Thing #12

I have always loved Google Translate. What's great now is you can type and it automatically translates into what ever language of your choice as you're typing. You don't have to wait and press a button to see the translation. No doubt this will massively help me in my ELA classroom when we are reading text with portions in other languages. Students will easily skim over portions of a text in different languages, but that is not acceptable. It obviously must be of some importance or else it would not be there. Both Google Scholar and Google Books have helped me in my research for my paper in another graduate class. I'm writing a research paper on violence against teachers in our country, and many books popped up just by me typing in "teacher violence". If excerpts are available Google will even give me the pages if they happen to contain my search term. I'm able to grab a little bit of research without having to search far and wide for a book and the particular pieces of information that I need. Google Scholar helps with finding periodical journals regarding my research topic--not just for my paper on violence against teachers but for any subject which requires the proper educated viewpoints and research.

Thing #11

I found doing a simple google search for "english teacher rss feeds" seemed to be the simplest route to see what was out there. Technorati seemed the most confusing since there was no option to search for anything, and my impression was that it didn't have anything to do with searching for blogs. To me the title of a blog is what will initially draw me in and one that drew me in was It's Not All Flowers and Sausages, and of course I had to click on it to see what it was all about. It's about a public school teacher who loves her job but has the typical frustrations we all do at our day to day jobs. As I've said before in a previous post, it's just nice that we're not alone. Not all teachers have the cute, decorated classrooms with constantly engaged students and teachers willing to collaborate at a moment's notice. Another good one I found was The English Blog which is just a great blog filled with resources and tips for English teachers. I subscribed to both RSS feeds via feedly so they're all in one place for easy access!