Reading moves into the 21st century

Recently in class we have been talking about digital literacy and I have found it very interesting.  That is why for this blog post I wanted to talked about digital literacy.  The evolution of reading from yesterday to today.  I decided to wait for this subject because for the past 6 or 7 months I have been considering upgrading my phone to an iPhone.  I didn’t earlier buy it earlier because the situation wasn’t right.  But this isn’t a story about getting an iPhone but how I use it.

I love my iPhone.  It is a big improvement over my last phone.  Would I have been happy with any smartphone?  Probably.  I love having apps that allow me to stay up to date with my various interests.  It makes being a fan of the following teams really easy because I just check my app and it keeps me update for everything to deal with the Braves, Jazz, Ducks, Aggies Football and basketball, Ute Football, RSL and even the soccer team in St Petersburg Russia.  I also use my iPhone to play various games and stay connected socially with Facebook, Snapchat and Instagram.  It makes waiting to donate plasma a whole lot more enjoyable because I have something entertain me.  The fourth major thing that I use my iPhone is for reading.  There are a ton of books that are public domain and so you can just download them.  You just have to know where to look.  The most recent thing that I have really enjoyed with an iPhone is having connection to the internet and therefore also a connection to the things that I have stored in the cloud.  I use dropbox for a lot of my school assignments and since you can get dropbox on iPhones it allows me to see those files even when I don’t have my laptop.

I find that I am clued to a screen for a good portion of any given day.  Some times when I am not glued to a screen are when I am in any of my class and also if I am doing my math homework then I am not glued to a screen.  I am also not looking at a screen when I am doing tutoring.  Other than that, for the majority of the day I am looking at some sort of a screen.  Whether on my phone or laptop I am looking at a screen of some kind.  Being in college and without a tv in my apartment it makes it easy to avoid the tv screen.  But I think that that will be a temporary thing that will change once I move on out of this stage of life where I am “a poor, starving college student.”

Earlier I referenced using my phone to do some reading.  What exactly do I read?  I spend a good deal amount of time reading updates, reviews and commentaries on different sports.  After class, I think that this is a really good place for me to make judgments on the credibility of various sources.  I have my preferred app to get my information because I find it to be reliable and I also agree with the commentary that I read.  There were a couple apps that I tried but I didn’t like the reviews that they had or else I didn’t find the commentaries to be interesting and so I read from that app less and less.

Something that I could ask students to do in groups for a term project or something would be to make a prezi.  During class I found this really cool prezi during class.  There have been a couple times this semester where I have “nerded out.”  These are times when I realize that I am a math nerd and I am proud of it.  Here is the link to the Prezi.  I personally have not yet made one but it seems like it would be a lot of work to make one so this would be probably be a group project that the students would work on over a couple weeks.  In my mind this sort of representation could be used as an end of unit project that will show the similarities and differences between concepts from that unit.  For example: in a geometry class a group could share different conditions required to have congruent triangles.  Another group could share the different conditions required to have similar triangles.

After Writing=Reading

Last post I talked about writing and if I considered myself a writer.  To give the short answer I would say no, not really.  The same is true about me being a reader.  Again, like writing I have found times when I have enjoyed reading but I am not one to just sit down and be enveloped by a novel for hours.  Whether it is that I don't have the attention span or that I don't like to sit still for that long the overarching statement is that I don't consider myself a reader.  I find myself super distracted by outside influences when I am reading.  Even if I am really enjoying the book that I am reading I can still get distracted and then I just don't read.  In my college experience the time I would say that I was the best reader was after last semester and before I started to do things for the summer.  I had finally decided that I wanted to read the Hunger Games Series and I ended up reading those pretty quickly by my own standards.  Now as a kid I would read all the time.  I would come home from elementary or even junior high and just get enveloped in the book that I was reading but then that kind of died.  My mom was a big push to get me to read.  We had this rule that we could only watch so much tv and then we had to do other things like reading, homework or practicing the piano.  Then I also remember every summer I would participate in the summer reading program at the county library that was right down the road.  I loved to ride my bike to the library and then back.  It just far enough away that it would take a little bit to get there and then a while to get back because I always came back slower.

