Featured 7-9-2014: Global Writes

 

Global Writes works with schools and school districts to develop and implement programs integrating performing arts techniques with literacy programs.

 

Global Writes helps schools develop technology applications to share student-created work for publication and feedback. This includes the use of digital media, videoconferencing, podcasting, and blogging.

 

Schools and districts can get assistance in finding local arts partners as a classroom collaboration resource as well as in seeking local funding to sustain arts integration programs.

 

Global Writes helps schools around the world work together to foster communication and collaboration among students around literacy-based projects integrating the arts using technology as a resource.

 

 

Professional development opportunities focus on arts integration with existing literacy curriculum, providing teachers with opportunitites to develop an appreciation of the arts across the curriculum and confidence in using performing arts techniques in their classrooms.

 

 Watch a Global Writes overview

 

Global Writes provides both formative and summative evaluations to monitor student progress in their programs and supplies data to support increases in student achievement and teacher knowledge.

 

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Featured 5-29-2014: Writing@CSU

 

Writing@CSU is an open-access website supported by Colorado State University to provide resources to writers and teachers.

 

Writing@CSU provides access to the largest collection of web-based resources for writers and writing teachers. These materials, from more than 300 contributors, support instruction in a wide range of writing processes and genres.

 

The Writing@CSU website and the larger Writing Studio Project are designed to help writers by supplying an interactive, online space that simulates a well-run workshop featuring:

• Timely advice from teachers
• Feedback from other writers
• Helpful examples and demonstrations
• Access to tools that can help you write effectively

The Studio supports writing classes with a course management system that includes most of the tools found in commercial systems, as well as wikis, ePortfolios, blogs, and other tools that support the learning and teaching of writing.

 

 

The blogs, wikis, and ePortfolio tools can be used within courses or on their own. Depending on your preferences, your work can be completely private, shared with selected people, or open to the public.

 

Writing@CSU accounts are free and give you a personal online space where you can compose and save your work.

 

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Featured 4-29-2014: Literacy Design Collaborative

 

Literacy Design Collaborative is a community of educators providing a teacher-designed and research-proven framework, online tools, and resources for creating literacy-rich assignments and courses.

 

The mission of Literacy Design Collaborative is "to ensure that every student in America graduates from high school with the Common Core literacy skills necessary for success in college and career.” In the furtherance of this goal, LDC strives to provide continuous, reflective professional development; to integrate literacy and content in K-12 instruction; and to help educators succeed in implementing the high expectations of the Common Core Standards.

 

Core Principles of Literacy Design Collaborative:

• Align with the Common Core State Standards.
• Promote the distribution of reading and writing instruction among all teachers.
• Make tasks central with clear goals.
• Connects reading and writing instruction.
• Use back mapping to identify the specific literacy skills students need if they are to succeed on a task.
• Foster a responsive system that encourages teachers to adjust their instruction in response to the formative information they gather on student performance.
• Encourage local choice with a balanced focus on results as well as means.
• Be teacher-friendly.

 

LDC offers educators an instructional system for developing students’ literacy skills in preparation for the demands of college and careers. LDC does not provide off-the-shelf curriculum units or lesson plans. Rather, LDC encourages teachers to build students’ literacy skills and understanding of science, history, and other content through meaningful, CCSS-aligned reading and writing assignments.

 

 

 Visit the Literacy Design Collaborative YouTube channel

 

Literacy Design Collaborative, as a dynamic community of teachers, is rapidly expanding its library of exemplary instructional modules, effective mini-tasks, and tools and resources for supporting teachers’ efforts to engage students in rigorous, CCSS-aligned learning.

 

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Featured 3-24-2014: Subtext

Classroom groups can exchange ideas right in the pages of digital texts using Subtext, a free iPad app, opening up opportunities to engage students and foster analysis and writing skills.

 

Subtext was built to support classroom reading, with practical features such as getting everyone on the same page in class to insight into how your students read.

 

With Google Books and Feedbooks built in, you can search for any book or digital document, or import your own ePub formatted documents. You can also share and discuss web pages with a class in the same way as books.

 

A set of annotation tools helps to engage students and foster analysis and writing skills. Students can highlight key passages or tag a set of commonly-used literary concepts.

 

 

Set up a closed class groups in Subtext to keep your students focused and secure as they read. They will only see notes from you and their classmates.

