It is my belief that the very nature of reading and writing has changed forever. No longer must a written work needing some editing and revision be redone entirely from beginning to end; the computer's word processing program makes an adjustment automatically, inserting or overwriting words or entire sentences. A paragraph can be moved intact to another place in the paper, or removed completely. And information can be obtained immediately with some degree of practice using a search engine, such as Google.
What the computer cannot do is interpret and comprehend the information for you. It cannot think for you and determine how you want to present the information you have found, unless all you do is copy and paste the information you have found. In that case, it still is lazy work and considered as theft of intellectual property. In school, we call that plagiarism, which is a form of cheating.
Given all of this, you are expected to make an attempt to read and figure things out, to try to comprehend what the author says and means, and to work at it even if you don't get it right the first or second time. Laziness and cheating will never pass as trying. You must use the tools at hand and those given to you when you were born.
What are my plans for this English 1 - evening school class? We are going to read and write and integrate technology into everything we do. It is my goal to offer you a special experience, usually reserved for those new and fancy high tech college prep high schools, an English class held every session in a computer lab. Imagine a paperless English class.
You will begin the first class session by opening an account at MyClass.net , following the instructions below. It is at the MyClass site where you will find your assignments, obtain an email account for the duration of this class, drop off the work you do for me, find documents to use in class, and so on. After you read the following, hold the Ctrl key on your keyboard and press the letter N once. You should have a new browser window that looks just like this one. Then click on the MyClass link above to go to the site and begin to register (you are now multi-tasking). Please follow the instructions below:
On the MyClass.net home page, click "Register".
Complete the registration by filling in the requested information (information marked with an asterisk * is required). You will choose your own personal user name and password. To make it easy, please make your user name your first and last name as one word (latoyajohnson), and use your student ID as your password.
Registration takes only a few minutes.
On the final registration screen you are asked to enter a Class Name and Class Password. Enter this information:
Class Name: English 1E
Password: harper
Click "Go to Class Homepage" and you're done! The next time you want to visit this MyClass.net site, go to http://www.MyClass.net and click "Member Login" to enter your personal user name and password.
