Enhanced English Teacher

I recently discovered the website Americans for the Arts. The purpose of the website is to promote art education.  The sponsoring organization has embarked on a National Arts Education Public Awareness Campaign.  The website provides links to the advertisement campaign to bring awareness to the Ten Simple Ways to instill art education in children today.
The [...]

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I recently read an excellent article titled “The End of Solitude” by William Deresiewicz posted online at the Chronicle Review.
The article brings up valid concerns about our growing dependence on technology and the need to remain connected.  According to Deresiewicz, the preceding generation wiped out boredom by switching on the television.  The current generation is curing loneliness [...]

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I am a big fan of TEDTalks, and recently showed two episodes in the classroom.
In Read the Net, an online literacy English elective, my students are studying and blogging about third world countries.  We created a class spreadsheet of statistics comparing third world countries with the United States and the rest of the world.   Students [...]

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Recently on Twitter, @neilstephenson tweeted the following question:
How do you know if your use of technology impacts student learning?
I didn’t respond.  I couldn’t respond.  I wanted to respond, and I knew I needed to be able to respond, so I started planning how I could respond.
I teach two groups of students: Read the Net, an English [...]

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Over the past month or two, I have enjoyed using Twitter.  I can boast that I am a Before Oprah tweeter.  Tweets occasionally suggest entertaining or helpful websites to enhance the overall twitter experience. I decided to feature a few below.

Twitter Search – You can use this website to search for hot topics on Twitter. [...]

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Short video clips from You Tube are great for spicing up classroom lessons.

The Ten Things I Hate About You – This 1999 movie is a twist on Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew.  It could be used for teaching Shakespearean allusions, but the clip mainly focuses on a sonnet written by Kat, the movie’s “shrew.”  The [...]

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I am trying to introduce nonfiction text with each novel that we are reading in 9th grade English this year.  It is not always easy because I have to substitute the time we would use for close reading of novel passages to cover the nonfiction texts that complement the novel.  I always feel short of [...]

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I teach two regular 9th grade English classes.  I have some smart students who could be in Pre-AP classes if they pushed themselves, but that is the problem, lack of motivation.
We recently had a three day weekend for Easter.  I assigned two chapters in To Kill a Mockingbird (TKAM) over the long weekend.  My students [...]

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I recently used blogs I found on Twitter to create an assignment in my Read the Net class.  Read the Net is an English elective class designed to get students to read and write using Web 2.0 tools.  I usually use a variety of web tools: wikis, blogs, and nings, but recently I decided to [...]

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Recently, I learned about Vodpod while Twittering.  I follow @michelledodd and she follows @MrKp.  Michelle RT (re-tweet-ed) Steve Kirpatrick’s tweet.

I clicked on the link URL in Michelle’s re-tweet.
I checked out Vodpod and decided to create an account.  It only took a few minutes to upload two You Tube videos to see how it works.  Vodpod [...]

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