Jacqui's Story

Jacqui on Oprah

Some Questions

I have a few questions:

When someone comments on your blog and you want to respond to their comments, do you email them or post another comment on your blog?

What is the suggested maximum blog length for optimal readership?

Does anyone have guidelines and or model student blogs for comments from high school students?

Is it possible to add a link in a comment?

Any answers to the above questions would be greatly appreciated!

Blogging4Educators

Rather than start up a new blog, I decided to revisit this one I created a couple of years ago for another EVO workshop. This is blog I use for professional reflection, although not very regularly, as evidenced by the posts. I noticed some of the videos I had uploaded previously are no longer working. I wonder why? I am looking forward to learning more about blogging through the EVO online workshops and meeting other educators who are blogging as well

Globalounge.com

"The challenge in life -- the beauty in life -- has to do with trying to balance movement with stillness. Which is to say, action and contemplation... I want to balance the two so that I can try to understand the world and understand myself, and so that I can go out and learn and offer what I can, and then come back in, as it were, and gather myself, find out what I really think and believe, place solid foundations underneath my life."
-Pico Iyer

This quote really speaks to me in what I am seeking to do right now. I have a strong desire to travel extensively over the next year and a half. I want to see and experience a variety of cultures and document those experiences in a blog. I am beginning to envision a new project that combines my passions in hopefully a variety of ways with many surprising twists and turns. This new project is called globalounge.com

A Few Note at the End of the Third Quarter

I am very pleased with the way everything is going in my classes. My students really work hard for the most part and I have been able to provide them with challenging material. I'm looking forward to incorporating more TPRS and Video/Drama stuff next year, but my thematic units really work well with the students I am working with. I also want to really design my computer/career/study skills class to optimize the time I have with my students. I hope that Rocky is able to get Rosetta Stone up and running soon. Things will finally start to wind down a bit now, I believe. Monday is a staff development day and we are going to see Ron Clark at the Orleans in the morning. I'm looking forward to seeing him speak, but it is rumored that they paid him $40,000 for this one day engagement which seems way too much. I went to a really nice workshop called ELL 101: The Nuts & Bolts of Language Learning given by Connie MacFarland, an ELL specialist in the region. She was really dynamic and made the workshop a lot of fun. She reminded me how important music and laughter are in the classroom, especially the ELL classroom. She also talked a little bit about brain-based learning. One fact that really stuck in my mind was the notion that our brain likes 60% predictability and 40% novelty. Another thing she said is our brain needs a change of state every 20 minutes. That's another area I would like to know more about: brain-based learning. This summer I will try to read some books by David Souza and Eric Jensen to familiarize myself more with it, if I have the time. I have a pretty busy summer planned already, but it should be fun. I'm really looking forward to teaching a Virtual High School Class. I hope I get to teach Computer Applications, as that would go hand-in-hand with preparing my Computer class for next year.

Changes

My ELL I class has grown significantly in the last couple of weeks, but all of the new students have a decent level of English so that's good, but, nonetheless, it does change the dynamics of the class and I have to readjust how I manage the class. The Read 180 program is freezing a lot when my students use it, so I probably won't use it for another week. Rocky, our computer strategist has almost got Rosetta Stone up and running on my computers, but again I will need to figure out exactly how to use it so that will take at least another week. Technology is great when it works, but getting it up and running is a lot of work. In the end it will be worth it. I am experimenting with podcasting and video. I haven't involved my students yet, but I think it will be very easy to have my students use moviemaker and also podcasts (if they don't get blocked by the district). I'm not that impressed with podcasts yet, but I still haven't explored them that much either. They just seem a little boring.

Group Work

I have put my 4th/5th period class into groups based on their reading levels and grades and set up a competition between the groups along with giving them group roles and participation points as a group as well as individuals. Every day I give each group a report card based on five areas: Cooperative, On-Task, Attentive, Prepared, Efficient. Their group roles are as follows: supplies person, clean-up, helper, and task-master. So far, it is going beautifully. My students like the competition and they are behaving and working much better. I track their totals on a chart with stars so they can see how they are doing against the other groups. I have also broken up my beginning level class into two groups for 1st and 2nd period which is really working well for my slower students. They get work at their pace and level and have gotten a lot more practice speaking. My more advanced students are not slowed down by the slower students and they also get a lot more practice, too. I've gotten 4 new students over the past two weeks, but luckily they all have a decent level of English. They are actually coming into my beginner class at just the right time.