What Makes a Great Online Teacher?

What Makes a Great Online Teacher?

1. Resourceful: Finding and curating academic e-resources: a fluid curriculum that is ever adaptive using Open Internet Resources and aligning them with  CCCS

2.Creative: adapting content to new media of delivery: not just content delivery – we want to be dynamic and exciting: cultivate digital literacy/21st Century skills, publishing opportunities, portfolios, Web 2 and 3 tools

3.Dynamic: engaging students in what could be an impersonal environment: giving over the online space to student led research projects and presentations, so that online spaces become maker spaces

4. Warm and supportive: connecting with students who are spatially remote but may also be socially remote

5. Effective classroom management in an e-environment

6. Willing to share best practices with colleagues: learning from each other

For a more in-depth study of what makes a great online teacher read my article: What Makes a Great Online Teacher?

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3 Ways to Model Academic Discourse for High School Students

1. Have students compare/contrast popular journal articles with scholarly articles. Have students list their observations.  Great databases to use for popular journals: Newsela and Proquest.  Great databases for scholarly articles: Jstor and Google Scholar. Students will usually note (among the possibilities): a Works Cited page in scholarly articles (although sources will be cited informally in popular journal articles, students will not see formal citations with bibliography in popular journal articles); jargon is more specialized in scholarly articles; subjective point of view/thesis may be implied or explicitly stated in a scholarly article and it serves as organizing principle, shaping the article into an academic argument.
2. Have students write an essay modeled on a scholarly essay in the discipline framework based on the subject you are teaching. Scholars of English literature and scholars of biology use different academic citation styles and there are different conventions in constructing scholarly essays in the various subject disciplines: Humanities/Social Sciences/Sciences.  Have students explore Jstor database and read several essays in the discipline before assigning the mimesis essay.
3. Have students present a scholarly article (accessed via a database or anthology of published scholarly essays) to the class — see my NCTE Lesson Plan http://www.readwritethink.org/classroom-resources/lesson-plans/modeling-academic-writing-through-1133.html on this for details. Essentially, to give you the condensed version here, students should identify thesis (explicitly stated or implied); discuss rhetorical strategies used by scholar (comparison/contrast, description, synthesis, narration, process analysis, analysis, cause and effect,…); determine if scholar balanced claim and evidence and if scholar fully developed claims with evidence; consider transitions among ideas; determine whether thesis is restated or a final thought is offered or both.

10 Poetry Prompts: paint a summer canvas with words

10 Poetry Prompts: paint a summer canvas with words.

10 Poetry Prompts: paint an autumn canvas with words

1. Paint a portrait with poetry. Capture a person in formal setting (static image surrounded by symbols of person) or informal setting doing a mundane task (movement) or doing something they love or something obligatory.
2. Write a poem with dark/light motif capturing an autumn dawn or twilight.
3. Write a poem in which auditory and tactile images of autumn (cacophony of morning bird songs and like sticky ice cream fingers)  are the predominant images.
4. Write a mimesis poem using Dickinson’s “I dreaded that first, Robin, so.”
5. Write a dramatic poem drawing on fairytale, myth, or legend characterization and don the mask of that character.
6. Write a blackout art poem working from a postcard: vintage or new
7. Write an original poem about water and light in nature and then cull images for a second poem, a haiku, from the initial poem.
8. Select 5 paintings from among Monet Water Lilies and write a haiku collage (5 haiku) — placement on the page and juxtaposing haiku are part of the process.
9. Write a collaborative poem with one other student, alternating voices by culling from one original poem that is wholly complete.
10. Write a poem that explores motion in people or objects.  See Cartier Bresson photo of man on bicycle.

Pinterest: Create a Textbook by Anthologizing

Teacher as Curator:

1. Anthologizing Supplemental Reading Assignments: Supplemental reading assignments for your course could be pinned on a board that is organized around a subject or theme.   I have culled a selection of non-fiction articles for my students to read and reflect on. One assignment is includes coupling a nonfiction article with this prompt: Write an essay in which you identify the thesis of the article, which considers author’s point of view and engage in dialogue with the author by responding to the central claim in some way. Base your evidence on the content included in the article, your own experiences and other articles and books you may have read on this topic.  I make this anthology available to my students via Pinterest.

