Here is the conversation I started.  I never expected to get so many responses in return.  Within the next day I had received almost fifty email notifications telling me that people were commenting on my discussion.  A lot of the people who responded kind of took my topic and went off on tangents about the meaning of multiculturalism and racism in general.  It was difficult to keep up with what everyone had to say, but I found a lot of the teachers’ responses very helpful.  They gave me examples of the novels they teach in their classes, such as Things Fall Apart, and A Raisin in the Sun.  Overall, the responses helped me brainstorm new ideas for my paper, but more importantly the process made me more confident on using the ECN in the future.

These last few weeks of school are really busy…but the end is in sight!

First of all, I have to say that I have appreciated the experience of creating this blog.  I enjoy hitting the ‘publish’ button and then seeing my finished post appear on my page.  It’s nice to have a place where I can write whatever I want, with no length requirements or headings at the top of each entry.  That format of writing gets old really quickly, and I value the freedom in blogs. 

That being said, this blog is something that is a lot more time consuming than I realized it would be.  I would love to be able to get on here and comment on all of these cool things we are doing in our LLED block classes every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, but I simply don’t have the time.  Instead, I have tried to focus on one or two main things in each of my posts.  I think that this way, I won’t feel overwhelmed when I sit down to write an entry.  I can clearly state what I want to say without going off on tangents, which would be easy to do.

I think that the quality of my blog is pretty decent.  I have written about some things that have come up in our LLED classes that concern me as a future educator as well as a lot of stuff about the technology that we’ve been using this semester.  Even if my posts haven’t generated tons of comments and conversation, they are still meaningful to me.  Because after I wrote some things down here, I felt like I had a better understanding of their significance.  So maybe I’m still figuring out what the primary purpose of blogging is; to influence the readers of your blog, or to work things out for yourself?

I’ve been fairly consistent with keeping up with my blog.  There might be a few large gaps in between posts, but usually that is due to a break in school or maybe one week where I took off and didn’t post anything.  But for the most part, I have blogged about once a week, and each of my blog entries is about the same in length and the amount of time I put into it.  I usually work on this blog while I’m at work in the computer labs, like I am right now.  So I work on it on and off the the 2 hours that I’m here, trying to finish it up before my shift ends.

So, I just took a look at my stats page for probably the first time since I started using my blog.  I wasn’t too surprised by anything on there, all of the numbers seemed accurate to what I would have predicted.

After looking over my stats, I think that the thing I want to improve upon the most is commenting on other people’s blogs.  I’m not sure how much there is I can do to get people to look at my blog and make that 129 number go up, and honestly it’s not that important to me.  I would rather spend my time going to my classmates’ blogs and conversing with them about things I find interesting.  With a little more effort in the commenting area, I think that the blog portion of my PLN will be successful.

I’ve spent a decent amount of time working on my group’s Reading Wiki in the last couple days, and it’s cool to see it coming along so well.  I haven’t had a chance to look at the other groups’ wikis, so I’m not sure how ours compares, but it’s definitely come a long way from where we started.  We ended up splitting up the initial questions that we created in class and took it upon ourselves to find the best answers be could using the resources that we had.  I researched a variety of questions we had about roadblocks to teaching, including how do you teach someone how to read, how do you teach reading to struggling students, and how do you teach things like poetry and Shakespeare?  I found quickly that as soon as I started to uncover the ‘answer’ to one of these questions, plenty more questions came up.  I spent about 90% of the time on this project just going from one website to another, reading about different teaching strategies and ideas.  It didn’t make for a very long or comprehensive wiki page by any means, because there is such an overload of information out there that it’s difficult to decide what it most important to mention.  I think I learned a lot more about navigating all of the overwhelming information online to get to the really good stuff than I learned about working with wikispaces or even about any of the topics that I focused on.  I did uncover a lot of great resources for English teachers that I wouldn’t have known about otherwise. I could see myself using the wiki concept sometime in my classroom as a way to organize thoughts for group projects.

