Literally Digital Idioms

Building upon Prensky's idea that "Today's students think and process information fundamentally differently from their predecessors" (p.4) and coupling that with Johnson's ideas about TV and the internet My lesson would be about making idioms literal through a digital medium. 

My lesson would require students will demonstrate thier research and information fluency by looking up various idioms. They will collaborate with one another to select a series of idoms they would like to portray literally. 

Students will choose between at least two projects for this lesson.

1. They can draw out a literal depcition(ex: a picture of a cat sitting on a copy machine would be a "copy cat") of the idioms and create a 'photostory' book. Photostory works a lot like 'windows movie maker' and 'iMovie' that it allows you to take still photographs and arrange them into a video files that will play like a slide show. (this project will work great with the intelligent classroom. Teachers could use their document camera to take photos of the student's work and then import all of the photos into Photostory [their laptops already have photostory]. 

2.The other choice would be for students to create a video of literal idioms. So they might record a fork in the road and it would be a dining utensil sticking up in the street. Students would work in groups to complete this assignment which would address the need for collaboration and communication. Since students are using prior knowledge to generate new products they are applying innovative creativity. 

3. If a student had another idea of how they would like to demonstrate their literal digital idioms I would be open to suggestions.

As an extension to deepen the student's research and  information fluency, students will be asked to look up the origin of the idioms and the culture from which the particular idiom originates.