Monthly Archives: June, 2010
Using Rubistar
One of the teaching tools I tried for the first time this year is Rubistar, a website that is part of the 4 Teachers group of websites, developed by The Advanced Learning Technologies project at the University of Kansas Center for Research on Learning (a mouthful, I know). I had mixed success, but I think …
The Meaning of Tinkering
When I first started blogging, lo these many years ago, I used Blogger.com, had the most basic of templates, and composed each blog post on the fly, not giving much thought to revising or crafting. I didn’t know how to post images, had only a basic working knowledge of HTML, and gave little thought to …
Thinking About Twitter
To Twitter, or not to twitter? The most public use of Twitter these days has been microblogging celebrities: Ashton Kutcher and Britney Spears duking it out for the most followers, B- and C-Listers making every banal thought public, all kinds of celebrities saying goodbye to one of their own. But the White House and the …
Backyard (poem)
Back Yard by Carl Sandburg Shine on, O moon of summer. Shine to the leaves of grass, catalpa and oak, All silver under your rain to-night. An Italian boy is sending songs to you to-night from an accordion. A Polish boy is out with his best girl; they marry next month; to-night they are throwing …
Summer Reading, Part Two
I just went a little crazy on Amazon, so here’s what I’m adding to my summer reading list: Wolf Hall, by Hillary Mantel. This won the Man Booker Prize, which is one good indicator, but is also historical fiction about Henry VIII, another winning sign in my eyes. Write Beside Them, Penny Kittle. This is …
A Little of Column A, A Little of Column B…
The Good: I’ll be spending the upcoming week helping to facilitate a week-long professional development workshop I attended last summer. This is a new step for me, and I’m excited to stretch myself this way. The Bad: I have a summer cold. The kind of summer cold that gives you head and face aches, the …
Through a Blog, Darkly
I’ve been blogging for over seven years now, the first four years or so in an anonymous blog before I started and switched to this one. My third blog-birthday in this space is coming in July, after over three hundred posts. Making the decision to blog under my name gave me a much-needed rebirth as …
Summer Reading
No, not for my students, but for me! So far, I’ve got two teaching books and a literary nonfiction book on my list, and I’m always looking for suggestions (hint, hint). Back when I did my series on great teaching, one of the books I added to my wishlist was Teach Like a Champion. I …
Public Apologies
I’ve been fascinated lately with a developing genre of the personal/confessional essay: the public apology. The premier examples in my mind are found under Dave Bry’s byline at The Awl, one of my favorite aggregator-type websites. Bry’s apologies are stunning, really, when read all together: full of pathos, empathy, candour, a wicked wit and clear …
Overload
Remember back in April, when I was all twitchy about having 122 emails in my inbox? 318. And final grades are due tomorrow at noon, even though we have a three-hour faculty meeting from 9 AM until noon. So really, they’re due at 9 AM tomorrow morning. I just backed out of a Brownie camp-out …
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