The Polliwog Journal

One of our inservice days this year was dedicated to technology. In one session we learned about netTrekker, a subscription search tool for schools. It seems to be worth the money we paid to subscribe. I want our students to know how to use it, so I came up with a lesson to teach them [...]

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On a whim, I pasted the first paragraph of a story (A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings by Gabriel Garcia Marquez) into Wordle.

It would be cool to hand the Wordle out (nothing more, not even the title) to the class before reading have students in groups come up with the following:

What is the story [...]

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Pam sent me this question and I thought it was worthy of public discussion:
I read your blog frequently for inspiration to share with our English teachers. Today I went to it to mine for free advice. Since I didn’t see any posts alluding to this question, I thought I would ask you directly.
What qualities do [...]

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Thank you Ted Nellen for the link to this video, “Learning to Change-Changing to Learn,” which is further validation of everything I believe about the future of schools. I am so proud to be a CyberEnglish teacher, which I owe again to Ted and his vision.
We’re a revolutionary classroom, and yet, we are not anywhere [...]

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In a recent Web search, I found a pretty cool Cyber English blog:  Matt Thomas uses a WordPress blog to manage his work for East Hollywood High School.

addthis_url = ‘http%3A%2F%2Fdhogue.edublogs.org%2F2008%2F06%2F08%2Fcyber-english-is-out-there%2F’;
addthis_title = ‘Cyber+English+is+out+there’;
addthis_pub = ”;

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It is the fifth year for this project: Living Histories Multigenre Web Projects. I still love “teaching” the project that Pat Schulze and I developed in 2004. Not just a paper, not just hypertext, not just multigenre, this project seems to do it all. I like how layered in skills it is. I have [...]

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You know how sometimes you just grab onto something, like a little analogy and it sort of fits? Well, the other day I was explaining the Living Histories project to my ninth graders and reminding them that they needed a minimum of 10 hyperlinks throughout their project. I told them that I did not want [...]

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I’ve been writing, speaking, and thinking about CyberEnglish a lot lately, but today, as I was reading students’ cyberjournals, I was reminded of the simple things that make CyberEnglish so important. In her journal, Lilly wrote
Putting your assignments online really forces you to look at your writing and make changes. In most classes I [...]

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CyberEnglish_2
Part two of a two part interview with Dr. Susan Antlitz aired on Saturday, March 1 on WMWK FM. Antlitz, the Community Issues program host, is also a writing instructor at Joliet Junior College.
In this episode:

hypertext
how I got started in CyberEnglish
helping students become citizens of the Web
21st century technology, including Blogs and Wikis
why students [...]

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Ryan Bretag, in a recent post in his blog The Four Eyed Technologist, said that NCTE is “moving toward the future,” but then chides gently, “(or is that the present).” Either way, NCTE has its seatbelt securely fastened on the 21st c. literacy skills bandwagon. Now that I think about it, bandwagon may be the [...]

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