Meg's Media

     This unit was a little shorter than some of our previous units, but it's one that I had a lot more interest in. I experienced blogging and listening to podcasts during my time as an ELA high school student.       For a class that I took in my freshman year of high school, an elective that was called Writing for Social Media, we had to listen to an episode of a podcast for class. That my first introduction to podcasts. I remember we listened to a podcast episode in class that our teacher just wanted us to listen to, but then for the one we had to listen to on our own, we got to pick any podcast about any topic. I remember I picked a podcast called Pilot's Lounge, where these two cousins discussed the pilot episodes of popular TV shows.      My blogging experience came from being a writer for my high school's newspaper. We had to keep a blog, and my first year on staff, I did one about health and fitness, a phase I was in. Looking bac...

      So, I've mentioned in the blog previously and in my class that I grew up not using social media, and the territory was very foreign to me. The same goes with video games. I am not a gamer; I didn't grow up playing video games. Therefore, once again, I was in the dark about how video games could possibly used in the classroom. Although, now I recall a day in my freshman year social studies class when we played the online game "The Oregon Trail," but that was the only time that we played a video game like that with the intended purpose to be to help us learn.     All that being said, I feel like I didn't know the possibilities. For example, in an article titled "Video Games in the Secondary English Language Arts Classroom: A State-of-the-Art Review of the Literature" written by authors Nash and Brady and published by the International Literacy Association, they describe a case where the students had read the book "The Outsiders" by S. E. Hi...

      'Social Media' and 'classroom' don't seem like they'd be part of the same blog post considering teachers often collect phones and prohibit them from being used in the classroom, but here we are. I'll admit, social media as a whole is a bit foreign to me. I wasn't allowed to have it growing up, so I went my whole K-12 experience social media free. I've now had Snapchat for 13 months and Instagram for almost 6 months. No TikTok, Twitter, Facebook (which I'm actually surprised by the number of college students that have Facebook; it is a decent amount). Needless to say, I do not consider myself any type of social media expert, which is why this unit was so interesting to me.      Some of my biggest takeaways from this unit came from a journal article we read titled "Middle School Students' Social Media Use", and I think the title speaks for itself. Statistics are used to show the risks of social media use at such a young age. It ...

      I did not hear the term "multimodal" until I was in my second semester of my freshman year of college, and it still took me another semester before I understood what it meant. Multimodal composition at its most basic definition is using multiple forms of expression as a tool for teaching or learning. Looking back, we used multimodal composition in school very frequently.     In the classroom when I was growing up, anytime we read a play, we assigned parts and acted it out in class. Even reading for a character allowed my classmates to express their creativity, assigning accents and distinct voices to characters. In the book "Teaching Literature to Adolescents" author Richard Beach claims that "One benefit of engaging in drama activities is that students shift from being passive responders to a text to become active producers of language. They are now spontaneously employing language and embodied actions to assume a role, address a problem or dilemma, resp...

      Visual Literacy in the ELA classroom can be demonstrated by the use of graphic novels. My introduction to graphic novels came in primary school with the Lunch Lady book series by Jarrett J. Krosoczka. A lot of young kids enjoy reading the Diary of a Wimpy Kid books by Jeff Kinney.      The reason graphic novels pose as a challenge is that their is a reliance on words and pictures to comprehend what is happening. For example, entire panels can show what is happening without using any words or barely any words at all, and it's an important and contributing factor to the overall story, as shown here:       In the example I found here, the Lunch Lady (who, for context, is like a superhero) gets a new gadget and suggests they head to the boiler room. The dialogue in those two panels is the only dialogue across those seven panels. The next five panels show the process of them going to the boiler room. The sneaky expression on the lunch...

 Hi there! My name is Megan Mitchell, and I'm a college sophomore studying Secondary English Education. I'm creating this blog for my Writing for Non-Print Media class to synthesize and reflect at the end of each unit. Some fun things about me that I'd like to share are: I love sitcoms (The Middle and Parks and Rec are my favorite), I love to read, I'm 10,000% a dog person (I have a poodle named Dixie), I love to go shopping (Francesca's is my favorite store), I play the piccolo in the marching band, my favorite singer is Taylor Swift and my favorite Taylor Swift song is Last Kiss, my favorite color is yellow, and my favorite flowers are daffodils. Also, I can juggle. That's my biggest flex 💪 and usually what I tell people when we have to share a fun fact. Anyways, welcome to the blog! Enjoy! xoxo