Exercise Caution: Your Reputation and Facebook Promoted Posts

Scenario: During the 2012 election, you found a page that was supporting a candidate you supported. You hit "Like" on their page to comment on posts and share their funny info-graphics. Then in February, this page decides to post pro-marijuana images. They promote a post and suddenly your friends are getting a pro-drug post in their feed that is attributed to you. Congratulations! You've taken a dent to your squeaky clean teacher reputation.

Shocked?

This is a reality thanks to Facebook promoted posts. It seems harmless enough when you like Oreo or The Hunger Games, but comedy pages, political pages, and other less predictable Facebook pages can put your reputation at risk. 

You can't predict the stances of pages you like down the road, but the choices of their admins could put your good name on the line.

My advice? Don't friends parents or untrusted coworkers, and every few months go through your "Likes" and clean them out!

Good luck!

The Most Exhausting/Rewarding Discussion I've Ever Lead

Art by Bernie Wrightson

Last week I introduced Frankenstein to five consecutive classes of 12th grade AP students. I used a list of provided anticipation guide questions that delved into sticky issues like parental responsibility, genetic modification, the nature of good and evil, and the treatment of disabilities in America. I've run discussions where three students talk and the rest stare you down until you squirm and someone else shouts out, and I knew that I did not want this to be a three person discussion for an audience.

What I did, which worked beautifully, was I made a line down the classroom. The trick with an anticipation guide is to make everything an agree or disagree statement and to NOT allow anyone to rest somewhere in the middle. You have to pick sides, there is no abstaining from the vote.

The result was awesome. Every student had to pick a side, so when I pointed and called on someone to explain, they had already stated a position with their physical location; all they had to do was give a reason. The debate got intense and I had to be on 100% of the time. Some classes were more congenial than others. I had to moderate every moment, negotiating whose turn it was to speak and making sure that nobody got hurt feelings. When the discussion got too one-sided I had to think on my feet to play the devil's advocate.

I went home and I poured myself into pajama pants before collapsing on the couch for a two hour nap, but the intense exhaustion was worth it. By being on my feet and taking an active role in moderating each discussion, I was rewarded with a fully-engaged class that connected to the themes of the material we were about to start.

I encourage you to think outside the box when you lead discussions. How can you make it physical? How can you pull the quiet students out of hiding? Draw the line and force your students to have opinions. You'll be tired, sure, but it's pays off.

Find Vocabulary With Search Inside the Book

It's hard for me to find vocabulary for a novel by merely re-reading the book. My vocabulary acquisition is so high above my students that challenging words don't stick out to me unless they are so unusual that you wouldn't consider them worth teaching to a bunch of sixteen year olds. I'm not saying that challenging words aren't important, I'm just saying that students in public school should learn the meaning of "condolence" and "tangible" before words like "perfidious" and "gulden."

I often google vocabulary lists that other teachers have compiled and shared for use in the classroom. I put them all together and then whittle down the list to find words that will be useful in the lives of my students. Of course, when teaching these words in the context of the book, it is nice to know where exactly the words are used and in what context.

Amazon's relatively new feature, Search Inside the Book, is perfect for this. When signed-in, you can search the text of any book enrolled (most classics) and find the passage you are looking for.

How do you use it? Once you have your word list (I don't recommend teaching any more than 10 words (and that's a lot) per week), go to the page for the edition of the book you own. Below the image for the cover will be a series of links, one of them labeled "Search Inside This Book." You can use the search bar on the left of the pop-up window to search for the word. If you are not satisfactorily logged-in, you will be prompted to log-in and then returned to the Search Inside The Book page.

I used this feature to find all of the 14 words on my The Things They Carried word list, then highlighted and flagged them in my physical book. Teaching vocabulary in the context of a written work is almost-always going to yield better results than picked an arbitrary list of words to know.

Happy searching!

More QR Codes (3 Ways to Use Them in the Classroom)

What the heck is a QR code? A barcode functions in two dimensions. A scanner reads blocks from left to right. A QR code is read in three dimensions and therefore can contain much more information. They can be read through a free application on a smart phone or tablet device. They look like this:

In a previous post I outlined one idea for using QR codes in the classroom. In this post I will outline 3 ideas to incorporate technology into the physical world of your classroom through the use of QR codes.