mrshawke-dot-com » Day in a Sentence

Day in a Sentence: Transitions

johawke — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 01:47:01 +0000

Hi there! I’m so glad to be able to host Day in a Sentence again! (Thanks, Kevin!) Day in a Sentence is a weekly opportunity to join together with people from around the world in boiling down one of your days into one sentence.

Since many of us are teachers who are leaving our work-filled school year and entering our (work-filled?) summer vacations, I thought it would be fun to focus on transitions: What changes are you going through in your job, your home, your life? How do you deal with change? How does it deal with you?

Also, if you have a picture or audio file (or whatever else) you’d like to add into the mix, by all means send them along!

The plan:

Reflect on your week or one day in it.
Write about it in a single reflective sentence.
Send it to me via the comment box at the bottom of this post.
I’ll put everyone’s sentences together and publish them sometime this Sunday.

Thanks! I look forward to hearing from you. :)

p.s. I’m holding all comments on this post until they’re published.

Most of my teaching resources are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License, which means you can feel free to use them with attribution as long as you don’t use them commercially. If you’re not sure, don’t hesitate to ask me. Unfortunately, I am currently unable to send out my tests and quizzes, but I am hoping to establish a less time-consuming alternative for this in the near future. Sorry!!

My Day in a Sentence: Sketchcast

johawke — Mon, 18 May 2009 02:16:41 +0000

This week, Kevin aka dogtrax asked us to come up with an “essential question.”

Just in case the embedded sketchcast doesn’t show up, here’s a transcript of my question:

“How can I be more productive and more creative without feeling overwhelmed?”

Twitter in a Sentence

johawke — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 02:09:59 +0000

I hope that everyone’s day is as beautiful as the one we’re experiencing here in southern Virginia! I’m wishing every day could be like this one.

The dogwoods are blooming out back, their white-flowered branches gently swaying over top the little white bells and purple irises. We’ve opened the windows to let the breezes blow through the house.

To everyone who contributed a sentence this week: Thanks!

I enjoyed hosting and look forward to getting back into the swing of contributing myself in the future. :)

Larry starts us off this week with a downside of the changing seasons:

“Hot and cold — both inside and outside classroom.”

Barb channels her inner alliteration in a similar theme:

“Spring has sprung forth pollens, rain, & sluggish spirits with its up & down temps.”

Mary reminded me that — although her breed of silence is so tempting — I should embrace the fleeting, never-silent phase of life I’m in now.

“This week my vacation included late mornings with hot coffee, the garden to renew, my mind to rewind and the silence to enjoy, a glass or two of wine and sleep; what joy.”

The ever-poetic Ken ponders an un-twittered twittering wit:

“What wit would twitter
a single tweet of note and
get no twitter back?”

Kevin is looking for some advice on where to put his stuff while his stuff-holder is gone:

“The question we ponder this week: Our garage is soon to be knocked down (and rebuilt) but where do we put all of our stuff?”

Bonnie, whose new photo site is a treat, sends in her sentence from abroad to make us all feel a wee-bit green:

“A week in Israel in the middle of April. Spring in sandals! Lots of pics on my FB page. Twitter, BOO!”

Anne writes about her recent virtual experiences and simultaneously expands our vocabulary:

“With little virtual world experience, I attended the netgened awards in reactiongrid using opensim and enjoyed the adventure with students.”

And finally, my own sentence details my family’s final destination yesterday evening:

“Took kids to Open Mic last night & played music while 4-yr-old stage-dived & break-danced & 15-yr-old & 2-yr-old tore up cookies & chips.

Day in a Sentence, Twitter-syle

johawke — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 03:06:30 +0000

[Cue mic. 3, 2, 1, and...]

Hi there, and welcome to this week’s episode of “Day in a Sentence,” a magical place where you can boil your entire week down to a mere sentence! I’m Jo Hawke, filling in this week for your usual host, the ever-energetic, awe-inspiring Kevin of Kevin’s Meandering Mind.

If you haven’t at least heard of Twitter by now, you must be living in a cave. :P Seriously, now that Oprah‘s done an episode on the social-networking service, it’s official: Twitter has hit the Big Time.

In honor of the San-Fran start-up’s merging into the mainstream, I suggest doing this week’s Day in a Sentence Twitter-style!

The rules:

Boil down one of your days into one 140-characters-or-fewer sentence. You can abbreviate and use symbols, if you like!
Write or paste your sentence in the comment box below and send it. (Adversely, you can email me your sentence at mrshawke(at)gmail.com.) All comments are moderated, and I won’t release the sentences until after they’re published. Other comments will be approved as reviewed.
On Sunday, probably sometime in the afternoon, I’ll publish your sentences in a new post. Then, I’ll also release the original comments.

If you’re already on Twitter, I’d love for you to follow me, so you can read all the tweets I’ll be twittering (or tweeting) or possibly retweeting!

If you’re not, try it out. There are some great ideas floating around the Twitterverse to inspire you in your classroom, boardroom, or studio. And you may be able to follow some of the innovators in your field.

I get to follow everyone from creativity and education expert Sir Ken Robinson and Sal Iozza, founder of open-source e-commerce application CRE Loaded, to Randa Clay, design and marketing guru (who made the above Twitter graphic!), Pulitzer-winning photojournalist Jim MacMillan, and English educator and prolific author Jim Burke.