Here is my English 4C Collection of Supplemental Non-fiction Articles:

https://www.pinterest.com/judeobsc17/non-fiction-articles-for-my-english-classes/

Student as Curator: We all know that is significantly more consequential to put tech into the hands of our students. Oftentimes, teachers use these tools in lecture style delivery of content. Here are two ways to put a curation tool into the students’ hands:

2. For research papers, I now require students to provide an e-bibliography via Pinterest board as well as a conventional MLA style bibliography page. This e-bibliography has values beyond merely culling sources as there is an aesthetic dimension to it as well. Students pin their external sources to the board. It allows me to evaluate their discriminating among sources of information for their research papers and to check for source of language and source of information plagiarism — for definitions of these types of plagiarism, see my book, Preventing Plagiarism: tips and Techniques, NCTE, 2007   https://secure.ncte.org/store/preventing-plagiarism

3. For Project-Based Learning where students collaborate and need to share sources of information on content within a group, I ask each group to create a shared annotated bibliography for the project. This helps with discriminating among sources (specifically via annotations on the Pinterest board) and with making materials accessible to all group members in one place.

Here is a collaborative Pinterest anthology on Kafka’s The Trial:

https://www.pinterest.com/julianorman2/the-trial/

Painting in Poetry: Prompts for 11th and 12th Graders

• Paint a portrait with poetry. Capture a person in formal setting (static image surrounded by symbols of person) or informal setting doing a mundane task (movement) or doing something they love or something obligatory.
• Write a Cento poem by collecting and juxtaposing lines written by other poets (from poetry journal or class anthology (collection of original poems written by students).
• Write a Cento poem and then write a blackout art poem using the Cento poem as a center of origin.
• Write a poem with dark/light motif.
• Write a poem in which auditory and tactile imagery are the predominant images.
• Write an extended metaphor poem of season — primarily in tactile and olfactory imagery
• Take up a poetry journal, turn to a page with the digit 5 in it ,and select 5 words to integrate into a poem.
• Write a dramatic lyric or narrative poem grounded in a childhood memory.
• Write a dramatic poem drawing on fairytale, myth, or legend characterization and don the mask of that character.
• Select a line from a class anthology poem and begin an original poem.
• Write a blackout art poem working from a page in a popular journal.
• Write an original poem about water and light in nature and then cull images for a second poem, a haiku, from the initial poem.
• Select 5 paintings from among Monet Water Lilies and write a haiku collage (5 haiku) — placement on the page and juxtaposing haiku are part of the process.
• Write a collaborative poem with one other student, alternating voices by culling from one original poem that is wholly complete.
• Cull a fragment of a recorded dream from your sourcebook and write a poem
• Cull from your sourcebook and write a poem.
• Use your curated objects on your Pinterest board (e-sourcebook) for a source that inspires a poem.
• Write a poem that explores motion in people or objects.  See Cartier Bresson photo of man on bicycle.
• Write an ode to a beloved person.
• Write a mimesis poem using Dickinson’s “I dreaded that first, Robin, so.”
• Write a dramatic poem exclusively in dialogue.
•  Imagine a night without day in auditory and tactile and olfactory imagery
•  Explore the theme of joy in solitude — think Thoreau.
•  Write a blackout poem from one page of Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher”
•  Picture an object from your bedside table or dresser and have that be an anchor image in a poem.
•  Select a favorite poem and write a mimesis poem.
•  Select a favorite poem and delete every other line: you fill in the missing lines.
•  Integrate alliteration and assonance into a poem about experiencing sunset in the woods or in the streets of a city
•  Create a haiku collage by scavenging among some of your other poems.

What I learned about mentorship and personalized learning in Higher Ed from a West Milford HS alumnus on Alumni Day

What I learned about mentorship and personalized learning in Higher Ed from a West Milford HS alumnus on Alumni Day.