The Hobbit, as a text, requires very little defense as an effective tool for teaching the elements of fiction. Its merits are self-evident in the text and the masterful style that Tokien employed when he wrote it. Creating a unit using technological tools, however, does take some defending, as technology shouldn’t be included for its own sake but rather for the betterment of the students’ education. This unit employs several different digital and technological tools, many of which are relatively new to classrooms. Some of the tools are used for the entire class at once, while others are brought up as options for diverse learning styles.
All of the presentations and lectures over the course of this unit employ either Prezi or Powerpoint. Both of these formats allow the instructor to lecture hands free and pay attention to the classroom while filtering through the information (as opposed to writing and lecturing from the board). Additionally, both tools include audio, video, and image options to appeal to a variety of intelligence types. Students who are spatially intelligent will enjoy Prezi lectures in particular. These digital tools can both convey information to the entire class at once in a quick, efficient way and can be designed to be aesthetically pleasing to the audience.
One of the major digital tools provided for student use is Google. Within itself, this site contains a variety of different applications (scholar, document, images, earth, and the search engine itself). Students will be allowed to access this site to research information for projects, share documents with fellow group members, find images for presentations, and locate areas of the planet for settings study. Its applications are so broad and irreplaceable that this site finds its way into several of the lessons. Similar to Google, in that every student will be using it, Blogger is a digital service that will allow each member of the class to have a localized site for their work. Student work can be available to the teacher and the rest of the class, and commentary can be made online without any need for paper copies.
Several other digital tools will be made available for students as optional guides and helpers. Often these tools will act as alternatives to more traditional response mediums. For instance, students who do not feel that they are strongly artistic may use storyboards.com as an alternative to drawing their own storyboards. Similarly, Glogs will always be acceptable in place of posters or other creative, image-based response. Bubl.us is another website that aids with organization for visual learners, but its use will only be mandated once—at all other times it will be available as an optional tool for students to use. Visual learners will also benefit from the inclusion of youtube video clips to add another dimension to lectures.
The Hobbit has always been a book worth teaching to students. Its storyline, characters, setting, and language are so rich that it provides a great mentor text to young writers. Technology does not change that, but simply provides faster, more efficient, and more appealing ways of conveying the lessons that this book has to offer. This unit plan has not reinvented anything about the way that books are taught to students, but simply changed the media of instruction and, in so doing, made the material more accessible to students growing up in the digital age.
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