Curation for Learning: Find Your Fit Extend Activity

Starting in the Fall of 2021 I will be instructing 10th Grade English focusing on Informational Writing Skills for the first semester. The class composition will be predominantly Navajo. These students have been identified as having a variety of academic, social and emotional needs. The first week has been scheduled for assessing prior knowledge, getting to know one another and laying a foundation for our classroom community with a focus on assessing academic writing skills. Academic writing, specifically informational writing, is typically a challenge for the students. There are three main issues: 

• A lack of or weak understanding of MLA format guidelines;
• Application of active reading and note-taking skills; and
• Slightly below or poor grammar skills. 

My goals are three fold; make the class and course materials personal, positive and profound.

I would like to successful shape the semesters to be project-based with a student portfolio submission at the end of each semester. I believe that this will allow for a more engaging class. Additionally, research shows that when learning is personal it yields a positive impact on the whole learner. Furthermore, the use of project-based learning (PBL) will allow for curriculum and lesson reflection to better serve the student population's academic, social and emotional needs. 

Following the Mentimeter activity (see WordWall) I it was fresh in my mind how important word choice in when utilizing OERs. Using eCampusOntario Open Library I immediately found forty-nine Open Education Resources (OER) and was glad that my word choices yielded focused results. 

Writing for Success published in 2015 License: CC BY-NC-SA. The description offers key words, like, building writing, critical-thinking and grammar review. The digital PDF version of the text allows for easy navigation of units and subunits. The text offers thorough explanations and each topic offers a brief practice activity. With respect to HS instruction, this text could serve as a teacher resource for supplemental instruction and resource for students choosing self-study or independent review. Writing for Success requires a great deal of reading and looks as if it would work well within the LMS Canvas using Immersive Reader and/or Read&Write for Google to support struggling readers and non-native English speakers. 

The second OER source that I explored was MIT Open Courseware. MIT Open Courseware offers a modest OCW Highlights for High School and various Literature courses ranging in length, video only, audio only, lecture notes, and more. While this will not serve the informational writing unit, it may be of future use when examining poetry and/or compare-contrast topics. 

The third and final OER source I explored was MERLOT for ways to make Writing for Success more personal, positive and profound. The Visible Thinking Routines for #RemoteLearning The Infused Classroom. This sparked the idea of students brainstorming and sharing via Flipgrid their observations of various informational text before. The site also offered a Plagiarism Tutorial hosted by the Z. Smith Reynolds Library. MERLOT is proving to be a varied and useful tool. The photo that I found using my refined search techniques is from December 24, 2015 by Plagiarism-Checker.me 

Overall, this extend activity has proved very useful and one could easily fall down the rabbit hole with ideas for future extensions and learning opportunities.