Mr. Laguzza's House of Learn

Some of the wikis I looked at looked like very good ideas, particularly any that made a point of connecting people from different parts of the world or simply inviting any classes to join (1001 Flat World Tales and The Great Debate 2008). Some seemed like decent ideas that may have helped get their kids writing and interacting with each other (Go West and Kubler Reading).  Some looked like redundancy if there was classroom teaching all year (Dr. Reich’s and Censorship and Responsibility) and one looked like an excellent tool for this modern world, but has a stupid name like everything else on the Internet (DiRT). I’m sorry, but the Wiki Wiki Teaching blog was a little embarrassing. Not only did the Scarlet Letter Review look like a poor man’s SparkNotes but it actually had LINKS TO SPARKNOTES. I think any English teacher is nuts if they think none of their kids are using things like SparkNotes at times but it’s probably not a good idea to direct them to it. That will kill off any potential they had to develop the skill set necessary for analyzing and criticizing classic literature pretty quickly.

As for me, I may start a Wiki called something along the lines of “The Greatest Books in the World” and have my students write book reviews of books they think deserve to fall under such a heading. I would enjoy contributing myself, and I know I have a load of feverish readers returning in my seventh and eighth grade classes that would love to share why The Hunger Games and others totally rule.

This RSS tool is pretty overwhelming and sloppy. I think I will stick to Google searches for now. I came across this: http://bookseer.com/.

It’s an instant book recommendation provider. I suppose it takes the fun out of talking to your librarian and friends if you use it too much, but if it ever took off as a very intuitive tool (It doesn’t seem too bright yet from the tests I ran.), it is something else out there that can get kids reading and keep them reading. I am certainly all for that.

I am pleased to finally completely understand what RSS is. Looking over the required links I found this article on TeachPaperless:

http://teachpaperless.blogspot.com/2010/07/blog-recommendation-fed-up-with-lunch.html

It is actually a recommendation to read another blog called Fed Up with Lunch. I thought this was a very good idea and wish it would get the amount of attention that that woman who cooked all of Julia Childs’s recipes got. I worked in a public school in the Bronx and I am pretty sure they were alternating between gruel, mush, and Soylent Green every three days. I cannot exaggerate how bad the food looked at this middle school. It was often unidentifiable and while kids in public schools throughout other areas in our country at least like the taste of the rather unhealthy lunches they eat in school, my M.S. 302 students barely ate at all because it was so unappetizing.

Now I work at a small private school in Manhattan, Professional Children’s School. Here the kids have the opportunity to eat a balanced and healthy lunch every day and many do. Unfortunately, it is freedom that ruins a lot of these kids’ diets. There is more than one middle school student every year who is eating entirely different forms of sugar at lunch every day. I make a point of setting a good example and giving these students a very hard time when I catch them.

There is a variety of ways lunch in school can turn out to be bad news for American students, and I am crossing my fingers for Fed Up with Lunch to get lots of media attention and make a change for the better in American public schools.

I am terrified that we can casually refer to my student body as “digital learners”. Does this mean they might verbally “skip”, fall temporarily mute, or visually scramble from time to time? My students are not digital learners even if their world is way, way, way more digital than mine was at their age. I may use these tools to engage them, but it will only be because it proves to be particularly useful, and it will be done with the same general goals in mind that I always have for my students (I want them to love literature, I want them to realize everyone can write something worthwhile, I want them to understand and develop their own ideas about what it means to be a good, useful, successful, happy citizen, etc.) If the Web 2.0 tool can play well with all these goals and teach a specific skill fantastically, then I will use it.

These tools can help with my own learning simply because they are the means by which more and more professional development courses are being taught. I certainly am thankful for this courses scheduleless nature, but I do not yet see an advantage of blog interaction over human interaction besides convenience.

I’m sorry I’m such a stinker. I’m really a pretty nice guy.