One of the many aspects of this collaboration that I’m enjoying is the debrief that happens after particular lessons. This past week we both facilitated learning activities based heavily on the Media Awareness Network’s Sex in Advertising lesson plan. We chatted about the lesson on Friday afternoon, and agreed that this lesson works well in the first unit of the course. (Our unit outline with lesson plans is available, too.)

What we liked

• The topic of sex in advertising suits the grade level. I had considered trying this with a younger group, but we agreed that Grade 12 students bring a maturity to this that is important for getting into the material.
• It gets students really thinking. After looking at some advertisements as a class, they work in groups to analyze some of their own selected ads. There’s a lot of discussion about how sex is being used to sell products.
• It gets us as teachers thinking. It’s not always obvious how sexuality is being portrayed or used in some of the advertisements, but we jump in and talk it through with students. Usually they arrive at interesting conclusions in the course of the discussions – conclusions that we wouldn’t have expected, but that are backed up by some careful thinking.

What needs work

• I need to think more about gender in advertising vs. sex in advertising before facilitating this lesson again. Some of the discussions that we had made me wonder if I’d be better off preparing for this with a discussion of gender.
• The overheads available on the Media Awareness Network are a great resource, but like the authors suggest, it’s nice to freshen them up with ads from magazines that students bring in. I’ve adapted most of the overheads into a PowerPoint presentation for use in the classroom, which students can download from the unit page on our course website. I’d like to get these into a more web-friendly format, though. (Time to dust off iMovie.)

I thought for a long time (an hour is a big time investment) about the new-to-me concept of using a wiki for class collaboration. After reading Mr. B-G’s post about wikis, and as a result checking out Kristin’s “Not-So-Intimidating World of Wiki“, I felt emboldened. I hunted around and found some examples of wikis being used in ways that I think fit my own teaching style; a favourite was discoveryisms, which connects in so many ways to the English course I’ve re-organized around life’s big questions.

I ended up checking out free wiki hosting options. Wetpaint was ruled out almost immediately: despite its nice themes, it asks for a birth date to sign in (what’s with that?) and members of private spaces have to be emailed invitations. (I make a point of not collecting student email addresses.) I couldn’t find any examples of pbwiki use that I really liked. And not being so emboldened as to want a public wiki yet, I landed with a nice, safe private one (free for teachers) at Wikispaces. So now I will have the fun of launching an experiment in online collaboration with my Grade 12 English students this semester.

But that’s not all, nor is it even the best part. Another Grade 12 English teacher at our school, who has also set up a blog for his class, is interested in having his students participate in the brand-new wiki that I’ve launched.

I’m already benefiting from having another person thinking about and working on this with me. He has suggested that we create groups containing students from both classes to work on specific parts of the wiki, thus enabling cross-class collaboration. All sorts of possibilities are opening up here.

And my third bit of good news for the day: I’m going to have a working LAN in my classroom this semester! No more screen shots of interesting online texts for my classes. This is a very generous move on the part of our school IT person, who himself is a busy teacher and doesn’t need the extra work that comes with supporting teachers’ connections in the classroom. I am very grateful.

On top of all of this, it’s Friday. All around a great day.