Maura+Brantley

Maura was born and grew up in Billings, Montana. She earned her Bachelor's degree in English from University of Montana. She also has her Masters in Reading from Boise State University. Maura taught 7th and 8th grade English in Shelby, Montana for four years. She has spent the last ten years teaching 11th and 12th grade English at Mountain Home High School. Maura has always loved learning and exploring which has inspired her to become a teacher. She has been inspired by several of her English teachers throughout her life, especially her journalism teacher Mrs. Sexton. Mrs. Sexton's devotion to her students and classroom was evident on a daily basis. The most important aspect in Maura's classroom are the students themselves. Mountain Home High School is very diverse and each student comes in with interesting backgrounds. Students at Mountain Home High are very respectful of each other's opinions and differences. One of Maura's most embarrassing moments was when she asking students to follow writing prompts and a student asked if they could write about something else. Maura responded by saying, "Sure. I'm easy!" From that point forward the students joked that Mrs. Brantley was "easy". This was especially funny because her husband also teaches at Mountain Home High!

This is a google search story that I will use to show my students one of the nonfiction novel options that they have for a reading choice. Instead of just talking about the book, I will show them bits and pieces of what it is all about.

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I think I am going to try and do something like Diane did with her English 10 class with facebook with my edmodo page. It is set up nice with a code and they can attach their poetry. We always write multiple and share our best, so this will be a great way for them to share as well. As for the prezi poems, I think I will give them the choice to share published author's (American since I am doing English 11) or their own. We'll see what they prefer.

My edmodo page

This is a poem example that I am planning on assigning to my juniors as part of their poetry portfolios. The style is using the anaphora If I were. . . and the poem that they choose will focus around a theme. This is my example so far. media type="custom" key="8500018" align="center"

This is my developing wiki page. I am torn about what will be best to use, but I am developing a wiki page anyway. I will probably end up revising it for my English 101 and 102 class instead of relying on blackboard, but I have started creating this one for my English 11 class since I have nothing for them for this year and would like to do some thing with them for digital writing this year. (Maybe I'll end up doing one for each of my classes.) This is my wiki page so far.

This is my prezi instructions video. This is also on my wiki page too. Instructions for a Prezi

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This is my color or emotion poem example using photostory:

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This is my poetry power point, but I am going to be doing a lot of revisions. The template was there so I thought I would see if I could fix it up-I am adding examples, etc.

Podcasts: Poem of the Day Poet reading poetry

Great poet example-Taylor Mali Taylor Mali

Link to rubric scoring guide creator for media: mulit media rubric creator