When I try to explain to people, even the most highly educated and interested people, what I am doing in my classroom, I get two distinct reactions.
1. This is way too technical for me. It is fine if you want to try it out (and fall flat on your face when parent/administration/other teachers find out [...]
For over a month, my students have engaged in working on a few different wiki projects (Utopias, -Isms, and Book Discussions), but the excitement climaxed when they started collaborating with a group of 8th graders from Wallingford, CT. The students started to create their own spaces to talk about the issues that were close to [...]
There is a new type of reputation out there. It lingers and builds long after you you have stopped caring about it. Managing it is hard. Too many elements to focus on, and too little time to maintain them all. So, you do what you can.You look for just the right resources to update at [...]
I was at a wedding this past weekend and I had a sort of epiphany. I’m not really sure why it was at a wedding rather than anywhere else, but I immediately took the white paper napkin clinging to the bottom of a cold water glass near me and I scrawled out the greatest fallacy [...]
I was looking at our del.icio.us bookmarks this morning, and I was flabbergasted at the diversity of topics that are being talked about in our blogosphere. The tags go from “Best Friends” to “Books” to “Abuse” to “Making a Movie” to “Middle School Romance” and everywhere in between. As I was looking at these community-centered [...]
Today, in class, I asked my students to think of the best and worst prompts that they could be asked to write about (most authentic and least authentic). I was impressed by the sophistication of their responses, but I was particularly intrigued by one response in the category of least authentic prompt. It came from [...]
I was not tagged to contribute to the book meme, but that is okay because I mostly thought that memes were a little bit hokey. That is until I started looking into memology. I am really enamored with the concept of viral ideas, that we contribute to one anothers conciousness in such a contagious way. [...]
I’m trying to create an atmosphere of change in my Language Arts department. Now, I knew that there would be resistance from a few teachers, but I thought that the passion and purpose of what we (my co-chair and I) are doing would convince these teachers that we are not trying to hijack the department [...]
