mrmayo.org

I’ve recently relocated to the Washington, DC area from Virginia Beach. I’m a secondary English teacher with two years of experience teaching 6th grade English at Brandon Middle School in VBCPS. I’m writing this post to summarize the ways I’ve used technology to teach my students. When I interview in the DC area schools this summer, (soon, I hope?) I will refer them to this post so they can preview all the wonderful work my students have done.

During my first year, I started an after-school online magazine called Brandon’s Online Magazine. Students picked their own topics and wrote about a subject of their choosing. For example, Christian wrote movie reviews on his page called Movies. Roni posted her artwork on her Online Art Gallery, and also wrote an ongoing story called Ninja of the Night. Check out THIS VIDEO STREAM from Brian’s page about roller coasters called The Drop Zone.

We also created an online mp3 zine (podcast) to accompany the online magazine. All our shows can be heard on our Podcast Page. You should definitely listen to Podcast #5. Funny stuff! After two years, the online magazine had over 11,000 hits, with around 40 writers from three grade levels.

The experience with the online magazine prompted me to spend most of last summer creating a classroom blogging template. This year, each one of my students had their own blog. We used the student blogs as online writing notebooks. The blogs energized my students’ writing. We created a true community of writers. By the end of the year, we had over 4,000 hits to the student weblogs. Our readers were the students, their parents, other relatives and administrators. That’s 4,000 times that someone else read my student’s writing besides me.

In addition, my students and I wrote grammar songs about the eight parts of speech. I recruited a few students to help me write some hip-hop rhymes for some of the songs. Here are the songs we did this year:
Direct Objects mp3
Subject Pronouns mp3
Mariachi Subject Pronoun mp3
Adverbs mp3

Our work has been recognized in a Swedish magazine, The Philadelphia Enquirer, Edutopia.org, and Weblogg-ed.com. Many school districts and universities across the country link to our sites as positive examples of how to safely use new technology in the classroom.