Tagged: What a Way to Discover Other Bloggers!

Dana Huff tagged me for a meme, a new concept for me. My immediate response was akin to getting a chain letter–not a good response to say the least–but, the more I explored the chain of links in the meme (from Dana to Clix to Richie to Edna) the more cool blogs and fellow teachers I discovered. I’m certain I would never have discovered Clix, Richie, and Edna had it not been for Dana tagging me.

Reaching out to a larger community, finding fellow educators, forging collaborations is what makes blogging beneficial, exhilirating, and rewarding. So, I’ve decided the meme too is beneficial and a bit fun. Here’s to reaching out, finding fellow educators, forging collaborations!

First, I am supposed to post the rules:

1. The rules of the game get posted at the beginning.
2. Each player answers the questions about themselves.
3. At the end of the post, the player then tags 5-6 people and posts their names, then goes to their blogs and leaves them a comment, letting them know they’ve been tagged and asking them to read the player’s blog.
4. Let the person who tagged you know when you’ve posted your answer.

OK, so now the questions.

What were you doing ten years ago?

Having taught five years previously at a different area school, I was finishing my first year at Southside High School, a rural district in Arkansas. In those days I was teaching English 10 and Oral Communications.

What are five things on my to-do list for today (not in any particular order)*

1. Finish grading the timed essays my AP students wrote so that we can discuss them in class today.
2. Select and copy student essays to serve as models for other students.
3. Plan professional development (60 required hours in Arkansas) and turn in form for approval from my district.
4. Locate sample ePortfolio rubrics to share with students as they collaborate to design a rubric for the ePortfolios they are creating.
5. Sign up for my 20 minute “Spa Day” session, the session my principal is providing all the teachers! What a guy!

What are some snacks I enjoy?

• Russell Stover Sugar Free Chocolate Pecan Clusters 
• Mixed Nuts (with not so many peanuts)
• Coffee (Hazelnut flavored is my favorite)
• Unsweet iced tea–Sonic Route 44 being my absolute favorite!

What would I do if I were a billionaire?

• Give the first tenth to my church.
• Create an endowment to fund mission trips at my local church.
• Create scholarship endowments.
• Perhaps, I could create an endowment to raise the Arkansas teaching salary so we could recruit and keep quality teachers (how far would a billion go?)
• Invest wisely and live off the interest
• Teach part-time AP English and teacher workshops–or maybe start my own non-profit organization that works with schools to embrace 21st century learning
• Okay–I’d blow some of it on materialistic stuff!

What are three of my bad habits?

Only three? Hmmm…

1. Drinking too much coffee.
2. Not getting papers graded and back to students fast enough (I do procrastinate a bit, but mostly, there seems to be too many papers and not enough hours in the day.)
3. Getting bogged down by things I can’t change; I’m quite the visionary–sometimes to my own demise!

What are five places where you have lived?**

1. Arkansas
2. Arkansas
3. Arkansas
4. Arkansas
5. Arkansas

Pitiful, heh! 

What are five jobs I have had?

1. Cinemagic:  The kid behind the counter checking out video rentals (they were all VHS then!)
2. Linnie’s Optique:  Helping people select frames for their eyeglasses, stocking shelves…whatever else she (Linnie) needed.
3. English Teacher: at four different schools–all in Arkansas from grades 10-12
4. Financial Advisor: During a brief period of teacher burn-out, I tried–but didn’t last long–another career.
5. Educational Consultant:  I’m designing and delivering educational workshops across my state.

What five or six people do I want to tag?

As Dana said, no pressure here to participate, so I hope none of these people get annoyed with me!

• Tammy Gillmore (a veteran teacher–she’s just entering the blogging world)
• Bud Hunt
• Karl Fisch
• Will Richardson
• @edu

Come Read with Us!

Dana Huff  has invited educators to join her in reading Write Beside Them. In the spirit of forging a collaboration, I’ve created a wiki to unite all of us who want to join Dana in reading and discussing the book.

Harvey Daniels, one of my heroes in the world of literature circles, has given the book this blurb:

Write Beside Them debuts as the field’s most comprehensive, contemporary, and practical book on high school writing. Kittle not only tells how a skillful writing teacher operates, she shows you on the accompanying DVD, with clips of kids at work in every stage of a writing workshop. And all this glorious teaching happens with real, sometimes struggling kids who remind us of our own classrooms and students. Write Beside Them is the whole package.

Such high praise from Daniels is enough to make me pre-buy a copy (The book isn’t yet released.). We’d love to have you join us. Head over to Amazon to purchase your copy; then, add your name to the club list on the wiki.  Hope to see there!

