Did you Grade my Essay Yet? and Other Ponderable Thoughts

 Pro Blog Post #7 World Without Fish : PSA Hello! Here is my first attempt at creating a PSA in the digital form…and I’m just okay with it. I really wanted to attempt to do something with videos, but that is really hard!  I found lots of videos that I wanted clips from on Youtube, but using the various youtube downloaders…the ads and pops up are horrendous. I mean, everytime you click, another window opens.  I have an adblocker, but then with it enabled I couldn’t use the software. So, clearly, if one is going to make videos, the best way is to make your own. I give a lot of credit to the time and patience of a person who can go find videos, download them, edit them, splice etc. After watching Pauline’s example last week, I thought I would try Vimeo.  It was really user friendly but still I found myself putzing and playing around with every function. For this, I only used images.  I ran into problems this time with a lot of photos these days on websites and thro...

  Pro Blog Post #6 : FLIP Book Review Eco-narratives aren't new, but certainly a growing trend, and dare I say need in the world of publishing today. It is a genre that I am both interested and active in. While an English teacher by trade, it was a close call to be a science teacher, so I feel this genre marries my two loves :)   While I read three different selections-- Flush, by Carl Hiaasen , A Voice for the Everglades: Marjory Stoneman Douglas, by Vicki Conrad, and World Without Fish, by Mark Kurlansky --I chose the latter to create a book talk on Flip...GRID. There I said it!  Who names something with just one word?? It was much better as Flip Grid, ha! So go ahead and if you want to hear me talk about Kurlansky's book (I cringe to hear my own voice) go for it and enjoy! Oh, and read the book!

 Pro Blog Post #5 As I am an English teacher, stepping back into the role of JUST the writing coach is a welcome one! I love the process and coaxing out ideas from students. In my own classroom, significant time is given to writing in the classroom, with me floating from student to student.  Those days I often call them my baby birds, because they are all squawking for my attention the minute I get up from one student conference, haha. On these days, time flies by! There is a fun, productive energy in the room. The dreaded day is when I have to assign a grade to papers I have already seen multiple times in the process, feeling torn about what grade it SHOULD receive even though I know how much IMPROVEMENT has already been made. The guilt is real!  The students often find it hard to accept as they remember (and rightly so!) my praise of their progress, ideas, and outcomes. And while I keep my commentary and rubrics clearly aligned to their progress through skills, the grad...

 Pro Blog Post #4 I am a visual person by nature. I loved it as a kid in elementary school, when every project required me to have a fancy cover or I got to illustrate my pages. Then somewhere in middle school, the images weren't required anymore and all of a sudden writing required simply words on a page…so I modified, adapted and learned to love to write as well.  But something got lost. Maybe some energy but more noticeably–me. My personality got lost a bit because art and aesthetics are still a big part of who I am.  A project from 9th grade Oh, wasn't I clever?? Fast forward to my teaching career, I strive to provide students the ability to produce a wide variety of texts, even when the standards I’m assessing are meant for writing alone. Visual literacy is more important than ever. In their review of literature advocating for the use of multimodal literacies, Chisholm & Trent (2012) point out that “schools have an obligation to prepare students to develop compe...

 Pro Blog Post #3 Let’s get one thing straight–I am not one of those English teachers who fell into their job because they always wanted to write the next great American novel but needed a day job to pay the bills. So when I hear my students say, “I’m not a writer,” I readily reply, “Well I’m not a published author either, but I’m a writer everyday.” Queue the sound of my own laughter :) I went into this field knowing that I wanted to coach people to believe in their own abilities and that growth is far more satisfying than any end goal or product. In her guide for teachers, Vicki Spandel (2005) embodies these beliefs in the chapter entitled, “The Right to Write Badly.”   It seems so obvious, but when she mentions how no one looks at a little kid who hasn’t yet learned to swim as a “non-swimmer,” it makes me question how we get to the point in our lives where everything seems so finite and fixed. Even my high school students of just 15 (yes! ONLY 15 I sigh, not wanting to thin...

Literacy Selfie Mash-up  Pro Blog Post #2 I was never the athletic type. Don’t get me wrong, I was no slouch…but I wasn’t the type to join in organized teams or games.  I preferred the imaginary worlds I created, often based on the current books I was reading.  And I read voraciously. I could bike to my local library and the school librarian was a confidant, suggesting and marking books for me. I read everywhere, often taking my reading to parks and nature so that I could recreate scenes and imaginary scenarios. Adventure books and stories of strong, independent girls fueled my aspirations and self-esteem. Perhaps naturally, I found myself attracted to writing stories and writing about things that I had learned in books. For as avidly as I read fiction, I enjoyed non-fiction as well, feeding my brain full of information about places, people, animals, and subjects I hoped I would one day have the opportunity to see and learn about beyond the setting of Fond du Lac, Wiscons...