L. Suzanne Shanks's Blog – September 2007 Archive (9)

I’ve now begun the book study I’m doing with my two inductees; The Art and Science of Teaching by Robert

J. Marzano. The book study and attendant assignments, reflections, and journal

articles are structured to cover some important topics early in the year, like

goal-setting, instruction and assessment. However, it leaves…

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This will need to be a short post because between supervisory duties, mentoring, extracurricular sports obligations, clubs, and the like, I hardly have time to breath lately. However, I wanted to at least share that a family member who is one of my best friends took the time to write me an email about my blog. She actually read the whole thing! How wonderful to have my first reader from among my close circle. I've had some far-off readers whom I didn't know add comments; I've made new…

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I just love it when something pops into my life right when I need it. Seems I have Someone looking out for me who believes in Just-In-Time delivery.

I’m teaching my 8th Graders about primary sources next week in anticipation of doing a R.A.P. reading response on some Revolutionary War primary sources. There are some excellent sites on the web on this

topic. (You can find my links under the tags “…

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This week I attended the first District meeting of mentors and their progeny, a room full of brand new educators. It was exciting and humbling. I’ve been a mentor several times before yet every time I am

asked to do it, I feel surprised and honored. I’m looking forward to

the growth that mentoring always brings into my own practice. I hope to

share some of my experiences and reflections about the process here

with you. For now I am just enjoying the fact that my very shy…

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LOLcats according to Wikipedia. Love 'em or hate 'em? I think they're pretty funny and addicting. What do you think? Every so often you might run across a crude one or a bad word in a caption, so be careful and always browse under adult supervision! The best collection seems to be at I Can Has Cheezburger? Some say LOLcats really originated from…

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This week found me teaching blogging and internet safety. It was my first attempt to blog with kids; I'll see as I grade their posts this weekend how it really went. Maybe it was boring to introduce themselves and what they learned this

week about blogs and blogging; I'm still learning myself. My hope was that--minimum--they got some good practice writing strong paragraphs to a prompt so I can justify the activity to my Web 1.0 administrators. I don't want to keep giving… Continue

I've been experimenting for about three weeks with a microblogging tool called Twitter.You've probably already heard of it, or maybe you're even using it. What are your experiences with Twitter? Do you use a different microblogging tool? What do you think of it? I've heard great things about how educators are tweeting for much more than "What are you doing now?" -- the web site's motto. Teachers and tech professionals all over the world are sharing…

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My goals this week are to review internet safety with my older students and begin it with the younger ones. We will be posting our first blogs on Think.com, along with our "4 Slides" slide shows introducing ourselves.



I'm going to ask again why the District hasn't secured and allowed my wifi so we can actually use it! My tablet PC is itching to… Continue