There were other aspects of the PLN that, like I said, I haven’t touched at all.  I opened a Twitter account and I’ve never tweeted.  I linked my twitter and this blog to my LinkedIn Account, which I guess can some in handy for networking.  But one of my main concerns is that all of my personal information is spread out across so many different websites that I can’t even keep track of it.  Personally, I’d rather have nothing come up when someone googles my name.  It seems to unnecessary to have all of these different usernames and passwords for things, and it makes me uncomfortable knowing that even just my name and school and major is listed out there in random places that I can’t even remember.

One thing I am definitely glad I’ve learned about it Nings.  I couldn’t have told you what a ning was before this semester, but the English Companion Ning is such a great resource, and I’ll definitely take advantage of it when I start teaching.  It’s like PICCLE, but on a worldwide scale. Very cool.

Back home to see my family near Pittsburgh this weekend for Easter

Oh, and it’s rainy today. So this seemed appropriate…

All right, so first of all, I had the amazing oppotunity to travel to Jamaica over spring break for a service trip.  I could go on and on about the things I saw and learned while I was down there, but I’ll spare all the details for the sake of relevancy and space.  Although most days I was outside in the beautiful weather helping to lay a foundation for a house, build a house, or work on a greenhouse project, one morning I had the chance to visit the local primary school.  I was really excited to see the ways that school was similar or different from American schools.  Just to give a little background information, we were in a small village of about 2,500 people in the south central part of the island called Harmons.  So this was worlds away from a large city or resort town in Jamaica, and it was really cool to see how the Jamaicans really live.  The school that I visited was a one-room building down at the bottom of this steep hill (everything in Harmons is a steep hill; it literally sits in a valley of huge mountains).  When we got there, we stood quietly off to the side while the students did their morning devotions.  They were all lined up outside the school singing, praying, and listening to their teachers lead them in their morning prayers.  All of the students wore a brown uniform adorned with buttons and badges for different things.  It was interesting to see how religion is incorporated into the school system there; the students said the Lord’s Prayer, followed by the teachers saying, “Good morning, students,” to which they responded, “Good morning teachers,” and finally a collective, “Good morning friends.”  It was really very touching, and made me think about my own elementary school experience when we would get yelled at for breathing too loudly during the pledge of allegiance and subsequent moment of silence.  The Jamaican students were supposed to be quiet during their devotion time, but ninety percent of them were fidgeting and whispering to their neighbors, like kids will often do.  It was a much more relaxed atmosphere.  Once the school day had started, the kids were up and out of their seats more oftent than not.  If they had a worksheet to do, they were carrying it around the classroom with them asking their neighbors, and mostly us volunteers for help.  The students overall were just very social and excited to be there at school.  There were no doors on the classrooms, so if you leaned down behind the teacher’s desk you could see all the way down the school into the other classes.  The walls didn’t reach all the way to the ceiling, and the noise level was outrageous.  While I was sorting books in the library (which was really just a tiny room with a lot of dusty donated books in it) I could hear every single teacher screaming at the top of their lungs just to be heard over all of the noise.  At one point, a student came into the library to talk to me and I asked him what he was doing today in class.  He said they were taking a test, but didn’t seem too concerned about staying in the actual classroom to finish it.  The supplies are very low and some students don’t even have a pencil to write with.  But despite all of the distractions and shortcomings, the students were very happy and seemed like they really were learning.  All of the subject matter I observed being taught was age-appropriate, and I couldn’t even answer some of the questions on the fourth graders’ riddle worksheet.  So the school was extremely different than anything I am used to, but I loved the energy of the students and teachers.  I think that learning about foreign education systems is really cool.  You can actually sponsor students in Jamaica to go to school, because many of them can’t afford it, through the ministry I was involved in, Won by One.

Okay, so other than getting back to State College at 6am on Monday and then having class all day long, the trip was amazing and I’d recommend it to anyone.  In relation to the PLN, I’ve been utilizing certain aspects of it much more than others.  I still get email notifications from the English Companion Ning and I enjoy reading them and catching up on recent topics.  I still need to update our reading wiki, which I plan on getting to later today.  Even though we set up a wiki to organize our plans for the Tuesdays with Morrie lesson my group did last Friday, I’m not sure any of us used it after our first group meeting.  It is just so much easier to use a facebook message or gmail to get the same thing done.  I can see where using a wiki would be helpful for working on a document over a long period of time, but when it comes down to just communicating simple plans to a group of people, it isn’t convenient at all. 

