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English 20 Final Exam 08

We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light.
Plato
(427 BC-347 BC)

We must constantly make decisions in daily life. Some decisions are simple choices (e.g., Coke or Pepsi) while others affect people’s entire lives. Furthermore, every decision has consequences and often there is not a clear alternative. Decisions involve weighing alternatives and considering the consequences. Does conforming to the beliefs and actions of the majority make a person a “good citizen”?

When you have to make a choice and don’t make it, that is in itself a choice. -William James

Your writing should be a synthesis of the 5 paragraph essay AND a blog post.

Time: 2.5 hours
Submit a printed copy to your teacher and a trackback to this post.

Tags: choices, coke, conformity, consequences, decisions, English 20, good citizen, literature, paragraph essay, pepsi, plato, post time, synthesis, tragedy of life, william james
Posted in English 20

Student blog will win $10,000 Scholarship

One blogger chosen by “the internet” will win $10,000 US scholarship … for keeping a blog.

As the ratio of high school student blogs I read to the number of college student blogs I read approaches infinity, I think it a good time we troll a few of the best college bloggers in the US.

All STJ student bloggers have been involved in assessment of one another’s blogs since the beginning of STJ iblogs in 2006. I’m certain we’d pick a deserving “Final Four” from the list of 20 finalists.

I’m curious to know for what blogs STJ bloggers vote.

Submit your comment (or trackback) here with a brief reason/detail/example justifying your vote for the $10,000 US scholarship.

Consider our recent emphasis on structure and voice: How are these college bloggers defining themselves through voice? What structures/patterns do successful bloggers adopt? What role do comments play in the development of the blog?

Yaaar, there be pirates in one of the blogs . . . but don’t let that influence your vote.

Tags: blog, bloggers, Blogging Tips, CTS 10, detail example, English 20, English 30, final four, good time, iblogs, infinity, Information Highway2 INF0220, pirates, scholarship
Posted in Pingo Lingo

LOTF: Focus on Voice

Consequences
How do we live with the consequences of our decision making?
Related Questions:

What are the consequences of an important decision that you have made recently?
What are informed decisions? What are uninformed decisions?
What role does foresight play in our decision making? What are the advantages and disadvantages of hindsight?
What is the effect of making a decision when we are uncertain of the consequences? What are the consequences of making decisions which go against what other people think? What price do we pay for each decision we make?
What role does emotion and feeling play in our decision making?

Choose a focus. Write a post. Trackback.

Blogging Tips:
Pay particular attention to your own development of your voice in your style. Attempt to engage your audience to comment critically on issues of your choosing.

When commenting on another’s blog, look for the issues that invite your critical response.

Tags: advantages and disadvantages, audience, Blogging Tips, consequences, critical response, emotion, English 20, foresight, hindsight, Lord of the Flies, making decisions, uninformed decisions
Posted in English 10

English 20 Final Exam 2.0

Search the net, search blogs, search your mind. Synthesize, hyperlink, blockquote, and trackback.

Your writing should be a synthesis of the 5 paragraph essay AND a blog post.

Refer to one or any texts from your course: Macbeth, BNW, Can. Lit., Film, News, or other online media.

Your question:

What does it mean to be human in an engineered world?

Time: 2.5 hours
Submit a printed copy to your teacher and a trackback to this post.

Tags: blog, English, English 20, essay, Final, macbeth, Man, paragraph, paragraph essay, print, question, synthesis
Posted in English 20

Looking for News

Try the following suggestions to increase your daily intake of news feeds.

• Surf the latest headlines from all over the world. Results are based on google search rankings, the larger the font –> the more hits in google, I recall. Headlines link to an array of news organizations.
• Aggregate a few headlines from, say, cbc.ca/rss in your own blog sidebar.
• Create your own online newsreader at bloglines.com or google reader.

Add your own suggested news feeds or feed aggregators in a comment or trackback here.

Tags: blog, Blogging Tips, CTS 9, English 20, google, Hypermedia Tools INF01070, iblog, Information Highway2 INF0220, Pedagogy 2.0, result, sidebar, stj, view
Posted in Pingo Lingo

Personal Universe Lexicon

To construct your Personal Universe Lexicon, start with a new post. You may wish to construct the list with pen and paper first and transfer it to your blog later. Begin by following these instructions:

Write down as many words as you can then sort the words into the categories outlined below. Complete each category. Write as quickly as you can.

