It looks like the plugin I use to enable visitors to subscribe to updates via e-mail is a bit buggy. It’s not supposed to send e-mails to user when I create Pages, the WordPress name for static pages as opposed to blog posts. It looks like it is sending them, however. I’ll let the author know; meanwhile, feel free to visit the pages or ignore as you see fit.
[tags]wordpress, e-mails, updates, plugin, subscribe2[/tags]
For those of you who didn’t see my previous post, I upgraded to WordPress 2.3 yesterday. Most of my previous upgrades have been seamless. This time, I had two problems, one of which is really puzzling to me.
The first, as I mentioned in my previous post, is that I can’t get tags to work with my theme. I have decided to continue using my plugin, SimpleTagsPlus, because it does what I want with a lot less fuss (at least for me).
The second is that for some reason, the image padding code I had in my stylesheet was suddenly ignored, and my images and text butted right up against one another. I fixed it by adding image code to the “Content” div layer, which means nothing to 99% you, I know, but it worked. However, this makes no sense to me because my stylesheet should not have been impacted by the upgrade in any way.
[tags]tagging, wordpress, upgrade, css[/tags]
I have just upgraded to WordPress 2.3, and I am maily posting to check it out. I had to disable the feature that used to appear in my sidebar called “Most Popular Posts.” It was generated with a plugin called “Popularity Contest” that is broken for 2.3, and although the author has stated previously that it will no longer be supported, it looks like Alex plans to fix it, but it may be some time.
So far, I like some of the features. For instance, I receive notifications when plugins are updated right through my user interface, so I don’t have to check every once in a while to see if new versions are available. I also like the new implementation of tags. I am going to try to figure out how to import my SimpleTagsPlus tags so I don’t have to keep that plugin.
You can learn more about WordPress 2.3 at the development blog.
Update, 9:36: I’m having trouble getting the tagging to work. Hopefully, I can figure it out tomorrow.
Update, 8:29 on September 26: Well, I still can’t get it to work, so until the theme is either updated to integrate tags or someone is able to help me figure it out, I’m going to stick with SimpleTagsPlus. I am quickly becoming frustrating trying to guess where the line of code I’m supposed to add goes and which templates it goes in. Using the tagging feature saves me eleven keystrokes, so maybe it’s not worth the aggravation.
[tags]plugins, upgrade, wordpress[/tags]
Some of my students made the news today: “Teens take over parking area to make a point” from the AJC.
Two of the students mentioned in the article, Julian and Jonathan, were in my class that did the Brave New World projects. They haven’t presented their projects yet, but I know that their utopian society is eco-based. Julian’s mom sent me the article. Sometimes I think Julian would have been much happier if he had been a teenager in the 1960’s. They’re great kids!
[tags]ecology, education, students, news, green space[/tags]
My students began presenting their utopian (or dystopian?) projects (based on this UbD unit for Brave New World).
First of all, I think it was a fun project. The students worked hard on it, for the most part, but I think I gave them too much time. I noticed they got most of the work done the last two days. I think I was afraid that learning how to use wikis would take them longer than it actually did. Next time, I think I’ll make it a week-long project and leave it at that. Also, I think in the future that I’ll require the students to create wikis. I gave them more options this time, but I really liked the wiki format for constructing this project.
The students gave me permission to share their wikis with you.
Two more groups will present on Monday when our class meets again.
Image credit: LGagnon.
[tags]utopia, brave new world, dystopia, project, writing, english, education, literature[/tags]
ADD permeates my life. My husband and daughter are both ADD, and I frequently teach students who also have ADD. I think I have a higher tolerance for ADD behavior than many people do; I have noticed, for instance, that others frequently seem to be irritated by a student’s behavior while I am scratching my head in wonder at their irritation. In fact, I feel awkward when things in my classroom are too focused or quiet. It has become glaringly obvious to me over the last few weeks just how little tolerance most teachers have for ADD behavior in their classrooms.
ADD, whatever its causes, is a reality of teaching school. How to deal with students who have ADD is the question.
I think perhaps this question is more difficult for elementary school teachers. I have my students for 90 minutes in a day at most. It can be exhausting when several display signs of ADD in just that short period of time, so I imagine it is difficult if the time is stretched out over a whole day. I’m sure its frustrating. I think it’s easy to forget that children with ADD truly have trouble controlling impulses, and it’s easy to blame them for behaviors that they have trouble controlling. And frankly, maybe it’s easy not to like them.
When you’ve worked with a child of your own, struggling because she just can’t seem to please no matter what she does or trying so hard to pay attention but failing, maybe you see things a little differently.
