First, I got a nicely printed and bound copy of the action research projects I worked on a few years ago with an amazing group of teachers. I guess that means I’m officially published!
Then based on my discussion with my preservice class last night, I had an impromptu poetry slam with my ENG4C class. The things they came out with amazed me! I have to thank one of my preservice students, Brittany L. for sharing some of her favourite examples of slam poetry on her blog. Yes… some of the poems contain profanity but this is a grade 12 class and we critically discussed this.

We’re going to keep building on it,  but here is a list of what my students (ENG4C) noticed about the poetry performances we watched:

One of my students just left class now and said “I just wanted you to know I had a lot of fun in class today.”

“Me too!” I said.

Today was good.

I must confess, I cannot disguise my enthusiasm for this week’s class. Today we’re going to explore some web 2.0 tools and you will have some time to play, experiment, make mistakes, and report back to the class. I hope that this will give you some ideas for your lesson redesign. All links in the presentation below are active.

I may have been a tad ambitious last week. We didn’t get to finish (or really start our jigsaw, although I was able to assign all the topics last week). So this week will finish the jigsaw exercise before talking about comics in the classroom.

*A note to my regular readers: I’ll be using my blog for communicating with my preservice class for the next couple months. If this is useful for you too, then great! If not, check back with me in March.

For your convenience, I’ve uploaded the presentation for January 11′s class here. You’ll notice I try to avoid text-laden slides so some of them may not mean much without the accompanying discussion.

Due to scheduling conflicts, our first class will be held online. Information for our first class will be posted here by Wednesday January 4. I look forward to meeting you all face to face next week. If you have any issues accessing any of the materials posted below, don’t worry too much. We can address that next week.

1) In preparation for our first class, please complete the following survey:

2) Think about how you would redesign that survey for use with your students in your next practicum placement and be prepared to discuss your ideas next week.

3) Please read the Language and Literacy Researchers of Canada Position Statement.

4) Watch the following video that provides an introduction to this course.

5) Post a sticky note here in response to the video Learning to Change, Changing to Learn. (If the link doesn’t work for you, feel free to post your reply as a comment on this post instead). In the syllabus, the video originally posted for reading was this one:

Feel free to comment on either.

6) Watch the second part of our introductory video:

7) Here’s what you need to do for next week:
a) Make sure you’ve completed the above literacy survey. Come prepared to share the changes you would make to it to use with your students in your next placement.
b) Familiarize yourself with the chart for analysing texts. We’ll discuss it next week.
c) Have a look through the following professional educator blogs and think about the conscious (and perhaps unconscious) choices these educators have made about how they present themselves online and what they choose to use their blogs for.
• Zoe Branigan Pipe – http://pipedreams.edublogs.org/
• Rodd Lucier – http://thecleversheep.blogspot.com/
• Jaclyn Calder http://teachercalder.ca/