Hi! My name is Rebecca Tisa and I am a Spanish Teacher. I have been teaching for 10 years now, with almost all of those years in an urban setting. I am the mother of three little angels and when I am not teaching, I spend every second I can with them.
Currently, I am working at East Upper School in cooperation with the University of Rochester, our EPO (Educational Partnership Organization) in order to get off of the NYS list of Persistently struggling schools. I've just begun working on a Professional Development called "Cool Tools" to learn some new technology driven strategies and resources that I can use in my classroom. I applied for a received a ChromeBook cart for my classroom so I have unlimited access to computers, which has been a lot of fun for my students and me. I would love to enhance this experience for them as technology can often be the hook that struggling student and disengaged students need in order to be successful.
I honestly don't know much about blogging and have never really considered it as an option for my students. Reading the articles that tell how much it increased student AND parent engagement were encouraging. We are also working on providing immediate and individual feedback for our students and this sounds like a perfect way to incorporate that strategy as well. Because we have the ChromeBooks for each student, Blogger seems like an ideal choice for my students as it connects to their already existing google accounts. This would also mean that it has the potential to be a cross-curricular, school wide endeavor if we so choose it to be.
I am apprehensive about online etiquette and interested to learn more about how others have taught this to their high school students. With so much social media and digital experiences (both positive and negative) it is critical for students to learn how to do this work appropriately, even if prior experience and current digital culture says otherwise.
