RSS -something for English teachers and a nice blog from Ohio

Jim Burke is an English teacher, formerly of Burlingame, who likes to write about teaching English. He has a matrix of skills that English students should have mastered by the time they graduate, hands-on lessons on topics such as how he organizes his notebooks, and musings. Does anyone of our group know him personally? Here's his site.

http://jimburke.typepad.com/my_weblog/

The one blog I discovered randomly is called Erin O'Brien's Owner Manuel for Human Beings. She has 786 subscribers, one of them being me. She writes about her husband "the goat" and her child "the kid" and the new Mass. senator and what it's like to go to a transvestite bar in her sad little suburb of Cleveland. Sort of like Erma Bombeck, if you remember her. I don't think I would use it in the classroom, though.

http://erin-obrien.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default

Tech Challenges for Us

Bandwidth. That's the shortage at my school. We are asked to not use YouTube or other streaming because of a shortage of bandwidth. We are warned that our phones and attendance system will crash if we do it too much.

That said, I will tentatively try to use streaming and see if the sky falls down.

Anyone else?

Happy New Semester

Wow, January used to be a "mellow month." It's easier to get the classes going in the new semester, as there are fewer new names to learn, but there are other commitments--yearbook deadlines to meet, grant applications to write, and (ahem) this class.