Lyn's
Eighth Grade Classroom:
Integrating
Technology Tools into an ELA Unit on The Giver
Lyn, an eighth grade
ELA teacher, found ways to integrate Inspiration and Kid Pix
into her annual curriculum unit on the classic novel The Giver,
by Lois Lowry. This richly textured novel has themes that resonate with
young adolescents’ developmental concerns: family and relationships,
diversity, euthanasia, community and conformity, and the awakening of
sexuality.
Planning
for the Unit
Aligning her goals
for the unit with the district’s ELA standards, Lyn sought to improve
her students’ reading comprehension. On a literal level, she wanted
them to be able to identify and describe the setting, sequence of events
in the plot, and defining features and motivations of the main characters.
Going deeper toward the interpretive level, she wanted students to respond
to the mood of the book by appreciating the author’s literary devices
and use of language to set the tone, create tension, and touch the reader’s
heart.
Lyn’s planning drew on what had worked well when she taught the
unit the previous year. Going with her finding that paper and pencil
graphic organizers were highly effective in helping students map out
the plot and understand character development, she decided to use Inspiration
for the same purposes. Earlier in the school year, Lyn had learned how
to use Inspiration and was finding it to be a helpful tool. ("The
visual cues make a big difference for the kids, especially those who
are visual learners. It’s not just plain words on a page.")
For this unit, Lyn created a plot chart for students to fill in. She
included two boxes for students to describe the setting and main character.
Next, she placed six numbered boxes in a circle. They were labeled "event,"
"conflict," "what happens next," "climax,"
"what Jonas decides to do," and "resolution."
Lyn also had in mind a role for multimedia in this unit. The last time
she had taught The Giver, she had shown her students the Hollywood-produced
movie, Pleasantville, as a way to build concepts related to the
advantages and disadvantages of living within a utopian society and
the consequences for those who rebel. Not only were students engaged,
but Lyn also felt that the introduction of multimedia had helped her
auditory and visual learners understand key concepts. Now Lyn wanted
to deepen their experience by including music to help them understand
the shifting mood of the story.
To help students recognize different ways that ideas and emotions can
be expressed creatively through graphics and sound, Lyn decided to integrate
the multimedia software program Kid Pix into the unit. Kid
Pix allows users to create and combine images, sound, animation,
and text.
To increase motivation, Lyn decided that as a culminating project students
would be required to create a soundtrack to mirror the major events
in the book. By relating the events of the story to music, her students
would not only be able to demonstrate their understanding of the plot,
but also convey their understanding of the characters’ evolving
emotional states.
The
Unit in Action
At the start of
the unit, Lyn explained that the students would select appropriate music
to accompany specific parts of the novel. "By using music to establish
tone, you will have a chance to demonstrate your understanding of the
story’s plot and character development." The directions she
distributed specified that students should do the following:
- Select a partner
to work with as a team.
- Give your team
a name (e.g., one team called themselves the "Big Mamas").
- Complete a plot
chart (created with Inspiration) that describes eight events (e.g.,
the Ceremony of 12, Jonas becomes the Receiver of Memory, Jonas learns
what release is, Jonas escapes and takes Gabriel).
- Create a soundtrack
with eight different music excerpts (30 seconds per excerpt) on either
a blank tape or compact disc.
- Complete one
soundtrack sheet that identifies for each of the eight plot events
the title of the song, singer/group, tone/mood, and length of the
music excerpt. "No inappropriate language" should be used.
- Make a final
presentation to the class describing the scene and mood and playing
the music.
Lyn provided the
equipment. However, the students were responsible for locating and bringing
in the music. The students could come in before school from 8:00 a.m.
to 8:40 a.m. and after school from 2:30 p.m. to 4:00 p.m. to use the
equipment.
Creating the soundtracks involved working at both the conceptual and
technical levels. Conceptually, students had to reread passages of the
book, discuss the mood, reach consensus on what they wanted to convey
through music, generate ideas for music selections, and find the music.
This was an iterative process that often sent students back to the drawing
board after a selection did not quite work as intended.
