On a rainy, chilly Friday afternoon, I attended the ORATE (Oregon Association of Teacher Educators), where I gave an overview of NCTE’s (National Council of Teachers of English) recently published position statement, Beliefs for Integrating Technology into the English Language Arts Classroom. The slides from the presentation are below; as of this posting, all the active links are accurate.
I’ve had a couple of crappy days this week, so when it looked like things might be easing last night, I found myself sitting at my desk, itching to make something. Let me be more specific. I found myself craving the experience of being immersed in the process of creating something. Of composing. It used to be that I would turn to writing when I […]
I was in a meeting today about a youth program I’m helping develop. I needed to take some notes, so I pulled out my phone, brought up my favorite note-taking app, and starting typing away. Somebody leaned over and smirked, “That’s right, practice being a role model for the kids.” I went from calm to infuriated in about two seconds. I had to leave the meeting […]
Webstitute #3 at the English Companion Ning closed earlier in the evening; I thought I’d catch a few thoughts in writing before they drifted away forever. Here are four that come to mind first: Lesson #1 Check the tech! Need I say more? Well, one addition to my post from the other day. I think the best learning in tech situations comes from posing a […]
I was hours away from finishing the final qualifying paper, AKA comps, for my doctoral program. It was 10:30 p.m. and if I stuck with it, I could get the citations done before dawn. I was working on a big, graphic-heavy document and Word was acting finicky– I’d started getting messages that my disk was running out of space, which was pretty much impossible, I […]
What if you’d been born blind, and then, through some neurological intervention, you could suddenly see? You might say, “Fabulous!” But as Oliver Sacks tells it, more often than not, the newly sighted person isn’t sure the change is such a good thing. Sacks, a neurosurgeon who writes compellingly about patients with unique neurological disorders, describes patients who ask if they can go back– to […]