March 18

Student Blogging Challenge – Week 3: Images, Videos And Music

IMPORTANT UPDATE -Due to a snow day in the middle of the week, and our enthralling discussion of Poe, we will extend the due date for Week 3 of the Student Blogging Challenge to the first week back from Spring Break. The new due date is Friday, April 6th.

Yes, this week we deal with using images, videos, music and sounds in your posts.

But can’t I use any image, music or sound that is on the internet?

No, you must use creative commons, public domain or in some cases the fair use rule.

But where can I find these images, music and sounds? Can’t I use anything when I google an image?

No, your blog is public so you must use creative commons images, sounds, music and videos.

Sue Waters over at Edublogs has created a student blogging bootcamp with lots of interesting posts. Check these out (mainly Edublogs but many also relate to other platforms.) Other posts found here for Blogger blogs.

Other places to find information on creative commons

Images

Make sure you check out the links in the Tools to Use symbaloo above the header

Video

Check out Sue Water’s post from the student blogging bootcamp where she shows how to create and upload your own videos as well as where to find videos and how to embed on your blog posts.

Music and sound effects

JamendoCCMixter, post with 14 websites for music, post with 20+ websites for music, post with 55+ sites with sound effects

This week’s activities for WHS Eng. 12 classes:

Activity 1. Take a photo or find an image or piece of music. Add it to your post (with attribution) and write a poem relating to the image or music. Invite your readers to write their own poems. Here is Fernando’s example, Samantha is confused

OR

Activity 2. Similar to activity 1. Take a photo or find an interesting landscape image (include attribution) or create the beginning of a video.  Write the beginning of a story relating to your image or video. Remember to include a conflict of some sort between your characters. Invite your readers to finish the story. How many different endings can you get? Which ending do you prefer? You might need to visit some other bloggers and invite them to finish your story. Remember to leave the URL of your post for them to click on.

Each class must pick one activity, either activity 1 or activity 2 and have the work ready to upload by Friday, April 6th. 

Most important learning from this week’s challenge is:

Use creative commons images or public domain, not just any image on the net. Always include attribution of where you found the image. Compfight plugin does this for you.

Week 2 Blogging Challenge Class Places:

1st period = first place 3 pts. (Best Overall)

 

4th period = second place 2 pts (Best Voice Overlay for Video Instructions)

 

6th period = third place 1 pts.

Running Totals after 2 weeks of competition:

1st period           4 pts.

4th period          4 pts.

6th period          4 pts.

 

 

March 16

Student Blogging Challenge Week 2

And that means it post day for the Eng. 12 Blogging Challenge.

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History of Wapahani

Wapahani High School was created in 1967 to combine the two schools; Selma High School and Center High School. The name Wapahani was chosen by the daughter of Ardis Bailey. Ardis Bailey was a secretary at Selma High School. Wapahani is a Delaware Indiana word that means white river, which runs behind the high school throughout the state of Indiana.

The first high school was Selma High School, which was established in 1904. The school was located in Liberty Township. Selma High School was open from 1904 to 1967. When Selma High School closed, it turned into a middle school for a few years, until a new Selma High School was built next to Wapahani High School.

Center High School was established in 1905. It was located in Perry Township in Delaware County.  Center High School was a very small school during this period of time. Center High School’s curriculum was limited and only had the basic education.

At Wapahani High School there are many college dual credit classes. We have multiple extracurricular activities, such as different kind of sports and activities. Wapahani has changed and developed throughout the years, making it a great learning place and a great high school experience.

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Use this link to learn how to leave a comment.