 

Subtext can help you follow how students and classroom groups progress, including reading speed, word look-ups, highlights, notes, and quiz results.

 

See Subtext in Action

 

Subtext is aligned with the Common Core Standards. When students read with Subtext, they are encouraged to analyze what they read, articulate what they think, and make connections between texts and the real world.

 

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Extra 3-7-2014: Writinghouse

Writinghouse is a free, fully automatic bibliography and citation maker. Save time by creating a cited page instantly in the MLA, APA, Chicago, or Harvard referencing styles. It's easy and fast.

 

 

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Featured 3-5-2014: Teaching Kids News

Teaching Kids News produces daily, timely, relevant kid-friendly news articles for kids, classroom educators, and parents. A new article, based on what is actually happening in the world, is offered every day (except holidays).

 

Every story is in kid-friendly language and is appropriate for kids in grades 2-8. As well as accessible vocabulary, Teaching Kids News provides context for everything in each story, so students can understand what’s going on, and why.

 

In the Curriculum Connections, students are encouraged to think critically about the story and also about the way the story is presented. Does the story exhibit a bias? How might the story be written differently by another journalist?

 

Teaching Kids News strives to "teach balanced literacy in a meaningful way.” Teachers have a current events resource that can be used for shared, guided, and independent reading lessons. At the bottom of each article are Writing/Discussion Prompts, Grammar Features, and a Reading Prompt that will enable you to connect with your students and solve real-life issues.

 

 

The articles are intended to work well in a classroom setting, in small groups, or for individual students. Each article can be a nearly complete lesson plan.

 

 See a video introduction to Teaching Kids News

 

Teaching Kids News has a sister site, Getting Kids Reading, with tips, activities, games, websites, research information and ideas that will help you get your kids reading.

 

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Featured: 2-11-2014 Quandary Game

Quandary is a free, online, award-winning game for players aged 8 to 14, that engages students in ethical decision-making and develops skills that will help them manage challenging ethical issues in their own lives.

 

 

Quandary presents situations relative to building a new colony on the planet Braxos. Players must make decisions in situations that have no clear right or wrong answers but do lead to consequences for themselves, others in the colony, and to the planet Braxos. Players must consider facts, opinions, and solutions as they interact with other settlers in the colony, 

 

Playing Quandary can help participants develop such skills as critical thinking, perspective-taking, and decision-making. The game provides a structure for approaching ethical decision-making without telling players what to think. 

 

 

Quandary is a digital card-based game with three scenarios. Each takes about 10-30 minutes to complete, depending on the speed of the player. 

 

 See a video showing how teachers and students can use Quandary in the classroom

 

 Read a PDF that shows how Quandary correlates to the CCSS for English Arts

 

The game and supporting materials are all free. Quandary will work on any web browser with the latest version of the Flash player plug-in. 

  Quandary is also available as a standalone app for Android and iOS tablet devices.

 

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Featured: 2-4-2014 Vocabulary Notebook

Vocabulary Notebook provides a a set of tools for schools and teachers to help students learn vocabulary faster using technology, making it more contemporary and engaging.

 

With the full Vocabulary Notebook for schools, students will have Cloud Accounts and teachers will have a dashboard to manage and get feedback about their students.

 

Key Teacher Dashboard features:

• Check your students' most important and unknown words.
• See interactive charts with stats about your students.
• See your student's tests scores and number of words.
• Suggest words to your students.

Vocabulary Notebook is easy for students to use. Just install the app and start to type those words you always forget. Change the importance of a word and mark it as "known" or "not known" whenever you want.

 

Students are able to filter words by importance or categories, for example, showing only words related to “work”. Sort words alphabetically or display only those words, phrasal verbs, or idioms that you don't know.

 

The test tool will randomly select words according to your filters and it will ask you to select whether you know them or not. Those words you don't know will automatically be marked as "not known", making it easier to take another look at them later.

 

Cloud Accounts and the web app synchronize with students’ mobile apps for iOS and Android. 

 Watch a video overview of Vocabulary Notebook

 

Teachers can discover which words students don't know as well as the categories they use most. With Vocabulary Notebook, teachers are able to send lists of vocabulary to their students.

 

With the Teacher Dashboard, you will see key information about your students. See stats like the number of words each student has, their average score in self-assessment tests, how often they use the app, and more. 

 

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Extra: 1-17-2014 Vocabulary.com

Vocabulary.com claims to be "the quickest, most intelligent way to improve your vocabulary” regardless of your education level or age.

 

Vocabulary.com can help you learn the words you need for academic and business success.

You begin by answering a few questions, more than 100,000 questions have been created to help you learn words. A model of your knowledge is built and the more you play, the more Vocabulary.com learns about your vocabulary knowledge.

They can predict which vocabulary words you don’t know and teach them to you. If you get a question wrong, Review and Progress questions are scheduled to help you learn the word, and remember it in the future.

Vocabulary.com can track your progress as you quickly learn useful words and improve your vocabulary.

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Featured: 9-10-2013 Rewordify

Rewordify is powerful, free, online reading comprehension software designed to help people comprehend difficult English faster and learn words in new ways.

Paste a difficult English sentence, paragraph, or more, or enter a website URL and click the 'Rewordify text' button. You'll get an easier-to-understand version of the text. The modified version is also specially highlighted to help build vocabulary.

The Rewordify technology aims to develop independent learners by helping people read, understand, and learn what they want to read, on their own.

 Watch a video overview of Rewordify

 Try the RewordifyTeacher Demo

Rewordify is completely free. There's nothing to register for, no app to buy, no software to install. The site displays no ads and requires no log-in or user registration.

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Featured: 8-21-2013 BusyTeacher

BusyTeacher is a place where English teachers share their printable worksheets, lesson plans, and other lesson activities with colleagues for free.

BusyTeacher serves up more than 10,000 downloadable, printable worksheets created by real teachers for teachers. The worksheets are categorized by topics such as grammar, listening, speaking, vocabulary, and more.

You will also find such useful items as free puzzle creators, classroom posters, coloring pages, and flashcards.

 Watch a video introducing BusyTeacher

BusyTeacher has nearly half a million registered users. You can join for free or log in using a Facebook account.

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Featured: 8-6-2013 Breaking News English

Breaking News English provides free, ready-to-print ESL/EFL lesson plans for teaching current events.

Breaking News English presents simple news, in seven levels from elementary to advanced, that is easier for English learners to understand.

Breaking News English delivers a new lesson every two days. All lessons are based on stories currently in the news. Lessons have up to 26 pages of printable activities and handouts available as downloadable PDFs. There are 30 or more online quizzes for each lesson.

 

 See a Breaking News English video tutorial example from Shelly Terrell

Listening files in mp3 format in British and North American English can be downloaded or subscribed to via a podcast. Breaking News English includes graded listenings with each lesson.

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Featured: 7-16-2013 The American Novel

The American Novel offers a comprehensive exploration of 200 years of the American novel, with detailed information on more than 50 American novels and authors, as well as the literary movements they inspired.

The Literary Timeline lets you scroll through 200 years of the American novel.

Six Novel Ideas uses six themes such as Melting Pot and Violence to explore the American novel throughout its history.

Test your literary know-how in the Elements of the Novel section of the site. The Lit Quiz will test your knowledge of the major works and authors of the American novel. In the flash quiz show, To Tell the Truth, decipher literary symbols or guess story characters. Use the Context and Hypertext feature to learn more about the historical, social, personal, and literary influences of important American authors.

The American Novel is a companion website to the PBS American Masters TV series Novel Reflections On The American Dream. The series explores the characters, plots, and themes of seven novels written since 1900, that deal with wealth, poverty, and the nature of success and failure in America. Passages from each book are dramatized through still photography that is inventively animated coupled with original and archival footage.

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Featured: 6-25-2013 Voxy

Voxy is an English language learning system based on research in second language acquisition, mobile technology, and cognitive science.

Voxy delivers authentic content that actual native English speakers use in real-life activities, providing opportunity to practice reading, writing, speaking, and listening, with feedback from English-speaking tutors.

Technology-mediated learning offers personalized and individualized instruction to give learners access to content, just-in-time feedback, and progress updates to enhance the learning process.

Adult learners have opportunities to engage with genuine language content, practice using the target language to accomplish real-world tasks, and receive feedback on errors.

Distributed regular practice will help to sharpen the learner's skills and provide frequent opportunities to improve. Whether using a computer, tablet, or smartphone, learning and practice is always accessible.

 Watch a video overview of Voxy

Voxy guides learners through a sequence of lessons, tracking performance and adapting lessons accordingly. Voxy works for beginners to advanced learners.

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