Friday, November 07, 2008

Online Resume Builders

BEGIN HERE (and read the note below):

Online Resume Builder

Important note: You can save the resume you complete using the above Online Resume Builder by:
1. Dragging your browser over the resume, copying it, and pasting it into Microsoft Word.
2. Saving the Microsoft Word document on the transfer drive.

Other resume resources:
Resume Tutor from University of Minnesota.

A second online resume builder (click on free trial)

Sample Student Resumes from AIE

More Student Resumes

Sample Resumes for different careers.

Monday, November 03, 2008

College Essay Resources

The College Board has useful section on Essay Skills for the college admissions essay. Included are a section on how to choose a topic and tips on writing the essay itself.

Samples of successful essays can be found at www.quintcareers.com/

The Common Application essay prompts are at https://app.commonapp.org/CommonApp/docs/downloadforms/CommonApp2008.pdf

True fact: You can pay as much as $1000.00 to have a professional essay editing service such as EssayEdge help you with your essay. (Or you can just ask Wirthy and get help for free).

The College Board suggests you compete the following as part of your brainstorming process:
  • Discover Your Strengths: Do a little research about yourself: ask parents, friends, and teachers what your strengths are.
  • Create a Self-Outline: Now, next to each trait, list five or six pieces of evidence from your life—things you've been or done—that prove your point.
  • Find Patterns and Connections: Look for patterns in the material you've brainstormed. Group similar ideas and events together. For example, does your passion for numbers show up in your performance in the state math competition and your summer job at the computer store? Was basketball about sports or about friendships? When else have you stuck with the hard work to be with people who matter to you?

Wednesday, October 29, 2008

Topics and Links for Things Fall Apart Mini-Research

Topics:
Chinua Achebe
Things Fall Apart (criticism and reviews)
Ibo culture & traditions (music & dance, food, religion, family)
Colonialism in Nigeria
human sacrifice & cannibalism
Nigeria today

Links:
Portals to the World: Nigeria
Online Nigeria
NationMaster: Nigeria
Amazon.com: Things Fall Apart
Reading Room: Things Fall Apart Review


Wednesday, October 22, 2008

Creating a Personal Portaportal for Literacy 9

Your assignment for today is to create a Portaportal with links to 15 or more resources that will be helpful for Explorations Board research.

(1) Please begin by checking the Literacy 9 links at www.guest.portaportal.com/ray_wirth and bookmarking links to those sites that you feel are most useful, based on the web site criteria we have been discussing.

(2) Next use the following search terms on Google.com and investigate the sites you receive as results. Don't stop with page 1 of the results. Dig deeper:

Online Encyclopedia

Online dictionary


History resources

Science resources

Another site for Consideration: (See especially history and science headings):

EducationIndex.com

(3) Create your own Portaportal by going to www.portaportal.com and creating an account. (If you are unable to create a Portaportal account for any reason, please save your links as an organized set of desktop "bookmarks" instead.

(4) I'll check your work next time. Good luck!

Wednesday, June 11, 2008

AP English Summer Reading 2008

All students taking AP English in 2008-2009 should complete the following:
(1) Read one required novel: either Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses or Barbara Kingsolver, The Bean Trees.
(2) Read one choice novel. This novel should come from the reading lists below or from one of the lists provided as a handout.
(3) Post your responses on the online forum at http://2liveis2learn.proboards105.com/
OR take notes as you read the two books. These "notes" should consist of 40 or more "bookmarks" in the form of post-it notes inserted into the book. Each booknote should be a comment about a particular passage in the book. Ideally your notes will include reflections, observations, analysis, connections, and more. Please write me at rwirth@msad56.org if you have questions.

I'm strongly encouraging students to post in the online forum rather than taking "booknotes" but have left the booknote option primarily for those students without internet access. See you on the forum.

101 Great Books

Recommended for College-Bound Readers

It's a good idea to talk to your parents, librarians, teachers, and counselor about your reading list. They can help you choose the best books for you from among your many options.

