Search results matching tags 'reading' and 'language arts websites'

Blending Art, Literature, and Problem Solving at the J. Paul Getty Museum

Anonymous — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 17:08:25 GMT

Common Core Standard 7 for Reading presents teachers with many possibilities for mixing all kinds of art forms with literature. Music, photography, painting, sculpture, and many other media are easily brought into the classroom today because of the internet…the important thing is to use these resources heuristically. 7. Analyze the representation of a subject or a key scene in two different artistic mediums, including what is emphasized or absent in each treatment (e.g., Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts” and Breughel’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus). Teaching students to analyze subjects or scenes in comparative forms gives us an opportunity to explore with them the traditions of storytelling—the many and various ways stories can be told and have been told throughout history. Poetry, short stories, plays, and even novels and epic tales have important connections to art and present new, thoughtful ways to analyze and evaluate themes. To start, you … Continue reading →

Online Resources for Analyzing Character

Anonymous — Mon, 15 Aug 2011 14:12:27 GMT

This week we look at the last of three standards under “Key Ideas and Details” in the “Reading” section of the Common Core: Standard 3: Analyze how complex characters (e.g., those with multiple or conflicting motivations) develop over the course of a text, interact with other characters, and advance the plot or develop the theme. For students to understand how a character develops over the course of a text and how his or her interactions impact plot and theme, they first need to know where to begin. A good place to start is to help them get into the mind of the character. The idea is to help students take a character and, to borrow a quote from Atticus Finch, “climb into his skin and walk around in it.” The internet offers many ways to facilitate this creatively with technology. Here are a few ideas and sites that might work … Continue reading →

Animoto: Another Great Tool for Adding Music and Video to Your Lit Plans

Anonymous — Tue, 21 Jun 2011 16:40:48 GMT

Summer has finally arrived here in Maine. I hope many of you, like me, have finished up the school year and can now take some time to recuperate. Looking forward to a productive summer, I am planning a series of blog posts focusing on the Common Core State Standards Initiative. My plan is to post regular articles with a simple goal: each blog post will take one specific CCSS outcome and demonstrate a resource and/or method for utilizing technology to meet that standard. Essentially, I envision a CCSS curriculum map for Language Arts, based completely on technology integration. I’m hoping to begin this series the first or second week of July. Meanwhile, I have found a website I think will be fun to use with students in the fall…Animoto. Animoto is a basic online tool that allows you to create “video slideshows” or montages with music and text. The basic … Continue reading →

What if Your Textbooks Were Free and Customizable?

Anonymous — Tue, 31 May 2011 22:40:22 GMT

As the school year winds down, you might be thinking about what new or different books you hope to use in the fall. If you are, I encourage you to check out Open Educational Resources (OER) textbooks. OER or “Open Source” textbooks are digital, often customizable, textbooks published and available on the web. Many of them are quite comprehensive and are written by highly-qualified professionals with advanced degrees. These books also often include interactive elements and multimedia such as sound and video. Best of all, they’re free. In the Classroom Here are some OER sources you can explore. Since these are open and free, you’ll see that you can pick and choose from multiple sources for your students instead of having to commit to one textbook from one publisher. Many of them are also available in PDF format for download and to print either for free or for a … Continue reading →

The Internet Archive: One Very Big Collection of Multimedia

Anonymous — Wed, 18 May 2011 00:25:07 GMT

The Internet Archive is a huge, well…archive. Basically, it’s a collection of images, video, music, audio recordings, and texts. Once you explore this massive digital library though, you’ll see that it’s hard to get your head around just how much is collected here. For example, the audio section includes an archive of millions of recordings of everything from an audio version of The Quran to radio talk show recordings. The music section includes live music recordings from the Grateful Dead and millions of others. The text section, called the “Open Library,” includes millions of documents from textbooks to novels and … Continue reading →

What if Hamlet Had a Facebook Page and Tweeted?