I have a little more patience than a lot of teachers I know, so some of the things that have worked for me might not work for others, but for what it’s worth, I have successfully used the following strategies in working with students who have ADD:
It can be really draining to be surrounded by ADD, but I have found that I like dealing with students who struggle with attention. I prefer working with students who have struggles in general. I guess I like a challenge, or maybe I just like the way it keeps things interesting.
How do you deal with ADD in your classroom?
[tags]add, adhd, classroom, education[/tags]
Last week, my ninth graders started working on a project associated with their summer reading novel A Lesson Before Dying. One group in particular was really doing a good job, going beyond the links I had given them to find interesting ways in which racism subtly impacts our society. In fact, they learned some things I didn’t know, and I was really excited when they shared it with me. Because I was impressed with their work, I decided to send e-mails to their parents letting them know.
Unfortunately, the positive note home hasn’t been a regular part of my repertoire in some time, and I had forgotten its power. Think about it. Most of the time, the first communication parents receive from teachers is about a problem in class. How great would it be to be approached for the first time by a teacher with a pat on the back for your child? I don’t know about you, but if I ever got such a note from my children’s teachers, I would be on their side immediately. I would be so grateful they took the time to tell me good news that I would support them for the rest of the year. Of course, that’s just my opinion, but maybe it would work like that for other parents, too.
I decided that I need to bring positive notes into my schedule. It takes only a few minutes to send one, but its impact can return many times over. I want to write about two e-mails a week, and I hope that at some point in the year, I can send a positive note about each student.
Teachers don’t have to dig for reasons to send notes home. Every student does something deserving of praise at some point in the year. My only ulterior motive for doing this is that as a parent who frequently hears nothing but bad about my middle daughter, who is in the process for evaluation for ADHD, it would make a world of difference if I felt like her teacher did see she had some good qualities. It’s frustrating to have a bright, funny, loving child who struggles in school and conflicts with teachers. I guess now that I’ve been in those shoes, I know how I’d feel if I ever received a positive note, and I suppose I determined that I would follow the Golden Rule on this one. It isn’t that I expect to hear from my children’s teachers — I probably won’t. But it does make me feel pretty good that I’m trying to do something about my students’ notions that if their parents hear from a teacher, it’s always bad news.
Why don’t you think about making positive communication part of your repertoire, too?
[tags]communication, teaching, education[/tags]
Karl Fisch wrote a post Tuesday — “Is It Okay to Be a Technologically Illiterate Teacher?” — that really, really resonated with me. He was spurred to write it after reading Terry Freedman’s post “Oh, Sir, You are too Kind.”
I am in utter agreement with Karl and Terry. It’s time educators (and everyone else, for that matter) stopped displaying a bizarre sense of pride in their technological illiteracy. Not knowing how to do simple things in MS Word — such as moving between table cells and saving a document, in a scenario Terry describes, is inexcusable. In our society, dependent as it now is on technology, teachers who are incompetent with technology are jeopardizing their students’ success. I am not saying we all need to be at an expert level, but I’ll ask the same question Terry did. What message are teachers who can’t even create and edit a simple Word document sending their students?
It is especially frustrating to me when educators dismiss technology — “Oh, I just don’t know how to do any of that, ha ha!” To plagiarize the same argument Karl and Terry made — would you brag like that about not being able to read? Not being able to read as an adult in our society creates a sense of shame and embarrassment on the part of the non-reader, and a sense of outrage on the part of those who can read. It should not be acceptable in our society to be proud of not knowing something. I won’t go so far as to say that technologically illiterate teachers should feel shame and self-loathing, but they needn’t brag about their lack of knowledge either. There has to be a middle ground. A point at which, say, a teacher realizes his or her incompetence and decides something needs to be done about it — and not just running down the hall to the teacher who does know something about technology. As Karl said, teachers have to make the effort to learn. We accept nothing less from our students.
Teachers have to realize at some point that exhibiting ignorance with this sort of pride is not OK. It is OK not to know something and to try to fix that, and I would hope that most teachers would do so. I don’t know everything. That’s true. At the end of my life, I still won’t know everything. I would hope, however, that when I reach the end of my life, I will never have exhibited pride about being ignorant of anything.
[tags]technological illiteracy, education, technology, teaching[/tags]
I really need to go through my files and see what I can upload to the handouts page. I know I’ve come up with some things I haven’t added.
I have now gone to Curriculum Nights for three children and participated in my own, so perhaps my evenings will once again return to some semblance of normal. My middle daughter’s teacher has an interactive white board like I do, and it was interesting to see the parents’ reactions on both nights — so similar. Well, they are pretty cool. My students have been enjoying getting a turn correcting sentences with errors as a warm-up on the SMART Board, and when it gets out of alignment (which is an issue with my projector, not my SMART Board), they think it’s really fun to align it properly.
