New Year, New Blogs

Cary Academy has decided to host our blogs in-house using WordPress MU. I’m excited because this gives us lots of opportunities for cutomization. Each student will have his or her own blog, and I’ll keep a class blog.

WE (Writing Enthusiasts) Magazine

Lots of hours of student and teacher work went into the middle school (6th-8th grade) literary magazine. The results are fantastic! Congratulations to all the authors, artists, and designers. Hope you enjoy browsing the magazine.
We used Microsoft Publisher to create the magazine and Adobe Acrobat Pro to publish it as a pdf. Section covers were created [...]

Red Scarf Girl Characters

This week students created ways to present their knowledge about the characters we have encountered so far in Red Scarf Girl. Here are some great examples of student work.
This group of students recorded quotes for each character using Audacity and embedded them in the PowerPoint. Unfortunately, you will not be able to hear them while [...]

Red Scarf Girl

We have begun reading Red Scarf Girl by Ji-li Jiang in conjunction with the World Cultures unit on China. You can find out more information about the book by visiting Ji-li Jiang’s website.

We Are Poets!

On Friday night, students, parents, and friends gathered at Barnes and Noble in Cary to share poems written during the course of poet Phillip Shabazz’s residency. I am in the process of creating a “book” from poems students wrote during the week. For now, I’ll share an album of photos of students reading their poems and [...]

Art and Poetry in the Garden

Students completed their haiku and Japanese line drawing projects today. The project was inspired by Tosa Mitsuoki’s paintings, Autumn Maple and Flowering Cherry with Poem Slips. Mitsuoki’s paintings feature trees bedecked with traditional Japanese poetry. An excellent resource for teachers about the Flowering Cherry painting is available from The Art Institute of Chicago, where both [...]

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

Odes were originally a form of Greek lyrical poetry composed to honor important people, places and events and were accompanied by music. (More about the history of the ode) Over the years, poets have adapted the form by writing odes to more commonplace items. Pablo Neruda, a Chilean poet, published a number of these types [...]

National Poetry Month

Poetry month begins tomorrow, but we kicked off the festivities a few days early. In class today, students read 16 word poems that they had written inspired by images they found on Flickr. We also watched an illuminated poem from the site, Away To Teach. Click play below to watch the poem and take some time [...]

Chatting About Poetry

Inspired by a post about using chat in the classroom, I decided we would try it for an introductory discussion about poetry. I was interested in countering some of the negative attitudes students had about poetry and getting a sense of their prior knowledge base (types of poems, poets, specific poems etc.) We used tinychat, [...]

Diigo and Homophones

If you’ve ever wanted to highlight or put a sticky note on a webpage, Diigo may be the answer. Diigo is a website and toolbar that allows readers to bookmark and annotate web content. It also allows users to share their bookmarks, highlighting, and annotations with others. Diigo has both a toolbar download and Diigolet, which a user [...]

Dreaming About the Future of Education

Many of the teachers I talk with spend a lot of time thinking about the future of education and technology. Today I thought it would be interesting to have the same kind of discussion with students. During class we watched a video from the 2009 Technology, Entertainment, and Design (TED) conference debuting a wearable “Sixth [...]

Vocabulary Review Using the Class Wiki

Students took a cumulative vocabulary quiz on Thursday while I was presenting at the NCTIES conference. To review for the quiz, students created wiki pages for each of their vocabulary words. Each wiki page included the definition of the word, synonyms, and antonyms. Students also chose a picture which they thought represented the word well. Some [...]

Trimester 2 Comment

Here’s a Wordle of my comment for our class this trimester that will be included in all students’ progress reports.

The Ghost in the Tokaido Inn

We began a new book, The Ghost in the Tokaido Inn by Dorothy and Thomas Hoobler, last week. Students are working on chapter summaries for the book which we will post to the wiki.

 

Socratic Dialogue

I started class several days ago by projecting a picture of a dead Greek philosopher on the screen. That would have been a bit strange except for the fact that we were beginning a mini-unit on Socratic Dialogue. The goal of a Socratic Dialogue is to have a group discussion that centers around asking questions [...]