Search results matching tags 'reading', 'technology integration', 'language arts websites', and 'online english'

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 →

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

www.learnoutloud.com

www.teachoutloud.com

Interactive “A Jury of Her Peers”

Anonymous — Sat, 04 Dec 2010 16:13:45 GMT

Hello fellow teachers and tech integration enthusiasts. I’m back from a short break. A major project in my graduate class has kept me away from blogging for nearly two weeks. The good news is I’ve been developing an interactive Shakespeare website I’ll soon be able to introduce here. For now, I’ve got another interactive text to tell you about. It is part of “Interactives” by Annenberg Media—a collection of lessons which span across the curriculum and that are meant to “enhance and improve students’ skills in a variety of curricular areas.” These activities range from 3D Geometry and History to the subject of this blog—Language Arts. Only four Language Arts “Interactives” are available at this time, but it is easy to imagine connections between Language Arts and some of the activities in other subjects such as history. For example, anyone teaching Marlowe or Shakespeare might find the Renaissance Interactives in the history section very useful.

Of particular interest for those of us in high school Language Arts, the Interactive version of Susan Glaspell’s “A Jury of Her Peers” is a good one. It is a simple website with no frills but well-designed interactive elements that teach some of the basic literary elements of short fiction. Because the story is in the public domain, audio versions of it are easy to find on the web too, along with recordings of the stage version (called Trifles). I’ve provided some links below.
When you arrive at the site, click the wooden door on the right to delve into the murder mystery. Throughout the story, there are points where the reader can click an icon to explore a literary term such as Point of View which is the first one you will come across. When a reader clicks this icon, he or she is taken to a separate section where the concept is explained and applied to the story in the form of a series of engaging questions. Once the reader has explored the section about that particular literary term, she is directed back to the story and may continue reading. There are several literary terms to learn about before the end of the story.

Navigation is easy because each page offers icon links to continue on with the story or to return to the main page. The icons are illustrations which complement the story. The site is a bit plain visually, so it might be easy to overlook this valuable resource. However, what this site may lack in aesthetic design, it makes up for with its engaging lessons—it’s a great way to teach the elements of plot with a chilling murder mystery online. With each of the literary elements the reader is given an opportunity to not only read the definition of the term but to actually apply it to what she is reading too.

My only disappointment with the site is that there is no place for students to take notes or to record their answers to the questions posed about the story. An easy fix for this is to have students open Google Documents accounts and create a document where they can record their answers. This way it would be easy then to have them work collaboratively, share their ideas, and submit their work to you online while reading the story. Tabbed browsing is great for this kind of multitasking.

In spite of its graphic simplicity, the Interactive “A Jury of Her Peers” is a site worth bookmarking and adding to your list of Interactive Language Arts resources. It isn’t as flashy as other digital textbooks, but it is useful and it meets my requirements for being interactive and not just multimedia. The last page of the story also provides some links for more information about the author, literary criticism of her work, and other related resources.

On a final note, you may want to stick to reading this one with upper-classmen and AP students or you may need to provide basic readers with support, because the story is mostly appropriate for advanced readers. Even some of my honors-level freshmen struggled to understand all the subtleties of the story, so you’ll want to plan ahead for this.

Enjoy…

^Scott

Links:

Audio Version of “A Jury of Her Peers”

Audio Version of “Trifles,” the play version of the story