Here is a link to a resource that Sheila sent along to me. I know the webmaster and others at the Northern Nevada Writing Project, and I encourage you to sign up for this free service!
Sign up for “The Mini Lesson of the Month” e-mail network today! Receive free, quality lessons every month in your e-mail box. No junk e-mail! Just a lesson (or two) once a month.Sign up by e-mailing Corbett Harrison at: charrison@washoe.k12.nv.usSimply write: “Sign me up!” in your e-mail’s subject field. That’s all it takes! Sign up today and start receiving your first lessons on the first of every month!
The Northern Nevada Writing Project: Our Mini Lesson of the Month Network
Today, I was invited to hear a talk by Dr. Steve Graham of Vanderbilt University, co-author of the Writing Next report we are reading this week.
You can read notes from the talk on my blog and hear my audio reflections in this podcast.
ENG 315 Podcast 7 - Reflections on Talk by Dr. Steve Graham
This podcast includes interviews from Bright Ideas 2008 including notable author Chris Crutcher and students from ENG 315: Jen, Michelle, and Sarah.
ENG 315 Podcast 6 - Blog Version (4-13-08)
As we move toward a discussion of assessment next week, I encourage you to read this article with thoughts about how you are being assessed this semester with reading responses, field notes, your multigenre project, and your final portfolio.
What is common across all kinds of assessments? For what purposes might tests be better suited as an assessment tool? When would you choose to use these different kinds of assessments and why?
Command Performance: Creating Accountability That Works | Edutopia
While schools wait for innovation in accountability testing, some are taking matters into their own hands, creating performance assessments that guide and strengthen teaching and learning. Typically, these assessments come in the form of portfolios and presentations — tasks that bear something in common with the kind of work students may ultimately do in college or in a job.
For those of you looking for another genre for your inquiry project, you might think about creating a timeline using xtimeline. Check out the article from Edutopia, then go try to create a timeline!
Timelines 2.0: A Fun, Easy, and Free Classroom Tool | Edutopia
Timelines are one of the most useful and effective tools I’ve found that can fit in nicely with any classroom’s content area and grade level. They are fantastic vehicles for doing research, being creative, and sharing and publishing information. In addition, they are easy to use for simple classroom projects such as tracking birthdays, major significant events, and holidays. Furthermore, they offer a rich opportunity to explore the goings-on behind significant events, allowing students to uncover what led up to wars, significant scientific breakthroughs, changes in culture, or shifts in art styles and music. The possibilities are endless.
A fantastic new timeline tool I’ve been playing with is xtimeline. This free Web-based tool makes it simple to create timelines, and it has built-in capabilities that allow you to conduct research, embed photos and videos, do group editing, and engage in social collaboration. Imagine combining the power of a traditional timeline tool with the history and edit features of a wiki while making it a social, globally published, living online document. It doesn’t get much simpler, or more effective, than this.
As we move to the end of the semester and student teacher gets that much closer, it is worth pausing to consider the wider field of education and what challenges you may face. Kozol has been a passionate voice for all students and teachers over the years, and this article from Edutopia reminds us of how your first few years can be full of challenges, and how to overcome those challenges.
If you haven’t yet read any of Kozol’s work, I think that it would be worth your time to grab one of his books for your summer reading list.
Teaching with Passion: Advice for Young Educators | Edutopia
For more than forty years, Jonathan Kozol has taught in, worked with, and written about America’s inner city public schools. His straight talk in best-selling books such as Savage Inequalities and Amazing Grace has made him a hero of many teachers, and he fiercely opposes government policies he believes perpetuate educational inequities.
In his newest book, Letters to a Young Teacher, Kozol takes aim at the test-driven curriculum proliferating our educational system. Through a series of personal letters to Francesca, a fledgling first-grade teacher in Boston who invited him into her classroom, Kozol delivers sage advice, sharp criticism of the status quo, and stories of his own early teaching experiences. As Publishers Weekly remarked, it is “an impassioned book, not only for what it imparts of classroom doings, but even more so for the obstacles increasingly being laid at teachers’ hands.”
Good news for those of you who want to share your inquiry work beyond our ENG 315 class — CMU’s Institutional Review Board has granted us permission to do the research!
So, this message applies to you if you plan to put any or all of your work online, or if you want to use the data you find to present to others as a part of a job interview or professional conference presentation/journal article. If you only plan to share it within our classroom, then you DO NOT have to use these forms for your interviews. Even if you are not sharing your work beyond ENG 315, you should still discuss your project with your teacher and the people that you are interviewing, as that is ethical practice for teacher researchers.
I have posted the consent forms on our wiki, on the syllabus page (http://eng315.wikispaces.com/Syllabus), under the inquiry project heading in the following paragraph:
If you are interviewing teachers or students, please describe your research process to them. If you plan on sharing your findings beyond ENG 315 (online, in other classes, in future presentations), you must get informed consent. For teachers, please have them fill out the teacher consent form. For students, please have them take a parent consent form home to be completed by their parents. Once that form is complete, review the child assent form with the student and complete it with him/her. If you have questions about this process, please contact Troy right away.
Good luck with your continued research. I am very excited to see your work develop this semester and I am looking forward to seeing your multigenre projects and portfolios in the coming weeks.
Here is another genre for you to consider as an option in your portfolio: cover letters. Like the profile you create in online spaces such as Teach English or Facebook, your cover letter reveals a great deal about your personality and interests. Here are some tips from “Job Search Secrets” about writing an effective cover letter for educators.
Cover Letters Used By Applicants to Apply for a Career in Education
Cover letters can be written in different manners reminding employers to choose for qualified applicants that are applying for a certain position in the company. Writing cover letters can be difficult yet these letter or business letters are required in the employment process. Likewise, there are different cover letter format that can be written especially with the education cover letter used in applying a position in the educational departments.
Cover Letters Used By Applicants to Apply for a Career in Education - Job Search Secrets
Blogged with Flock
Using Technology to Tell Stories
Notes from Presentations about Digital Storytelling at SITE 2008Posted by hickstro on March 5, 2008
This week, I am at SITE 2008, preparing for a presentation on Project WRITE tomorrow. Today, I will try to blog from some of the sessions (as wifi will allow). Here are three sessions on digital storytelling that I attended this morning.
As you consider the ways that you will want to organize your classroom, I hope that you consider blogs, wikis, and social networks as a part of your overall plan. We have seen how they work in ENG 315, and have potential to support you as individual and collaborative writers.
Also, you may want to consider the free and open source program Moodle as an alternative to Blackboard. Here is a recent EdWeek article that outlines the two programs.
If you choose to write a professional response on this, and connect it to our next topic of newer and multiple literacies, you could discuss the ways in which a management system such as Moodle can be used to support the goals of your writing workshop. How could it support key ideas from the workshop such as student choice and peer response?
Education Week: Market for K-12 Course-Management Systems Expands
Through Moodle, Ms. Tipton now posts reading passages and links to Web sites that are related to her lessons. She also has set up a popular online chat room for her students and posts homework assignments online, a feature that students as well as some parents have embraced. Moodle’s online capabilities, she said, are making her social studies classes a hybrid between traditional and online courses.
Ms. Tipton is part of a growing number of K-12 educators in regular classrooms who are using course-management systems to share assignments, homework, classroom assessments, and other information with students and their parents. A course-management system is a software program that allows controlled exchanges via the Internet of just about any kind of information related to a course, although the features of individual products differ.
