English 11/12 Syllabus Prezi

I decided to make a syllabus Prezi for my new English 11/12 class as well!  The content is almost the same as the English 9/10 class, but the theme of the template is different.

You can access the English 11/12 Syllabus Prezi here and I have set the privacy settings to allow others to copy it!  Hope this helps someone!  

Course Syllabus Prezi

Thinking about the first day of school, I was reflecting on how boring it can be for students to have to sit through one dry but necessary explanation of the course syllabus after another.  Since one of my main goals for this year is to do even more in infuse technology into my classroom, I contemplated how I could do that on day one.  My students will be getting their own school issued laptops to use, but they won't have them on the first day, so I was trying to think about what I could do as the teacher to spice things up a bit while still conveying the necessary start of school information.

I'd looked at a few Prezi's over the summer on various topics, but I had never made one myself.  I've done plenty of PowerPoints, but never a Prezi.  Well, no time like the present!  Might as well demonstrate from day one that technology is an important part of the way we will go about our leaning in this class and model that I too am a learner.

So, without further ado, here it is!  My first Prezi!  Have a look and tell me what you think!  English 9/10 Syllabus Prezi.  I will still hand out a paper copy of the syllabus, but hopefully this Prezi will make it more engaging for students and set the technology tone for the rest of the school year! 

Summer Technology Picnic

This has been a summer filled with learning about new technology.  I didn't necessarily plan for it to be, but that's the way it turned out, and really, I couldn't have imagined all the amazing things I would discover and learn.

Below you'll see a list of some of the contents of my technology "picnic basket": all the goodies I've found and carried with me through the summer that I'm now getting ready to spread out and enjoy during the school year. 

• Flipped Classroom
• Schoology
• Edmodo
• Twitter
• Mastery Connect
• Socrative
• Diigo
• Highlighter
• Spelling City
• Paper Rater
• No Red Ink
• Screencast-O-Matic
• ActivePresenter
• Sophia
• Mentor Mob

As the year goes on, I hope to blog about my experiences using each of these technologies and probably a few more along the way, because there's always room for just a few more goodies in a picnic basket! 

Why I'm One Brave Teacher

Teachers in general are a brave lot.  We enter into a profession where we know we will work long hours for low pay and marginal respect, and yet we do it anyway to serve a higher good.  That's brave.

Is that why I call my blog "One Brave Teacher"?  

Well, the part about long hours and low pay certainly is true for me, but that's not really why I'm one brave teacher.

I wrote about the small school where I teach, which is also the school I attended as a student, in my previous post Where I Come From.  It is across the channel from an Indian reservation and our school mascot is a Brave, so that alone makes me one brave teacher!  

However, I'd like to think I'm brave in other ways as well.  This blog was created as a place for me to reflect and share how I use technology to enhance instruction.  That's brave.  

It's brave to put yourself out there in a blog.  Lot's of people do it, but millions more don't.  I'm a bit of a perfectionist, so blogging isn't always easy for me because I like to really labor over and craft what I write, but I'm going to try it. 

It's brave to learn new technology, after all, it might be tricky and it might not work right, and then you have a room full of students staring at you wondering why you can't get the cool new thing you told them they were going to do to work.

It's brave to try to continually make yourself a better teacher.  I've been teaching since 1994.  After 17 years I could sit back and coast a little, but that wouldn't be what's best for me or for my students.  And, it wouldn't be any fun!  I want to learn too!

I want to keep up with what's happening in education, and better yet, get ahead.  I don't always know where I'm going or how I'm going to get there, or even if I'll like it when I arrive, but I go anyway.  That's brave. 

I think I'm one brave teacher, but only one among many.  Here's to all the brave teachers out there!   

Image found here.

Where I Come From

I've been fortunate to spend my entire teaching career working at the same small school I attended as a student, in the tiny town where I grew up in northwest Washington.  It's an eclectic place that no one had ever heard of until it was "discovered" in the mid 1980's and now it's a haven for tourists from all over the world who come to see tulips, antiques, and other treasures.  It used to have two grocery stores, three gas stations, and countless taverns.  Now it has one grocery, one gas station, and countless boutiques. 

It's a community of fisherman and of farmers, of artists and poets, of workers and retirees, of wealthy and of poor, bordering an Indian reservation and surrounded by forests, farms, mountains, and water.  It's beautiful and I wouldn't live anywhere else!

Where I Come From

With a total student population of about 650 in grades K-12, the school is small and all of the buildings are on one campus.  The middle school has about 150 students, and the high school numbers about 220.  When I graduated from high school, there were 28 people in my graduating class, and about 125 in the whole high school, so we've grown over the last 20+ years, but we're still small by most people's standards, and that's the way I like it!

Even though we are small, we are fairly diverse.  Across the channel from the town itself is an Indian reservation, so about 1/3 of our students are Native American.  About 10% of our student body is Hispanic, and the majority of the rest are white.  We have about 45% of our students on free or reduced lunches, and our high school graduation rate averages 76%.  A complex mix of students such as this presents some unique challenges for me as a teacher, but I feel very fortunate to teach at my alma mater and be a part of a proud tradition. 

I love living and teaching here.  It's not perfect, we have our problems just like any other school or town, but it's home.  

A small school in a small town--that's where I come from. 

Getting Started

Welcome to my first blog post!  Let me introduce myself: my name is Suzann Keith and I am a high school English and middle school language arts/reading teacher who loves teaching classical literature and writing using modern technology.

I started teaching in 1994 and the technology available to me at the time consisted of an overhead projector in my classroom and a Macintosh LC computer at home.  No one had ever heard of the Internet, and the copy machine didn’t even collate and staple your copies for you!

Now, of course, I use the Internet all day long, I have a MacBook Pro laptop, a document camera and an LCD projector in my classroom (in addition to the TV, VCR, DVD player and overhead projector that are collecting dust).  The copy machine now collates, staples, and even hole punches!  What a difference a decade (or almost two) makes!

I love technology and discovering new ways to integrate it into my classroom.  I’m not a techie, but when I hear about or see something new, I am pretty quick to figure it out and implement it.  The Internet and Web 2.0 tools in particular have really helped me to keep my teaching fresh and current, and after 17 years in the classroom, that’s important.

I’d like to use this blog to reflect on my own teaching, help inform others of how one (brave) teacher uses technology in her classroom, and connect with other braver teachers out there who are paving the way.

Let the blog begin!