This year is my first time attending the annual New England Association of Teachers of English (NEATE) Conference. I have been wanting to get more involved with NEATE since moving here, as I was involved with the Georgia Council of Teachers of English (GCTE) before I moved. If you’d like to check out my presentation, … Continue reading Digital Storytelling Presentation at the NEATE Conference
I struggled with whether to write this post or not because digital stories are personal, or they can be personal, but I really believe my students have done good work that is worthy of the world, so I am plunging in. As I have mentioned before, I went to a digital storytelling workshop last summer. … Continue reading Digital Storytelling Final Projects
I have written before about the profound experience of attending a digital storytelling workshop run by the Center for Digital Storytelling, but I thought I would gather here some resources for teachers to use as models for students. Selfishly, it helps me by gathering all the models I want to use for my own students … Continue reading Digital Storytelling: Models for Students
Thanks to my school, I had the wonderful opportunity to participate in a digital storytelling workshop with the Center for Digital Storytelling in Denver at the Lighthouse Writer’s Workshop. I will admit that I went into the workshop with a fair amount of hubris. I thought to myself, I’ve been teaching English for sixteen years. … Continue reading Digital Storytelling Workshop
Last year, I shared my students’ digital stories. While I did have some good work, I knew the end results could be improved. I did some reflecting and retooling, and I made a few changes to the project for this year. First, I introduced more checkpoints that counted for a grade. For example, bringing an … Continue reading Digital Stories 2016
In my previous posts, I shared how my teaching partner James and I prepare students for reading There There and how we teach the novel’s Prologue. In this post and subsequent posts in this series, I will not share day-to-day lesson plans; rather, I will share some resources that James and I have used. Our … Continue reading Teaching Tommy Orange’s There There: Part Three
Dr. Rudine Sims Bishop coined the term “windows, mirrors, and sliding glass doors” as a metaphor for what media representation means. In case you haven’t encountered the metaphor, watch this quick video in which Dr. Sims Bishop explains the metaphor. The reason why representation is important is captured so well in this infographic created by … Continue reading Representation
I reflected on Friday and Saturday at this year’s NCTE conference in previous posts. This post is my final reflection on Sunday’s events. Session K started before the Sunday Keynote. I attended K.06: Public Rhetoric: Agency, Voice, and Mission in the Public Sphere, a roundtable discussion. The session included three roundtable discussions. I rotated among … Continue reading NCTE Reflections Part Three
I lost my grandmother this morning. She is one of the most important people to me in the entire world. She represents love to me because her love was absolutely unconditional, and it was something I knew I had with absolute certainty. I never think about her without thinking about her in her sewing room. … Continue reading Slice of Life #28: We Grow Accustomed to the Dark
I’ve let the cobwebs collect around here again! All I can say is the same old thing everyone says: time. I always say people make time for things they feel are important, so for one reason or another, blogging has had to retreat to the background for me. I am always thinking about things I … Continue reading On My Mind