Yada, Yada, Yada

James Taylor \"Millworker\"The Boss \”Millworker\”

Hello.  My name is Kathleen Jensen and I am a youtube-aholic.  A little history:  our family agreed that cable was a bad idea, partly because we recognize that we would become couch potatoes and partly because there was so much garbage to wade through to get to anything good on 152 channels.  So, in a way, we’ve been waiting for tv on demand, and you tube is a little taste of it. 

Last year I used youtube sporatically, illustrating a point here and there.  This year, I intend to use it more.  For example, when I begin teaching tone in poetry, I’ll compare the covers of “Millworker” by James Taylor and Bruce Springsteen.

I love this English teacher’s blog. http://www.huffenglish.com/ Today, I read a nice review of 18th/19th law regarding entailments–which figures prominently in a variety of Jane Austen works..  Also, I really liked the link to the NYTimes article on online vs. print text posted there:  http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/27/books/27reading.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

  I just this week read the Atlantic magazine article “Is Google making us Stupid”  and have wondered about the way reading text online vs. the sustained effort of reading text affects our brains.  I haven’t yet decided what I think about the whole thing. 

Thing 14

Quizlet

I keep a word wall that we invent in class for literary terms we need to know as well as vocabulary that comes up.  I can see how this would be a natural extension of the word wall.

http://quizlet.com/

Letter pop

I like this site because it makes things pretty so easily.  I think it would be great to use some of these templates for syllabus/online syllabus use. 

http://letterpop.com/

Mixbook

http://www.mixbook.com/

 I think this would be a quick and easy way for students to illustrate vocabulary, quotations from books, and settings from stories and novels.

I have tried three times to upload this silly picrure.   I think the pictures on Flickr are wonderful, and the possibilities amazing and endless.  However, this blog, with its disappearing posts is a pain, and my patience for technology is thinning by the second. 

I  haven’t really noticed the CC logo on websites, but I haven’t really been looking.  I have worried about copyright, and noticed how difficult it is to attribute images especially—and I realize the attribution is not copyright, although I don’t think my students get it.  In fact, the whole copyright thing makes me think twice about publishing to the web, rather than publishing in house.  I struggle with it, on one hand the clickability and appeal of  larger audience andusing/stealing/collaborating.  I “get” the idea of intellectual property, but I think the web is changing all that, and very quickly too.  It’s complicated . . .

Yes, I took a walk among the wikis today.  Do I see myself setting up shop in a wiki-world?  Well, I’m very interested in the collaborative nature of wikis, and would like to set one up for the English dept., just to have a place for all of us to deposit good websites, handouts, rubrics, assignments, etc.  so that it’s assessible to everyone in the dept. for editing, and the world beyond for whatever.  Originally, I thought social bookmarking sites like delicious would facilitate that, but there seems to be too much clicking involved (and you know how we hate too many clicks!), and it is limited in ways that wikis are not( we can’t upload stuff there).  I didn’t see too many sites used for departments, but I’m sure they’re there! 

The first way I saw wikis used were just as a sort of home page for a course— http://honorsbrit.wikispaces.com/.  It works well as an organizing tool, although it doesn’t seem to look as slick as some blogs which seem to serve the same purpose????

I did like the way that students were using the wikis as a collaborative study space–adding to each others’ notes, linking to cliff notes, making additions to word lists, etc.  http://bjordan.wikispaces.com/  I’m still looking for a wiki that really gets to the writing process—I can see wikis being used for peer response, editing, and revision. 

While navigating technorati and edublog via searches was not intuitive, I found that I loved the resources available to me on the blogs.  I can’t imagine having the time to read all the blogs that are now on my reader or having the time to update my own all the time (maybe after the kids are grown).  Interesting, I found the clicking from one blog via the blog role to other English teachers’s sites the easiest way around.  Two amazing English teacher blogs (which I’ve posted to delicious as well as the reader):

http://bgteacher.blogspot.com/

http://www.huffenglish.com/?page_id=15

I’m intrigued by the fact that I’ve been drawn to 19th century stuff lately via the internet . . . who knew?  I discovered Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South (read Cranford in grad school, but had never heard of North and South) until I discovered Youtube.  Now the book and film are at the top of my blog–for now anyway!What you see at the top of the webpage is a wallpaper from a fansite of Gaskell’s—imagine!

I loved this RSS link.  It makes me smile to think of my students listening to their homework on their IPODs.  I enjoyed very much the podcast of Li-Young Li reading two poems and being interviewed by the NPR guy, who has a good sense of humor in spite of working for NPR.  This particular podcast raises the question of how love and speaking about love has changed in an age of scepticism . . . how the metaphors are now cliches, rather than apt expressions of the tangible.   Li- Young Li’s second poem about his childhood was lovely and I wish I could share it with you  . . . oh, yeah, I can via my blogspace.

http://www.google.com/reader/view/?tab=my#stream/feed%2Fhttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.npr.org%2Frss%2Fpodcast.php%3Fid%3D510219