Teaching, reading, good habits, and more
Posts about this site, my other sites, technical issues, etc.
Having had my fill of Facebook’s vile business practices, I have decided to leave it behind and to use this blog instead.
Readers are welcome to submit comments. The first comment will be held until I approve it, but after that your comments will appear immediately.
And just for the record: the only data I will have from commenters is their email addresses, and I will never share those with anyone, for any reason. If at any time you would like your comments deleted, just ask.
Eric
Most of my WordPress blogs have been hacked by the worm that is running wild through even slightly out-of-date WP installations, so if weird things are happening when you try to read or click on links, please accept my apologies. I’m working on it!
I’ve just upgraded the site to WordPress 2.5 and hope to resume blogging more frequently later this month. In the meantime, if you notice something that doesn’t work, please let me know!
A flood of spam has forced me to turn off comments. If you would like to comment, please send me an email message (see ‘Contact Me’ in the left-hand sidebar under ‘My Stuff’).
I’ve now posted pages for each of the classes I’m teaching this year: English 7 B Advanced, English 7 A, English 9 B Advanced, Gr. 11 English A1 HL, and Gr. 11 Theory of Knowledge (TOK).
You can find links to each of them in the band at the top of this page, and in the sidebar at the left under ‘My Stuff’ (the English A1 link is only in the sidebar). I will continue to add information and links as needed to each of these pages.
If you are a parent or student and have trouble locating something or finding answers to your questions, please drop me an email or a comment.
Thanks to Anne Davis, I have now installed the AnswerTips javascript on this site and my three class blogs. Now you can double-click on any word on the site, and a pop-up window will give you information about that word. Sometimes the match is not quite right, in which case another click takes you the the Answers.com web site, where you can find the term you’re looking for.
I’m hoping my students will find this useful. We will see.
LearnerBlogs.org (where my class blogs are hosted) offers a fairly large number of themes as options for your blog, but their selection is just a small fraction of the total number available for bloggers who host their blogs on their own servers.
The problem with the LearnerBlogs themes, however, is not their number. The problem is that many of them lack features that are essential for blogging with a group of students.
Here’s my first-draft list of essential features:
It would be good to construct a list of LearnerBlogs themes that meet these requirements. As it is now, you can spend a lot of time trying out pretty designs that don’t function the way they need to.
How about you? What’s on your list of essentials?
The SSIS English Wiki is an experiment in cooperative learning. I’ve invited my English 8 students to join the wiki, and starting Monday they will be adding to the Poetry page based on what they have learned so far this year about poetry. They will be able to add content and edit, expand, or revise content added by others.
I’ve added a link to the wiki in the left-hand column (under “My Stuff”) to make it easy for you to check it from time to time. You can also subscribe to the wiki and receive notification every time someone adds material to it. Click ‘Notify Me’ (upper right) and follow the instructions. For email notification you will need a wikispaces username, but anyone can subscribe via RSS.
Classes start in six days, so you can expect my activity on this blog to slow down as my activity at school speeds up. This would be a great time to subscribe, either by email or via RSS, so that new postings come to you without you having to look for them. Cheers!
When you bookmark a web page, you save its location for yourself. When you ‘social bookmark’ a web page, you save its location for yourself and, if you wish, everyone else. Social bookmarks are saved on sites like Digg, Technorati, del.icio.us, and Rojo. People who view such sites can then check the pages you’ve bookmarked, and you can see the ones they’ve bookmarked. Result? The best—or goofiest—pages on the internet are seen by more people. Continue reading “Social Bookmarks”
Anyone may post a comment on this blog, and I certainly hope you will contribute questions and add your ideas. You do have to register, but this is very easy, and I will never share your email address with anyone. When you post a comment, it won’t appear immediately. This gives me time to preview comments and delete spam or anything else that might be inappropriate. Please join the conversation!
UPDATE: The link for posting a comment should say “Post a comment” but in some cases it may say “No comments” if no comments have been posted yet. Once a comment has been posted, it will say, for example, “2 comments”. I’m trying to eliminate the “No comments” link, which is not very intuitive.
RSS is a much better way to organize your internet browsing. I’ve posted an introduction that will get you started and I urge everybody to try it out. And if you do, please subscribe to this site!
Thanks to John Godley of Urban Giraffe I have a new WordPress theme with more functionality (including comments!). I’ll be testing it out in the next few days. If you find something that doesn’t work, please drop me an email (link at the left)—or post a comment.
Well, I didn’t like any of the alternatives, so I’m back with my original theme, ‘fsimple’. If anyone can help me figure out how to make the archive links work, your help will be gratefully accepted!
I’m going to be trying a different WordPress ‘theme’, so if the site looks very different and some links don’t work, stay calm. Wish me luck.
The Good Habits, Good Students site is still not ready, but that will take a while, so I think I will go ahead and start using this new site.
If you’re here for the first time and you use an RSS reader, please subscribe, as I expect my updates to be rather infrequent—one or two per month. The RSS link is in the sidebar, near the bottom.
I have maintained a .Mac web site for several years now, but decided recently to divide my projects among several sites to make things easier for readers. I was also inspired by Jon Udell to re-imagine my homepage as a blog.
Laughing Squid is hosting, WordPress is responsible for the blog software, and I’m learning how to manage it all. I expect to update every couple of weeks or so, and encourage you to subscribe via RSS so you don’t have to remember to check the site regularly. (If you haven’t started using RSS yet, I highly recommend it.)
If you have a question or comment, drop me an email!