Why is talking important?

"sign language: friend"
https://www.flickr.com/photos/raolea/2731334398/

What would you say if someone asked you, "Why is talking important?" Personally, I would look at them askance and wonder if they were being serious.

Talking is essential to survival and relationships, even if you can only talk with your hands, or a computer, or the direction of your gaze. If the human race is going to work together to stay alive, we have to coordinate and understand each others' needs, to decide who is friend or foe. The young have to learn the stories of their elders if they hope to become old themselves. And if nothing else, we are social creatures who get lonely without someone to talk to and share our lives with.

So why is it that when someone asks, "Why do people read?" the answer is often "entertainment"? All of the answers to why talking is important apply to books, which is just a bunch of written talking. I want to make that connection for future students of English language arts, and I have a few ideas about how to use technology to do so. I will classify each assignment under the SAMR model regarding technology in education.

Book Trailer

• Assign students to read a young adult book of their choice and create a book trailer like this that includes why that book might benefit a reader.
• I would classify this at the modification level because it can transform the project from a graded presentation into a suspenseful mini-narrative that connects books to movies, something newer generations will be more familiar with.

Interview

• Assign students to record themselves interviewing someone older than them. Tell students to ask the interviewee to tell a story they wish they would have heard at the interviewer's age. Students should submit the mp4 of the interview as well as a reflection comparing and contrasting books and interviews and answering the question, "Why do stories matter?"
• Students could interview without the recording and take notes, seeming to make this a substitution. However, making the connection between books and conversations is the point of the assignment; the goal is not simply for the student to gather information. Therefore, in this case, I classify it as high as redefinition, because for the assignment to work, students have to analyze the real-time method of communication and compare it to how written stories communicate effectively.

Audiobook Excerpt

• Instruct students to pretend they are producing an audiobook. Students must record themselves reading a section of a book (maybe from class, maybe a book of their choice). The recording may be played in class. Students can then reflect on why audiobooks are made and compare and contrast audiobooks to regular books.
• I would classify this as modification; allowing students to record themselves rather than pretend they are a recording while reading aloud in class gives them time to practice, gives them a good sample to present, takes away visual nonverbal communication that would be present with someone reading aloud in person, and makes the connection to the actual production of audiobooks one might find on Amazon in a way that simply reading aloud could not do.