Introduction

I am a high school English teacher located in southern Illinois. I work in a very rural school. How rural, you ask? It is surrounded on all four sides by cornfield. That said, I love my job and I work with a great group of kids!

Currently, I have quite a bit of technology in my classroom: a Smart Board, a projector, a scanner, a Flip video camcorder, a digital camera, and a few other bells and whistles. Like a lot of teachers out there, I also spend quite a bit of my own money on my classroom. I'm always looking for new ways to teach to keep the students interested and to keep the presentation feeling fresh and relevant. I know that I'm preparing students for jobs that don't even exist yet.

A few of the topics that I am especially interested in are podcasts, blogging/social networking, and student-created videos. This year, I've been experimenting with everything I hear about, but not going into much depth with anything. I would really like to incorporate the use of Glogster next year, and possibly find another teacher with students very different from mine to do an e-mail correspondence with.