Writers Workshop Sharing

This week, our group shared our writing pieces for one another and provided feedback.

For my piece, I wrote a "I Am" poem. In my 3rd grade classroom, students are in a unit about poetry and culture. Their culminating project is to write an I Am poem about their own culture. I decided to write one as well in solidarity with them. My poem is a reflection of my personal culture, largely shaped by growing up with my family. I talk mostly of my childhood culture as this relates to the children; but at the end I make a few mentions to my adulthood culture (e.g. enjoying beer and gardening!).

Some of the feedback I received encouraged me to elaborate a bit more on certain phrases (e.g. what do "intense" games of hide and seek look like?). For next week, I will incorporate more detailed language to make the poem more interesting.

Twitter Assignment Reflection

This week I completed the Twitter assignment. I read about uses for Twitter in the classroom and followed educational Twitter users.

I already had a Twitter account that I've used to follow news, sports, work topics, and a few education topics. However, I found the list of recommended people to follow very beneficial! It gave me a starting point to follow people and organizations I am interested in and reminded me of others I might want to follow as well, including EducationNC. Following these users will expand my knowledge of what's happening in education and will link me to other education Twitter users.

I read through some of the ideas for using Twitter in the classroom. Some seemed fun and reasonable (e.g. pop quizzes for bonus points, updating parents). But overall, I don't think Twitter is the best medium for communicating information about school. For one, I don't think young people really use Twitter much anymore. Two, there are privacy concerns about kids being on social media, especially for younger ones. Lastly, there are better tools to organize information and ask questions than Twitter. I may use some of these options, but not heavily by any means.