Categories:

• 16 words of each of the five senses (16 x 5 = 80 words). The words must mean, suggest: taste touch, sight, smell, and hearing. For instance, desiccated or frozen might suggest touch to you, or birdsong hearing.
• 10 words of motion. The words must mean, suggest motion to you. They do not necessarily need to be verbs. Baby could be a motion word for someone, for example.
• 3 abstractions. Such as love or freedom or truth.
• 7 anything else. Any word with meaning to you that does not fit into the other categories.

All the words on the list must

1. have significance to/for you
2. be specific; that is the word must not be “bird” but “robin,” not “tree” but “aspen.”
3. sound good to the ear.

Use no adverbs. Use no plurals.

Keep track of the words with your blog. Move them around each other in the list every day for a week. Choose one word at random from the list; write what the word(s) sparks, what the juxtaposition of words builds for you.

Trackback/pinkback your list to this post.

Tags: abstractions, blog, Blogging Tips, CTS 9, English 20, English 9, freedom, lexicon, Man, pen and paper, significance, universe, use, verbs, wit, Word Processing INFO1030
Posted in Pingo Lingo

In The Mind But Then The Meaning Is

English 20(Non-Chem)

Create a moebius strip of the title of this post followed by “In The Word But Then The Meaning Is”

Write about your own hobby. Research the origin of the term Hobby at Wikipedia.

Look at wikipedia’s entry for Model Railroads. What do you think?

Refresh your memory about Erik Erikson’s “Stages of Psychosocial Developlment.”

Tags: English, English 20, Moebius(Short Story), research, Social
Posted in Pingo Lingo

Pingback Trackback of the Canadian Outback

English 20(Chem)
Your task is to complete Writing Activity 1 from my canpoets blog.

Just following those instructions will not be enough, however.

Your assignment will not be complete until a “trackback” or “pingback” appears in the comment section on my Writing Activity 1 post.

I’ll have a bag of cookies on standby. Cookie of choice to STJ blogger(s) who completes a pingback trackback of the Canadian outback.

Tags: blog, Blogging Tips, Canadian Poets, English, English 20, iblog, poe, poet, stj
Posted in English 20

Audio Posts (But not quite podcasts, yet)

Or rather, Audio in Posts.

They’re not iTunesey podcasts, yet, but they’re simple enough.
Your mp3 file must be less than 2MB and uploaded to your blog in the normal way.

Go find the menu in Dashboard–>Options–>Audio Player.

Read the check boxes, the third check box will automagically change your mp3 links in your posts to embedded flash players. Easy-peezy.

Look at wmcauley’s mp3 links.

Tags: blog, Blogging Tips, change, dashboard, English 20, English 9, Hypermedia Tools INF01070, iblog, Information Highway2 INF0220, stj
Posted in Pingo Lingo

Insert a New Scene into Macbeth

1. Compose Act 5 Scene 5a: Lady Macbeth is reading letters while weeping. Enter Ross.
2. Compose Act 6 Scene 1: Donalbain visits the Witches.
3. Compose Act 5 Scene 9b: Malcolm’s speech in which he “accounts the loves” of his thanes and kinsmen.
4. Write a new opening for the play. Emphasize action and quick dialogue. Use Act 5 Scene 8 as inspiration for parallels. Consider Act 1 Scene 2 and Act 1 Scene 3 lines 93-115.
5. Insert a scene anywhere in the play that further develops the character of the “Gentlewoman.”

Tags: English 20, inspiration, letter, macbeth, Man, use, wit
Posted in English 20

Here’s an idea that could snowball!

Find a “copyright-free” etext online at, say, Project Gutenberg or here or here

Start a new blog.

Parse your etext into manageable chunks and insert into your blog.

Add graphics and organizers. Edit theme. Voila.

Look at Castle of Otranto and The Jesuit Relations and the History of New France as examples.

