Another lesson plan

Finished a lesson plan that I began Friday night. Cooking Up Descriptive Language: Designing Restaurant Menus is now published on ReadWriteThink. I have several other lesson ideas, but can’t seem to focus on any of them. Tomorrow will be a full day—content report is due and an Ideas section for Inbox.

Finished a book review for Feed, a young adult science-fiction novel that explores the feed, a technology that is implanted in children’s heads, affects the various characters and the greater society.

Tags: English language arts | K12 instruction | lesson plan | ReadWriteThink

Blogopoly & Other Bad Technology Metaphors

Friends from #blogshares shared the link for blogpoly. We’re all a little confused about the groupings there, but it’s interesting nonetheless. Blog research folks might want to look at what’s represented and what’s not, and etc.

I took the cute little Saturn to the garage today and had its oil changed. It’s all happy now. Also changed Stanley’s water and then watered the pouty purple plant.

While I was waiting for the oil change, I finished reading Click Here, but haven’t had a chance to write up a review yet. I did type up a list of the world’s worst technology metaphors. I can’t believe that no one cut those from that book!

Comparatively speaking though, the book’s stock rose when I picked up my next technology read: The E-Mail Mystery: Nancy Drew Digest #144.
Oh. my. goodness. I had such pleasant memories of Nancy Drew from childhood. I read every Nancy Drew mystery I could get my hands on. I sat down to begin this Nancy Drew-meets-technology novel, and was ready to put it down on page one. I’ve never seen so much tedious exposition. The technology in the book is fairly predictable. We hear of floppy disks, dialup modems, and booting up. And of course, there is e-mail, given the books title. I may give up on this one. I’ll give it a bit more time to grow on me, and then I may put Nancy Drew back on the nostalgic shelves.

Tags: blogshares |
young adult literature

Wily cheaters exploit popular gadgets

xposted to Kairosnews

From ASCD SmartBrief:
Wily cheaters exploit popular gadgets

“As cheaper cell phones, cameras and other gadgets become more widespread with students, some fear that “technocheating” could grow. Districts are taking steps to thwart clever students, who ingeniously replace the ingredient labels of candy wrappers with tiny scanned crib sheets or load low-cost USB flash drives with hundreds of megabytes of notes.” The Kansas City Star (Mo.) (free registration)

Tags: cheating |
plagiarism |
technology

photoblogging :)

The last couple of days have been littered with whatnot that needed done. Fixing little booboos and such. I had my meeting with the Senior Editor about my proposal. Now I guess I’m supposed to be writing a manuscript or something.

Last night I realized that I could use go@blogger.com to post with my cell phone while I’m up at Michigan Tech next month. I’m not going to write entries obviously, but I am imagining a bit of photo publishing.

A few more books arrived, but I’m still reading Click Here. Can’t wait to write up the review, or more accurately the list of quotations, from that book. :)

Tags: photoblogging |
young adult literature

Where I’ll be in 17 days

Gift wrapping makes a great day

Today began happily with a package from LiteratiCat, which held my gift-wrapped winnings from the contest on teenliterature. An excellent way to begin the day.

I wrote my Ideas section for this week’s Inbox, this week on reflection as a part of assessment. Then I moved on to edit a new ReadWriteThink lesson plan: Questions and Answer Books–From Genre Study to Report Writing.

We also published a new Flash interactive today, the Flip Book, which helps students create those a staggered length book–page one is the shortest and page ten the longest. I can only take credit for helping with the design, but it’s taken almost a year to get it from design to reality, so I’m happy that it’s finally done. We’re planning spin-offs on the tool, interactives that use the same idea of templates and drawing tools to publish other artifacts (e.g., book covers, CD covers). Ideally, those won’t take as long.

Tomorrow I have a meeting with the Books Team about my series proposal. I hope all goes well.

Tags: English language arts |
K12 instruction |
NCTE Inbox |
ReadWriteThink |
writing assessment

Literary Parodies and more…

Finished writing and published a ReadWriteThink lesson, Literary Parodies: Exploring a Writer’s Style through Imitation.
It’s a pretty typical assignment, but I had nice links, including to the Guy Noir episode, that I wanted to put together.

Reading Click Here, which has some scary imagery and dialogue that I’ll have to type up tomorrow. I did go ahead and update my list of what I’m reading and new books that arrived. Tomorrow morning, I’ll finish writing an Inbox Ideas entry on reflection and writing assessment.

Tags: English language arts |
K12 instruction | lesson plan |
ReadWriteThink | parody |

meblogging

Just found that not only is my plan to use technorati to track different technologies in the book reivews okay—it’s even got a name: meblogging! The practice that site describes is slightly different, but it’s the same idea really, so I feel a bit less guilty about perverting technorati to fit my needs :)

Tags: meblogging |
tagging |
technorati

under review

Took time today to read the technorati documentation and begin tagging my changelog entries. I’ve finished all of May, which sounds impressive unless you realize that it’s only the 7th. Still, I think I have a system set up, and I like the idea that even if people don’t use the technorati links, the keywords will help with generic search engines.

I decided it was also time to figure out how to handle book reviews. I want to post details on the books I read, both those that have a technology connection and those that don’t. I like the idea of building a library of reviews that I can return to when I need to remember something about a book. I did a bit of research on the available tools. There’s a drupal book review module, for instance. Ultimately, I decided that just adding another plain, old blogger account was enough—and I can get underway much more quickly than would be the case if I had to learn and configure a new tool.

So I’ve added reviews @ tengrrl.com to manage the project. I think I’ve allowed for everything that I want to list, and I’ve created a basic template that automatically pops up whenever I create a new post. I decided to try using the technorati keywords for my own purposes to get things started. In addition to the basic keywords, I want to tag the technologies that are mentioned in a particular book. The goal is not only to have the info for anyone reading the review but also to help with sorting and finding (e.g., if you want to locate the books that refer to chatrooms). Until I figure out a better way, I have created custom technorati tags, which work out generally to [technology in the book] + tengrrlreview. For instance, chatrooms + tengrrlreview should get you a list of books about chatrooms that I have reviewed. There’s only one right now, so it’s not very exciting to clickthrough. I think the strategy can work for the short term. It’s not quite what technorati had in mind, I’m sure; but it’s a good compromise for now.

Tags: book reviews |
tagging |
technorati