Author Title
-- Beowulf
Achebe, Chinua Things Fall Apart
Agee, James A Death in the Family
Austen, Jane Pride and Prejudice
Baldwin, James Go Tell It on the Mountain
Beckett, Samuel Waiting for Godot
Bellow, Saul The Adventures of Augie March
Brontë, Charlotte Jane Eyre
Brontë, Emily Wuthering Heights
Camus, Albert The Stranger
Cather, Willa Death Comes for the Archbishop
Chaucer, Geoffrey The Canterbury Tales
Chekhov, Anton The Cherry Orchard
Chopin, Kate The Awakening
Conrad, Joseph Heart of Darkness
Cooper, James Fenimore The Last of the Mohicans
Crane, Stephen The Red Badge of Courage
Dante Inferno
de Cervantes, Miguel Don Quixote
Defoe, Daniel Robinson Crusoe
Dickens, Charles A Tale of Two Cities
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor Crime and Punishment
Douglass, Frederick Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Dreiser, Theodore An American Tragedy
Dumas, Alexandre The Three Musketeers
Eliot, George The Mill on the Floss
Ellison, Ralph Invisible Man
Emerson, Ralph Waldo Selected Essays
Faulkner, William As I Lay Dying
Faulkner, William The Sound and the Fury
Fielding, Henry Tom Jones
Fitzgerald, F. Scott The Great Gatsby
Flaubert, Gustave Madame Bovary
Ford, Ford Madox The Good Soldier
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von Faust
Golding, William Lord of the Flies
Hardy, Thomas Tess of the d'Urbervilles
Hawthorne, Nathaniel The Scarlet Letter
Heller, Joseph Catch 22
Hemingway, Ernest A Farewell to Arms
Homer The Iliad
Homer The Odyssey
Hugo, Victor The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Hurston, Zora Neale Their Eyes Were Watching God
Huxley, Aldous Brave New World
Ibsen, Henrik A Doll's House
James, Henry The Portrait of a Lady
James, Henry The Turn of the Screw
Joyce, James A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Kafka, Franz The Metamorphosis
Kingston, Maxine Hong The Woman Warrior
Lee, Harper To Kill a Mockingbird
Lewis, Sinclair Babbitt
London, Jack The Call of the Wild
Mann, Thomas The Magic Mountain
Marquez, Gabriel García One Hundred Years of Solitude
Melville, Herman Bartleby the Scrivener
Melville, Herman Moby Dick
Miller, Arthur The Crucible
Morrison, Toni Beloved
O'Connor, Flannery A Good Man is Hard to Find
O'Neill, Eugene Long Day's Journey into Night
Orwell, George Animal Farm
Pasternak, Boris Doctor Zhivago
Plath, Sylvia The Bell Jar
Poe, Edgar Allan Selected Tales
Proust, Marcel Swann's Way
Pynchon, Thomas The Crying of Lot 49
Remarque, Erich Maria All Quiet on the Western Front
Rostand, Edmond Cyrano de Bergerac
Roth, Henry Call It Sleep
Salinger, J.D. The Catcher in the Rye
Shakespeare, William Hamlet
Shakespeare, William Macbeth
Shakespeare, William A Midsummer Night's Dream
Shakespeare, William Romeo and Juliet
Shaw, George Bernard Pygmalion
Shelley, Mary Frankenstein
Silko, Leslie Marmon Ceremony
Solzhenitsyn, Alexander One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
Sophocles Antigone
Sophocles Oedipus Rex
Steinbeck, John The Grapes of Wrath
Stevenson, Robert Louis Treasure Island
Stowe, Harriet Beecher Uncle Tom's Cabin
Swift, Jonathan Gulliver's Travels
Thackeray, William Vanity Fair
Thoreau, Henry David Walden
Tolstoy, Leo War and Peace
Turgenev, Ivan Fathers and Sons
Twain, Mark The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Voltaire Candide
Vonnegut, Kurt Jr. Slaughterhouse-Five
Walker, Alice The Color Purple
Wharton, Edith The House of Mirth
Welty, Eudora Collected Stories
Whitman, Walt Leaves of Grass
Wilde, Oscar The Picture of Dorian Gray
Williams, Tennessee The Glass Menagerie
Woolf, Virginia To the Lighthouse
Wright, Richard Native Son

Wednesday, June 04, 2008

Why Black and White Photography?

