So I managed to again put off doing the assignment for this class until the day it is due. I dread doing the assignment all week long because I'm sure that I will mess everything up and get frustrated and that it will just ruin my day. I don't know why I wait so long, because it ends up not being as scary as I anticipated.
I actually kind of enjoyed doing this assignment. I found some interesting feeds that I would actually like to follow.
The first one is so fun to read because the guy who writes it has such an interesting, engaging tone of voice--but the feed is also useful. He talks about how to use E-Pal and twitter in the classroom. He discusses how to make TOEFL students be more involved in speaking in the classroom. He evaluates the Callan method of teaching. He talks about the mistakes he has made as a teacher and what he has learned from them. I think this will be helpful, and I look forward to reading what he has to say in the future.
The second feed I subscribed to has all kinds of useful posts. It shows you where to find texts to fit your lesson plans. It tells you how to measure the difficulty of vocabulary in a text. It tells you when there are free online courses that may be useful to teachers. It talks about using facebook for teaching. Pretty much, it directs your attention to interesting articles courses and conferences that would benefit teachers.
The third feed I chose is somehow connected to NCTE. I have high expectations for the usefulness of this feed because every time I do research on teaching, I end up finding really good articles from the NCTE journal. The feed has a variety of ideas to use _____ in the classroom. For example, it evaluates the good and bad points of ReadWriteThink.org. It explores how to deal with plagiarism in the classroom. There is one post that reviews key information from 2009. I think this will be a great resource.
The fourth feed I subscribed to give tips on resume writing for teachers. It has strategies and example resumes. It has different posts for elementary school teachers, high school teachers, substitute teachers, etc. This will help me in the near future when I want to apply for teaching jobs.
My fifth subscription is actually more linguistically based and not really geared toward technology. However, I believe it will still be a useful tool. I have recently become aware of the great need for teachers to recognize the issues of dialects in the classroom. I want to keep up on these kinds of discussions, especially now that I am no longer taking classes that focus on that aspect of language and teaching English.
I also subscribed to two class blogs from last semester. One of them was from my teaching grammar class, and I will be interested to see what else is added to the blog. I took a teaching writing class as well last semester, but I really struggled with it--that is why I subscribed to the blog for the 2010 semester class. I want to review the blog posts and the readings for the class in hopes that I will be able to figure it out better the second time around.
Rachel, thanks for the good descriptions of the sources you found. I'm glad you found this useful!
ReplyDeleteYou're missing a few points because I can't see your Google Reader, when you link to it, it goes to MY Google Reader because I don't have your username and password. So that's why a screenshot is important.
If you're on a mac, try shift+apple+4 and drag the crosshairs over the thing you want to take a picture of. It will show up on your desktop as a pdf. If on a pc, use the 'print screen' option and paste it into Microsoft Paint and save it as a .jpg or .png or something. Good luck! Because your assignment was on time, you can resubmit this for full credit.