E.T Phone Home...in class?

I just got done reading Wired's How the iPhone Could Reboot Education by Brian X. Chen. Apparently, at a private school in Texas they are handing out free iPhones or iPod Touches to incoming students. The school, I'm guessing, put in a lot of money for developers to create apps and programming just for its students to use this technology.

There is an app they created that allows students to anonymously answer quiz questions. Basically, they are using iPhone/iTouch technology in the same way many schools use PRS systems. This allows those quiet students who don't like speaking up in class to still be involved and allows the teacher to gauge when students are struggling via informal assessment.

Obviously, this article wants to spin the story positively to make it sound like all this fabulous technology in the classroom is amazing. But, I start to wonder if something like this would be as big a hit in high schools. By college, as in the case of the article, students are more focused because they want to be in school - they chose to go to college. College students (usually) take their studying a bit more serious than a high school freshmen that prefers to see school as a social activity, not a learning environment. During my observation hours in various schools and while coaching, I see students' cell phones as an extension of their hands. Texting and the occasional, very rare, phone call are done between multiple other tasks. This brings up my point: are teachers, who didn't grow up with a keyboard in their hands out of the womb, able to incorporate technology like the iPhone into their classrooms successfully? And, will students be able to incorporate the technology into their learning without abusing the power? Maybe they can get a clue from Spiderman, "With great power comes great responsibility."

Additionally, a professor asked students in the past, "Why aren't you taking notes?" The students told him that they could find that information on Wikipedia or another website and taking notes was tedious and unneeded. I agree with this. Being a student myself, I am rarely taking notes because I can just reference the text chapter, the PowerPoint on Blackboard, or Google a whole mess of information. At this point, the students in school now are used to this type of learning because they've grown up with it. To an aging professor, it seems taboo not to be taking notes. I say the behind-the-technological-times teachers meet the technologically advanced students halfway.

Bill, you will be remembered again.

Teachers need a little bit of assistance with imaginative, creative lessons. Slate Magazine just helped a sister out! Have students write a fictional story based on an insignificant object to make it a Significant Object. It's simply genius.

I can see the possibilities now:
- a field trip to the thift store with $2 per student. Buy an object.
- have students trade objects in the classroom to avoid students being able to pre-write a story.
- have students bring in their own significant objects that others (like parents or friends) see as insignificant. Students write why the insignificant object is actually significant. (I did this with a dead squirrel's tail, and now my mom took the framed poem and tail and hung it up on her living room wall. No joke.)

Handwriting is back!

I'm not really sure if 2nd graders still have a penmanship section like I did with Ms. Heid, but I feel it needs to come back. There's just something about a handwritten note, card, or letter that Times New Roman can't convey. When I discovered paperfinger I found that handwriting and calligraphy are still around. This lady, Bryn Chernoff, creates customized gifts, address labels, and letters for weddings, engagements, announcements, and other gifts. Her products are gorgeous, and I especially enjoy the "Peace of Mind" gift idea.


Now, to get writing.

What Men Read...apparently.

I found 75 books that Esquire thinks all men should read. The title and subtitle are hilarious:

The 75 Books Every Man Should Read

An unranked, incomplete, utterly biased list of the greatest works of literature ever published. How many have you read?

I approve. Being the huge reader that I am, I haven't read a one book on this list. I think I fail at life! I best get started reading.

When Awkward Exclamations Come In Handy!

I hate Christmas time, and the required feeling that you must buy gifts for anyone and everyone. Furthermore, I think it gets a little absurd when a person (in this case students or parents of students) feels so moved to get any random thing for another person (teacher) because they feel obligated. Now, I'm not going so far as to say I would be ungrateful for a student's gift to me as his or her teacher, but I do feel awkward lines get crossed. Read Redbook Magazine's slightly humorous list of Worst Teacher Gifts submitted by teachers themselves. My personal favorite: the Victoria Secret Gift Card!

It's like if a ? and a ! made a baby.

I love punctuation. I despise the incorrect use of exclamation points or the use of too many of them. Whoever said using an exclamation point is like laughing at yourself is completely right. I stumbled upon an article/blog posting discussing the interrobang -- the combination of an exclamation point and question mark. You know, for those occasions need both, like: "You did what [insert interrobang here]"


As I type this, Firefox is claiming "interrobang" is spelled incorrectly. Catch up with the times, Firefox. Get rid of your little red squiggly line. It upsets me!

Now, I just need to figure out which commands I need to use on my Mac to get it to work.

The Culture of the Interrobang by Anne Trubek is clever and witty. And so, so true of today's times. Check it out!

I'm too dumb, I'll use others' genius.

