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Self-Publishing the World As We See It They ways we viewed and read the news was previously distributed to us through a filter.  Publisher, editor, advertisers, and corporations decided what we should watch and read when it came to content. In some ways, the classroom has followed a similar path. Look at the world now when it comes to news. We are all publishing to the world around us in blogs, tweets, posts and…yes…even Instagram selfies. Our brains are no longer designed to sit back and take what is given to us. We want to create and share what we see and learn too. Classroom Outcome:  This is one area where I feel that education has excelled, but there is still room for improvement. We’ve always encouraged students to write and report on what they think or believe. As students, we learned to play the game of “know your audience” when it came to writing a paper for a certain professor. Our purpose was writing for writing’s sake. Now we no longer have to limit ourselves to one recipient. Our students have access to a global audience and don’t have to write just to please one teacher. They can write based on what they see and believe to be true.

Focus on the hard stuff. I remember early on in my teaching career realizing that while I was doing a pretty good job getting students to read and discuss literature, I was not really teaching them writing. So I decided to schedule the block day in our week as a writing day. Ten years and thousands of pages of creative writing later, I still had not successfully taught my students to write a research paper, so I blocked out three full weeks in our schedule to work through the process from beginning to end. Rather than focus on what I know is humming along fine, I look for the weaknesses. Usually, these are the areas that don’t come naturally, or that I don’t like very much myself. (And I still sort of despise research papers.) But when I focus on the hard stuff, I am a providing a much better learning experience for my students.

have tried some crazy things as a teacher. Some I realized were flops immediately, while some I pushed through for months before admitting that they weren’t working out. But some of those innovations have saved my sanity, and I would never have tried them if I had been afraid to fail

Seek feedback wherever you can.

integrating Web 2.0 technologies, like those that follow, would help her students succeed in the 21st centur

Teacher: We Are Pawns in Someone Else’s Game

Schools market a product. It’s called education. It’s called reading and writing and math and social studies and science. It is called college and career readiness. But most importantly, it’s called hope and dreams. It is the future we market.

Or at least we used to. Nowadays, we’re forced to market high test scores and low suspension rates.

Opponents of the anti-bilingual-education measures see bilingualism as a social, economic, cultural, and academic advantage for first- and second-generation immigrants. They do not see bilingualism as an obstacle to societal integration of new immigrant populations; on the contrary, they believe that students who study and learn in two languages and become fully proficient and literate in their home language and in English can enjoy the richness and values of two linguistic systems and two cultural traditions that complement and enhance each other.

In fact, sociological and educational research supports the notion that immigrant students who retain their bilingual skills and their ties to their parents' culture of origin are more academically successful and socially well-adapted in the long term than their peers who become English monolinguals (Portes & Rumbaut, 2001). These researchers concluded that "forced march assimilation" policies for educating immigrant youth are counterproductive.

It is left up to educators to sort out myth from reality.

Heck. As specialists in English language learning, we don't even agree on what to call ourselves, our students, or our programs. ELLs, ELs, LEP, ESL, ELD, ESOL, bilingual. With chaos in terminology, our communication with content-area teachers, school administrators, and student services staff is often garbled and filled with off-putting labels.

However, in many high schools across the United States, 16- to 20-year-old immigrants who seek to attend school are discouraged from enrolling and referred to adult literacy programs offering far fewer hours of schooling.

The lack of enthusiasm for serving these students is unfortunate, but understandable. Public schools may feel they have little to gain and much to lose by enrolling older adolescents who have little or no English.

they can also amplify student voices and their creativity

ensure you have a case and screen protector for each device

Many school districts take advantage of mobile device management (MDM) solutions