Middle School English Teacher Uses iPhones as Teaching Tools

There's an episode of Boy Meets World in which 'cool' English teacher Mr. Turner assigns hapless Cory Matthews to read an issue of X-Men along with The Odyssey. [I seem to be on a sitcom kick this week.] Besides establishing Mr. Turner as the kid-savvy anti-Feeny, the episode was a demonstration that learning can respect both long-honored traditions and new trends.

Well, it turns out that a North Carolinian schoolteacher is trying the same tack, updated for the 21st century.
Cape Fear Middle School language arts teacher Craig Lawson is using all sorts of technology with his students. Most notably, the kids are using iPhone and iPod Touches [iPods Touch?] to create virtual story-lines and graphically work through plots.

I think this approach is a great way to get kids interested in the language arts. However, the article doesn't mention how Lawson is tying these projects in with traditional pen-and-paper language arts. As we become more and more immersed in the world of e-mail and Twitter, writing is a more important skill than ever before. Graphical story-boarding is a great way to get kids excited about narrative, but middle school is also a time when much of the grammatical groundwork is laid.

When writing online, I go back again and again to the lessons Miss Core taught me in sixth grade English class about infinitives and participles. Then again, I wish we'd taken some time to prepare ourselves for the burgeoning online world. I hope Lawson is remembering to balance as he's letting kids tap away on their iPhones.

For every iPhone story, there needs to be a written one, for every X-Men comic, a book of the Odyssey, and for every Mr. Turner, a Mr. Feeny.