home

Hello! My name is Sam Mills. I'm an MIT student at Eastern Washington University majoring in Secondary English. I did my student teaching in an eighth grade language arts and social studies classroom in Spokane. In addition to teaching, my passions are writing, sports and drawing comics (look below to check out one of my favorites--Garfield Minus Garfield!). I am absolutely intrigued by the concept of incorporating technology into my content area. Many students are already familiar with writing papers and doing research--that is what they do for school. Outside of school, however, they are using many more programs to media to exhibit their creativity and unique perspectives. By learning how to use these tools myself (and introducing them to my students who are unfamiliar with them) I want my students to feel no limits when it comes to expressing themselves with technology in the language arts classroom.

rss url="feed://garfieldminusgarfield.net/rss" link="true" number="5" date="true"

Learning Model: My learning space will incorporate the Authoring Cycle learning model. The model lends itself to integration with technology because it views writing as a fundamentally collaborative process. The main purpose of the Internet as a tool is making communication easier--occasionally making communication possible where it never was before. Combining the Authoring Cycle with Web 2.0 tools will allow students to work on the same draft in any location, collaborate with peers over long distances, widely research their questions of inquiry, and, ultimately, publish to a wider audience than was ever possible before the Internet.

Framework for Evaluating Media: Lasswell's Model for evaluating media, although predating the Internet, is still relevant in the computer age. This model could be more important than ever, as its basic questions (who says?, what?, to whom?, in what way? and with what effect?) can be very hard to answer when literally anyone with an Internet connection can author a site. Lasswell's is also a useful framework because it asks so few questions. Students will be more apt to try and answer five questions as opposed to seven--or even six.