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  You can also view the infographic here . Why I made the choices I did on my infographic Making an infographic for reasons to implement graphic novels in the English Language Arts classroom proved to start as a challenge to me. I wanted to implement lots of pictures of graphic novels, art, and comic strips. After looking at what I deemed to be a finished product, it all just seemed clumped together and unappealing. I had to look at the information I was trying to project: the statistics. The added imagery took away from my initial message of raising literacy rates and increasing enjoyment of reading. Instead, I choose to have the statistics themselves show as imagery. I don't want to pull peoples attention away from the information by having witty pictures of superman or batman.  The Percentages themselves were found here and here . These would prove to be big service points in the field of literature. I wanted to spark a conversation about these statistics. The statistic ab...

 Graphic Novels: An Introduction into Loving Literature      As many of us have already seen, we have an upcoming epidemic (and I'm not talking about Covid-19). I see more and more youth every day exclaim their hatred for reading. Out of the 60 sophomores I teach at the Barack Obama School of Career and Technical Education, I only have about 4 students who enjoy reading. Reading, in the school context, is projected as a huge task that is chalk full of activities to do in class. Students equate reading with grades and therefore dislike reading. Many students also get lost in text, do not feel connected to the reading, or just simply find the text boring. For these reasons and more, I decided to try to find a way to make reading fun for my students, this way their more apt to participate and more likely to develop an enjoyment of reading.     Graphic novels were the first thing to come to my mind to foster an enjoyment of reading. They are, typically but not ...

      As an Educator, I would love to see students actively engage in their readings. Until yesterday, I had not seen voluntary participation until we busted out the first book of the year. Many of the students moaned and groaned about how they didn't want to read a book (especially out loud). Everything changed once we opened the book.     The selected text (as seen above) was called Yummy the Last Days of a Southside Shorty  by G. Neri. This is a graphic novel about an eleven year old kid from Chicago who ends up in a gang. Yummy was a real boy and this is a real story. The students connected with this story, even with it being 27 years old. They loved it so much that four students voluntarily read the whole book!      Seeing this spark in the students made me want to dive into the benefits of teaching reading and English through Graphic Novels for struggling students. I saw students' understandings of the text being read and they conn...

 What's up?! My name is Dylan and I guess you're reading my blog. As I'm writing this, I am currently on my fifth year of college and my third year at UW Milwaukee. I am currently student teaching English 10 at The Barack Obama School of Career and Technical Education  and it already is playing a major role at how I view English Education. This is a school where a large amount of the student population don't care about learning or have simply been "swept up" by life. These students have had to deal with hardships that I can barely understand, but looking past these hardships I see students with a fire to survive and thrive in whatever way they deem necessary. My goal, as an educator is to provide these students with the tools they need to survive and thrive after high school. I would also love to spark an interest in reading for the kids too. Helping students learn applicable skills, like writing emails, leaving voicemails, and even creating a resume can help ...

 All blogs created after this are for CURRINS 545

 The blogging experience is not one I will quickly forget. It was nice, for once, to be able to talk about important things and not worry about sounding professional. It was great to solely write and have fun with it. I took a lot away from this experience too. I learned how valuable low stakes writing can be, how helpful it can be to generate a positive outlook on writing, and honestly I just enjoyed it (I may look into blogging more casually, and potentially have a professional one too).  I will be selecting my top blogs based upon the following categories: Professionalism, Design, and creativity. I then will select one of my Peer's blogs that I enjoyed overall. " Tonight is the Dundies, the annual employee awards night here at Dunder Mifflin. [holds up a trophy of a business man] And this is everybody’s favorite day. Everybody looks forward to it, because, you know, a lot of the people here don’t get trophies, very often. " -Michael Scott Professionalism What Young Wri...

