Senior English Blogs: Brave New World Units
Below are a series of screenshots from the Wordpress blogs I built to house and facilitate my Brave New World units intended for the CP and Honors Senior English classes I worked with as part of my student teaching tenure at Newburyport High School. As a class, we used these blogs to...
- keep track of our schedules
- establish open and ongoing lines of dialogue about our ongoing scholarship
- house detailed rubrics for any assignments
- engage in discussions surrounding quotes pulled from the text for our dialectical journals
- maintain running, digital word walls of vocabulary words from the text
- provide a place to ask questions directed either privately to me or publicly to the class
In-class work and homework assignments are all listed here by date and are updated regularly, allowing students to anticipate due dates and make up missed work easily.
I consistently encourage students to connect our classwork to their outside lives. In this instance, a student came across a song by a band he loves that directly related to our in-class work. The blog is a great place to share these connections with the whole class, allowing room for comments and discussion from the class.
This lesson asked students to connect themes from Brave New World to current events using news articles. The links to these articles were made available on the blog so that students could keep track of them, but also so that they could easily return to those articles and review them at any time.
Dialectical journals housed in the blog allow students to interact with one another digitally outside of class time hours. This also allows students to link to outside multimedia content, connecting the reading to articles, songs, videos, or images. At the end of each chapter, the resulting chat boards are easily accessible and searchable so that students can return to review the archives for quotes or ideas. Many students returned to these journals as a resource to help write their final essays.
The rubrics for the dialectical journals are housed on the landing page of the dialectical journal menu. Students can refer back to these at any point throughout the unit.
Our running digital word wall keeps a record of all the vocabulary we've come across and reviewed together in class. Each word is associated with an image for more visually-oriented students. Students can return to this to review at any time; this serves as the basis for any vocabulary-based activities throughout the unit.