Stud.icio.us
Through someone on my del.icio.us network, I discovered stud.icio.us. It is a college level (although it doesn't have to be) notes collection social networking thing. It will be interesting to see where this goes. It does cool things like easily links to wikipedia and google and facebook. I don't know if it would have been that useful to me, though, because typing out notes or taking notes WAS how I studied them. The act of getting it out on paper was enough usually that I didn't spend that much time reading over it. They have a blog too (blog.dicio.us) which hasn't been updated in 41 days. (Why did they have to take a cool name like blog.dicio.us?)

Labels: education, social networking

- posted by Alicia @ 4:12 PM |

 
End of year teaching and reflections on my love of research
We have 10 weeks of school left, counting this week and the last week of school. The last week will be finals. This week is already almost half over. Then one week will have a math taks test. One week has a holiday for Good Friday. One week has the freshman picnic. So that's like 6 weeks?

I am loving the end of the year. I am going to miss my student so so much. But I am finally at the point of the year where everything else is nothing new. No firsts. I have read everything that we will be doing for the rest of the year, so I don't have to feel anxious about barely keeping one step ahead of the students. And I love research.

Research (and my 11th grade research paper process) is one of the reasons that I majored in English (not literature, not creative writing, but the technical writing track) and certainly one of the reasons I love libraries. I love finding other people's words and putting them together. Seeing how they mesh. I love looking up articles and seeing where I can fit what. I love looking for a specific fact and finding something that will work perfectly.

I love the MLA handbook and I love that every question has an answer. Oh how I love rules. English rules!

I love my paper. It is excellent and I got a 93. I love the binder it sits in. I love the weight of the papers behind it and the dividers that organize everything. It is really a shame that my research paper was on breastfeeding. We chose our own topics --basically anything. My teacher thought it was funny that we had both breastfeeding and Hugh Hefner as topics in our class. And as weird as it might seem to choose that as a topic as a 17 year old, it made a great paper. Scientific fact plus controversy. But quite awkward to share that with my students today.
- posted by Alicia @ 8:42 PM |

 
Delicious and Teaching
A few weeks ago we had a professional development day at school where we went to three sessions. I learned to make a jeopardy powerpoint game (super useful), created a video with windows movie maker (fun but possibly not that useful) and learned more about podcasting. The podcasting one was rather frustrating because of the restrictions that the district I am in puts on using the internet and technology. One thing that I found so interesting in the session was that the teacher showed us the her del.icio.us links that she has collected. She introduced the idea to other teachers and it was awesome. I told her about the tutorial that I made for my master's thesis. I felt a certain propriety over the whole issue of del.icio.us in my human world (as opposed to the virtual internet world, where I see the blogs, feeds, and links of "famous" people whom I have never met). It was different being TAUGHT by someone who knew less in an area than I.

Tonight I was organizing my del.icio.us links. (I am really into organizing these days. The files. The desk drawers. The spice cabinet. Now onto less tangible items) I really like the new tag description idea. Although I don't know if anyone cares what some of my acronyms stand for, it makes me feel better to explain what OMAM, OAMC, and TKAM stand for. After writing my English acronyms on the board over and over again, the acronym looks more familiar to me than the actual title. But it is not that way for everyone.
- posted by Alicia @ 8:29 PM |

 
Spring Break
A time to organize the closet in color order. Ah I love Spring Break. Actually this is my old closet and mine now is perhaps to large to organize in this fashion. But oh how happy it makes me.

Other Spring Break Activities -

Random Errands, Mailing 403b information, Preliminary buying a house activities, planning the Romeo and Juliet unit for 7th period, grading papers, spending time with my grandparents, getting a manicure, organizing closets and cabinets, laundry, laundry, laundry, buying a plane ticket to Europe (destination tbd).
- posted by Alicia @ 12:56 PM |