IMG_0979 (1)-1zqoaxo from 4th Period

Senior Reflection –  I wouldn’t think I would learn anything from spending a month reading, crafting a fever chart, and writing an essay about an old story I didn’t really care about or like, but I kind of did. My biggest take away was figuring out that I couldn’t do the bare minimum anymore and that if I continued to do so that it would get me in trouble, especially in college. In the next four years after high school, I’m going to be continuously fighting for my spot at the top of the animation program at Ball State, the most competitive art major they offer. I’ve been working hard for it almost my whole life, so to go into it trying to scrape by would be stupid and very irresponsible. Another thing is that a lot of Ball State kids go to different internships with different animation companies like Cartoon Network and Nickelodeon, but no one has been able to make it into Pixar. They said that they’ve had kids get into the semi-finals, but never break through to the actual thing, so that’s my goal, be the first Ball State student to intern at Pixar. In order to do that, I can’t strive for the bare minimum anymore. I have to swallow my pride a little bit and start working hard in order to achieve the kinds of goals I’m setting for myself. I wouldn’t have thought that I learned that from spending a month reading, crafting a fever chart, and writing an essay about an old story I didn’t really care about or like, but I did.

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Use the link below to learn how to leave a comment.

File_000 (1)-1jkgj4f 

from 6th period.

Hamlet’s love for Ophelia

In the play Hamlet by William Shakespeare, Hamlet is extremely in love with
Ophelia. Ophelia isn’t sure how to feel about it as if she isn’t sure if she should love him
back or not. Hamlet writes letters to her expressing his love for her and hopes that one
day she’ll return the letters back to him. Polonius, Ophelia’s father, then finds these letters
and takes them to the Queen and Kings attention that he is writing these letters to his
daughter. When Polonius takes the letters to the King and Queen, the Queen sees no
problem in Hamlet expressing his love for Ophelia the way he is because he found
someone who was a caring person. After Ophelia’s father gets murdered by Hamlet,
Ophelia became very depressed at her father’s death and becomes a little insane. She then
drowns herself because she is depressed.
While watching the movie I was very interested as to how the characters Ophelia and
Hamlet’s roles changed. Hamlet was a shy misunderstood man who loved his mother and
found out later after his mother remarried to his uncle Claudius when he father died that
he did because he was murdered by his father. Ophelia was a shy timid woman who had a
great heart and cared for her father and obeyed him and the King and Queen. Ophelia had
the deepest love for Hamlet but wasn’t sure how he felt about her until he started writing
letters and expressing his love for her.

After watching the movie Hamlet, I believe that Hamlet’s love for Ophelia was
exactly as he wrote it to her. I believe he was strong and endeared to her and really
wanted to marry her but was too afraid to be turned down and rejected by her. Hamlet
was very loyal to her and had the idea that he would give Ophelia the world. Ophelia on
the other hand wasn’t sure if she could love a man who never spoke to her and showed
his love for her only through letters. Ophelia was very dear to him and was very
concerned of him at times.
In the play by William Shakespeare, Hamlet recited these lines “I loved Ophelia. Forty
thousand brothers, if you added all their love together, couldn’t match mine. What are you
going to do for her (line 285-287)?” This quote shows Hamlet’s love for Ophelia after
she died. When Ophelia died Hamlet and Laeretes had a battle to see which man was the
strongest and bravest. But Claudius and Laeretes had planned to kill Hamlet during this
battle. Claudius slipped a poison filled capsule into a drink and spoke “ Stay, give me
drink. Hamlet this pearl is thine; here’s to thy health. Give him the cup.” But Hamlet did
not drink. Hamlet’s response was “Ill play this bout first; set it by

 

March 11

Week 1 Blogging Challenge Winners

Congratulations 6th Period

Scales tries to educate us.
If we have a lecture, nobody listens.
Xylophones listen better than we do.
Tooting is all we hear.
Hazardous to our education.

Pretending we know what is going on.
Even Mrs. Scales pretends to know.
Relaxing all hour.
Internet is down, again.
Odor is still penetrating my nostrils.
Dragons are cool.

Best overall

Second Place goes to 4th Period

Best icon

Third Place goes to 1st Period (time to wake up for this week’s challenge).

That means that we go into the second week of the Student Blogging Challenge with the following scores:

1st period           1 pt.

4th period          2 pts.

6th period          3 pts.

About week 2: Commenting skills

This is another important week in the challenge. Blogging is all about having your voice heard and connecting with others who might like to read and comment on what you have written. But, as in many things we humans do, there are some protocols bloggers in schools like to follow.

