Sheila Rosa is a third year English teacher currently involved in the ninth grade cluster program at Attleboro High School in Attleboro, Massachusetts. Her interest in technology stems from a curiosity about media, media as an avenue of language and communication, and media as a part of the fabric of our culture. She sees computers as a tool to manipulate and to understand media. Sheila is not in anyway interested in how or why computers work; she just wants to know what they can do.
Sheila views multimedia as a novel she has only begun to read. Together with Jim Hall, they have created a workshop called Morphing Castles in the Sky and other Multimedia Fairy Tales. In this workshop they explore the possibilities of using technology to enhance the curriculum in the English classroom using morphing, videotape editing, computer graphics, and multimedia research projects. Because students are so familiar with media it is easy to teach them to be media literate. Once media literacy has been established, the transition to book literacy is natural (even with a desperate lack of familiarity with the written word). Teaching students to think critically is the goal. Once this has occurred, the leap from television to books is an easy one.
DickLaCiv@aol.com
Last Modified 2/21/96