Monday, September 10, 2007

A Drop in The Pond


Introductions are terrible things. One tries so desperately to make them provacative, or epic, or at least funny, and most of the time, all One succeeds in producing is a few wilted, awkward sentences, more evocative of past-its-due-date cabbage than anything else.

So, I've decided to keep this short and simple, so you can spend more time on the important stuff, and less time fumbling through rotten vegetables.

I'm a 20 year old student in Education who aspires to be both a teacher and a writer, with a penchant for the written word and British Television (because I find it witty.). My major, which I think you've probably guess by now, is English Language Arts. I'm an active environmentalist, and an advocate of social justice. I also love movies and Yoga. Never being much of a journaller, it may be considered odd that I have been an active blogger for a while, with blogs dedicated to a variety of things, Yoga, Enviromentalism, reviewing movies and books, and even blogs showcasing some of my own pieces of writing.

I thing Blogs are great teaching and learning tools, especially in the English classroom, where creativity and imagination are so highly esteemed. Blogs, when discussed and outlined properly in class, provide for students with a healthy source of anonymity, which tends to breed less inhibitions when writing. It can also foster the production of higher-quality work, since One has the ability to showcase pieces to the entire population of the World-Wide Web. On the same vein, it opens up the possibility for class-wide critique, which can be a great sounding board, but which, when used negatively, or when not properly regulated, can be as much a disadvantage as an advantage.

Blogs can also be used in the english classroom for students as a means of communicating the reflective and subjective aspects of the class, subject, or material itself. It can be a non-threatening way to raise questions and broach certain topics that One is uncomfortable speaking about in class, as well as documenting One's personal journey through a text or class itself. Blogs can be a useful tool for enabling both teacher and student understanding.
Integration itself, I think is the key to making blogs a successful technological tool. Like Yoga, it can be tiring, hard, or incomprehensible at the start, but the more you use it, the simpler it gets. The farther you stretch it, the more flexible it becomes, and the more helpful, until it's just another tool in One's teaching repetoire.






"Never regard study as a duty, but as the enviable opportunity to learn to
know the liberating influence of beauty in the realm of the spirit for your own
personal joy and to the profit of the community to which your later work
belongs
." -Albert Einstein

3 comments:

Steph said...

Wow!!! Not hard to tell your an English major! Very well written. I enjoy the continuity of your blog , it flows really well. The format and images you have chosen made it a very interesting visit.
See you in class...

Steph said...

yikes!!! that is a ton of work... well done. it is very concise and more than explans your sources. your references are very detailed.

Unknown said...

Nice work!