Venturing into the World of Edubloggers

Carla Beard is the mastermind behind The English Teacher Blog, and I find the work she does there to be very inspiring. While she writes a great deal specifically about English, she also writes about technology in ways that span disciplinary borders. She recently polled her students to solicit their musings about about technology, for example, asking this question:

"What is something you wish more teachers knew or understood about technology, especially technology in the classroom?"

The responses she garnered are very interesting, and she collected them in a series of posts that are definitely worth a look:

Classroom Technology Survey, Part I
Classroom Technology Survey, Part II
Classroom Technology Survey, Part III
Classroom Technology Survey, Part IV

Beard also uses her blog to share great links to tech resources for teachers from around the Web. Here are a few examples I found that are would be awesome to use in an English classroom:

• BBC's "60-second Shakespeare"
• The University of Central Florida's Digital Booktalk, which features video book trailers produced by students and designed to spark interest in reluctant readers.
• Teaching Copyright, which is a curriculum of 5 lessons designed to teach students about copyright laws.

This blog has inspired me to think about ways in which I might use resources like these to teach English in my own classroom. Technology can help literature come to life in new ways, and I sincerely believe that a multimedia classroom has the potential to make literary history more engaging for students than a traditional tech-free classroom. It can be really hard to conceptualize the people we read about in our textbooks as real people who experienced real things, and I love the possibilities that the Web offers to help these historical figures come to life for students in ways that might not otherwise be possible.

My favorite poet is the lovely Frank O'Hara, for example, and I've been able to find some great resources online that would help introduce his poetry to students. (O'Hara actually attended the University of Michigan as a graduate student in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and so you can imagine how delighted I am by proximity!) While I love reading O'Hara's poetry from the pages of from my dog-eared copy of his Collected Poems, I am completely enchanted with the ways in which technology has helped me experience his poetry in new ways.

Over at YouTube, for example, I found this video of O'Hara reading his poem "Having a Coke With You":



The official Frank O'Hara website also offers several other video clips and many audio clips that would be great to use in the classroom. To teach O'Hara within the wider context of the New York School (an artistic movement with which O'Hara was affiliated), I might also show the students video of poets John Ashbery and Barbara Guest reading, or perhaps this video of Jackson Pollock working on one one of his "action" paintings. Resources like these (which are literally at our fingertips!) can help show students what O'Hara and the other New York School artists looked and sounded like, and can thus make this entire aesthetic moment in time seem that much more real and accessible. I can't wait to have the opportunity to put these and other resources to work, and I'm grateful to Edubloggers like Carla Beard for blazing a path for the rest of us.

For your reading pleasure, here's the low-tech version (if you could call a poem posted on a blog "low-tech") of a Frank O'Hara gem:

"Today"
by Frank O'Hara

Oh! kangaroos, sequins, chocolate sodas!
You really are beautiful! Pearls,
harmonicas, jujubes, aspirins! all
the stuff they've always talked about
still makes a poem a surprise!
These things are with us every day
even on beachheads and biers. They
do have meaning. They're strong as rocks.

(1950)