I’m really glad I started my classroom website a couple of years ago. I think the students and parents really like it, and even though it takes some time to maintain, I think it’s well worth it, especially when students are forgetful or absent, and I can remind them of the resources at their disposal at the website. Last week I made some improvements to it so that it’s even easier to find notes saved from the SMART Board and handouts I’ve uploaded. I have tried to engage students in activities designed to force them to explore the site. Those students who have explored it have told me it’s pretty easy to navigate.
I wrote two Shakespeare units last weekend, so I don’t think I’ll spend any of the remainder of this weekend planning. I am excited, however, at my students’ progress on their Brave New World projects. I am concerned about the progress of one group, but the others are all coming along nicely. I am ready to finish summer reading in all my classes, though. My comma unit went over really well with students, parents, and the faculty members I shared it with, too, so that’s encouraging.
Well, I’m curling up with Rebecca. If you are interested in following my progress with fall books, step on over to my personal blog.
[tags]commas, teaching, education, planning, interactive white board, smart board[/tags]
As I have been working to create UbD plans over the last couple of days, a couple of things have become glaringly obvious to me.
The first is that the quality of available study guides and teachers’ guides varies widely. Most of them only have a handful of “good” lesson plans. What I mean by “good” is that I can use the plans without too much modification for my students, it is sufficiently challenging for high school, and it doesn’t involve too much of what I think of as “fluffy” work. I am totally all for using what I can without reinventing the wheel. My English Education professors encouraged us to steal, steal, steal. This was back in the day when listservs were well-populated and would have been great for teachers to share ideas, but teachers weren’t on them, and it was well before the age of blogs, wikis, webquests, etc. Our best source for ideas, if I recall, was ERIC. I had to create entire units by myself, stealing where I could, but mostly finding I had to buy anything that was really helpful (Perfection Learning units, Shakespeare Set Free, Novel Guides, etc.) It was a pain, and I envy new teachers for the fact that they have access to the Internet with this wealth of ideas. It must be much easier to create plans now than it used to be.
I have found some challenge, however, in finding lessons that are sufficiently challenging. They are indeed out there, but the best way to find them seems to be real search-engine savvy rather than anything else. I have not often found that huge repositories of plans have too much to offer. It’s rare for me to find something usable in those kinds of places, and those I find usually need to be modified somewhat. Sometimes, for instance, I find parts of the assignment interesting, but most of it is “fluff.” There seems to be a lot of Shakespeare fluff out there. I know the current thinking is to teach through performance, and while I do some of that, I think most of the unit plans I’ve seen depend on performance for almost all assessment, and that makes me uncomfortable. I think the biggest reason why is that I dislike roleplaying myself. I loathe it when I’m asked to roleplay situations for professional development, for instance. I never minded doing it for school too much, I guess, but I find lessons in which students have to dig into the language through close-reading text study more compelling. Students are invariably not attuned enough to Shakespeare’s language to act it out, and I find sharing professional performances more valuable for their learning.
I know plenty of people will disagree with me on the performance aspect of teaching Shakespeare; it seems to be the prevailing wisdom that students need to act out the whole play, complete with costumes and promptbook, in order to understand it. I would feel different, I’m sure, if I were a drama teacher or had a drama background. Still, I have never had complaints about not doing performance.
A perfect case in point — something I’d never do again — was something my supervising teacher and I did together in our Romeo and Juliet unit. It came straight out of Shakespeare Set Free: Teaching Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The idea is that students create masks to wear to class and they learn an Elizabethan dance similar to one that Romeo and Juliet might have danced when they met. To me, 10 years after I did this with a class, this seems fluffy in the extreme. We weren’t digging into the text at all. We weren’t reading about it or writing about it. On the other hand, some great activities can be found in the same section of the book. For example, a great activity which asks students to really figure out language is the Love Connection handout on p. 133 of the book. Students not only have to interpret the text, but also what the text says about the character’s attitude or beliefs, which is a great way for students to move from simple decoding to understanding. What I am essentially getting at (but it took me this long, blathering the whole time, to figure out how to say it) is that many assignments you’ll find online or in these kinds of unit plan books are activity-based and not authentic assessments, to borrow the language of UbD. Students have fun, but don’t really learn what you are trying to get them to learn. I sure had a lot of pretty masks for my bulletin board, and we had fun goofing around in a big circle, dancing, but I don’t think either activity really did much to advance our students’ understanding of Romeo and Juliet, and so many performance-based lesson plans tend to look suspiciously like that lesson.
The great thing about what is available is that you generally don’t have to pay for it, so you’re not out $20 or so after purchasing a book of useless activities. If you are planning to buy a book, see if there’s a way to look through it to see if it’s useful before you purchase it. It will probably be worth it if you can use some of the lessons year after year, especially if handouts are provided.
[tags]ubd, shakespeare, lesson plans, unit plans[/tags]