VBlog for Cut Letters and making Visual Aids

VBlog for Cut Letters and Making Visual Aids by Jane Jones

Click on the above link in orange to go to video.

I hope this link works! If it does - as promised, I will put in the directions that you can use for yourself and your students to learn this useful low-tech skill to make visual aids and bulletin boards using cut letters. You still need to teach media literacy and high-tech skills.

There is a reason this low tech/high - high/tech approach is important to me. It's a given that school districts have visual, oral and writing skill objectives. However, if you ramp up your expectations so that they match up, not only with your school district's objectives, but skills the employers and corporations specifically identify as ones high on their hiring list - your students will have an advantage.

The ideal assignment is an outcome-based one with a menu-like set up so that students have some choice. 

It could be a project with multiple stopping points that allow you to collect a part for review or a grade. The project could follow along with a novel or unit that you are teaching so that you can monitor student progress at different points and hold them accountable for different objectives. 

I often tell people that if I were teaching high school English and had any freedom, that my students would be producing E.T. the musical or Star Wars the musical (that was before this recent announcement that another Star Wars movie was in the works). If you think about it, almost every objective could be touched upon with a project like that. My other idea was to spend a whole year with irony as the theme and use only the newspaper - wouldn't that be fun?

Maybe teachers can get some freedom - wouldn't that be nice?