    

 

 

 

Blogging WebQuest

The labor has been long and arduous, but I’ve finally birthed (yes–I realize the connotation–an accurate one for the way I’m feeling right now) a finished WebQuest on blogging as part of my work with the Technology Infused Education (TIE) Cadre. 

I can’t take credit for the idea. My work is a mere updating and slight modification of WebQuest: Blogs and RSS created in 2004. I wish I could credit an author, but I’ve been unable to find a creator associated with the site. In creating it, I think I’ve learned more than those who will use it, much like I do when preparing to teach a Sunday School class.

I’d love to hear your feedback.

Spreading 2.0 Love

Yesterday I had the pleasure of helping a colleague start a blog with her journalism students. It was a rewarding experience–like planting a seed that I know will soon blossom, shine, and–if I’m lucky–re-seed in nearby soil (I couldn’t resist using a “green” analogy).

If you check out the blog, realize she just started working on it yesterday. It was the first opportunity I’ve had to play with creating a class blog–several authors contributing to one blog. Working together, the both of us learned a great deal.

Lucky for me, this colleague is an experienced technology user. For several years, as journalism teacher, she has worked with students to produce fabulous publications. With her strong background in using Publisher and PhotoShop, she is a quick study.  All year, she’s been wanting to publish the school newspaper online, struggling to find the right tool. She’s dabbled with Publisher and FrontPage but, with both, encountered a high learning curve (for students) and complications with accessing and publishing to the school server. 

Over the past couple months, I’ve been encouraging her to consider using a blog. Today, she asked me to sit down with her and show her how to use the blog we created for her a few months ago. In about forty-five minutes we covered the basics and brainstormed a layout and navigation:

• She’ll use pages for supplemental information: about the staff, how to subscribe to paper…and any other ideas they formulate.
• The students will create posts (not pages) for each article they submit.
• Students will both tag each article with key words and assign the article to two categories: the edition (like April 200 and the section (like Opinion or Club News). This system will allow readers three avenues for finding articles: a key word search (we added the search widget to the sidebar), categories (newspaper sections or editions), and, of course the archives.

During my prep period, I met with her journalism students, walked them through setting up a WordPress account (no blog–just a username and password), and walked my colleague through inviting them as ”Contributors” (meaning they can write posts, submit posts for review to the “administrator”–the teacher–and access and edit only posts they’ve submitted) by entering their e-mail in the “Invite Users” part of the dashboard. In about ten minutes (no joke) I walked them through using the blog to publish the newspaper online.

Such experiences always remind me how true it is that students are digital natives–how concepts that seem unnatural, foreign, and harder for us digital immigrants to grasp come so easily, so naturally for our students. The students had several pieces they’d been writing saved as Word documents, waiting to be published. Within ten minutes, they had copy and pasted their articles and submitted them for the teacher’s approval.

The beauty of using the blog for the online newspaper is its ease of use, built-in administrative features that allow the teacher to approve work before it goes online, automatic cataloging and archiving of articles, simple no-hassle publishing on-line, 24-7 access for both teacher and students. 

My colleague, her dashboard filling with the student submitted articles “pending review,” immediately recognized how much easier this system is–how managing and assessing students’ work just got a heck of a lot easier for her.

I couldn’t resist taking a quick minute or two to introduce her to RSS/Google Reader. I also populated her Reader with a couple edtech blogs.

I’m not naive. She’ll need more support. There will be other issues to consider:

• Making certain she and her students understand the implications of publishing online–the safety measures to consider.
• Learning advanced features–working with photos and videos and podcasts and… I did show her how to upload photos directly to the blog or to sites like Flickr that allow her to embed the photos.
• Adding student editors that allow different levels of control.
• Working out kinks (otherwise known as problem-solving) as they arise.

All it took to get this project off the ground was a small chunk of time, some one-one-one collaborating, and an eager colleague. I’m surrounded by eager colleagues–solid teachers who, being the professionals that they are, want to keep learning, keep improving, keep advancing so that we can march our students into the 21st Century–prepared to meet the challenges we know await them. I’m lucky.

Imagine if I had more time. Imagine if I could carve out a part of my day to devote to working with my colleagues. Imagine. I am.

Poetry WebQuest

The end is near. As the school year grinds (that’s how it’s feeling as I’m majorly overloaded) through April, nearing May, I’ve been thinking about what I could do to keep kids enthused and me sane. My English 11 classes are well underway in a poetry unit, one which I knew, in the end, students would publish an analysis of a poem and publish an anthology of their own written poems. How could they do this in a way that would engage them, that would motivate them to “get into” the project, that would help them to see poetry has a place in the 21st Century? Yesterday, it came to me:

A WebQuest.

