Sweet GalleyCat

 

Technology as Connectivity

High school is on my mind this week. 

It's the strangest sensation to finish teaching a lesson to twenty-seven seventh-grade faces, get in my car, drive across town, and be oriented to my new (enormous, foreboding, exciting, oh-so-grown-up) high school campus. It's as if something in the air changes.

Possibilities in high school seem endless. And expectations and responsibilities, for teachers and students alike.

I suspect my professional learning community will be more essential than ever. But how to use it is a little less predictable now too. It's time to innovate.

GalleyCat is made for cases just like this. One of the sixteen blogs run by MediaBistro, GalleyCat is the  media organ's pulse on all things publishing, which may seem like an incredibly tiny cross-section of a language arts teacher's domain, but this blog is replete with "points of contact" for young thinkers, readers, and writers just starting out in the world of media and publishing. (After all, all writing is published for someone, whether for a national syndicate or a classroom academic debate.)

The larger MediaBistro endeavor rides on the efforts of twenty-six editors, authors, producers, directors, and managers, while GalleyCat is largely propelled by editor Jason Boog, whose diverse media experience is reflected in the deliciously eclectic assortment found in GalleyCat's feed (Maryann Yin and Dianna Dilworth also contribute, and Nadine Cheung also edits). 

GalleyCat is my choice for classroom use for several reasons:

• It regularly features tiny-yet-mighty resources for professional writers. What does this have to do with high school students? Everything. Besides the practical implications of teaching the art of writing from a media platform that is relevant and up-to-date for students, showing sophomores or juniors that their ability to communicate so well that others will actually choose to read their texts (a reality professional authors must confront every step of the way) is more powerful than tests, grades, and other less accessible applications of students' actual writing. Case in point. It also has an ongoing fling with all things Twitter, which I love due to my personal quest to tame the Twitter beast for literary purposes. (Does anyone else see Twitter as a modern rip-off of the Haiku?)

• It achieves the the single best merger of technology and authoring that I have yet seen. Seriously, the amount of book- and text-related applications available to iPad/ iPhone/ iMac users staggers the imagination. There is a great deal of debate about whether resources provided through technology really are accessible to all students (most but not all high schoolers have smart phones), but debating aside, can you just picture a high school language arts class populated by students who make use of access to 100,000 titles on their phones or tablets? Just the thought gives me chills. GalleyCat makes that dream just a little less hazy.

• It's youthful. Saying this grates my old-fashioned sensibilities, but if technology resources don't meet the most immaculate standards of aesthetic and content novelty, young people can sense its fast-approaching demise and retreat faster than the older generation even begins to suspect something going awry (sometimes the actual presence of older people/ parents). GalleyCat, though a professional platform, is intimately connected to the high school and college populations interests and concerns. Is all GalleyCat content suitable as a lesson plan resource? Probably not. But suitability isn't just about appropriateness: it's also about relevancy and authenticity, which GalleyCat appears to have in spades.

I can see myself referencing GalleyCat in everything from casual classroom discussions to text resources for formal analysis and response. The blog organizes itself into Publishing; Deals, Bookselling, Writer Resources; GalleyCat Reviews; and Jobs. The possible classroom interfaces are virtually endless, potentially contributing to research into language arts careers, reading choices, and cultural evolution. GalleyCat also has the crucial benefit of being a well-oiled cog in a well-represented media machine: it isn't a freelance blog floating on its own in the infinite void of social/professional media, and it shows. It's brief, sharp, shiny.

I feel nervous about a lot of aspects of moving into the high school classroom, but about using GalleyCat in my lessons is one thing I would feel absolutely confident.