The BEACH. Zihuatanejo. My favorite place in Mexico. A happy “hola” echoes from stranger to stranger on every street corner with a genuine friendliness unfound on a New York City subway or an LA boulevard. It’s a slower pace to life. Quieter. Simpler. A great escape. Bright sunshine warming my skin as I fall into a trance, mesmerized by the sound of the waves swishing on the sand. My mind blank. Relaxing. Resting. Daydreaming. A stray thought - Andy in Shawshank Redemption: ""Tell you where I'd go. Zihuatanejo. It's in Mexico. Little place on the Pacific. You know what the Mexicans say about the Pacific? They say it has no memory. That's where I'd like to finish out my life, Red. A warm place with no memory... It's down there, and I'm in here. I guess it comes down to a simple choice, really. Get busy living or get busy dying."
Forgot where I was for a moment. Beach - Rick Beach. What a guy! I find myself fascinated by Rick's fascination with media literacy. Digital writing is quickly becoming a coveted pasttime for young adults as they nimbly navigate the labrynths of myspace and facebook. Not only are these places to connect with friends and waste time, but they are also places to recreate yourself through words and images. They are destinations for expression and individuality. How do I know this? I confess. I have a myspace account. Be my friend? No facebook for me though. When it started getting popular, you needed to have a university e-mail address, and I had already graduated. So, I never jumped on that bandwagon. Back to what I was saying...
Academics. Digital writing. Here's the part that got me thinking: "However, in participating in classroom or academic chat sites in an academic setting, students may need to adopt a different set of practices than in social networking sites related to discussing assigned readings, brainstorming ideas, or engaging in mutual problem solving" (Beach, et al., 11). He goes on to say that we, as teachers, need to help students construct voice, purpose, and audience, create and maintain online identities, and convey beliefs/attitudes through online written language. What a great tool this internet thing can be! My surprising concern (I surprise myself sometimes) relates to "teaching an old dog new tricks" so to speak. These kids have been online since they could walk. I recognize that they're amazingly resilient and flexible, but still...the generation of students that we will be teaching are not newbies in the world of technology (except maybe for 10th grader, Tony, who needed a detailed explanation today of what it means to double-space a paper - yikes). For the most part, they're already actively a part of something that we may not be - participatory cultures. How do we adapt their already adept skills to an academic standard without zapping the fun out of it? It's one thing to spend your free time perusing the web and writing blogs but quite another to teach kids how to purposefully utilize the available online tools.
This week, my resource has nothing to do with my blog post. I usually like to cleverly link the two, but I decided that I'd forget about this website if I waited until it fit perfectly into my little blog bubble. Check out www.teenreads.com - Authors! Reviews! The Ultimate Reading List! Podcasts/Videos (coming soon)! This is a very cool website devoted to teens and their reading interests. I think there are a lot of sub-par websites out there on just about any and every topic. This one is worth a few minutes of your time.
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