My Students are so Smart!

I have the smartest students ever! I cannot believe the cool things they have been doing this week. On Monday we began our unit on The Secret Life of Bees. This book addresses the Civil Rights and takes place in the 1960s. It's about a girl who runs away at age 14 with her black nanny and lives with three other black women. Let the love and bee keeping begin....

As you may have guessed, the book is extremely feminine. I had a difficult time reading it and I'm a girl (at least last I checked anyway). I wanted to come up with some ways to keep the boys and some of the girls interested in the subject matter so I decided to try incorporating technology into the writing activities we would be doing and historically relevant things into the class to try and engage the students a little more. I am so far receiving a good response to this.

So for their writing, students have made their own blogs and class wiki. It is so cool! They had two days in the lab this week and set up their blogs and wrote their first posts. They also have already added and presented their first wiki topics on the 1960s. For those who don't know, a "wiki" is a website that you can set up and invite other people to add to it (a lot like Wikipedia.org, only limiting who can add to it). So they are basically creating their own website for the class. I have posted below the links to all three class wikis. When you get to the home page, there is a white rectangle. Click "sidebar" in that. Then click "Secret Life of Bees" and follow the link to the "1960s." A list of topics will come up. Those are the pages my students created. Their blogs are posted in "student blogs" on the sidebar.

http://english10hour1.pbwiki.com
http://english10hour4.pbwiki.com
http://english10hour5.pbwiki.com

I really love how they turned out. This was their first try at creating their own webpage and blog. I hope this turns out to be something they enjoy and can use in the future.

I made Rick Beach proud.