To Blog or Not to Blog

Reading other teachers’ blogs is a great way to see what educators from around the country (or even world) are doing in their classrooms.  One of the greatest gifts we have is the ability to share ideas.  Peruse the following blogs and subscribe to a few.  Who knows? You might decide to even create your own!

Secondary Solutions is a blog with content specializing in Common Core English Language Arts and National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE)/International Reading Association (IRA) National Standards in English Language Arts standards-based supplemental materials for the 5th through 12th grade English Language Arts classroom.

Head Outta the Book is an edublog by teacher, Deborah Harris, who shares high school literature teaching tips, lessons, and observations.

The Scholastic Scribe is written by a D.C. area educator who teaches AP English Language and Composition as well as journalism and yearbook.  She holds degrees in both journalism and urban studies, so she brings a unique perspective into the classroom.

Other helpful blogs of note are Dr. Pezz, Huff English, Your English Class (focuses on grammar and usage), Secondary Worlds, Enhanced English Teacher (focuses on technology in the English classroom), and Cool Cat Teacher.

English Department Presentation

When our students graduate, we want them to have solid research and writing skills.  With that in mind, there are goals we have for our graduates.  Graduates should be able to (1) locate valid sources, (2) maintain and generate an accurate bibliography, (3) select relevant information, (4) understand note-taking and plagiarism, (5) logically organize their information, (6) write effectively using cited materials, and (7) publish a stylistically correct document.

If students are able to select their own topic, encourage them to use basic search engines such as Google, Ask.Com, Wikipedia, Bing, etc.  These are great ways to research broad topics.  Just remind the kids that results are based on a variety of algorithms and won't necessarily give results based on validity.

If you are assigning your students a specific topic, skip the basic searches and move onto more scholarly searches such as SweetSearch, Google Scholar, iSeek, and ERIC.  I am also checking into whether or not SJA subscribes to Ebsco and/or Galenet.

It is important for student to maintain a running bibliography.  As we discussed, this is most easily accomplished using the Citations function in Microsoft Word.  A terrific web-based bibliography source is BibMe.

There are many other wonderful Web 2.0 tools for the English classroom.  Among them are Pinterest, Google Docs, Awesome Highlighter, and Bubbl.Us.  I am also hoping to purchase a subscription for Inspiration.  For those of you interested in safe and private blogging for the classroom, check out ClassPress. Another site we discussed was Glogster, an interactive poster where students can combine text, images, music, and video.

We also briefly discussed the difficulties experienced using LiveBinders and the possibility of using Evernote.  Please look at the Evernote program and let me know if you are interested.  I'd love to do an in-service on using Evernote, and I think it's something we could use school-wide.

Department members were also interested in sources to determine appropriate literature according to the standards of the Catholic church.  After doing a little research, I found the following sources and will keep looking for more:

http://www.frcoulter.com/books/booklist.html

http://www.catholicfiction.net/catholic-fiction-reading-list/