Month: April 2015

Coding for English Teachers

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My students learning to use hex tables to create color on the web.
My students learning to use hex tables to create color on the web. They did it!

When you’re building research in digital literacies, it often is very useful to be married to a coder. Chris often helps me think about the perspective of someone who works in the industry and whether what I’m thinking about teaching might actually be useful for students — either immediately or at some point in the future.

Recently, he came in to help me teach my students about coding. All of the folks in this class are English teachers, reading and writing specialists, or headed into pre-service English teaching internships. To say the least, many of them were highly skeptical. They weren’t sure whether they could code, first of all, or whether they wanted to learn. What relevance does code have to teaching reading and writing?Read More »

Shakespeare (A coding exercise)

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Below you will find the text of the Shakespeare fan page that Chris made to push my teaching students into learning some HTML and CSS mark-up by compelling them into making some deeply necessary edits. English major humor ahead! I’m leaving it here for posterity, though you should be deeply saddened to know that you’re missing the original, eye-searing aqua-and-yellow color scheme.

The cover image is a Wikimedia Commons image of the “Flower Portrait” of Shakespeare.

Here goes…

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William_Shakespeare_1609
“Flower portrait” of Shakespeare.

O HAI you guys! I made this web page so that every one would know that I am William Shakespeare’s #1 fanboy. He wrote lots of plays and poems and stuff. Here is his wikipedia page if you want to read more stuff about him. HE IS THE GREATEST EVAR!

My favorite play is called Merchant of Venezuela. It is about two young people who fall in love even though they come from different sides of the tracks. The both have twins and when the four of them go camping in the woods one night fairies come and turn one of them into a horse or something. But that’s ok because they’re all on an island where a sorcerer lives (he used to be a king but when he tried to divide up his kingdom his kids kicked him out). So in the end there’s this HUUGE sword battle where everybody dies because one of the swords is poisonous and the other is really really pointy. It is SO COOL.