Blogs on High (9-12)

More Blogs on High (9-12)RSS
Mark PhillipsSeptember 6, 2012

Students should have a significant voice in school-based decision-making in every high school. They rarely do. With the teaching of democracy a stated goal of every high school, I still find this hard to believe.

Read More
Suzie BossSeptember 4, 2012

With the presidential election dominating the news between now and November, there's no shortage of timely material to bring into classroom discussions. If used as the starting point for project-based learning, the 2012 election can engage students in thinking critically about everything from media messages to voter rights to public opinion polls.

Read More
Todd FinleyAugust 29, 2012

Technology can enhance academic conversations, says Anna Des Roches, a community development officer for Collaborize Classroom. The American Association of School Librarians (AALS) agrees, naming Collaborize one of the "Top 25 Best Websites for Teaching and Learning in 2012."

Blake Wiggs, a history and language arts teacher in North Carolina, often uses Collaborize to efficiently "organize classroom participants and sort their contribution to the discussion." He likes that he can integrate audio or video clips and widgets into the discussion pages. Nico Saldana, a high school world history teacher, uses Collaborize to increase student participation: "Nobody can check out of a conversation because everyone is writing."

Read More
Ben JohnsonAugust 24, 2012

In Texas we have a new state test called the State of Texas Assessment of Academic Readiness (STAAR) and some schools like mine, were surprised by the student poor performance in writing. As I was reviewing the low scores, I began thinking, "What else can I do to help my students write better?"

Read More
Mark PhillipsAugust 22, 2012

I was in a local shopping mall a while ago and two girls who couldn’t have been more than 9 or 10 walked past me. Both were wearing makeup and dressed as if they were about to pose for a soft porn ad in Rolling Stone. I wasn’t even surprised. It just reconfirmed what I already knew about how girls are being sexualized at very early ages.

Read More
Andrew MarcinekAugust 22, 2012

This past week at Burlington High School, we started rolling out iPads for incoming freshmen. During this process, I couldn't help but reflect on what had occurred over the course of a year. Around this time last summer, BHS had roughly one thousand iPads ready to roll out to all students. The anticipation was great, the waters uncharted. During the 2011-2012 school year, we, the IT department and the teachers charted a course that led us to many exciting discoveries as well as many learning experiences.

Read More
Mark PhillipsAugust 9, 2012

The image projected on the screen in the front of the classroom is Magritte's painting of a pipe, including the words, "Ceci n'est pas une pipe." I ask the students to each briefly make a guess why they think Magritte wrote that, since the painting is obviously a pipe. Some volunteers share their guesses with the class. One student nails it. "It's not a pipe; it's a drawing of a pipe!"

Read More
Joe MazzaAugust 9, 2012

I recently had an opportunity to attend the first Digital Family Summit (DFS) in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Presenters and summit attendees were both parents and students. The "summit" included families from as far away as Canada, Utah, California, and of course those from local states and cities that could make the trip.

Read More
Todd FinleyAugust 8, 2012

High school writers often fail to include dialogue in their stories. Perhaps this is because they over-rely on telling narratives. Or perhaps skipping dialogue is a strategy that allows students to elude the punctuation rules that accompany quotations. Regardless, students should be taught that the payoffs for learning a few dialogue-writing skills are ample: dialogue can help develop plot, reveal characters' motivation, create a visceral experience for the reader, and make average stories extraordinary.

Read More
Kerri FlinchbaughAugust 1, 2012

At the 2012 Conference on College Composition and Communication, three well-known writing scholars led a discussion on a writing exercise they'd assigned themselves. For 30 days, each wrote for an hour about a different everyday object. After CCCC, three of us -- all friends, teachers and writers -- were energized by the idea of this activity and decided to try it out.

Read More
see more see less