Channels and Choices

On Friday I found out that my good friend's brother passed away from a heartattack. So my blogging came to a bit of a cease because I didn't quite know how or what to say about it. I didn't want to write something frivilous. So I gave it some more thought and after awhile came back to blog about it. I decided to honor his memory as a teacher by not just blogging about his passing, but to use it as something that could be a learnable moment for my students. So I opted to talk about the choices people made in how to pass on the news of his death. From the college where he worked calling his mother, to the police officers driving up in their driveway; from my phone call to my parents to the message I posted to our elementary school classmates, even the assignment itself where the students read about his death on the blogsite, all channels were included. So today I created a 10 point objective quiz that students will take on the blog entry. I also intend to talk to them after the quiz about the subjective part of what "communication rich" means and what type of contexts would be appropriate for each of the different channel choices.