Remember the wonderful toolkit we used for out Out of Eden Walk earlier this year. Using those ideas:

Notice: What stands out to you or catches your eye in this person’s post? In other words, what do you notice in particular? Be specific.

Appreciate: Share what you like, appreciate or value in the post you’ve read. Be specific.

Probe: Probe for more details. Ask questions that will help give you a better sense of another person’s perspective. (See Creative Questions & Sentence Starts below)

Snip: Cut and paste a phrase or sentence from the original post into your comment. Ask a question about it or say what you find interesting or important about what is being said.

Connect: Make a connection between something in the post and your own experiences, feelings, or interests.

Extend: Describe how the post extended your thoughts in new directions or gave you a new perspective.

Each class needs to complete 3 activities this week:

  1. Make a short video using both visuals and sound to explain to those people reading your posts how to leave comments.
  2. Write a class post on a topic you think other bloggers might be interested in.
  3. Reply to at least three other classes in the blogging challenge.

It is entirely up to your class as to how you divide up the work and responsibility for these three activities. All three parts must be delivered to Mrs. Scales by the end of class on Friday for posting.

 

March 9

Introducing the Three Eng. 12 Classes

Three separate senior English class periods will be competing while participating in this year’s Student Blogging Challenge.

For week one, each class has created their own icon, avatar, or logo and provided just a bit of introductory information. Let us know what you think or questions you may have. Students will respond to all comments.

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About Us Eng. 12 Period 1

  • Mrs. Scales 1st hour Senior Class at Wapahani High School
  • Most of us are in 1st hour because we leave to go to the career center or we leave to go to our internships
  • We are a small class from Selma Indiana surrounded by cornfields
  • The girls outnumber the boys, but only by a few
  • All of us have senioritis and we are past ready to graduate

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“Important” Facts About Period 4

 16 “hardworking” students (17, but we choose not to claim one)
 Dysfunctional
 We play scrabble every Wednesday during class
 We make/drink/spill coffee, daily
 Greatest flaw: honesty
 The attention span of gnats
 We irk our teacher, daily
 Work together strangely well
 Always make English fun
 Laugh wayyyyyy too much (if that’s even possible)
 We’re her favvvs
CHECK THE BLOG

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Scales tries to educate us.
If we have a lecture, nobody listens.
Xylophones listen better than we do.
Tooting is all we hear.
Hazardous to our education.

Pretending we know what is going on.
Even Mrs. Scales pretends to know.
Relaxing all hour.
Internet is down, again.
Odor is still penetrating my nostrils.
Dragons are cool.

 

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Please let us know which class you think has the most interesting visual and written introduction. We have also updated our map on the sidebar so we can see where all of our new comments are coming from. Check back often and look for the class logo for additional weekly blog posts.

March 7

Reflections – The Art of Examining Our Own Practices and Experiences

The final activity of the Hamlet unit for Eng. 12  was a reflection essay. Here is one of my favorite responses:

” Throughout the entirety of our Hamlet unit I didn’t just learn about Hamlet, I also learned some intriguing things about myself. When we started Hamlet, I wasn’t real invested in it. As we got further and further into the unit (especially the movie) I began to start paying more attention and better understanding the story. It wasn’t until it was time to write the paper that I really discovered what Hamlet had made me realize about myself. It surprised me a lot, but now that I know it, I’ll do my best to remember it.

Usually, on any normal essay, I will procrastinate until I’m staying up after 3 a.m. to finish my writing. This time it was different. I got sick about 3 days before the rough draft was due. Stuck at home, I decided to go ahead and write most, if not all, of my paper. I started probably about noon or maybe a little after and just started chugging along. The weirdest part, I actually began to enjoy what I was doing. If I didn’t like something, I could change it at my own free will and not have to worry about rushing just to get it done in time. Numerous times I wrote a whole paragraph, went back and re-read it, deleted it, then started over with a clean slate. Sure, I took breaks here and there, but I didn’t get done writing until about 6:30 that evening. I wasn’t even mad about it either! Reading my “masterpiece” I had finished, I discovered that when I give myself plenty of time to write an essay and revise it, I can actually spit out something that’s half-way decent.

