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.

Final thoughts on the class

I'm pleased that we can return because now we get to try things for the next month, then come back with our questions in January.

Next semester, I want to learn how to do slide shows. I want to keep working on navigation which is fundamental but tricky!! I want to wrap my mind around organizing a class of 35 teenagers and making it seem easy--group powerpoints using Google Docs??

I plan to do the yearbook senior survey using a form, and counting the 337 votes on a monster spreadsheet. It has to beat the old method.

Here's a Fun Survey!

Try this one.

spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?formkey=dFhJWFcySGJ1bGkwaFFrdHJhS3U1MEE6MA

Two Types of Wonder Wheels

In our ITEC class last time, I finally saw the Wonder Wheel that everyone said they liked. Before class, I had dutifully looked up Wonder Wheel and found on on Coney Island, pictured on the right. The Wonder Wheel of Google display is also pictured to the right. It can be a useful tool for students researching their persuasive essay topics. The limitation, of course, is it's the visible Google web database which leaves out a lot. After speaking with Dena at Aragon, I asked our new librarian whether we at San Mateo had access to academic data bases as do our Aragon colleagues. She is in the process of locating passwords, so soon, San Mateo HS students will have Wonder Wheel plus the vetted sources.

Maps at the Library of Congress

I enjoyed the interactive map reading exercise that showed a map, more like a detailed drawing, of Washington, D.C. I have pretty good background knowledge about women's fashions and when things were built, so I found it fun to guess when it might have been made. As the ladies did not have bustles, I assumed it was before 1880. If you gave students some fun facts for background info, such as the year the Washington Monument was built, and a fashion profile by decade of the 1880s, they might have more buy-in.

Now, at home, I have a map from 1664, a page from a Dutch atlas by a mapmaker named Hondius. I am going back online to see if I can find more maps by that particular mapmaker.

Update: I did find some maps by Hondius, but most of them were listed but not visible. I tried three times to upload one to this blog, each time getting a corruption message. It uploads in this weird jp2 format that does not work. I finally made a screen shot, a TIFF that I converted to a jpg.