In Closing

Although I know that the class is officially over, and that no one is likely to read this, I wanted to note that I've found this blog very interesting and useful. I might continue to use this blog, though I'm not sure what for yet. In the meantime, I've started another blog with this same account, which I plan to utilize to talk mainly about literature. This can perhaps be a place for me to gather my thoughts before instruction; or, it can be a place where my students can subscribe to read class notes, upcoming notifications, etc.

Here's my other blog: trytristram

Google Earth

I tried to make a tour using Google Earth, but it kept crashing. What I intended was to make a tour where the first two items were the Tabard Inn and Canterbury Cathedral, providing the starting and endpoint of the pilgrimage in the Canterbury Tales. The next place was going to be the supposed location Pearl Poet, then the Globe theater, and finally Westminster Abbey. As you can see, it would be a sort of geographical tour of major locations for English poetry. I would use this to acclimate students to these physical locations, so to help develop schema for the places we would be talking about in class.

Elumintate

I've decided that I will use elluminate in my classroom, and here's what for:

I know that about 110% of students are put off by vocabulary and have a hard time memorizing it for some reason. About 20% of this don't have too much trouble, actually, so the real result is about 90%. But bear with me:

Instead of simply having my students memorize vocabulary on their own, or else hammering it into their brains with multiple drills, I would use Elluminate to implement a pre-vocab activity.

I would either find or create images which represent each of the vocabulary words. For nouns this is obviously easier. For verbs and adjectives, the images would either show the action of the verb or the description of the adjective. Students would then interact with the images to think out the meanings of each one. Their ultimate task would be to come up with a few possible definitions for each image. We could then move into the vocabulary to collectively determine if the definitions they've chosen appropriately fit the word.

Thoughts on Glogster

Glogster seems like a neat way to implement a project with which students must interact. What I like most about it is the collage-like aspect of it which makes it possible for students to present information or images in a non-linear way; this allows for differentiation. What i don't like about is the limited space within which a student is confined to work.

As I mentioned, I like the collage-like aspect that glogster has to offer. Because of this, I would probably use this to implement a project in which students have to present information they've researched, or artwork they've created, in a collage-like format.