Today is the fourth anniversary of my blog. In light of that fact, here are a few facts and statistics: The first post on this blog was a review of Constance Weaver’s Teaching Grammar in Context. Since that post, I’ve made 564 posts (including this one). The first commenter was Ms. Ris, who commented on…
My full schedule has not been conducive to blogging. I haven’t dropped off the face of the earth, but I’m not blogging as much as I have in the past for two main reasons 1) grad school, and 2) department chair. Well, I’m not taking any classes this summer for a variety of reasons, most…
I created a Diigo group for my students some time ago, but it wasn’t until Monday, when we had a snow day (weird that we’ve had 70° weather in the same week as a snowstorm) that I invited all my students to join. The lack of response has been deafening. I understand to a degree. …
Bill Genereux has an interesting post about what he calls “The True Digital Divide.” He discusses in detail something I touched on in my presentation at GCTE. If we truly want students to engage with the technology and use the Web 2.0 tools available to them, we have to be leaders. We have to use…
Some of you may know I went to the annual GCTE (Georgia Council of Teachers of English) convention this weekend. It was great, but the numbers were down — probably the economy. I know lots of the schools systems have probably told teachers they would not pay to send them to conventions this year. For…
This is liable to be a rambly post, and frankly, I’m not sure I like reading those myself, but sometimes they have to be written. Those of you who are members of the UbD Educators wiki — are you interested in having a Ning, too? It wouldn’t mean shutting down the wiki, but Nings seem…
I am so excited! Some time ago, I mentioned that two English teachers I’d love to see blogging are Jim Burke and Carol Jago. Jim Burke has created a Ning for English teachers, where, presumably, we can all look forward to regular posts in the form of blogs or forum posts from Jim! And Carol…
You may have noticed that the Faculty Room has not been updated in some time. We have been on hiatus since August, and though the last post said we would resume posting in September, it hasn’t happened, and I’m not sure why. I contacted both Meg Fitzpatrick (who administers the blog) and Grant Wiggins, and…
After breakfast and a quick chat with my husband and my mom, I went to the Alamo. The tour interested me a great deal, and if you go, it’s worth it to rent the mp3 player for the audio tour. The guy running the booth for the audio tour also said nice things about my…
Tomorrow evening I’ll be flying to San Antonio to the NCTE Annual Conference. I haven’t been to an NCTE conference since 1998, which took place in Nashville. I went then because Atlanta is within easy driving distance of Nashville. While this is not true of San Antonio, I really wanted to go this year because…