Two provocative concepts—"release" and "stirrings"—generated
a great deal of discussion. One team, trying to skirt the issue, started
out by defining "release" literally as "letting go."
Through rereading and discussion, they gradually accepted the fact that
the term meant euthanasia. They wondered how to convey feelings about
this serious topic in music. One team used clips from the song "What
Would You Do," another chose "Survivor" by Destiny’s
Child, and a third team agreed on "Jaded" by Aerosmith.
As Lyn circulated among the teams, she noted how eclectic the students’
music selections were. The excerpts they selected included rock, oldies,
blues, heavy metal, tunes from Broadway musicals, instrumental music,
and classical pieces. Some students picked only sounds or noises, a
"blip," or static to show confusion.
Lyn found the high level of motivation to be gratifying. Jay was one
of the first students to finish his CD. He started to use an AlphaSmart
portable keyboard since he struggled with any task requiring reading
and writing, even though he had good ideas. A week before the project
was due, he told Lyn, "I’ll be finished on time. I went home
every night and picked CDs." Lyn recalled seeing him lug a bag
of CDs into school each morning to discuss (or argue about) music with
his partner, who also had significant learning difficulties. But Jay
told Lyn not to worry about him and said, "This is the best project
I ever did."
After the songs were extracted, edited, and converted to .WAV format,
the students then used their Inspiration-produced plot maps to
lay out the sequence of events in Kid Pix. They created an individual
slide for each event on their plot chart and imported the music into
the software program. After each slide was created, the students used
the slide show feature of the program to create a finished presentation.
With their notes and the supporting documentation for Kid Pix,
Lyn and her students were able to use the software to complete their
soundtracks. They also used Kid Pix to create album covers.
For the final presentations, Lyn set up a role-playing scenario. She
told the students to consider her not as the teacher, but rather as
the president of a record company. Their job was to "sell"
her their soundtrack. For each song, they had to set the scene, explain
the mood, and then play the carefully selected, 30-second musical excerpt.
Of the 115 students across her language arts classes, only 3 groups
(6 students) did not complete the project. Since it was more typical
to have 7 or 8 students out of every class of 35 not hand in a project,
the contrast with this unit was "outstanding."
Lyn was delighted with her students’ display of creativity. For
example, one team set the context for the sales pitch by telling her
to expect a soundtrack where "Star Trek Meets Star Wars."
The way the students typically divided up the roles was that one would
read the plot event and explain the mood while the other student would
play the music clip. Often, a class discussion ensued about the appropriateness
of the music, e.g., Did it really fit the mood? For example, one team
selected a song to convey romance, but the class felt that the music
expressed pity instead. Often, students had to justify their selections.
Even though Lyn was the audience, it was the other students in the class
who evaluated each team’s work. The students used a rubric, scoring
each component 1, 2, 3, or 4. Four was the highest score and represented
the following:
- An excellent
oral presentation (students made eye contact, spoke well, and answered
questions)
- Suitable songs
that matched the themes, with justification for their selection
- A thoughtfully
completed song sheet
Jay, the student
with learning problems, and his partner "knocked the socks off"
the class. Not known as being good orators, in this situation, the team
was eloquent. They offered their rationale for the music with confidence.
They chose brief selections from the text to read to the class to set
the mood before playing the music selection. Even though both Jay and
his partner had reading problems, they read the selected passages with
fluency. They shared responsibility by taking turns reading and playing
the music. The class gave them a rousing hand of applause and a grade
of "A". Lyn confided to us that they "would have failed
my class if they had not done so well on this project."
Reflecting
on the Unit
By using graphic
organizers created with Inspiration, Lyn felt that her students
were able to see how events related to each other. This new way of "visualizing"
the plot helped many students who had previously struggled with the
task. Even after the unit ended, students were better able to remember
parts of the novel and tell her what they meant because the music triggered
their memory. Being able to use self-selected music turned the abstract
concept of tone into something concrete. The students understood how
they felt when they heard a certain song and were able to see how the
writer used words to create tone (feelings and emotions) in the same
way. Lyn realized that using music, a medium appealing to adolescents,
provided a concrete way of understanding how a writer uses characterization,
setting, and plot to set the tone in a piece of writing.
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