And, of course, there are educators on my list that I actually met through the Day in a Sentence feature: Kevin, Bonnie, Larry, Gail, and Anne!

If you’re still not sold, don’t let the Twitter-eze or the word count hold you back, as long as you’re writing about a part of your week. ;)

Please email me with questions or comments (or use the form below). And thanks for joining me!!

[And...out...]

Updates

Here’s the video that Kevin posted at his website. It explains Twitter “In Plain English.”

Day in a Sentence: Stixy

johawke — Sat, 07 Feb 2009 18:02:04 +0000

I really love discovering new ways of communicating on the Internet, and this week’s DiaS adventure was no exception.

Stixy is a cool bulletin-board type application that allows users to write sticky notes and to-do lists, and to upload pictures and documents to a page by dragging and dropping icons wherever they like. The items are customizable, too, so you can change the colors and fonts of a note or add a border to a photo. Pretty cool.

It lags pretty bad on my old machine, though, so I had a difficult time moving my note around. (Not enough RAM, I guess, and not enough CASH to upgrade…) And I don’t love a side-scrolling page. I’m not sure if this can be changed in the options for a board.

To see this week’s sentences, you can click on the screenshot above and scroll around a bit. Here’s my sentence:

“I took off yesterday afternoon and all day today, acknowledging a temporary defeat to the TMJ pain. :(”

My Day in a Sentence: PicLit

johawke — Sat, 07 Feb 2009 17:21:35 +0000

Okay, so I didn’t make it in time to be a part of the Day in a Sentence last week, and I didn’t even get my sentence posted here for posterity’s sake until almost a week late, either.

Despite my tardiness, I don’t want to pass up the opportunity to share yet another great web application. Last week’s Day in a Sentence used PicLits, a creative writing site that features images on which you can paste your own words (“freestyle”) or drag-and-drop keywords.

Since I wrote my sentence first, I had a hard time finding an image there that really fit. Most of the pictures are nature-oriented, it seems. I chose the birds flying ’cause they reminded me of hawks (can’t tell if they really are), and there were two of them (me and Kevin) out there on their own (the way it felt behind the mic after so long!).

I’m thinking this will be a great place for my students to creatively display their haiku! I’ll let you know if it happens. :)

To see my PicLit, you can click on the thumbnail above to go to the original. Here’s a transcript of the sentence:

“After talking my husband into taking his guitar to the local Open Mic Friday night, my parents agreed to keep the kids, and we made a night of it; we played four originals and one cover and had a great time after not having hung out in town in, oh, about four years.”

My Day in a Sentence: VoiceThread

johawke — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 04:45:18 +0000

For this week’s Day in a Sentence,

Kevin over at Kevin’s Meandering Mind chose to use VoiceThread, a great multimedia tool that can incorporate many voices: Click here to go to the conversation.

I find the concept and possibilities of VoiceThread captivating. People can contribute to a conversation in five different ways: computer microphone, telephone, text, audio file, and webcam.

They can upload images, videos, and slide shows. And they can “doodle” while commenting. (I uploaded the audio that I recorded on my cell phone, since my mic wouldn’t work, and it’s obviously not as good quality as the others.)

In a technology-rich classroom, this could be an awesome learning tool! In one “conversation,” called 100 Ways to Use VoiceThread in Education, educators from all over the world have contributed ideas on teaching using this collaborative tool.

Here’s a transcript of my sentence:

“This has seemed like the longest short school week ever; I know it’s because I’ve gotten completely spoiled after a long Christmas break and then only a week of school afterward before exam week hit, and then we had another holiday AND a snow day (which was the first in forever around here and coincided providentially with the historic inauguration none of us wanted to miss); in fact, I may have been even less ready to return to school two hours late Wednesday than my students — nahhh.”

Updates

1/26/09 :: Added a semicolon to my transcripted sentence, thanks to my editor/husband’s sharp eye. Too bad he was already asleep when I finished this last night…

My Day in a Sentence: Metaphor-Style

johawke — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 03:21:11 +0000

Kevin of the Meandering Mind hosted the Day in a Sentence feature this week and asked for a metaphor. I haven’t contributed in a while, barely subsisting all around and not feeling much good for anything, frankly. But with my new, turned-around focus, I’m thankful to be able to be a small, sometime part of this community of talented educators and know I should do more. =)

Here’s my sentence (which I see now, in retrospect, could use some thankfulness):

“Working hours for an English teacher are those tiny, so-called “standard” paper clips; they never stretch nearly enough to clamp together all the to-be-graded papers of one kind from one class.

My Day in a Sentence: Ending the Second Week

johawke — Sun, 07 Sep 2008 23:45:33 +0000

Deb hosted the Day in a Sentence feature this week, and I actually made it in this time!! Here it is:

“As the second week of school ended, I reflected on the two times I had to raise my voice (both last period on Friday…) and brainstormed ways to channel all that energy into something positive and productive. Any suggestions?”

My Day in a Sentence: Open House

johawke — Sun, 24 Aug 2008 04:29:23 +0000

Bonnie hosted the Day in a Sentence feature this week. I sent my contribution in really late, and it got stuck somewhere along the way, but here it is:

I spent my 39th birthday meeting about 60 of my 107 new 9th- and 10th-graders, most of whom came with their parents to Open House.