The Polliwog Journal

For awhile I thought that FrontPage would kill CyberEnglish in the same way that video killed the radio star.
We’d been using FrontPage as the web editor for our students to create their websites since 2001, but FP is no longer supported by Microsoft. Also, our server was a Microsoft system set up to do live [...]

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Tim Walker interviewed me for the article Turning the Page: Students live in a Digital World. Are schools ready to join them? As always, I cannot believe the company I am privileged to keep.

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When I began teaching in 1990, I got no tour of the school, no handbook of helpful tips, and no mentor to guide me. I got shown my room that was barely ready for school. Undaunted, I plunged into the deep end and did not drown. To be fair, I didn’t know one should expect [...]

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In this seventh iteration of CyberEnglish at Sheboygan Falls High School, it is again the students themselves who remind me why it is so important to keep insisting that we maintain our commitment to the concept of CyberEnglish itself. In addition, each year, teachers from all over the country write to me to ask me [...]

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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.

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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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