Okay…so, what does that mean for you? It means having students write their thoughts instead of speaking them, which is, as we all know, an important skill when one depends on the internet/email to communicate. Below I give a very basic explanation of how it works and how you can use Firefly in your classroom.

HOW IT WORKS

When you visit a firefly-enabled website, you can click anywhere on the site and start typing. When you do, a bubble will pop up with whatever you are saying. Pretty interesting.

WAYS IT CAN BE USED IN THE CLASSROOM

1. Have your students look at different documents. Set a timer and do virtual stations. Each time the timer sounds, students would go to a different virtual station (or page of your website) to discuss via firefly.
2. You could anonymously post various students’ work for critique. Then they can print screen when they are done.
3. Put pictures of various advertisements your website and have students evaluate it for bias and/or method of using propaganda.
4. Have students do something like a word cluster.

I like this site because it allows for quiet evaluation of materials while giving a the assignment an edgy feel.

I would love to hear from you regarding ideas for using firefly.

To read the other posts in this series on T. S. Eliot’s poem, click HERE.

Chess is a game of strategy with many options at any point. Reading The Waste Land with students likewise can follow many paths. Following a linear route is not the only, or even best, method of examining the poem as it tends to be with other, non-modernist poems.

We begin with the ending, Read The Full Story…

To read the other posts in this series on T. S. Eliot’s poem, click HERE.

Teaching “The Waste Land” presents a daunting task, yet one that provides a great opportunity to practice the oft-overused progressive maxim: Learn with your students. I, myself, do not fully understand the poem, so teaching it means that you will have to say, “I don’t know,” that you will have to believe that your students may have a better insight on an aspect of the poem than you, and that you will discover meaning in the poem together, often at the same time.

In a sense, you really do have to bury the dead: the assumptions of students about what poetry is; traditional modes of interpreting literature; your pride; maybe even the high level of writing to which you surely have already brought your students (even my best writers find it difficult to write well about something they do not understand well). But, like the end of the first section of the poem, what is buried has potential to rise again: the narrator asks about the corpse planted in the garden, “Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?” which indicates that, despite massive amounts of despair, there is at least a small possibility of hope, an apt metaphor perhaps for the teaching of a poem such as this.

So the beginning of the week and a half we spend tearing this poem apart begins with a disclaimer for my students: You will not like this poem, and you will likely think that Eliot was smoking crack. Read The Full Story…