Semester in Motion

As my niece said in a Facebook posting yesterday "Has anyone seen my motivation?  I already checked under the sofa cushions and it's not there."

Somehow we've past the halfway point of the semester and I'm behind in almost everything (except reading - I always manage to get the readings done).

So here we are - students as designers, eh? 

In some ways, students are almost always designers. When they write a research paper, do a PowerPoint, make a speech – they’ve designed it.  While there are times the design is more tightly controlled than others (a formal research paper has many controls), they are still the ones designing the content – what words they choose, which parts they emphasize, how they shape their thesis, sentence structure.

Word choice is actual a huge design tool.  English has so many shades of meaning in the language.  When we have exchange students, we always have them keep a notebook for vocabulary as they learn it.  They inevitably end up with a whole page of “smile, smirk, grin, leer, sneer” words and when you would use each one.  

Review

          I was thinking about students as designers.  I was also seeing teachers starting to try to come up with creative ways to review.  Why not combine the two?  Have the students suggest authentic problems for the areas of review.

1)   It ensures that they can see real-world applications for the information

2)   It ensures the teacher knows they can see those applications

3)   It gives them more ownership of the review process

Students as designers

Let's start with looking at the statement "students as designers" literally.  How often do we ask them to produce a PowerPoint, or another document?  How often do we really help them become better designers of those documents?  I'm not talking about correcting grammar or punctuation, I'm talking about design.  Are we sharing the principles graphic design, or just looking at content?  If we are teaching that PowerPoint is a tool, shouldn’t we teaching them the right way to use it?  Too often I see kids who create a collage for a background, don’t fade the pictures and put huge blocks of fancy text in a bright color over top so you can see it.  It’s hard to read and visually distracting.  That’s without getting in to the “what about folks who are colorblind” discussion.  The whole “modeling” part is left out when it comes to this aspect of an assignment.  Just as we embed and scaffold learning to use the affordances of the software within the context of the lesson, we should scaffold and embed learning the fundamentals of graphic design.