"What would you do if you knew you could not fail?" ~ Robert H. Schuller

"Don't frown because it's over; smile because it happened." ~ Dr. Seuss

"Art means to dare--and to have been right." ~ Ned Rorem

"Forget past mistakes. Forget failures. Forget everything except what you're going to do no and do it." ~ William C. Durant

"Formulate and stamp indelibly on your mind a mental picture ofyourself as succeeding. Hold this picture tenaciously. Your mind will seek to develop the picture... Do not build up obstacles in your imagination." ~ Norman Vincent Peale

"If you don't invest very much, then defeat doesn't hurt very much and winning is not very exciting." ~ Dick Vermeil

"Kites fly highest against the wind, not with it." ~William Churchill

"The person who upsets you the most is your best teacher, because they bring you face to face with who you are." ~ Lynn Andrews

"I'm not young enough to know everything." ~ Oscar Wilde

Life Failure

I saw this quiz on MSN. I failed it. The quiz is a good reminder of how far education has come since back in the day!

Setting. Plot. Character. Resolution. Done.

I recently discovered a new card game during Educ 451 called "Nanofictionary." Basically, you collect a minimum of four cards (Setting, Plot, Character, Resolution) and make up a quick story. The game is awesome for literature classes (it teaches the reversed check mark), speech classes (it requires impromptu speaking skills, a voice, and storytelling skills), collaborative lesson planning (it can be tweaked to make into a group game rather than an individual vs. other individuals), and it helps critical thinking skills (some members of the game are judges).


The game would also be perfect for a creative writing unit. To get students started, give them each a character, plot, setting, and resolution card. Then, tell them to write a story based on that. You could require only a certain amount of words or put other restrictions on them.

Right now, the game is unavailable on most websites like Amazon because they're coming out with a new addition.

*friend* (Did I just cross a line?)

I found another great article on theapple today. Check it out!

As a student, I find social networking to be amazing. I have friended (I like how a noun has become a verb. Thanks, Mark Zuckerberg!) college professors and old high school teachers. I have also seen some of the pages of other high school and elementary teachers, and I'm surprised they would post some of the stuff that is on there. My philosophy, right now, is to maintain my Facebook page and this blog. I wouldn't friend current students of mine; however, after graduation I probably wouldn't have the same issue with it. An issue would come up if a graduated student friended me and his younger sibling or parents saw my page. Therefore, I believe it is probably in the best interest of everyone to maintain a more professional relationship until a student (and siblings) are long gone out of high school or just not do it at all.

"Blogging is easy. Writing is hard."

I was searching for ideas on writing prompts and came across this somewhat sketchy blog on Shine (the place I get my horoscopes). The blog isn't the best quality, nor does it look very reputable. After reading it completely, I realized the writer has no sense of grammatical or mechanical structure...or simple proofreading abilities. However, the original site I found the 50 Ideas on had the link to where she found the 50 Writing Ideas originally. In any case here are the sites: Sketchy Shine Blog and Original, Not Sketchy Blog.

The second site isn't as questionable as the first site and it explains the point of the 50 Writing Ideas. The site I found the ideas on has a couple of examples in the comments section, which makes it a little better. Look for yourselves. In either case, both sites have the same information.

Coffee and Communication

"Good communication is as stimulating as black coffee...
and just as hard to sleep after." ~Anne Morrow Lindbergh

I was reading my homework assignment for my Creative Writing class, and I came across this quotation. In my personal life I am anxiously awaiting a response from a recent interview so communication has been at the front of my mind. I think this quotation is a perfect reminder of how much fun communication can be. If I get the job, I'm definitely sharing this with my students!

Animoto.com is an A+

My Education 451 professor introduced us to new, free, Internet sites to add engaging and dynamic things into our lessons. Animoto.com is the bomb.com! At first, I was a little hesitant about it because it didn't look that user friendly. Actually, it was quite the opposite! The 30 second clips are super quick to make, and are a snap to throw on Facebook, MySpace, Blogger, and other sites.

I can see using this site for all types of projects: Facebook profiles, student introductions, theatre proposals, attention grabbers, transitions within the lessons, and intro-outros for class. I'll definitely be posting future made Animotos.

Giving the cannon to the canon.

I'm not a reader. Most people know this. Read my first blog for proof. When I stumbled upon MSN Encarta's article Death to the Classics! it got me thinking. If I ever am teaching an English literature class, I wonder what books are going to be in my canon. I've never understood why Shakespeare was taught in high schools. I remember back in my day when I would sit in the rock hard desks of my two English classes learning about Romeo and Juliet or Julius Caesar. The lectures would drag on and on, sweat would drip down my forehead from the sun beating through the gigantic windows, and I wasted more paper scribbling and doodling then on note taking. Let's face it, I have a degree in theatre and I still don't understand why I need to know Shakespeare.