This could actually be a good life lesson for me. I now know I’m capable of turning in decent work, even if Scales doesn’t agree that it’s good. Not everybody’s opinion is good I guess. Thanks to this assignment though, I may start allowing myself more time before I start cramming all my writing into a few hours.”

And by the way, Scales did think it was very decent work.

Another senior tagged a note on his rough draft of an assignment due yesterday, that made my day.

“Sorry about the lack of my 5th page. I clearly didn’t do enough digging and research, it
caught me off guard when I finished and this is all I had. I will have it finished tonight but as
of right now this is all I was able to come up with.”

Students growing and learning what they are capable of is what it is all about in teaching. I am loving my year teaching seniors. Students reflecting and taking personal responsibility for their learning outcomes should be the goal of all teachers.

More good reflective responses:

Learning About Myself by Learning About Hamlet

‘Don’t procrastinate, don’t procrastinate, don’t procrastinate,’ I told myself when I received the assignment for a fever chart and three-page essay; and I didn’t. I tried my best to focus, stay on task, and put my best effort into the Hamlet assignments. I planned ahead and tried to work out how to do certain aspects, while still achieving the goal of the assignments, but I soon lost focus.

Staying on task is something I struggle with, and I noticed more and more how my mind careens between subjects; especially as I had to bounce between the play and the film adaptation of Hamlet. I tried to keep my essay on task, but my mind would wonder. As I reread my essay, I found error upon error. I tried to correct as many as I could, changing paragraph structures, sentence structures and word choices. After I removed excessive wordiness and added clarity, my essay was small and not much in comparison with my rough draft. My rough draft had excessive quotes and was messy and all over the place. My mind cannot focus, and I cannot find a way to control it. I know my weakness and I don’t let it hold me back. Focus always seems in reach of me, and right as I go to grasp it, it dissolves like a cloud.

I learned that I need to sit down in silence, with only my assignments to focus on. I need to revise a lot more before my final draft is completed. I need to start sitting down with a printed copy of my essay, highlighters, and pens, and read my essay aloud, correct things that are confusing to read, redundant, and unnecessary. I need to read through and correct slowly, multiple times. I learned that I let my fear of not being good enough control how I write my papers. When I worry about how my essay makes me seem, I lose focus of goal my essay and forget my original thesis.

Most importantly, I learned that I am capable of more than I think I am. To achieve my goals I must relax, trust in myself, and focus. To achieve my goals, I also need to use less commas and causing less comma splices. While I kept a rubric near by, I still didn’t use it as much as I should have. I need to focus, and relax. If not, I will get an average grade because I have average work. The grade I get reflects how hard I work on an assignment. Honestly, I only did what I had to do, which is average, so received a C. I learned that despite my struggle to focus, I still must work hard.

 

Realizing just how great Shakespear was/is

What can be learned about one’s self from just a simple and old play? This old play has certainly caught my attention, with its subtlety in its characters speech and character development. However, through the reading of the play and the viewing of the 1990 film adaptation, I grew to appreciate how well the characters motives were displayed and how their intentions were obvious from the start of their introduction. These viewings and readings really taught me to look for the little details in films and plays. Such as in the movie the slight expressions of the actors made their respective characters feel very real,  and as though they were actually their characters. Looking at these subtle details allowed me to grow my interest in the Shakespearean style of writing characters.What can be learned about one’s self from just a simple and old play? This old play has certainly caught my attention, with its subtlety in its characters speech and character development. However, through the reading of the play and the viewing of the 1990 film adaptation, I grew to appreciate how well the characters motives were displayed and how their intentions were obvious from the start of their introduction. These viewings and readings really taught me to look for the little details in films and plays. Such as in the movie the slight expressions of the actors made their respective characters feel very real,  and as though they were actually their characters. Looking at these subtle details allowed me to grow my interest in the Shakespearean style of writing characters.

Though I wasn’t able to perceive much of the characters emotion from reading the play, the way in which it was written had kept me interested and enthralled in their character. After that, I wondered what was keeping me interested throughout the play and movie? It was the pacing of the play and movie that kept me waiting to see what would happen next. The play didn’t reveal the entire plot in the first act, and neither did the movie. Overall they only showed enough of the plot to make the viewer wonder the characters motivations and reasoning for their actions.

