Bill Sullivan's Home Page

 

September 7, 2011

Mr. Sullivan's digital sandbox

VERITAS ODIT MORAS

 

Latin III

English III

Honors English III

English IV

Honors English IV

Charles Dickens

Teaching Friends

Bible as Literature

Place-Based Learning

Project-Based Learning

Mr. Sullivan's (my alias) goals for his students: appreciate the writing process and become a critical thinker.


Nota Bene:

Word for the Wise

The Writer's Almanac

Academy of American Poets

Educational Links

Library of Congress

PBS

National Council of Teachers of English

The Landmark Project

Newspapers Online:

Washington Post

New York Times

Guardian / Observer

London Times

Journals and Magazines:

American Prospect

Atlantic Monthly

Granta

The Nation

Philosophy & Literature

Book Reviews:

New York Review

NY Times Books

Atlantic Books

Guardian/Observer

Columnists:

Thomas Friedman

Noam Chomsky

Jimmy Breslin

Maureen Dowd

Ezines:

Andante

Context

FrontPage

Diversions:

Harper's Index

Satire Wire

Grave Stones

 

Return to Top 

Meaningful Ways to Incorporate Technology in theClassroom

June 2011: After careful review of student evaluations regarding the use of technology in our classroom, I have come up with a new idea to create one blog for all of my classes. I am looking forward to this new way of thinking and creating. It will be a new mindset, and I always like adapting and trying new mindsets! Check it out: http://digitalcrowsnest.wordpress.com/

June 2010: The class blog and use of the blog was the clear message in the annual student evaluations this year; also maintaining curriculum on old fashion web pages ranked highly.

June 5, 2009: Student evaluations strongly suggest dropping Dreamweaver and continue with Wikis.

January 5, 2009: My first Blog; now hosting extra credit carrots.

November 20, 2008: CAIS Workshop on digital poems and stories

Academic year 2008-09: Click on my digital English Sandbox: an attempt to have students find great web sites to help them with style rules. Parents, if you wish, follow the prompts to join our private space.

Pandemics Winter & Spring (2007-08) senior elective with a PBL approach.

October 26, 2007: College Board National Forum: Classroom Roundtable Session

October 20, 2007: Click here for a web page delineating study skills for our Voc. Quizzes.

June 20, 2007: Click here for my CAIS workshop on digital stories and poems in K-12 classrooms.

April 2, 2007: Project Home, English III. See my page for this project.

December 1, 2006: Click here for new interdisciplinary digital fun.

November 11, 2006: Click here for a page that I made for the College Board Forum Classroom Roundtable Session.

June 28, 2006: Click here for a page that I made for the CAIS Technology Workshop about making digital stories and poems in the classroom.

2005-2006: Click here for a page that contains links to my student pages; English III students have extensive web pages and Digital poems.

June 22, 2005: Click here for a page that I made for a CAIS Workshop for making digital stories and poems in the classroom.

June 1, 2005: (future link) Click here for a page that catalogues student evaluations about technology in an English class.

July 1, 2004: Click here for a page that I made for a CAIS Workshop for making your own digital story.

April 28-May 1 2004: Learning and the Brain Conference in Cambridge, MA. Click here for Kim's, Greg's and Bill's notes.

February 26, 2004: Commission on Technology CAIS conference; Poetry Appreciation. Here's a new web page to explain why and how we began using Audio Recorder to appreciate poetry in English III.

February 22, 2004: Here's a new page to catalogue the potential uses of technology for students and teachers.

January 12, 2004: Check out the new web page for the Writer's Handbook. Is it good to have a copy on line?

September 2003: I want to hand my students a print out of their grade every 2.5 weeks this term. I have tried to make my expectations as transparent as possible. Click here and check it out.

November 2002: I hope to integrate more of what I learned at the recent Brain Based Learning conferences that I attended in Boston and more recently through CAIS. I think that our web pages will be useful tools to implement several strategies that I learned.

I-Movies:Some students recently volunteered to have their poetry memorization renders filmed on an I-Movie camera. I hope to have it as a way to celebrate student achievement in this case. Besides teaching time management skills, this assignment helps students understand a poem extremely well. In the spring term, students research and selected their own poem. I will soon edit these I-Movies and post them on the English III Web page.