Search for works by the following at Gutenberg:
Austen, Jane
Barrie, J.M.
Brontà«, Charlotte
Brontà«, Emily
Dickens, Charles
Burroughs, Edgar Rice
Carroll, Lewis
Chesterton, G. K
Christie, Agatha
Twain, Mark
Collins, Wilkie
Connor, Ralph
Conrad, Joseph
Corelli, Marie
Defoe, Daniel
De la Mare, Walter
Doyle, Arthur Conan, Sir
Eliot, George
Galsworthy, John
Haggard, H. Rider
Hardy, Thomas
Henty, G. A.
James, Henry
Jerome, Jerome K.
Joyce, James
Kingsley, Charles
Kipling, Rudyard
Leacock, Stephen
Mansfield, Katherine
Maugham, W. Somerset
Maupassant, Guy de
McClung, Nellie L.
Melville, Herman
Montgomery, L. M.
Moodie, Susanna
Moore, Clement Clarke
Nesbit, E.
Oppenheim, E. Phillips
Potter, Beatrix
Sabatini, Rafael
Scott, Walter, Sir
Shaw, George Bernard
Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft
Sinclair, Upton
Stevenson, Robert Louis
Stoker, Bram
Swift, Jonathan
Thackeray, William Makepeace
Trollope, Anthony
Wallace, Edgar
Walpole, Horace
Wells, H. G.
Wilde, Oscar
Wodehouse, P. G.
Woolf, Virginia
Yonge, Charlotte Mary

Tags: Arthur, blog, Christ, CTS 10, Dick, element, English 20, English 9, history, Hypermedia Tools INF01070, iblog, idea, Information Highway2 INF0220, Man, Manage, peace, right, stj, theme, use, Word Processing INFO1030
Posted in Pingo Lingo

Macbeth Act 2 Quiz Hints

“What goes around comes around”
“Pillow Talk”
“Smear Campaign”
“A Canadian Moment”
“Sibling Rivalry”
Don Henley’s “Dirty Laundry”

Tags: amazon, English 20, macbeth, view
Posted in English 20

Bloggiest start to the bloggiest year ever.

What a funny word, “bloggiest”. Should I say it is a “most bloggy” start to the year? Does correct English matter in a blog?

All students I teach have begun a blog, of sorts. For the most part, I’ve insisted the content of the blog must be school or course related, the myriad responses to Macbeth fit this category. Other responses are more like “snowflakes”, snowflakes is my term to describe the phenomena of no two responses to the same prompt being identical.

I aggregate(not related to the term aggravate) RSS feeds from each class to aid in tracking down assigned work. Each student has a spreadsheet I term the Data Collector that averages rubric scores and totals moderated comment feeds, too. I then collect the Data Collectors periodically to determine scores to enter into GradeLogic. The data collectors serve a dual purpose, a foundation to build a grade obviously, but a powerful device to bring a landslide of peer pressure and collaborative assistance on the lazy, slower, or reluctant bloggers. Those that finish first have always shown a willingness to “share their secrets” with others.

Students are also instructed to collect and deposit appropriate comments on each other’s blogs, too. It is proving to be a fine art to learn to comment. Last year I found the aspect of commenting to be more valuable than the creation of the posts. Comments must contain evidence of critical thinking, I said, not simply “gladhanding”. If you troll the blogs you’ll notice the biggest difference right now between a veteran blogger and a newbie is the quality/quantity of appropriate comments. Students complete work earlier to benefit from positive/any attention from peer “commentors”. Any student who doesn’t get their blog post done on time, gets punished by receiving low or no rubric scores from their peers. However, unlike class discussions, the very nature of blogging allows anyone to catch up at any time. The students themselves seem to have an unofficial pecking order for who writes the best comments. They have internalized their own standards for what they will accept as a comment on their blog and are very persuasive at convincing each other to measure up. A few students are positively verbose and comment on all they can. Others choose fewer responses yet measure their words very carefully. Those that finish writing a post early, are left to hustle remaining students.

The grade 10s are shifting their attention to Keyboarding modules for a while, although I keep prodding them about “Turing Tests”. iGod is our most recent fascination.

The grade 9s get their prompts from Mrs. Fraser’s class then I help them become a bit more tech savvy.

The Grade 11s are in the midst of Macbeth and may see no reprieve for at least 2 more weeks, I figure. The more traditional assignments I’ve used for the last 14 years are as appropriate in a blog as they have ever been in my class. Doing it with blogs is just so cool!

Tags: blog, bloggers, class discussions, content, creation, critical thinking, CTS 10, difference, discussion, English, English 20, English 9, God, grade 9, iblog, logic, macbeth, peers, purpose, response, right, rubric, stj, Thinking, use, wit
Posted in Pingo Lingo