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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If you read The Polliwog Journal, you know I am a huge fan of blogs in the classroom, but especially for teachers as a means to reflect, share, and communicate with the broader teaching community. Not only that, but teachers who blog are more likely to engage their students in the interactive realm that blogs [...]

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AP students are often asked to analyze the diction of a passage. Diction means to some degree the author’s style, such as formal diction, but more technically diction means the author’s choice of words. I sometimes have students highlight words and phrases that have a similar tone or meaning. They may use more than one [...]

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Yesterday, I was at Bay Port High School (btw, what a beautiful school!!!) to teach a session called “Using Blogs and Wikis in the Classroom” for the Summer Instructional Technology Academy. There were about 20 teachers who were all great–all self starters and really excited to learn something new about blogs and wikis and how [...]

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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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I had created my del.icio.us account quite awhile ago, but never played with it until this week (spurred by Dawn Sahouani’s reminder to try it).
The real value of del.icio.us is the connectivity it provides. I like that I can save urls and find them easily later, from any computer, but what’s really cool is to [...]

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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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Kate Says has posted the results of a survey on blocking of educational Web applications, like blogs, YouTube, social networking sites, etc. In a very impromptu survey of one class today, I asked, “how many of you were using the Internet for a legitimate school assignment this year and got blocked.” I was not surprised [...]

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