I also fondly remember the days of Mr. Moen and Mrs. Davidson's silent reading days. Usually, these days only taught me the best reasons (see "excuses") for having to go to the library to check out a new book that would be thrown in the back of my locker and forgotten until its due date. Silent reading tested my patience and my ability to stare at the clock's face. Silent reading days, to me, were a complete waste of class time. It wasn't that I would rather be using my learning time to learn, but at least lectures provided me with more entertainment than Mirror Lake's whitecaps.

However, it's inevitable that I'll eventually have to teach reading classes. While I'm still learning how to conduct such classes, I am continually thinking about what I might want to teach. I remember Mrs. Smith varying the books we read in class to include stories geared more towards girls and action adventure books geared more towards boys. In fifth grade, Mrs. Harper picked out a select few students who were more mature readers to read Lois Lowery's The Giver. This book still remains one of my favorites.

It was said in one of my education classes that we often reteach what we ourselves were taught in school. However, I believe in relevancy and being able to explain to students why something is being used in the classroom. Therefore, the classic canon, unless required by my school will probably be avoided. There is so much more richer, diverse, and interesting material available then Shakespeare, Harper Lee, Steinbeck. Maybe it's my own personal tastes in more modern, American texts, or maybe it's because I was never given the opportunity to learn about books that old, dead guys wrote in an engaging environment. In either case, my personal canon is still being developed, and I'm always on the search for the next great book.

My Inner Doug Wilson (of Trading Spaces fame)

I'm a fan of looking at things that inspire me, just take one look at my apartment. A camera has been an extension of my arm since I received my very first 35mm camera many Christmases ago. My photography skills have no doubt improved over the years. Now, I wield a Nikon N75 35mm SLR camera and a digital Nikon Coolpix S560.

I've always been a spatially orientated person, and my mom can attest to the multiple times she has heard bed frames scrape across the cement basement floor as I rearranged my bedroom for the upteenth time. When I was younger, the television would be stuck on TLC or Discovery's home improvement shows. Eventually, as cable added more channels to its repertoire, I watched HGTV and Food Network religiously. I would often flip between the two stations during commercials to see how Alton Brown made his next creation or how Genevieve Gorder was going to fix another home improvement disaster.

It's to no surprise then that I've been interested in the aesthetics of classroom design and the effects that certain designs can have upon the multiple students stepping through its doors. I've also been so interested in this subject that I based a major research paper on it in my Educational Psychology class. I'll for sure be using some of the sources I found during that project onto this blog. I was perusing theapple.monster.com's website and came across

20 Cheap Ways to Decorate Your Classroom.

The ninth idea was by far my favorite. It could be because I'm a sucker for Post Secret books, but it's also a good way to incorporate writing into the design.

9. A PostSecret-style project – My students came up with something like this on their own last year. It started as a couple of post-it notes anonymously detailing their feelings on the wall behind my desk. By the end of the year, it was a tremendous piece of art!

Word Up to wordle.net

http://www.wordle.net/
Wordle- English notebook cover by Ace Academic!

As I was sitting in my Education 451 class here at NDSU last week, my professor listed off a few websites that might be useful to us as future teachers. She described this website, wordle.net, that can take a list of user-generated words to create colorful word designs like the one above. The way she describe it made it sound pretty lame central. However, today as I was messing around on all things of Google greatness, I saw a picture of an actual wordle. I'm a visual learner, and I found this to be an amazing idea.

My mind started racing on ideas where wordle would work in the classroom. A list of vocab words, the parts of a play or book's setting, descriptions of characters, parts of speech, and the list goes on and on. The most interesting one that came to mind was to use this as a way for my students to introduce themselves to me. Students could bring up the site and start typing in adjectives, activities, or things that describe themselves. Once they've generated their own list of words, they can keep clicking to generate different formats of those words until they find one they like. This would be a great way to get kids, especially freshman, thinking about descriptive language for a possible creative writing unit.

Personally, I'm going to start using wordle to create character descriptions for plays I'll be directing. My actors can also use wordle to show me who they think their characters are. I'm also thinking of using the website for binder covers, notebook covers, and other things.

The powers of wordle are endless.
Check it out and tell me how you might use the site.

http://www.wordle.net/
Wordle- Period G by Meredith


http://www.wordle.net/
Wordle - Storytelling devices by Sylvie

Curious Incidents

To introduce myself, I figured I would stray away from the stereotypical introductions. The type filled with, "Hello. My name is Kelsey Johnson. I'm from a small town in North Dakota, lost somewhere between one tiny, unknown community and another. I'm an Aquarius who likes long walks on the beach." While all of what I just said is coincidentally true, I want you to know how I got here.

