Cool Tools

The cool tools wiki is a good one, and I'll focus on three programs that I researched that hold some potential for me as both an English teacher and as the web design and yearbook teacher.

• Kitzu, though it seems mostly arranged for the California standards, has some 'kits' of lessons that fall into many categories. In the category of visual arts I found lessons on color that I may be able to use with my yearbook staff as we discuss the use of color in the book.


• snap.com, This site allows annotation on blog posts or on web sites that could be used by my web design class to add more multimedia to the site creation experience without needing to learn Javascript, a valuable thing to bypass whenever possible.


• Google notebook, a tool which I think Google stole the ideas and interactivity when they purchased Etherpad. This seems to be etherpad without the chat window that can be anonymous. I am a fan of knowing who is typing what, so I think this has some merit in replacing online sign-ups for my students.

There are hundreds of other options, including yodio and other web 2.0 tools, but I don't know how I'll manage to fit them all into my curriculum. I think it is more a matter of finding a tool once the plan has been created as opposed to focing a plan to include a tool. That is my least favorite kind of planning, after all.

Ebook Final Project

This is the final project that I chose for the course. It requires that you have some instructional time with the students as well as a project that would allow itself to create a 'book' of work for the students.

I had students email me their Word files and audio, though in hindsight there are a few changes I would make to the procedure to save myself some time:

• have each student create a 'jpg' of their poem so I don't have to convert them.


• have students save all the files in a shared folder on the network so I don't have to 'save-as' all the links they email.


• enable all students to record by requiring it and providing recorders (which the PTO graciously purchased us this year)

This was a good project, but I am still converting files and making snapshots of the poems. With the adaptations mentioned above, I think this is a sustainable project for future poetry units that we do.

Wordle 2

After using wordle a couple times, I really like its ease-of-use and its convenience. I decided for my second attempt to post the poem that got me really into the imagist movement, The Red Wheel Barrow by William Carlos Williams.

Wordle 1

This is a wordle I did of the unit 15 vocabulary words for Level D of Sadlier-Oxford's Vocabulary Workshop Book.



I hope you like it!

On the way: Nation’s first tech-literacy exam

Check out the article that I've posted here.

On the way: Nation’s first tech-literacy exam

This goes to show that technology education and use is more and more becoming part of our culture in the modern American high school. We are now going to be measured (as an educational system) on how well our students use technology.

Here are my questions:
What do you think this means on the local level? How long before the powers-that-be trickle-down the mandated technology course at the early grades? What do you think of this addition to education? Is this a valid use of public education? Can anyone really live without these technologies any longer? Is this what it felt like to be in the first generation of automobile owners or electric-light users? How long before it's just part of how we define our society, or is it already?

The Wiki Experiment

This has been done for a while, but I'm just getting around to posting it. Sorry.

In the interest of authentic assessment, I decided to give the wiki a test during a class. My students had just finished reading Fallen Angels by Walter Dean Myers and had to have an in-class seminar over this outside reading. Normally, students have to discuss an assigned book in a large-group environment. I thought this lent itself well to both a forum, which I've used before, and possibly a Wiki.

Students used Moodle to add forum posts with questions they had about topics in the story, and that portion of the day went quite smoothly. After that was completed, I had them work on a Wiki that described the various characters in the story so that all would have access to the most accurate information (telling a couple to be watch-dogs for inaccuracies).

The fact that the Wiki in moodle would only allow one student to edit at a time led me to revise the plan and create a google-doc that my afternoon classes could work with. The Google-doc allowed them to edit at the same time, but wasn't real-time. I am hesitant to use Etherpad due to the chat feature, though that was an option as well.

The overall product was not great with the Wikis while the Google Docs were a little better.

U.S. moves closer to common standards

I highly recommend reading this article:
U.S. moves closer to common standards


I know that this is not an article about twenty-first century skills, but I thought it might make a difference when thinking about curriculum. Imagine how things are likely to change for us here in the midwest if we have to teach the same curriculum as the far east and west coasts. I enjoy the diversity of our nation, so my concern is that we will become less diverse due to uniform educational requirements. Will the federal government be assigning textbooks, or will we get a choice of reading materials for our English classrooms?