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Digital Literacy

This year digital literacy has allowed my professors and me to communicate more often and effectively about the work I have been doing for school. One new strategy that I have discovered is using Google Docs to share work with others. In secondary education, this technique would also prove useful, as students would be able to share their work with each other and with the teacher to monitor each other's thoughts and work together to complete group assignments despite living in different parts of town. People have been discussing literature and other pieces of writing for as long as they have existed. They have always only done this face-to-face, however. Today, we have the option to have these talks, make these critiques, and form these ideas from remote locations by sharing documents with each other through Google Docs. By replicating these interactions through this digital literacy strategy, we enable ourselves to have them more often. Students are only in class for forty minute...
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Teaching for Hope

Teaching in ways that make students excited about material and hopeful for the future go hand-in-hand and are crucial for fostering student success in and beyond the classroom. Making subject matter relatable to students and what they are genuinely passionate about is a great way to generate interest in classroom activities and, in ELA especially, making assignments about their interests is a great way to create hope about them. Students should be given as many opportunities to write about authentic topics as possible. If a student loves cars or interior design, for example, let them run with that. Create assignments that assess them on their ability to write about something they are excited to learn, obtain, or experience. Create positive associations between writing and their dreams. This will encourage them to write better and more often, so that they can continue to develop and reconceptualize their desires in life. In the process of sharpening their focus on what they want to ...
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Why Am I a Teacher?

Why Am I a Teacher? There are a number of reasons why I’m a teacher. I think the biggest one is that I am obsessed with growth and development. There is nothing I enjoy more than the feeling of understanding or being able to do something that had previously escaped me. That moment of clarity that comes when a new concept or skill just clicks is something I live for and look forward to sharing with my students. Helping them improve is a process that I thoroughly enjoy and believe to be directly related to the condition of society as a whole. That is, as an English teacher, I will not only have the pleasure of facilitating understanding and a love for learning in my students, but I will have the opportunity to specifically teach them about concepts that will appeal to and hopefully improve their morality. I think it is important for every member of society to have an awareness of the conditions of other people and the issues that complicate the world. These issues (most of ours are soc...
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