Wednesday, July 9, 2014

Making Memes is HARD! Post and reflection

This is the kind of project that I think many teachers would look at and say, "This would make a great in-class project!"  But as a Type A perfectionist, I can tell you that I agonized over this for too long!  Did I have the right picture?  Did it comply with copyright rules?  Was my caption witty?  Ugh!  I felt like there was so little room for error.  Really, just one picture and two witty lines!

Anyway, here is my attempt at it.


This is meant to be a play on I Know What You Did Last Summer and of course, it assumes that you are old enough to have either seen or heard about that movie.  The need for understanding cultural references cannot be emphasized enough when creating a meme.  It's like watching The Simpsons.  It's much funnier when you understand all of the cultural references.

Still, I really like this idea of pushing students to use vocabulary in meaningful ways because word choice means so much.  At the same time, we as teachers are promoting visual literacy too by asking students to think deeply about the images they are using. As one of our school's English teachers says, "there are no more flat words," meaning that words are now hyperlinked or connected to images and we have to think as much about those elements as the words we choose.

As a former history teacher, I think this could be a great preview and wrap up exercise for a unit.  It would give students a chance to revisit their memes based on their improved understanding of a given topic.  Likewise it would be a nice way to offer a chapter summary of a book in English class.

For me, this was an extremely difficult task, but one in which I can see immense value.

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