So far I have limited myself to talking strictly about books.  But there is more reading that is done than just books.  I do read a couple blogs that my friends or family write.  In this way I am able to stay current with things that are happening with them and their children even though they live far away.  The other thing that I like about blogs is that there is so much versatility in them.  You can change text color, size, highlighting, and you can add pictures and video clips.  There are also probably a lot of other things that can be done that I just don't know about.  I have a friend who really likes to make lists and share these lists.  So he started a blog that was talking about movies and the evolution of movies.  His blog also includes a list of his top 200 movies of all time.  There are some current movies on this list but then there are also some really old ones.  I also tend to enjoy reading the school newspaper however I rarely read news article s from different news stations.  They just don't seem to interest me.

When I think about reading specifically in mathematics initially I think of how there are the dreaded story problems that everybody seems to despise.  Whereas there is not much that can be done about those other things can be done.  As a teacher I could encourage reading by taking problem ideas out of popular books that could possibly spark an interest in a book.  There is a craze about zombies so a problem that could be talked about is modelling how many people will survive a zombie attack.  It would all be theoretical but could give something else to apply things to.

After the beginning comes the discussion

In my mind communication is a huge thing.  In my mind communication is the means by which a person communicates with another person.  There are many different ways that people, and animals for that matter, communicate with each other. Some of these ways include talking, hand gestures, body language, signs and all the other sorts of written language.  Some people are good at communicating and others need help with that.  I would say that I am one of those that needs help communicating.  I would say that one of my weakness is in writing.  I would not consider myself a writer.  There have been a few, distinct experiences where I may have considered myself a writing but that is not common.  Those times were when I really had something to say.  I wanted to remember and recount my vacation to Moscow and so ended up writing 10 pages about the weekend that I had.  I would have definitely considered myself a writer then.

St Basil's Cathedral in Moscow, Russia

When I did do that write up then I immediately started to add pictures to that document.  One of the ways that I prefer to express myself is through pictures.  I could try to explain or describe what it was like to be in Moscow for hours but the person I am talking to could have a different picture in their mind.  But then once I show that picture then everything comes together.  I don't have the capacity to be that comprehensive.  Now that doesn't mean that pictures are perfect at communicating a desired message.  But I believe the age old saying "A picture is worth a thousand words."

As a child I also had very few memories of writing.  There were various writing assignments that I had in school.   Then also during the summer my mom would play school with me and I would write some reports on animals but it still had that school mentality.  I did have another moment when I wanted to write.  I decided that I wanted to write a story.  It was called Jeremy Thatcher the Dragon Hatcher.  It was only a couple pages but I was pretty proud of it.

Since then my writing habits has stayed just about the same.  I have never really been one to write poems or songs.  They seemed like something that didn’t really flow for me and I felt limited.  That things had to be a certain way or style.  It is something that I never really pursued.  I do write the occasional email and even more uncommon is writing a letter.  There are more common types of writing I do which include texting and writing on Facebook.  I also notes write notes so that I don’t forget things.  I always hate it when I go to the grocery store to get milk, bread and fruit and end up not getting bread.  Gah!  Frusterating!  So that helps me remember.

In school, there were a lot of writing assignments.  There have definitely been times when I have written a lot of homework and times when it hasn’t been too much.  But the times that I would say that I enjoyed writing was when I had a topic that I cared about.  Something that I was personally involved in and that I cared about.  It helped when I could see how a knowledge about what I was writing was beneficial. The other time when I enjoyed writing was when I was able to take literary license and write short stories.  That was there wasn’t a huge pressure to keep writing and keep writing.  But I could make it as long as I wanted.  The assignments that I really did not like were the opposite of what I just said.  So when there was a topic that I could really care less about or something that I didn’t see how a knowledge of this would be useful.  That always made writing a lot harder.  The last complaint that I will share was when I had to write a certain length.  Whether that was a certain number of words or a certain number of pages.  That was frustrating because there is a limit to my opinion.  Now if there is a rebuttal or a differing opinion then a paper can be extended.  But I found it hard to make my writing be long enough.

Carrying that in over to math is strange at first.  I don’t remember having a lot of writing in my math classes until I reached my undergraduate studies.  It was only then that I really came to understand the importance of writing in mathematics.  Being able to write and communicate is incredibly important.  Half of learning mathematics is learning how to communicate through the language of math.  When I felt confident in communicating and writing about the content I was learning in my math classes then I knew that I had pretty good understanding and my comprehension was pretty high.