English Companion Ning

I spent some time this morning poking around English Companion Ning. This is basically a discussion forum for teachers where they can post a question and other teachers can answer and give their advice. There is a particularly long thread of comments in response to a post where a teacher asked for suggestions on how to run his classroom the day after one of the students in his school was tragically killed in a car accident. This is a difficult situation for sure and it presented itself a couple of times during my high school years. Reading the advice and condolensces to this teacher reminded me of the profound impact that teachers can have on their students. It reaffirmed to me that this isn't an easy job I'm signing up for, but it will be worth it. I have a feeling that resources like this one will be invaluable to me when my time comes to stand in front of the classroom.

Personal Technology Project

For my project I am going to learn how to use Mindmeister. My class will read Fahrenheit 451 and use Mindmeister to analyze and map out themes and characters.
The idea is that each student will choose a unique aspect of the storyline and then the maps can come together to give students a more analytical idea of what the book is all about.

Woops!

I had my class website all done by Monday night and I totally forgot to post the link! Here it is
http://sites.google.com/site/watkinsclass/http://sites.google.com/site/watkinsclass/

Some New Goodies

While poking around on the internet for some rubric templates I came across this awesome website. It doesn't look like much, just a page of links set up by some teacher. There are some really good links on there though, and they have a different page of links for math, history, language arts, etc.

As if my booklist isn't long enough already...

Thanks to Emily and Tasha I found a couple new blogs that I really like. Powell's Books and YA Lit: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly. Powell's went straight into my Google Reader, hooray for yet another way to put off my homework :)