So, Ashley (my student intern) and I are collaborating to create a webquest: Marketing Your Mind: Prancing Into the 21st Century. We created a wiki yesterday and over the next few days will hopefully finish it. We brainstormed together, sketched out (on big paper–one of my favorite tools) a basic plan, and in the spirit of teamwork, we’ve divided the workload: I’ll be writing the introduction, task, and conclusion; Ashley will tackle the process and evaluation. 

I’m a big fan of the webquest, but this one I’m especially liking. Being able to introduce my student intern to webquests, to have her roll up her sleeves and help create one, will impact not only my students but will hopefully impact several generations to come–both hers and mine.

 I’d love to have you track our work over the next few days and offer feedback and suggestions.  

 

 

 

Teaching Tone: Second in the Poetry Series

I confess: I simply haven’t had time to catalogue all the lessons in the poetry unit, so this is not actually the second lesson. It just happens to be today’s lesson. I’ll get back to the others—when I can find time to do them justice.

 

Created by my student intern, Ashley Dorsey, this lesson’s goal was to have students understand how an author’s diction often conveys tone, how—as readers—we need to be able to select the key words and phrases and identify the author’s tone. It is a long post, but I wanted to capture, step-by-step her teaching of the lesson. In hindsight, I wish I could have had a camera in hand to capture a still shot or video snippet of her in action; sadly, I don’t yet have that luxury—the luxury of having 24-7 access to a camera.

Moonfruit: Awesome Website Builder

Moonfruit.com. You must check out Moonfruit, a site I discovered—actually that my students discovered—while creating their portfolios. To be so simple—point and click, drag and drop—it’s one of the most visually powerful online website builders I’ve ever seen.

 

Several of my students have created web pages, rather than stick with the blog format, for their ePortfolios. Shea and JM have made significant progress.

 

One drawback: the free account displays advertisements after the free 14-day (no-ads) trial period ends. You can pay for a no-ad site, of course. Amazingly, a few of my students, enamored by the site, are actually going to pay to get their own domain and ad-free site. JM told me yesterday he was considering upgrading to the two-year plan, long enough for him to use the site through the remainder of high school and be able to present it to colleges and organizations for scholarships.

 

I am smitten myself. In an effort to model lifelong learning for my students, I’ve started my portfolio at Moonfruit. I must admit: it’s FUN! For those of us who love the visual, who love to create, who love to tap into the powerful combination of artful language and creative design, Moonfruit has the power to engage our whole minds.

 

Reading and Writing Poetry

These last few weeks of school, we’re tackling an intense poetry unit in my English 11 class. I’ve decided to pen a series of posts, detailing the unit. So, here’s the first in the series.

 

My goals for the unit center around three key skills:

1. I want students to learn to analyze a poem, to be able to read deeply, digging beneath the surface-level meaning of the poem to unearth the treasures beneath: the thematic meanings often veiled in figurative language and literary elements.
2. I want students to be able to write responses to poetry that convey their deeper understandings. To do so requires them to use several skills:
   1. To have a literary vocabulary to be able to discuss the techniques a poet uses.
   2. To understand and be able to use strategies for unpacking the meaning of complex poetry.
   3. To discern key words and phrases and weave these smoothly into their own sentences.
   4. To write commentary that explains both how and why an author uses particular devices and strategies and for what larger purposes.
3. I want students to compose free verse poetry that employs specific literary devices and strategies.

 

Granted, their responses will require many more skills, but these are the ones on which we’ll focus.

Gatsby VoiceThread: Showcase Projects

We’ve fixed the private vs. public issue so that everyone can now view my students’ VoiceThread projects. If you missed the previous posts, check out an explanation of the project here and a reflection of the project here.

Check out some of the VoiceThreads my students created: their analysis of a particular color in The Great Gatsby:

 

• White!: Aaron, Landon, Casy, Darius
• Yellow: Dakota, Kevin, Teela, Josh
• Lilac: Kory, Matt, Kelsie

Call for Techy Book Projects

Bud Hunt is asking readers to submit their favorite YA titles. I’d love readers to submit their favorite tech ideas for book talks.

In our school, students regularly give book talks–oral presentations of the books they’re reading. These talks encourage students to craft an attention-getter, give a brief overview of the book, give more detailed information on at least one particular aspect (author, setting, character, theme, structure), and end with a teaser that encourages others to read the book. You might want to check out the book talk rubric. We’ve found these book talks are our best advertisement of books. Afterall, teens listen to each other.

I’m wondering about ways to go beyond the  mere in-class oral presentation. I think producing a VoiceThread or podcast might be cool. Has anyone tried this? Do you have specific advice for tackling such a project? Could you share other ideas for book projects?