...................................

The Song Maketh the I-Movie. With this in mind, we are having an extra credit contest. The student who proposes the song for our upcoming I-Movie of this year's field trip to Amherst will receive an extra credit boost on his/her lowest vocabulary quiz grade. Click here to see the current submissions. Once we have the song, then we can cut the movie.

..................................

I am currently enjoying the I-Movie software. It is a powerful tool. I spent some time over spring break reading an I-Movie book that helped complement the advice from one of Andrew's Technology sessions last February.

..................................

My senior class is currently researching their future schools to find out academic and extracurricular culture for upcoming college experience. They are researching such items as the preferred style guide to papers, in which English class they might enroll, how many papers or exams are required, the format for exams. We will post these conclusions on the class web page and seniors can check them next year similar to how one might look at a time capsule.

Return to Top

Current and Past Links to Student Work

Academic year 2010-2011:Click on my digital sandbox page which hosts links to all of my current class blogs (where students author the blogs) and class wikis.

Academic year 2009-2010:Click on my digital sandbox page which hosts links to all of my current wikis and blogs.

Academic year 2008-09: Click here to find student web pages.

May 11, 2007: Click here for our work-in-progress regarding our American Cultural History digital textbook. We're scanning documents of interest that we will later donate to local library web page.

May 7, 2007: Click here for our field trip up historic and scenic Mt. Skinner.

October 2006: Click here to see new student web pages. We are leaning the craft of writing book reviews; we're also writing about issue important in our lives today.

March 2005: Click here to see some Digital Stories. My students have created their own stories and have composed I-Movie productions that involve complementing images and music. You will have to search around a little on each page to find each digital story.

October/November 2004: Click here to see some Digital Poems. My students have interpreted poems of Whitman and Dickinson by using Mac's I-Movie software.

June 2004: Click here to view a movie; it was a student project to rescript, cast, act, film and edit what the group of students believed to be the most dramatic scene of Miller's Death of a Salesman.

January 21, 2004: I have made a new web page to explain why and how I use technology in my English Curriculum; I also explain how I use different software applications.

December 15 2003: My English III class has added audio to their web pages. Using Audio Recorder software, students have recorded their favorite passages of Whitman and Dickinson; they have posted these passages on their web pages with a little text to explain why each passage is their favorite. Click here and check it out.

January 22, 2003: May and I have mobilized our Sophomore Leadership class to create individual web pages. We no longer require students to bring a notebook; we now ask them to use their laptop everyday in class. Click here to see these electronic portfolios.

January 2003:

I have begun a web journal in order to deliberately reflect on the use of technology in my curriculum: what works well and what needs improvement?

November 2002: May, Rachel and I are trying to get our Sophomore Leadership class to create individual web pages. Click here to see the results.

October 2002:English III Teachers have organized our trip to Lenox, Massachusetts to see a dramatic performance of The Scarlet Letter. Click on the Field Trip Link on the English III Web Page.

October 2002: My English III class has begun an in-depth technology project. We're all learning to make web pages, and I have begun a sample page of a fictitious student, Johnny Poe. click on his name to see a sample English III page.

September, 2002: May, Rachel and I are launching a new web page for our Sophomore Leadership B1 & B2 sections. Click here.

September, 2002: I am wondering if we could have students create place to list book reviews of their favorite pleasure reading. SA Book Review

September, 2002: English III Teachers are planning a field trip to Lenox, Massachusetts to see a dramatic performance of The Scarlet Letter. Details will follow soon.

April, 2002: English III Field Trip scheduled for May 2, 2002. Mr. Sullivan's Period 2 and Period 7 classes will meet outside of Brewster at 8am. We will return approximately 2:30pm. Students will not attend their seventh period classes but will be on time to their afternoon commitments. Do you want to see last year's field trip I-Movie? Click on "Genius Loci; Poet's village".

...................................

