living language

Creative Commons affects what pictures I can accept in “Senior Yearbook Collages.”  The guidelines for this year’s Seniors will have to be edited!

As of now, I haven’t set up web projects for my English 7 students, but seeing as their web savvy (or at least comfort in playing around with it) seems to be zooming past mine, hopefully I will be able to put some of these Web 2.0 skills to use!  At the least, I am glad I will be more knowledgeable as to what’s possible, even if I don’t integrate all these new Things into my curriculum right away.

Hmm, thought I had published Thing 2 before…maybe it’s somewhere in the blogosphere….  I was trying to create fancy titles before, so maybe simply calling each Thing a Thing will help me stay organized.  I’m hoping that after this I really will have completed the first 5 Things, and that these entries won’t disappear on me!

Anyway…thoughts about Web 2.0…I feel that this course is helping me to catch up on what my students are doing, since I am usually slow/resistant to enter the Web 2.0 world for social purposes (Facebook, Twitter, etc.).  The first blog entry was difficult to write — or rather, I really resisted it.  After writing the first few entries and even receiving back a few kind, informative and encouraging comments back, I’m seeing it as fun (yay!).  It’s exciting to have incuded a couple of permalinks successfully and to be reading articles that discuss what’s on the cutting edge of technological communications.  I still have this fear that I won’t use the correct terminology for things, but hey — I’m participating, so I guess I am out in the Web 2.0 world now.

Been “skreading” (new word for on-line skim-reading!) articles on my Google Reader for a few days now.

Here’s an interesting piece on Successful Teaching about uses of the Kindle.

Moving away from paper books kind of freaks me out and makes me feel simultaneously sentimental (as in “Call me Aunty Jane Austen”), but it seems that The Kindle could be useful in training students to annotate as well as to look up words (both very basic skills in the English classroom). I’m wondering if the row of dictionaries in my classroom will become an outmoded tool, soon….

There’s so much here that it’s obvious that “learning to read Blogs” requires revisiting the concept of skimming.

One of the blogs that interested me was the Remote Access blog and his bias exercise

I like how the students created two descriptions, each with a “positive” and “negative” bias, to go along with pictures they had taken.  Powerful stuff, when students themselves are creating/articulating the lesson that the teacher wants to teach.

When I think of the technological toolbox that I am about to build, it definitely feels like a big challenge. Will I be able to use these new tools skillfully? How quickly will the toolbox change, and how often will I need to upgrade my tools? Will that toolbox at times be a Pandora’s Box when teaching pre-teens? So, I suppose my first challenge is to take that fateful/faithful leap past the “what if” questions.

I have no problem viewing problems as challenges.    It is tackling the challenge that is the Big Step Forward.

Having just completed my third year teaching seventh grade English, the importance of play is more than apparent every day.  One of my hopes, goals and dreams for next year is for the learning of grammar and literary analysis (at the 7th grade level) in my classroom to be more…fun!  If I can play as well as work through 23 Things this summer, my own learning can serve to remind me how my seventh graders feel when they are faced with the many many things they must accomplish in the school year.  And it will remind me of their desire for fun and games — interactive activities where their learning is on the same par with (and not secondary to) my teaching.