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.
Tuesday, September 22, 2009
Monday, September 21, 2009
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.
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
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!
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
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!
Sunday, September 20, 2009
Word Up to wordle.net
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.
http://www.wordle.net/
Wordle- Period G by Meredith
http://www.wordle.net/
Wordle - Storytelling devices by Sylvie
Saturday, September 19, 2009
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.
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.
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."
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.
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