into the classroom. While Wikipedia might not be the best place to find something to quote, it can be a wonderful place to find a reference or a resource. When looking for information online, not everyone was taught how to use search engines correctly. There’s a whole art to the use of quotes and plus signs and keywords I will be able to impart onto my students, but Wikipedia makes it easier than that. It hyperlinks things together and shows you where the information, or the primary source, comes from. As an educator, I want my student to dig deeper when we are doing something. As a writer, I love the accessibility of this knowledge. This makes me wonder if we can change the structure of written lecture slides/information for class.

When creating a blog, this is a form of writing online that so many students do not get to have exposure to compared to how we review literary texts and movies in English classes. As someone who is looking to teach English at the secondary level, I need to set my students up for success, and a huge part of that is finding all sorts of material to help them futher analyze and think critically of the world around them. Looking at blogs such as the one I created and seeing what makes them credibly or puff pieces is a valuable skill that the kids need to learn if they are going to write coherent and fact-based papers for my class or for their future English classes. By making my blog well vetted, researched, and easily fact-checkable via the citing of government documents and the hyperlinking to various resources, I have a wonderful example of why it's so important and so much easier for the viewer to consume your content if it is clearly credible.

The was a very fun exercise, and I’m interested to see if any of my classmates truly keep up with it, and I hope to be able to use these skills elsewhere, especially in the classroom. It doesn’t have to be audio, but I do think that for interviewing people and publishing the interview, this is a very helpful skill that I have now learned. For my students, exposing them to this type of content and helping them find different formats in which information is easiest for them to learn is incredibly helpful. I might have a few students that just can't read to save their lives, but podcasts over non-ficiton materials and things happening in the current news cycle as well as audiobooks for our fiction texts can really help them improve their comprehension of the material. Since I have now worked with audio, I will be able to discern what is a good and what is a bad audio snippet to show them. If I am to provide my students with a quality education, then I am to also provide them qualities materials. A good teacher never teaches what they cannot make themselves to give to the students as an example.