Women and War

If I was fortunate enough to be able to film a documentary, my focus would be on the soldiers, particularly women soldiers, coming back from Iraq. My primary focus would be on post traumatic stress syndrome and how the soldiers are dealing with this on the home front. In addition, I would ask them if the PTSD diagnosis was covered by their medical insurance or was it described as a "pre-existing condition." Furthermore, I would include their transition from a war torn Iraq to that of a civilian including their role as mother and their role in the workforce. One follow up question would be what struggles have they had in this re-assimilation process. Another question I would ask is how can we as a society and government do a better job in assuring that soldiers are taken care of when they come home. Essentially what services are they not getting. I would also find it beneficial to interview these women's families and asking them how this has affected them and how their parent/spouse/sister/child has changed or not changed because of this experience. I would also like to interview specific doctors who have had the chance to work with these soldiers and the effects that they are seeing from a medical perspective.

I think that some of the problems I would be faced with are women who feel comfortable enough in talking about these issues, and comfortable enough to be extremely honest about their situations. Overall, I feel this would be an exciting endeavor that would hopefully have us as a nation questioning our role in helping soldiers combat the war zone and whether or not we need to re-evaluate it's overall effectiveness.

Podcasts on Writing

My school has really been pushing this idea of podcasting in the classroom. Many teachers are reluctant for two reasons. One, being lack of time, and two, being lack of resources. Part of the reason I took this class was to become more familiar with the effective ways to incorporate podcasting into the curriculum. One way that teachers have stated they could use it is when a students are either absent or on vacation. Teachers can put their lecture notes and homework on these podcasts. Although this idea can be useful and beneficial, I do not see it much different than posting it to the website. I, however, have been particularly interested in how this can be used with students to voice their opinions, their ideas, which hopefully would make learning more meaningful to them. Because of this, I do believe that incorporating these into literature circles would be excellent. Students could record their literature circle and have additional questions or comments about the book afterwards.

Some of the podcasts that I found that may be beneficial to subscribe to were firstly Hamline University's Conversations In Education. This link can be found at http://www.hamline.edu/gse/conversations/ The particular podcast I listened to was discussing the ways that we use writing in our daily lives. They were asking people what writing they have done today, and many stated emails, comments on student work, reading logs, and some even said none at all. This would be a great way to have students start thinking about the ways we lack writing in our daily lives or reexamine the ways we use writing. This could definitely make for a good discussion.

The second podcast that I listened to comes from Scholastic. Since my school believes in the six traits philosophy for writing, it was interesting to listen to the podcast by the creator of this strategy. This podcast can be found at http://teacher.scholastic.com/products/scholasticprofessional/authors/podcasts.htm