technology
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How I Saved My Teaching Career: Step 7: Write a Blog
This is the final post in a series on how to overcome burnout and love teaching again. See the end of this post for previous entries. In the summer of 2007, my burnout reached its peak. I’d taken some steps to deal with it (and you can check out the links below to read… Continue reading
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What Have You Been Thinking About?
Whether you’re a teacher, a parent, a student, or just a citizen of the world who believes that learning is important, you may be thinking about new problems or dwelling on old fears or puzzles as the school year begins. Maybe you’d like to hear what others have to say about your burning questions or… Continue reading
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“Either You Can Be a Teacher or You Can Be the Plagiarism Police”
As the new semester creeps nearer, I’m starting to think about plagiarism again. My use of Turnitin.com, a plagiarism-detection software, is helping me relax a bit – last semester, the software made discovering plagiarism, and talking to students about it, a lot easier. However, cheating is a perennial source of anxiety for most teachers, and a… Continue reading
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Should We Bid Farewell to the Academic Paper?
Is the academic paper the best way for students to demonstrate their learning? Will learning to write papers help students develop the skills they will need later in their lives? One of my heroes, Virginia Heffernan of the New York Times (whose Sunday Magazine column, The Medium, is sorely missed) writes this week that “Education… Continue reading
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Khan Academy: What are the Possibilities?
I just today learned about Khan Academy, the online education institution whose goal is “providing a free world-class education to anyone anywhere.” In the TED talk above, the academy’s founder, Salman Khan, describes exactly how the project works. The site is home to more than 2400 educational lecture videos, mostly in the domains of math… Continue reading
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The Five Best Podcasts in the World
Because I’m an English teacher, I rarely read anything I don’t have to. During the semester, my novels collect dust on the coffee table, my Kindle lies abandoned in my schoolbag, and the weekend newspapers sit coiled uncomfortably in their rubber bands until I toss them in the recycling bin. Once my final grading is… Continue reading
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Why Teachers Need Something Better Than Microsoft Word
Onscreen grading is a revelation. I have resisted the transition from paper grading to onscreen grading for a while now. I experimented last fall with having students submit a paragraph online once in a while, but I was reluctant to use Track Changes tools, as I knew most students weren’t familiar with them, and so… Continue reading
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Ask Auntie Siobhan #4: My Students Won’t Put Their Phones Away
Today at Change.org, Auntie Siobhan addresses the question: What do I do about the scourge of cell phones in my classroom? Please come visit and leave your own advice. And if you have a question you’d like Auntie Siobhan to answer, write to me at siobhancurious@gmail.com. Continue reading
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The Uses of Boredom
I became a reader because I was bored. I learned to read when I was about four years old, but, like most children, I read only picture books until I was seven. My parents brought me to the library every two weeks, and I filled up on library books at school as well, but picture… Continue reading
About Me
My job is to teach people to read and write; aside from that, I like to learn things.