Home

Arquillos

Boardman

About

Discussion

Recent Discussion

Create New Topic

Site Stats

Most Read Messages

Referers

Hits By Hour

Karen's Intro

Unable to make a story, thought I'd start off as a discussion item (although I feel a bit paranoid if I am a discussion item)...

My History

Earned my degrees in speech pathology and audiology and worked as a speech-language pathologist in the public schools for 8 years following the completion of my master's.  In 1986 I joined the faculty at Marshall University in Huntington, WV to teach in the Communication Disorders department.  Early in the 90's I began to think about teaching and learning (up until that time I was just going through the motions, doing what my professors had done) and one thing led to another and that other thing ultimately led me here. 

My Hats

I wear a lot of different hats.  In addition to my teaching responsibilities, I direct the Writing Across the Curriculum program on our campus, am a Technology Liaison for our local writing project site, co-chair (with Michelle!) the DTeam of the National Writing Project, direct the NWP Technology Liaison project, parent two allegedly adult students (both in college), and sometimes I even have time to spend with my husband.

My Interests

I have a strong belief that technology can enhance teaching and learning and consequently writing.  I know this from my own experiences and from the experiences of my students.  Somehow, I find myself in the position of explorer, I want to try new things and see what happens.  This is kind of where I am with blogs.  I just really want to know what happens when teachers are given access to a web that lets them focus on content, not design.  My immediate (meaning this summer) uses of blogs will be for an experimental project of a select few youth writing camps being sponsored by writing project sites this summer.  In this project, we will be looking at blogs as a place to publish, get and give feedback, and as a "home base" for a community to develop.  I'll keep you posted on how that develops.  A second thing I'm hoping to do this summer (but haven't quite worked this all out yet) is to have the students in my computer course do a "multigenre" paper instead of a traditional kind of paper they've done in the past.  To that end, I think having them each have a blog would be stupendous, allowing them the freedom to easily focus on content and not design (although they do learn how to make web pages in the class, I don't want the class to be all about the technology...I want it to be about how technology supports the content or acquisition of content)....but, as I said I just don't have it all worked out yet (and I do worry about having them develop blogs at schoolblogs with its unreliability).

That's About It...

...for now.  Glad to be here, thanks for letting me participate.

Karen