I know iMovie isn’t technically part of the PLN, but it is a tool we’ve been using a lot in our LLED block this semester.  I’ve spent a lot of time working with it recently and I think I’ll feel very comfortable putting together the short iMovie I am responsible for in my group’s LLED480 workshop on Monday.  I finally finished the iMovie I made of THON pictures, and it kind of turned out to be a bigger pain than I realized when I learned that youtube does not accept movies any longer than 10 minutes.  Who knew?  So of course my movie was somewhere around 14 minutes and I had to go back and delete a bunch of stuff to get it down to 10 minutes.  Annoying, but useful information for future reference. Anyway, here is the finished product.

And that’s all for now

I have learned by far the most about using iMovie by just playing around with it on my own.  My friends started a new independent organization this year to raise money for the Penn State Dance Marathon, and I’ve been compiling all of our pictures into an iMovie.  I’m getting close to being done with it, and I will be sure to post a link to it on here when I am.  Partly because I was much more interested in this voluntary ‘project’ than anything I’ve made for class so far, and also because I had a lot of material to work with, I learned a lot about iMovie and my project is already about 13 minutes long.  So I’ve seen the ways that iMovie can help turn ideas into a really cool final product, but I think it would take a lot of time to get students familiar enough with it to really use it efficiently.

We’ve also been adding on to our wikispaces that we set up in LLED420.  I put a couple hours’ work into it the other night, although it doesn’t necessarily look like I added all that much.  Most of my time was spent looking up information and judging what would be the most helpful to share with the class.  The question I was focusing on was how to teach someone how to read.  I figured it would be a good place to start, and it also seems important that as English teachers, we know how to do this.  No one ever teaches us how to teach people how to read, which kind of surprises me.  Obviously we will be teaching secondary level students, but we will still encounter a lot of struggling readers who will need help with the basics before they can tackle anything else.  I found a really great website devoted to this topic, readingrockets.org  that has tons of helpful information about why students struggle with reading and what parents and teachers can do to help.  I read through a lot of this website and put some of the better information into our wiki.

We’ve also created a wiki for our LLED411 teaching group, where eight of us are planning to teach a lesson about the book Tuesdays With Morrie.  Rachel was nice enough to write down all of the plans we made yesterday when we all met and put it into the wiki in case anyone wants to refer to it in the future.  Unfortunately, we don’t usually check our wikis on a regular basis.  We do a lot better with communicating through email or through a facebook inbox.  It gets a little confusing having our communication spread out over so many different websites.  I found a good youtube clip of the Tuesdays With Morrie movie trailer that I think we’ll show to the class as part of the lesson introduction.  The date for when we teach the lesson got pushed back until after spring break, so we should have enough time to get everything organized.

Last week in LLED420 we had a spontaneous video chat with other undergraduate students in Sweden.  It was kind of awkward on our part because we had no idea what to talk to the other students about, and they all seemed pretty familiar with using this technology to communicate.  Still, I enjoyed hearing about their experiences with education in a different country.  When we asked them about what happens in Sweden when a school is performing poorly, they seemed a little confused and responded that the school would not be closed down, but rather given more money to improve performance.  Our entire class burst out laughing, which I think says a lot about how backwards the education system in the U.S. can be.  We were laughing because her answer seemed so obvious and simple, but we all know that in America the opposite would probably happen.  Poorly performing schools have funds taken away from them as a form of ‘punishment,’ only decreasing their chances of helping students to improve.  We were also all [retty shocked by the news that education is free in Sweden.  If students want to go on to University, they don’t have to pay for it.  This idea of free education is a little mind-boggling to students who pay so much for tuition.  I think that talking to the students in Sweden, even just for a few minutes, gave us all a little more insight into how different things could be if we were willing to make changes.

Okay, this is all for now. I have a ton of work to get done before I leave the country for spring break and surrender all contact with a phone or computer.

