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Monthly Archives: November 2006

Acrostics

Thursday, November 30, 2006

A simple way to introduce HTML, and Concisely play with language Related to a topic, Or even just a word, that Students Take an Interest in – a form of Creative Silliness. Acrostics are apparently an ancient form. They’re also a new way to deliver a punch line, or an epithet.

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On Anonymous Student Blogging

Wednesday, November 29, 2006

Jeff Utecht needs a little help understanding the difference between using a pseudonym on a blog and being deceptive. He asks What is the difference between us telling a student to use a fake name on their blog or on the web and a 13 year old pretending to be 18 on myspace? We teach [...]

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Google Reader

Tuesday, November 28, 2006

For the last couple of weeks, I’ve been messing with Google Reader as an alternative to my Bloglines feed aggregator. Though it was simple to export and upload the Bloglines feeds, it was a day or so before I located the [mark all as read] button, in plain sight, and I could stop deleting the [...]

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Dismantle NCLB

Thursday, November 23, 2006

From Susan Ohanian: The Educator Roundtable: Ending NCLB is a grassroots movement of educators, parents, and concerned citizens who have signed a petition, rejecting the misnamed No Child Left Behind Act and calling for legislators to vote against its reauthorization. We do so not because we resist accountability, but because the law’s simplistic approach to [...]

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For the Gift of Work

Tuesday, November 21, 2006

Why Log Truck Drivers Rise Earlier than Students of Zen In the high seat, before-dawn dark, Polished hubs gleam And the shiny diesel stack Warms and flutters Up the Tyler Road grade To the logging on Poorman creek. Thirty miles of dust. There is no other life. –Gary Snyder

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Time on Task

Monday, November 20, 2006

Accounting for knowledge gained is a stumbling block we face in education, as well as in real life, which we all recognize as being separate from one another. Learning is so incremental that it usually doesn’t show up on the books, as it were, until there’s been a sizable accumulation, or until some contingency demands [...]

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Models of Writing Development

Friday, November 17, 2006

Yes, students should learn to write for a variety of purposes and audiences, as it says in our writing standards, but the options for various audiences at school have always been limited by the social environment. Ah, but we have the internet now, and I’m thinking about how my students’ development as writers can be [...]

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Writing about Thinking about Writing

Sunday, November 12, 2006

We may hear that students are motivated to write, or that their writing is more “authentic,” when they have a real purpose. We may observe that when students publish their work online, they enjoy getting comments from their classmates, teachers, family members, and even strangers who read their work, and they become more interested in [...]

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del.icio.us at work

Sunday, November 5, 2006

A few weeks ago my principal asked me to talk about my students’ web page to the staff at one of our regular meetings. He sees that my students are interested in writing now because they are big time WWW authors. I told the teachers that the web is a two-way medium, which was a [...]

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