Hey y'all, so I read the graphic novel Skim  by Mariko and Jillian Tamaki. Skim was overall a really good and fast read. I'd highly recommend it to someone who wants to get into graphic novels, even though there can be a few triggers throughout the reading. Below this you will find a short book trailer I composed to see if the book is anything that would interest you. I covered up any potential spoilers with text so there's that lmao... Also, if you would like to use the program, Biteable , feel free! It's free to use  I found making a book trailer to be quite difficult. It was really hard to make the book sound interesting and compelling without giving any spoilers. It took me longer than I thought it would to create it because of that. I tried using stock images, but I felt like it didn't have the same effect as if I used the images from the novel. I'd say my favorite thing about creating this was finding images that conveyed what I wanted to say without spoil...

We're living in a time where students are turning in less and less writing and doing less and less reading. This comes down to a multitude of different things that negatively affects a young person's ideology of reading and writing. One thing that directly affects writing is feedback. Feedback on students' writings can come from a numerous number of people with varying levels of the understanding of writing. All forms of feedback directly affect the student's outlook on writing and can have either a negative or positive impact on them. We'll start with the first thing people would think of when it comes to feedback... Teachers Teachers can have a profound impact on students' writings by providing concrete feedback throughout the writing process. This doesn't mean writing a grade and notes at the end of the paper, but rather providing feedback and helping students throughout the writing process as a whole. Yes, this means from prewriting/brainstorming all the...

When multimodal composition comes to mind, the only project I can vividly remember is from my senior year of high school. I took a critical thinking class with a very influential teacher in my education. His name was Mr. Schreiber. His class taught us to never take things at face value and to always critically analyze things presented to us. We had a unit about subliminal messaging in specifics to advertisements. We learned that subliminal messaging is the key to selling products on commercials and were prompted to write our own scripts and create our own commercials. Our commercials were meant to show our understanding of subliminal messaging and create something to show the class. It prompted us to go out of our comfort zones and use multiple modes of writing and creating to make a finalized product. After te class is shown the commercial, they were asked to point out every piece of subliminal messaging they had seen. It was the best feeling to create a commercial with a subliminal m...

How do I go about writing? Well, writing for me starts with an idea, typically prompted in school. Before I can even think about writing, I need to do something else that works for me. I tend to do a "prewrite" but I don't consider it to be prewriting (mostly because it is the literal bare minimum of a prewrite). I take whatever the prompt may be and try to divide in into 2 or 3 main ideas. Each of those turn into a body paragraph. That's it... That's my magical prewriting strategy.  After my extensive prewriting process, I just free write based upon the ideas. If there are any quotes that I can remember, I add them to support my writing. If I cannot think of any, I typically don't add them 'til after my first draft. My first draft is always blocks of writing, no transitions, and minimal quotes. After this first draft is made, the next step is key ! I will not touch my first draft for at least 24 hours. let me say it again for the kids in back who didn...

Hi all! My name is Dylan Temple and I'll be one of your writing coaches this semester! Here's a little collage to kind of see an abstract of who I am as a person and a writer. Who am I as a writer? Now that is a hard thing to define, so I'll have to start at the beginning of my reading and writing career... (Yes, that is baby me) Okay, so maybe not that far... But around late middle school to early high school I actually really began to slack as a reader and my writing suffered because of it. I became very dissuaded with reading because I felt no connection to what I had to read. This disadvantage was continued by having a hypercritical English teacher my freshman year. It is best said by McAndrew who speaks of tutoring, but applies with teaching: "if a tutor zeros in only on surface errors...the effect on the writer may be harmful and adverse to the goals of tutoring" (17). Rightfully so, I struggled through high school English courses going from honors classes t...

  What experience do you have working with online social media or digital composition as a way to connect with others? Social Media and digital composition has played a vital role in my forming of connections with others in my life. Through connections through Facebook and other social media sites alongside with online gaming, I have made countless Affiliations, which according to Jenkins are "memberships, formal and informal, in online communities centered around various forms of media" (3). Some affiliations are more professional connections. One of these are the online friendships made with old teachers. I reached out to teachers who had played influential roles in my education and upbringing, and therefore formed meaningful affiliations with people in my field. On the other hand, I have made lifelong friendships that only began as affiliations. Two of my closest friends were made online virtually through World of Warcraft. We bonded over Collaborative -problem solving tha...

 This is a test blog, to see what it is like. Here's a picture of my Corgi Millie