Hannah Ferrara

Whenever I looked at the syllabus before this unit began, I became a tad nervous whenever I saw that we were doing an assignment called "Video Analysis." I was anxious about this project because I definitely do not consider myself an actress nor do I like being on camera. To my surprise, the project ended up being quite simple and a lot of fun, too. For this project, my group members and I chose the short story titled, The Story of an Hour, by Kate Chopin. The first step of the story process included us making a 20 shot story board, which is a planned out drawing of all 20 scenes. Creating the story board was actually really easy because the story we had chosen was not very dialogue heavy, therefore, all we had to do was focus on big actions. Also, it was a lot of fun creating the scenes on paper because we made the short film exactly how we saw it through our own eyes. Overall, this step was very simple and made the filming portion of the project fly by. The ne...

Unit seven was all about transforming a visual genre into an auditory genre through podcasts. Mainly, the podcasts were centered around literary works and made into book talks or book reviews. Introducing a new concept or new piece of technology into a classroom can be challenging. The concept of using technology, specifically podcasts, within chapter 18 of Teaching Literacy in the Digital Age by Mark Gura was introduced. For Madame Smith's, a middle school French teacher, it was hard to figure out a source of technology that students were not used to or bored with. Teaching foreign language can be difficult, since the only true way to learn a foreign language is through speaking. Madame Smith eventually came up with the idea for students to create podcasts where they would have conversations or interviews. Not only are podcasts a great way to get comfortable with the French language, but also they are great for learning vocabulary and sentence structure. There is so much value in ...