Anonymous — Tue, 26 Apr 2011 23:06:43 GMT

Ok, so the days are finally getting longer here in New England and the end of the school year is within sight…but I still feel like there simply aren’t enough hours in the day to get everything done and the students are growing restless by the day. So, as usual, I’ve been digging about on the web, looking for resources to keep my students busy and learning as the weather grows warmer and their attention spans shrink. While digging, I came across a site from the UK that is an impressive social network for teachers called TES Connect. TES Connect … Continue reading →

New “Epic Comics” Lesson Explores Epic Simile with Comic Creator Technology

Anonymous — Sat, 09 Apr 2011 15:32:20 GMT

Last week I wrote a post about using online comic creator applications to create comic strips based on scenes from Homer’s Odyssey. Today I’ve published a lesson plan based on this idea. This plan explores Epic / Homeric Similes, vivid word choices, and tone in the Odyssey based on Common Core Standards for Literature–Craft and Structure. I tried to keep the lesson basic and easily adaptable, so there is plenty more you could do with these resources but this plan will get you started using online comic creator applications. I hope you will explore the lesson and share your classroom … Continue reading →

The Jack London Collection Online

Anonymous — Sun, 20 Feb 2011 14:08:52 GMT

Jack London died of kidney disease when he was only 40, but during his short life he was an unusually prolific writer. When he died in 1916, he left behind everything from the adventure novels for which he is most known, to journalism, essays, and letters. The Sonoma State University Library has gathered and organized much about this important American author in the Jack London Online Collection. This site includes an audio book version of The Call of the Wild, a radio drama, a searchable collection of images of him, his family, and friends, and a sizeable assortment of primary … Continue reading →

Add Some Spirit to your Boorish Shakespeare Plans

Anonymous — Sun, 06 Feb 2011 13:54:33 GMT

If you are looking for engaging, easy-to-adopt (or adapt) Shakespeare lesson plans, one of the best resources online for anything Shakespeare is the Folger library. I’m deep in the first act of Romeo and Juliet with my students right now, so I’ve been spending a lot of time browsing the net for new stuff. One of the problems with Shakespeare online is that there is just so much out there. I recently searched “Shakespeare Lesson Plans” on Google and got 693,000 results. And so much of it is the same old material. Where do you start? I get a headache … Continue reading →

Learn and Teach Out Loud: Add Some Audio or Video Flare to Your Lit Units

Anonymous — Sun, 02 Jan 2011 14:30:29 GMT

When recently looking for electronic resources to add to my short story unit, I came across LearnOutLoud.com where hundreds of recorded works are available free for download. Learn Out Loud doesn’t just have audio recordings of books and stories (though there are plenty of those); they also have podcasts and videos. Some of the resources cost money, but there are plenty of free downloads (hundreds across all content areas. And, for those ambitious teachers among us, you can even upload your own teaching content (lectures, etc.) and try to sell it through Teach Out Loud. Next time you do a particularly good job of dynamically introducing Romeo and Juliet, maybe you can turn your introduction into some cash. In the Teach Out Loud section, you can also browse content already published from other teachers. Teach Out Loud has hundreds of downloads available including readings from Shakespeare’s Sonnets for $1.99 and a “Introduction to Non Fiction Writing” which is a free download with content from an actual MA course at UCF. In short, this site has a ton of great material to supplement your lessons. Learn Out Loud and Teach Out Loud are excellent examples of the powerful opportunities we educators have on the internet. The more communities we form and discover, the more knowledge we can share. These sites have a wealth of resources for teachers and their students and plenty of it is free or very inexpensive. If you’re on a budget like mine, start by clicking on “free audio & video” on the home page. This will bring you to a section with over 3000 free audio and video titles covering everything from Quantum Spirituality (what?) to French I and 987 free Literature titles. To get started, try “Poetry Out Loud: Audio Guide” which includes poetry read by poets, actors, and scholars. These collections are worth your time browsing. When you find good stuff, it won’t hurt if your students like the idea that some of the materials for English class are available to download on their iPods and iPhones too…they won’t even have to unplug.

Enjoy,
Scott