I’m still wondering how/if I can have direct links to my classmates’ blogs on one side of my page.  I think I’ve seen that it can be done, but I’m still trying to figure out how.  I’m wondering if I need a different theme that makes this possible.  I’d prefer to be able to view everyone’s updates right from my own page as opposed to checking my RSS feed.  It’s a little overwhelming and difficult to navigate at this point.

I love Calvin and Hobbes, so if you check my blog on a semi-regular basis, prepare yourself to see some of my favorite cartoon strips.

       I’ve been enjoying the use of WikiSpaces a lot, and I’m glad that we learned how to set them up and use them in this class.  Otherwise I probably wouldn’t have even known they existed.  In my teaching group for our third LLED class, we have set up a Wiki so that we can all share ideas and information about the lesson we’ll be teaching in a couple weeks.  The reason it is so helpful is because we’ve all found that trying to organize a time to meet up is nearly impossible.  We all have really crazy schedules, and in this class we have 8 people in our group.  There’s really no way that we can find a time that works for everyone.  It’s a lot easier to shoot each other facebook messages or write on the Wiki.  I’m really pretty excited about the lesson we’re preparing for this class, it’s based on the book Tuesdays With Morrie by Mitch Albom.  I read this book for the first time only a couple months ago, and I loved it.  Everyone I talked to about it said that it was really sad and depressing, but I actually found it to be a little relieving.  There are a lot of cool ideas that we’ve been throwing around about the lesson, and after meeting today we all agreed that we wish we had more time than just 40 minutes to do it because it’s going to be really interesting.  I like the idea of doing a fun one-day lesson like this, where the students don’t need to have read the entire text in order to engage.  I think it would be a great idea to teach a lesson like this in between Units as a sort of break for the students.  I would have loved to do something like this in high school.

       Speaking of new and cool ideas that I’d like to use in my classroom, my friend just sent me a link to a youtube video he thought I would enjoy because I’m an English major.  The video shows two men freestyle rapping back and forth, but the audio is deleted.  Instead, the audio playing is something recorded by a different man.  He is rewording what the rappers are saying to each other in a much more sophisticated language.  It’s actually pretty funny, and also fairly inappropriate because the rap deals with crime and sex.  But it got me thinking about how this would be a really cool assignment.  Obviously, it would work best if we could find raps that are less risque, but I like the idea of comparing that kind of language to the kind of language we read in English class.  It’s interesting to see in the video how the narrator gets the same message across as intended by the rappers, but in a much different manner.

       My other favorite part of developing this Personal Learning Network has definitely been the English Companion Ning.  I’ve been getting a few emails here and there because I’m subscribed to the Ning, and I actually enjoy reading them and seeing what other English teachers are talking about.  The most recent email was talking about a recent conference in California, and how impressed the speaker was that most of the teachers in attendance were part of the ECN.  I’m really glad that we were introduced to it and I can definitely see myself referring to it in the future.

       Okay, well that’s all for my PLN today.  I plan on revisiting this again soon.

I’m really enjoying reading M.T. Anderson’s Feed, which was assigned to us in class.  I really wouldn’t classify myself as a fan of science fiction novels, but there is something about this book that intrigues me.  Once I get past the strange language, I can appreciate the plot and characters.  I still find myself skimming over words and phrases which Anderson uses as slang in his futuristic book.  I find myself thinking past the text and more about what kind of social comment Anderson is making about society.  The world he creates seems exaggerated and crazy at first, but the more I read the more similarities I see between the book’s setting and our current world.  I’m more than halfway done with the book, and I plan on finishing it soon.  It’s an easy and quick read.

I just started exploring the idea of social bookmarking, which I find very cool.  It’s like letting everyone else do my research for me.  I opened an account with Diigo first, mostly because I knew it would take less time than Delicious.  Delicious is run through Yahoo, and I am strictly a Google girl.  This school year I have discovered the magic of Google groups and documents.  Everything is very organized and I love it.  The thought of opening another account through Yahoo makes my head hurt.  However, I did some exploring on Diigo and found that they have a tool which allows me to not only bookmark things with Diigo, but also save them to Delicious.  I guess they both can be connected.  So once I sit down and create a Yahoo account, I can update Delicious to match my Diigo.