Marinating in RSS — Thing 5
Once again, I find myself learning about a Web 2.0 tool I’ve been using in my personal life that I now find can have professional uses as well. I subscribe to our school newsletter, Northworthy News, via RSS and have it delivered directly to my email’s inbox. I’ve been utilizing this feed for a year now and have been encouraging my parents to do the same. Who knew RSS could keep me updated on so many things, not only around my school campus, but around the world?
After setting up Google Reader with the 5 mandatory feeds and 2 optional feeds (NPR: Story of the Day Podcast and TV Decoder), I “marinated” over the weekend. One blog post hit me over the head and I’ve been unable to get it out of my mind since. On Pat Hensley’s blog, Successful Teaching, she writes “Why Bother Trying?”. This post is in response to “I am always racing people, and I always win,” by Paul Bogush who writes Blogush. The idea being discussed is the ever-struggling student and their motivation (or lack thereof) to succeed.
The struggling student usually begins the year with a poor performance and is then expected to raise the bar throughout the year. He/She is always fighting that uphill battle. Pat Hensley suggests starting the school year off with two weeks of easy assignments so that the student will perform very well and be highly motivated to maintain this level of success. She then goes on to say that you must discuss these successes with the student, making sure he/she understands that the lessons will become more complex (she says not to use the word “harder,” as it may become a self-fufilling prophecy), but that hard work and perserverence will deliver even greater success.
This concept greatly excites me and I look forward to establishing a high success rate among my students during the first couple weeks of school this coming Fall. With some hard work and perserverence by both teacher and students, it looks to be a highly successful year.
June 1st, 2009 at 4:49 pm
Wow! You’re blog looks great! You have inspired me to go change some things on my blog. And now that I’ve “marinated,” I think I will go comment on RSS.
June 1st, 2009 at 8:42 pm
Your site looks terrific.
June 4th, 2009 at 9:22 am
Hello, Very interesting & plain sense concept about the struggling student. I belive letting them feel successful is very important. I teach in a shop/laboratory and my students are given various tasks. unfortunatley making things easier in the beginning and more difficult towards the end is tough. The project based curriculum offers real world experiences. Students find that depending on their own skill sets, some tasks are easier for them then others. It is very difficult to line up curriculum from easy to hard every day. Over the three year period i have them , the years curriculum advances.