Winter, 2002: During the long days of winter while we were reading Dickens' classic, A Tale of Two Cities, I had my students make character web pages. Andrew passed the idea down through the English folder and I had my students help create the guidelines and criteria for a good web page before we began. Thus, when I evaluated these pages, I used the criteria that we had established together. Click here for our Dickens'web page and then click on the class project of character web page. Be sure, too, to scroll down and look at the interactive map of London's 19th century population.

...................................

Fall, 2002: Take a look at our literacy memoirs. We put them all on a web page and made them anonymous because of the memoirs personal nature. Notice how many relate accounts of loving to read at a young age yet school began to creep into their reading interests. We used this project as our first writing assignment and it complement our summer reading book, Tobias Woolf's This Boy's Life.

Return to Top

...................................

Professional Development

I am a member of the CAIS Professional Development Commission. I am one of the planners for the upcoming conference on 21st century skills on October 21, 2010. Check out our wiki.

December 3, 2009: New conference schedule, descriptions of presentations, and flyer for the January 21, 2009 21st Century CAIS conference.

October 20, 2009: I co-presented this keynote of the October conference with Andrew Watt, Chairperson of the CAIS Commission.

The Writing Center:Writing Center Homepage.

Beginning in the academic year of 2009, I am stepping aside from the center, which is now called Academy Tutors. Instead, I will be taking up Latin, a subject that I last taught in the 20th century, 1995.

Inspirational Movies that we used in the Writing Center.

Junior Leadership Information 2008-09: Click here for information on Senior Leadership opportunities for the 2008-09 academic year .

Junior Leadership Information 2007: Click here for information on Senior Leadership opportunities for the 2007-08 academic year .

October 2004: Need help working on a paper? Click here for our new schedule.

January 12, 2004: Check out this Powerpoint which was presented to juniors this week during the Leadership L Block periods. The powerpoint stemmed from a successful meeting of seniors who suggested the presentation be brief, cover the exact points which juniors needed to know for the Leadership curriculum yet also be fun. Thanks go out to Mr. Ellerton who furnished the classic tune, Under Pressure, a timeless classic from the collaborative efforts of David Bowie and Queen.

September 29,2003: Check out our new schedule on Writing Center web site. We have new hours and have taken an historic leap by tutoring during the academic day.

April 16, 2003: Check out our new schedule on Writing Center web site. We have new hours and have taken an historic leap by tutoring during the academic day. Along with begin open 8-9:50pm, we are also open on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday during F, G, and L periods.

September, 2002: Check out our newly updated web site. We have new hours this year. We're open 8-10pm on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday evenings. Make the trip across the glass floor!

May, 2002: Our Writing Center Junior and Sophomore tutors are learning how to brainstorm and pre-write a college essay. Experienced tutors will help them with the subtitles of tutoring a college essay compared to other academic essays. Senior tutors will also help work through several drafts of their own work in progress. In several weeks, English III students will be visiting the Writing Center to work on a personal narrative essay assignment for brainstorming and other prewriting issues. Check out the Writing Center college essay web page.

 .........................................

October 2002: We have also begun having our senior legacy nights. Hear and see some I-Movies of some of our seniors. Find out what Polly thinks makes up a good writing conference in the Writing Center: Polly

You can also see and hear Polly give advice about brainstorming and prewriting a college essay on our college essay help

..........................................

Currently on the Wring Center web page, the page that delineates our vision for a typical writing conference, we have Laura writing out her steps to the conference in narrative form. Polly also supplies her steps in an I-Moive. Finally, Liz supplies her version in a diagram made by Inspirational Software. I want to explore more uses of this software; here it allows Liz to show the various steps and many decisions that a tutor makes throughout a typical tutorial session.

Inspirational software could be used more often to help students brainstorm and in the prewriting stages. Mike Pardee, who suggested the software, has also used it challenge his students to explore their weaknesses when plotting out their ideas while completing a large and complex writing project. The software allows linear folks to convert their ideas to picture graphs and equally aids nonlinear thinkers in the process from drawing their ideas in pictures before converting them into a formal outline. It's creative software for the writing process.

Return to Top

The above motto, "Veritas odit moras," is a line from Seneca's translation of Sophocles' Oedipus. It means "Truth hates delay."

Return to Top