Keenan+Cooper

Keenan Cooper (Sophomore)
My major is Secondary Education with a focus on Language Arts.

1. Facilitate and Inspire Student Learning and Creativity
An interesting idea to cater to this standard would be to use social networking or wiki pages to have students collaborate with others around the country while reading the same piece of literature. I believe this would facilitate and inspire student learning by allowing them access to new perspectives with which to analyze literature. In order to inspire creativity, I think they could use a similar idea: write responses to questions and problems of literature in tandem with their online friends. For example: Have one person freely write a response to a question by the teacher. Have another student read this, edit it, and create a new response. I think providing new perspective to students is an excellent way to provide them the tools to be creative.

ning Experiences and Assessments
I believe contributing to a mindmap (one of the brainstorming tools we discussed) is a good way to have students use technology to organize thoughts and gain perspective. High school students are always looking for answers to the question "Why are we learning this?" Having students use brainstorming technology and collaborate with their peers (and hopefully even adults) may help them add value to their literary experiences by providing other opinions and possibly even posing socially relevant questions.

3. Model Digital-Age Work and Learning
It is the responsibility of the teacher to be knowledgeable on not only the technology used in the classroom, but also the technology being used by children at home. While I don't believe it is necessary to tap into all the technological resources children use (I find this invasive. I also believe that children do not have enough privacy today), it is important to understand how and why they use certain technological resources as it may be possible to model their work and learning around certain resources already available. Say you found out that students were using a new social networking site with some crazy new feature, like the ability map all of their friendships. Realizing that these students find this information useful, you could mimic their lives in their education process by using collective brainstorming. For example, you could have students create a facebook group with all the characters of a piece of literature. Each student (or a group of students) would be responsible for a character, and the collective class would have to recreate portions of the literature.

4. Promote and Model Digital Citizenship and Responsibility
This standard could be very difficult or very easy based on what types of literature your curriculum requires you to teach. For example: Great Expectations doesn't exactly tackle any major current social issues. However, I believe that with the right teaching material (current, relevant books), social issues and citizenship could be framed in a very useful way using technology. I believe that some of the people students look up to the most are only a few years older than them. I think it would behoove high school students to be corresponding with students in college in order to help them get a glimpse of the real world (or if not the real world, at a glimpse of what their educational superiors believe to be the real world). I believe technology can be very useful in teaching language arts because it has the power to grant students something they need from educational experiences: Perspective and Relevance.

Koffi and Keenan:

Good Lesson Plan:http://edsitement.neh.gov/view_lesson_plan.asp?id=407 Bad Lesson Plan: [] Lesson plan Rubric:

5 Organization Templates for Teachers
Award Certificates: You can use these templates to create awards to reward students for improvements or generally good work. Quizzes and Tests: Pretty self-explanatory - use these templates when organizing assessment materials for students. Planners: You can use these planners in order to organize your material and schedule to maximize the use of your time. Diagrams: Use diagram templates to provide visual aids to students during lectures. Outlines: One could use outlines to collaborate with students in order to organize class material in a way that makes sense to them.

Here is my seating chart:

I have designed the following Google custom search engine in order to allow potential students to search for games and lessons to increase their language and vocabulary skills: [|Language Search Engine!]

For week 7, I created a movie using xtranormal.com that I will use to demonstrate the use of heteronyms during my lesson plan. Here is the link:

[|Heteronyms!]



Easy test maker:


 * Two different definitions are separated by a semi-colon on the right. Match the word with the definitions for each of its pronunciations. ||
 * || 1) ||  || minute ||
 * 2) ||  || combine ||
 * 3) ||  || close ||
 * 4) ||  || bass ||
 * 5) ||  || invalid ||
 * 6) ||  || contest ||
 * 7) ||  || attribute ||
 * 8) ||  || lead ||
 * 9) ||  || buffet ||   ||   || a. || a struggle for superiority; to make the subject of dispute ||
 * b. || an inherent characteristic; to ascribe ||
 * c. || a harvesting machine; to become one, unite ||
 * d. || 60th part of an hour; very, very small ||
 * e. || being near in time or space; to shut ||
 * f. || one who is sickly; without foundation in fact or truth ||
 * g. || a stringed musical instrument; a type of fish ||
 * h. || a meal laid such that guests may serve themselves; to strike or push repeatedly ||
 * i. || a heavy, malleable metal; to guide by going in advance ||  ||

Rubric and Lesson Plan

Lesson Plan -

[|Vocabularious Rubric]



Here is my lesson reflection: