reaching our potentials
February 6, 2012 2 Comments
Cold Outside by Italian Voice on Flickr
In October of this year (2010), I volunteered at two writing and reading festivals, the ViWF and the SiWC and they were very valuable and enjoyable experiences for me. I met a lot of writers, local and international, and I even had the chance to have conversations and learn from several successful authors. Read more of this post
July 1, 2011 4 Comments
Does your writing have style? 'Writing' by jjpacres on Flickr
In this post I’ll give you a free style guide template to work with, and I’ll cover the following:
In university we learn about style guides such as MLA and APA, which are so confusing that you practically need a guide to use them–especially if you take a psychology and a history class at the same time! But style guides don’t have to be complicated or long–they can be as short as one page!
My first run-in with a simple, personalized style guide really delighted me, so I thought I would share this simple tool with you. Read more of this post
November 29, 2010 3 Comments
"Sierpinsky Galaxy" by ChrisDlugosz on Flickr
Michio Kaku’s book, Physics of the Impossible, has helped me to understand a subject that I thought I never would: quantum physics. Ever since my first year of college in 1997, when my philosophy of religion instructor, Dr.Katz, talked about atoms being mysteriously connected, I wanted to understand this process and became curious about quantum mechanics.
Like many, I had avoided physics and chemistry because I found the technical aspects boring. Read more of this post
December 13, 2010 Leave a comment
my mindmap using xmind
Xmind is a great–free–mind-mapping tool that you can use to explore yourself! Read more of this post
January 8, 2011 5 Comments
Did you know that the average person uses only 2000-5000 words on a daily basis? One of the most important tools I use as an English, ESL & Literacy teacher is a most frequently-used-words list.
It is possible to make countless vocabulary exercises & games from the crucial 2000 most frequently used words, and they are also the key words for learning the long and short vowels & spelling rules, for children grades 2-6, but also for adult English speakers that suffer from lower levels of literacy (80% of Canadians score 3 or lower out of 5 on the literacy scale, see here).
Read more of this post
January 11, 2011 6 Comments
This evening I watched the documentary, Food, Inc., which exposes huge flaws in our food system and explains why unhealthy food is cheaper than healthy food (see this in-depth post).
Fast Food for Fast Living, by Imaging Dissent, on flickr
Somewhere near the middle of the documentary, they flashed the statement, “the largest predictor of obesity is low income” and it made a lightbulb go on in my head. Was it true? I immediately logged onto my university library website and did some research, to confirm if there was actual evidence to support this theory. There is, and, in fact, there is so much and it is so conclusive that it is disturbing I hadn’t heard of it before (see here for lots of links). Read more of this post
January 15, 2011 2 Comments
Oh the Places You'll Go, by Bandita, on Flickr
Late last year, my friend Rebecca, an artist in Vancouver, told me that I needed to join Twitter because it would connect me with all sorts of people who are passionate about the things that I’m passionate about. I had been a user of Facebook since 2007 and I enjoyed it, but I looked at Twitter as an application for 18 year olds, and ‘online addicts’.
It was around that time that I discovered Alex Samuel–one of BC’s most influential women in 2010–through some research I was doing on social media for work. Her blog-post “10 Reasons to Stop Apologizing for your Online Life” was a breakthrough for me, and it helped me to stop criticizing myself and others for being active online and to view my online life as real, meaningful and empowering. Read more of this post
February 3, 2011 10 Comments
Frustration, by Sybren Stuvel on Flickr
Information Overload
We live in what is called the ‘information age’ and the world has been called the ‘Content Nation‘; people are now able to create content at rates that were truly unreachable even 20 years ago, and share that with people on the other side of the world. It’s amazing–and very overwhelming. Pete Cashmore (of Mashable) predicted that ‘content curation’–organization and sharing of the ‘best’ content online–would be one of the biggest web trends of 2010. Read more of this post
February 17, 2011 5 Comments
Run! by Glenn~ on flickr
As an ESL teacher, I found that my own writing drastically improved once I started teaching grammar to my students–especially the 7 different types of sentence fragments. I had learned English grammar in high-school, but those classes were boring; I had more important things to concentrate on, such as the outfit I was wearing, or how dreamy Cory Haim was in License to Drive. When I started to teach grammar as an ESL teacher, I was actually re-teaching myself, and the most valuable aspect of grammar that I re-learned was the 7 sentence fragments. I am convinced that most writers need more practice in this, and I hope this lesson will help you learn to write more eloquent and accurate sentences. Read more of this post
July 5, 2011 Leave a comment
This list of twitter resources and secondary applications will help you run your twitter effectively and with less effort:
(Updated June 2011) Read more of this post
April 2, 2011 Leave a comment
So, what is grammar? One of the best definitions of grammar that I have heard comes from a book called The Practice of English Language Teaching (link opens the entire book on Scribd), which defines grammar as
“the description of the ways in which words can change their forms and be combined to form sentences.“
For example, “I pie eated” is not grammatically correct, because the word “To eat” has not been formed ‘correctly’, and the order of the words is ‘incorrect’. The grammatically correct form is “I ate pie.”
Grammar has two aspects:
February 25, 2011 4 Comments
I'm Shalon and I use this blog as a place to store and share interesting links and information that I learn on my journeys in education, English, writing, science, collaboration and psychology.
My goal with this blog is to ground and connect my writing to a larger knowledge community. In every post, I do my best to include references to professional and academic websites, books & articles.
