There has been an influx of reading lists for white Americans to more deeply understand the long history and enduring egregious examples of systemic racism in our country in response to the Black Lives Matter movement. This is a rational and important reaction: we know that reading increases knowledge, understanding, and empathy. I am a white educator in a predominately white county and school. Too often, segregated white spaces are insulated from needing to do the urgent work of dismantling...
My name is Jane Bannester and I’m a teacher at Ritenour High School in St. Louis, Missouri. On Aug. 9, 2014, Michael Brown Jr., an 18-year-old black man, was fatally shot by 28-year-old white police officer Darren Wilson in the city of Ferguson, a suburb of St. Louis. It happened on a Saturday. Our school began its first day of a new school year that Monday. Ritenour High School was in the circle of protests that ran several weeks. It is only 13 miles from Ferguson, separated by an airport. At...
Presidential election years present ample opportunities for lessons in media literacy; depending on your outlook and your class dynamics, this is either exhilarating or terrifying. Either way, it’s necessary for us to play a role in helping students navigate the overwhelming messages that surround them. As I have written about in the past, I’ve found rooting my media literacy lessons in classic rhetorical analysis has been the most successful in eliciting meaningful class discussions....
COVID-19 continues to impact our nation. As more and more schooling is delivered via eLearning, a spotlight shines on the “digital divide.” What is a digital divide? It is the uneven distribution in the access to, use of, or impact of information and communications technologies between any number of distinct groups, which can be defined based on social, geographical, or geopolitical criteria, or otherwise. What are schools and communities doing to ensure all students have equitable access to the tools and resources needed to carry out successful eLearning? It is up to you, as reporters, to find out. This contest is fairly flexible, but has a few guidelines that must be...
When learning how to operate a DSLR, it is important to understand three critical components to how a camera works; Aperture, ISO, and Shutter Speed. In a previous mini-tutorial, we covered aperture. In this article, we will address Shutter Speed. A camera records light. The length of time a camera’s shutter opens for light to hit the camera’s sensor is referred to as Shutter Speed. These units of time are typically measured in fractions of a second. However, in some cases, photographers will use longer shutter speeds that can be measured by minutes. To understand this even better, view this video clip by our friend Vincent at Apalapse: https://youtu.be/7R9ZTxoTOSk When selecting...
This spring, school doors closed and students stayed home due to COVID-19. Teachers and administrators were incredibly creative in finding ways to reach students and continue their education. In my district, we were lucky. We already had 1:1 Mac laptops for high school students and iPads for K-8 students. Tech-savvy students and teachers are the norm. Many courses are already offered online. Often, I counted my blessings when hearing about the challenges faced across the world to continue education. But eLearning was another beast. I know there’s a lot of terms thrown about these days: online learning, eLearning, and distance learning. Some schools even resorted to packets of...
