National Poetry Month

April is National Poetry Month, and this is our last week of Evening School. What better way to end our class than with poetry. It's like chocolate frosting on the educational cake we have baked. By the way, that was a metaphor.

The first thing I want everyone to do is to create another blog, not a blog entry, but another blog. Call it Blank's (Your name) Poetry and make the site address yourname2.blogspot.com. It is at this site where I will find poetry that you will be writing this week -- Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. I will give you some specific criteria or standards each day for the poem you will be writing. It is these criteria that I will be evaluating to see whether you "get" it.

Now go to today's myclass.net assignment and begin the poetry unit.

Week 4 and a Whole Lot More

If you have been coming to Mr. Latman's evening school English 1 class since the first day, this is Week 4, Day 13. Because of Presidents' Day, there will be only 3 days of class this week. I've worked out an Assessment Grid for 10 tasks that you should have done by last Friday. You can find it in the Resource folder at MyClass, if you want to run one for yourself. You won't receive credit for doing a task until there are no longer any corrections to be made. So you must make grammatical, spelling, and content corrections for your Blog responses. Please do so as soon as you get into class.

This week you will be looking at the similarities between Marcus Garvey and Malcolm X, continue with readings and Blogging responses from The Best of Simple, and continue working on your Langston Hughes PowerPoint Mid-term Presentation.

Your Blog Site Address

I still don't have everyone with the correct Blog address. I need your first and last name as one word dot blogspot dot com as in garylatman.blogspot.com. If you don't have it set up this way, please log in and call me over to your computer and I'll correct it in the Settings.

Here It Is Week 2 -- What Have You Learned

In this, the second week of our Evening School English 1 class, we will continue to work on reading some Langston Hughes, using our individual Blog sites for response to my writing prompts. And we will continue to edit the Blogs making revisions (see my Comments), correcting spelling and grammatical errors as well, and making the response clearer. At various times, you will be asked to send email to me or to your classmates with an attachment.

Let's start today by checking our Blogs for my Comments and then Edit your Blog if my response asks you to make changes or correct spelling and grammar. If you haven't finished last week's work, do so immediately before logging into your email.

As a reminder, our assignments are at your MyClass site and your responses are at your Blogger site.

The book that I ordered for each of you, The Best of Simple by Langston Hughes, should be arriving by the end of this week. I think you will enjoy these vignettes.

Creating A Folder for a Specific Computer

Creating a Folder for a Specific Computer

For the computer you are presently using:

Go to the Desktop and open the My Computer icon.
In the Address bar find the Data (D:) drive and open it.
Right click any white space on the screen and click on New and then Folder.
Type in your first and last name where the name space is highlighted in blue.
That is where you will save the documents you work on.

What You Already Know, But May Need A Reminder Once

You are all young men and women, not children, until you act like it. You are responsible young adults, until you act otherwise. I expect to be treated with the respect given to someone who is very special in your community, as I am here to help and assist you progress in YOUR education. I expect each of you to respect yourselves and believe in your own abilities. And I certainly expect you to respect each other in this class, as we explore the world of reading, writing, and technology. Anything less is unacceptable.

English in the 21st Century

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.