Throughout this unit, my respect for Shakespeare’s works grew immensely and made me want to focus more on character. Overall this unit made me respect how well written these plays were and the effort it took to make them.

 

“I learned that I enjoy Shakespeare’s works. I enjoy the feeling of figuring out the little puzzle pieces you figure out along the way. While reading I like figuring out the different little innuendos he puts into his plays so discreetly.”

“First and foremost I learned that not everyone thinks the same in a tight situation, it showed me that remaining calm and thinking first will clearly help a situation no matter the issue. Stating the obvious, it is safe to say that Hamlet wasn’t exactly the best at taking a more structured approach to his problems.”

“Did I learn anything from the play Hamlet? You bet I did, it was almost like taking a psychology class. I really started paying attention to hamlets actions a lot more as the play progressed.”

“I wouldn’t think I would learn anything from spending a month reading, crafting a fever chart, and writing an essay about an old story I didn’t really care about or like, but I kind of did. My biggest take away was figuring out that I couldn’t do the bare minimum anymore and that if I continued to do so that it would get me in trouble, especially in college.”

March 2

Completing Hamlet Writing Workshops


Both the Eng. 12 classes and the AP Lit. class have been working on a 9-week long unit on Hamlet. It has been a jampacked third quarter, with everything from a fun reading theater style run through of the play, to learning to use the Shakespearean language to track emotional states of specific characters with our fever chart assignments, to doing a close watching of the 1990 Franco Zeffirelli film adaptation of Hamlet starring Mel Gibson. Finally, our last two weeks have been devoted to Writing Workshops in the classroom. So far we have gone through writing a draft to specifically look at the structure of each part of our essays. Time has been spent on knowing and using all of the parts needed to construct a complete introduction, focused body paragraphs, and a powerful conclusion. Today, you are finishing the revision stage of your writing. You must come to class on Monday, March 5th with your completed revised draft of your essay. We will spend Monday working on the proofreading stage, where we fix the errors. This will include grammar, punctuation, formatting, and MLA specific corrections.

On the front board today I posted the exact Works Cited page entries required for this essay. This is the correct information that you should have been able to pull from your MLA practice templet for both the play and the movie we watched.

Next week’s schedule will be as follows for both classes:

Eng. 12

Monday – Proofreading and Final Essay published through Turnitin

Tuesday – Reflection timed writing Essay done in class and published through Turnitin 

Wednesday – Scrabble 

Thursday & Friday – Class Logo for Blog Challenge 

AP Literature

Monday – Proofreading and Final Essay published through Turnitin

Tuesday – Final Hamlet AP Multiple Choice Exam

Wednesday – Reflection timed writing Essay done in class and published through Turnitin

Thursday – Introduction to Author Study Project

Friday – Introduction to A Raisin in the Sun Unit

For all classes, the grading period ends on Friday, March 9th. 

 

March 1

Final Grading Period English 12 Blog Challenge

Welcome to the student take over of the Mrs. Scales’ Room blog. Begining March 4th the seniors at Wapahani High School will take over this blog and participate in the 2018 Student Blogging Challenge. Each of the three Eng. 12 periods, 1, 4, and 6 will do a weekly challenge post for the following 10 weeks. Each class period will complete this series of 10 weekly tasks all designed to improve blogging and commenting skills while connecting students with a global audience.

Your first task will be to create a class logo or avatar that you wish to use to represent your class period each week on the blog. You can do this as a whole group, or you can select someone from your class period who will individually (or even as a small group) be responsible for this first task. The grades for each week will be on collaborative grade for everyone in the class and with ten weeks of activities to accomplish everyone in the class should be actively involved in one or more of the assignments.

Students, remember the communication toolbox used earlier in the year for our Out of Eden Walk participation. Be creative and informative. Think about the possible global audience you will be posting for and have fun.

Readers, remember anything after the soon to be revealed class period logos will be coming from that group of seniors and no longer be direct information from Mrs. Scales herself. Let the challenge begin.