The short answer is that my Advanced Creative Writing professor assigned the class a "professional development" project.

But, that still doesn't answer the question about how I got here, on this blog, discussing pedagogy, quotations, anecdotes, witticisms, best (or worse) teacher practices, or literature. (That last one's the kicker.)

In the summer of 2007, shortly after I just finished my 120th credit at Washington State University, I went back home somewhere in the depths of southwestern North Dakota to live with the parents (how cliche) before heading off to the Real World (not the MTV show) to get my butt kicked and then subsequently smeared onto the lonely sidewalks of Minneapolis, MN. With no one my age lurking around town anymore and my mom, step-dad, and little brother controlling the brain-rotting television, I picked up a book.

Up to this moment, I despised books with almost every fiber of my being. It wasn't because I struggled with reading, I was actually a relatively good reader, I comprehended [most] of what I read when I actually did read my textbooks, I enjoyed the creative writing sections in English classes, and I was antsy for the start of One-Act play and speech competitions. I simply hated being told to read something and when to read it. I hadn't had the opportunity to pick up a book for pleasure. Weirdly enough, however, I liked roaming around Barnes and Noble's shelves inhaling that "new book" odor, riffling through the theatre section, and looking at quotations books.

My mom, an avid reader, had a plethora of mismatched bookshelves lining the basement walls filled with hardcover books she had acquired over the years. My older sister read, cataloged, and shelved her copies of The Babysitter's Club books. My younger half-brother was also gaining quite the little library of Animorphs and other sci-fi books, too. It was apparent that I hadn't picked up the "reading gene" from my mother like my siblings had. This didn't bother me though. Reading was for the weak, the geeks, and the people who had no real-life friends and depended on the characters in books to fill that void.

Imagine my mother's surprise when, years later just after her middle child had just graduated college, I was caught red-handed. It was obviously a shock to her system because as she looked into my eyes after I lowered the lime-green covered book she said, "Kelsey?! Are you really reading a book?"

I fumbled over the words as I tried to mentally find an excuse: "There's nothing good on TV," "Carter sucks at life and I don't wanna hang out with him," "At least it's not a Playboy?" None of these were going to work, so I just muttered the truth, "Because there's nothing else to do and this book is too good to put down."

She looked at me quizzically and just said, "I never thought I would see the day where you are reading when you don't have to."

It was true. Stephen Chbosky's The Perks of Being A Wallflower introduced me to not-sucking literature. At that point, I wasn't quite sure how Perks would play into my life, but it didn't take long to figure it out.

While I was a theatre student at Wazzu, I shortly contemplated double majoring in English education so I could teach theatre and speech. This ambition was short lived because beer pong, theatre rehearsals, and Nintendo's "Where in the World is Carmen San Diego?" ruled my life. I realized that I wasn't going to read literature forced upon me by professors if I could simply drink enormous amounts of Mountain Dew and Orange Soda while traveling the globe in search of Ms. San Diego!

However, after getting my butt handed to me by Real Life, receiving two rejection letters from graduate schools (one I hadn't even applied to!), I realized the thought of living in a cardboard box, scraping up pennies to buy a package of Ramen, and doing everything short of prostitution to pay back my looming student loans, I thought about The Perks of Being A Wallflower and my original intention of getting my English education degree. Within a few days, I re-evaluated my life's ambitions and goals.

Once admitted into North Dakota State University, I filled my semesters up to this point with credits ranging from linguistics, oral interpretation, and American Literature. While I still struggle with reading all of my assignments, I've come to finally appreciate literature. Now, when I walk through Barnes and Noble, I catch myself saying, "I need to read that."

Since reading The Perks of Being A Wallflower, I've not only riffled through more books, I've actually read them. Charlie, the book's protagonist, is given a list of classic books from his AP English teacher, Bill. Dave, my favorite person ever, gave me a majority of these books as a gift. So far, I've read Catcher in the Rye, Hamlet, and have started Walden. I often find myself religiously reading MSN and Yahoo! news articles. Some of these articles end up giving me a new perspective on teaching or creative writing so I'll email them to myself. Because email is a life-sucking black hole of doom, I don't have a system to keep the articles organized. And, this is where this blog comes into play.

That, in a nutshell, is how I've come to here. From a hatred of literature, The Perks of Being A Wallflower made me realize how much I want to become a teacher.

I just needed a fictional character in a book to fill in the void.