Story Character Homepage

Overview

Featured Resources

From Theory to Practice

 

OVERVIEW

Students look at a variety of student and family homepages and make a list of common elements. They then make a list of elements unique to them that would be found on their homepages. Next, students select a character from a novel they have read. They use an online tool to gather basic information about their character and analyze the character to determine what he or she might include on a homepage. Students make a list of graphics and links they might incorporate into their character's homepage, then plan the page using a storyboard. Finally, students create their character's homepage using a Web-authoring or word-processing program.

back to top

 

FEATURED RESOURCES

Literary Elements Map: Students can use this online tool to begin an analysis of their character.

back to top

 

FROM THEORY TO PRACTICE

Today's students are immersed in technologies that enable them to communicate and create in graphically rich, flexible, multimodal formats.  In their article "Infusing Multimodal Tools and Digital Literacies into an English Education Program," Doering, Beach, and O'Brien state that "in composing digital texts, adolescents need to think both multimodally and semiotically-that is, they need to think about which media and modality best represent their ideas and how to format their pages in ways that invite their readers to select those links leading readers to relevant information. The composing plan involves not only what one wants to say, but how one wants to say it, and knowing how to strategically place links that lead to the intertext."

This lesson requires that students integrate both written and graphic responses to a character in literature. Students must collaborate in an active, hands-on experience that requires students to combine character analysis with technology to construct their ideas in a new format.

Further Reading

Doering, Aaron and Richard Beach, and David O'Brien. "Infusing Multimodal Tools and Digital Literacies into an English Education Program." English Education 40.1 (October 2007): 41-60.

back to top