Please visit the following link and be able to explain 4 reasons why black & white photography still exists in a world of color:

http://digital-photography-school.com/blog/why-black-and-white-photography/

Wednesday, May 21, 2008

Assignments for Thursday, May 22

New Media / Literacy 9:

  • New Media Class Only: Complete an entry in your blog. When you have a total of 10 entries, each with at least a paragraph of text and a photo, your blog will be complete. At that point, please upgrade previous blog entries to include links and / or improve the overall appearance of your blog. (Blogs will be graded next week).
  • New Media and Literacy 9: Sign out a library camera and go on a 20 minute photo shoot in and around the school to take photos which fit the theme, "Things You Might Not Have Noticed About SDHS"
  • New Media and Literacy 9: Download your new photos to your folder on the Yearbook drive.
  • New Media and Literacy 9: Take some time to edit the photos you have taken using Picassa and / or Adobe Photoshop (keep originals of the photos also, so that we can compare them with the edited versions.
  • New Media and Literacy 9: Sign in to Picassa (same info as with the class google account) and upload your photos to an online Picassa web album. (If you can't figure out how to do this, don't worry about it).

Wednesday, April 30, 2008

The Future -- Unit Outliine

The Future – Senior English


Essential Questions:

--What shapes our (personal & societal) views of the future?

--What kind of place will the future be?

--Do we have any control over the future?


Standards:

  1. Students will be critical readers, listeners, and viewers of a variety of sources and texts, including fiction and nonfiction books, print and nonprint media, and live speakers.

  1. Students will read a wide variety of literature from many periods and genres to build an understanding of the dimensions of human experience.

  2. Students will employ a wide variety of strategies as they write and speak, to communicate with different audiences for a variety of purposes.

  3. Students will conduct research by generating ideas and questions and posing problems. They will gather, evaluate, synthesize, communicate, and reference information and data from a variety of sources.

  4. Students will consistently participate as knowledgeable, reflective, creative and critical members of literacy communities.


Objectives:

  1. Students will independently and critically read a novel about the future.

  2. Students will understand and critique various views of the future.

  3. Students will integrate these views (see #1 and #2 above) in the form of a creative project to effectively communicate their own views of the future.


Activities:

    • Read a novel based in the future and complete an online Wiki page as well as an online journal on the reading.

    • Participate in the Long Bets Challenge by collaborating with a classmate and posting a ‘long bet” on the online message board set up for that purpose.

    • Plan, create, revise, produce, and present a creative project which presents the student’s view of the future

    • Write a critique of the view of the future presented in the project (above), including a comparison to other published views of the future.

Materials:

  • Sets of novels, including Anthem, 1984, Brave New World, 2001: A Space Odyssey, I Robot, The Handmaid’s Tale, Fahrenheit 451.

  • Online resources including www.longnow.org and longbets.org

  • List of formats for creative projects (handouts)


Assessment:

  • Online journal and wiki page.

  • Creative project and critique.

  • Presentation of creative project.

Wednesday, March 19, 2008

Biography Project Resources

EasyBib.com -- Works Cited Page made easy

NoodleBib -- Another recommended Works Cited & Bibliography builder

Google News
-- for newspaper articles on your topic

HeadlineSpot.com -- search newspaper archives

Student Research Center
-- search newspapers, magazines, & more

Amazon.com -- for book reviews of your biography
New York Times Book Reviews
More Book Reviews

Tuesday, March 04, 2008

SDHS Web site -- Where should we host it?

pbwiki (highly suited for multiple editors, easy to use, easy to maintain standard look and feel)

edublogs (suited for multiple editors, easy to use, easy to maintain standard look and feel)

on our our sad56.org server (more difficult for use by multiple editors, more creative freedom, difficult to maintain standard look and feel)

Friday, February 08, 2008

Hamlet Act 2


















After reading Act 2 of Hamlet, log in to the class forum, find the Hamlet section, and post there. See the guidelines provided. A direct link to the English 12, White 4 Hamlet section is here.


Hamlet Links

Dr. Seuss Does Hamlet: Fox in Socks, Prince of Denmark

HAMLET: The Song (from Prarie Home Companion)

Enjoying "Hamlet"

Hamlet Discussion Questions

Monday, January 28, 2008

Online Message Boards

The link to the handout for the online message boards session is here.

Click here for the sample message board -- the Senior English Forum.

Wednesday, January 16, 2008

English Wide Open Exam


The online version of the English Wide Open exam is here.