Weebly it is!
After consultations with our director of technology and several English teachers over the last few weeks, we have decided to go with Weebly for our digital portfolio pilot program. I'm teaming up with our advanced composition teacher to standardize the adoption of digital portfolios across five English classes during this fall semester. She and I are planning to meet next Tuesday to design a template, collaborate on multimodal projects to include in the portfolio, and sequence instruction for pilot teachers and students. I hope to deliver my first training session on Weebly and how to integrate this platform into the composition curriculum sometime late next week, and I might use this session for Task 6. We're all very excited to see where this pilot goes, and if it's successful, we might even propose the inclusion of digital portfolios in additional classes outside the English department next year. We chose Weebly for a number of reasons, including ease of management and portability (students can take accounts and portfolios with them after graduation), transferability of skills, and platform versatility. We plan to evaluate the pilot at the end of the semester (since our composition classes are only a semester long) and then again at the end of the school year. At that point we'll decide whether to stick with Weebly long term or to try another platform. Stay tuned for updates! In other news, the media center has had a busy week. I taught research orientation to three 10th grade classes for their upcoming research paper projects. Our 10th graders write lengthy argumentative essays on hot button social issues topics, so I try to get them comfortable with a variety of databases we purchase specifically for such topics (Gale Opposing Viewpoints in Context and Facts on File Issues & Controversies) as well as our general research databases (EBSCOhost Explora, Questia School, and Gale Research in Context). We also got word that we might be making a few improvements to the media center over the Christmas break, so we're taking a hard look at our collection and finalizing an intensive weeding plan--we need to streamline our shelving to make room for more furniture. Nothing is certain quite yet, but we're hopeful and want to be prepared.
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I decided to use RebelMouse to set up my professional learning network. I love how easy this tool is to use and and how it allows a user to incorporate dynamic content (like social media accounts and RSS feeds). It's also great for organizing different types of resources into separate categories.
I consider Twitter to be the most useful part of my professional learning network. I made a conscious decision when I set up my account a few years ago to use Twitter primarily for professional purposes; I rarely (if ever) use it for personal reasons. I love how this intentional focus allows me to get only the "good stuff" in my Twitter feed. I follow people and organizations that are tied to libraries, educational technology, and broader education topics. If I'm ever looking for new material or just want to get inspired, the first thing I do is check Twitter. With hashtags and other search options, it's pretty easy to find great articles, resources, and professional connections.
Over the past few weeks, I've been collaborating with an 8th grade English teacher to teach her students about website credibility, ethical use, and bibliographies in preparation for a nine-week study on Georgia authors. Yesterday we finished our last lesson with her students. We started the lesson by discussing why teachers ask students to cite, why students feel tempted to plagiarize, types of plagiarism, and how to manually cite a webpage. We ended the hour by starting work on a bibliography, which I will grade. It was a very full day! The students learned a lot and (hopefully!) left feeling more confident about their upcoming author study. I plan to use this lesson and its materials to document Tasks 2 and 3, so I'll save the details for a more in-depth explanation on my Five Roles pages.
I want to take a few minutes to talk about OneNote class notebooks, which I used to deliver digital materials to students and to guide them through instruction. Although teachers' use of OneNote is not required at my school, I would say that the vast majority of faculty for grades 7 and up do use this method... because it's so fabulous. If I were still a classroom teacher, I would absolutely be using OneNote class notebooks every day, in all of my classes. It's a Microsoft program that allows teachers to set up a notebook for each class that delivers materials digitally to students (like notes pages, handouts, and worksheets). These digital notebooks also have a separate space for student work, so teachers can grade assignments right there within the notebook. Class notebooks simultaneously eliminate the paper chaos and allow teachers to give immediate feedback. Students can even time stamp their work. We've put quite a bit of time and effort into getting both teachers and students ready to use OneNote and class notebooks, but every minute has been worth it. This tool has revolutionized learning at my school. |
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