"The folks at Twisted Sifter shared a really cool compilation of maps this week in their article "40 Maps That Will Help You Make Sense of the World." These cool maps gave me a chance to reflect on the world from different perspectives and I wondered how awesome some of these conversations would be in the classroom.
The Twisted Sifter post was a great reminder, especially here at the beginning of the next school year, that educators have a responsibility to share other perspectives around the world and invite those perspectives into the classroom. In fact, it's one of the seven College and Career Readiness Capacities that are the umbrella over the entire ELA Standards document. This capacity asks that students come to understand other perspectives and cultures."
"Expecting students to read deeply and draw meaningful conclusions is at the heart of the Common Core ELA standards. Students are asked to read closely, cite evidence, and make evidence based inferences when they read. They are expected to deepen their learning by valuing textual evidence and reading critically. Annotating text is one way students can cite textual evidence, infer and deepen meaning as they read.. "
"At Harriet Tubman Elementary in Newark, New Jersey, 5th grade teacher Yvonne Copprue-McLeod teaches a lesson about reading comprehension and answering open-ended questions using textual evidence.
Ms. Copprue-McLeod's strategy for her lesson is to have students work in groups, using specific details from the text to draw inferences and answer questions about the main character in the text. This lesson is aligned with multiple 5th grade Common Core ELA standards (RL.5.1, RF.5.4, SL.5.1, SL.5.4)."
"Almost 4 years ago, I wrote a post on Langwitches titled Teaching Hyperlinked Writing and Reading. 4 years later, many (most?) teachers have not heard, let alone are teaching and coaching their students in the use of hyperlinked writing. The word "hyperlinked" is still being underlined in red as I am typing the word, indicating that it must be somehow misspelled or that the word does not exist."
"Choices. Kids need access to choices in instruction so that when the moment arises they can make discerning decisions about what they will do. I just watched that happen. At a conference with adults where kids were invited."
"A free new social networking platform aims to encourage elementary school children to read more books. BiblioNasium is a pilot virtual reading village for children aged 6-12 and their friends, parents, and teachers. The site enables young readers to catalogue, share, and exchange their book recommendations. It also offers reading-level-appropriate book recommendations using the Lexile Framework for Reading."
"Shanahan on Literacy - nformation for teachers and parents on teaching and assessing reading, writing, and literacy, and information on Timothy Shanahan's upcoming professional appearances and publications."
"Annotating tools are a must have for every teacher. I personally can't imagine myself surfing online with no web tools to help me annotate, highlight, clip, and share parts or segments of the web content I find interesting. Most of the browsers nowadays particularly Chrome and Firefox have specific extensions for this purpose. All you need to do is install one of them and there you go, with one click you can master the information you read."
"Sara Shaw, an elementary school teacher in Avon, Mass., realized she needed to teach online research skills several years ago when her students kept turning in projects riddled with misinformation. The flawed material often came from websites the students used. They took the information as fact, when it often was just someone's personal opinion."
"Public schools are keenly aware of the power of the mainstream media; a critical television segment or a laudatory newspaper article will be talked about in the hallways for days. But the landscape has shifted, and school leaders must embrace a new, growing reality: social media has become the source for breaking news. "
"Adults forget all that they do while reading. We are predicting, making connections, contextualizing, critiquing, and already plotting how we might use any new insights or information. Yep, we do all that when we read.
As teachers, we need to train students in each of these skills, and begin to do so early on. I was recently in a second-grade classroom where 70 percent instruction was in English and 30 percent in Spanish. Most of the children spoke Spanish as their first or home language. "
"For the past five years I have collaborated with a playwright who works with my students as they write original plays. Each year, on the first day that she has been in the room with us, Kate and I stage a conflict about what should come next in the lesson. "
"3. Atop the Mountain, Into the Sea
On the board, I draw a picture of a mountain overlooking the sea. A lone figure stands perched atop the mountain's summit and another swims among the waves below."
"Even before the invention of photography, certain images have gained iconic status in human culture. Our history and art textbooks are full of examples and many of them are etched in our memories.
440px-Join_or_DieBenjamin Franklin's "Join or Die" snake image, said to be the first American political cartoon, originally appeared during the French and Indian War, was repurposed by Paul Revere in 1775, and continues to be a powerful representation of the movement toward U.S. independence and nationhood. More recent visual texts, from the Hindenburg disaster, to Iwo Jima, to MLK's "I Have a Dream" speech, to the haunting images of September 11, help us understand what "iconic" means in terms of cultural memory and messaging."
"The students work, huddled in pairs, jotting down ideas in notebooks. The classroom buzzes with collaboration, punctuated by giggles and laughter. Students are excited to be writing as we start our annual celebration of Script Frenzy! "
"Grade Essays Faster - "Impossible!" you say? Look, we can't grade the essays for you, but we can reduce the repetitive, inefficient manual labor involved - and in doing so we open up a new world of invaluable student data. Welcome to the future."
"Social studies supervisors and teachers across the country are revising their unit plans to meet their state's content standards, as well as, the Common Core State Standards for Literacy in History and Social Studies. Simultaneously, many states are implementing new evaluation and observation frameworks. The performance ratings employed by the most popular evaluation models encourage a shift away from teacher-led direct instruction to more student-centered activities incorporating inquiry and synthesis. In social studies, primary source document analysis goes hand in hand with the 9-12 Common Core reading and writing standards. Here are five top resources to align your curricula to the Common Core with student driven lessons.
"
"The Common Core Learning Standards describe the importance of teaching students how to comprehend informational text. They are asked to read closely, make inferences, cite evidence, analyze arguments and interpret words and phrases as they are used in a text. Primary source documents are artifacts created by individuals during a particular period in history. This could be a letter, speech, photograph or journal entry. If you're looking to integrate social studies into your literacy block, try out one of these resources for primary source documents. "
" In 2012, the department began the development of a statewide STEM education plan. The tools and resources below have been developed to ensure schools can successfully implement a STEM education plan at the local level."
"Do you wish your students could better understand and critique the images that saturate their waking life? That's the purpose of visual literacy (VL), to explicitly teach a collection of competencies that will help students think through, think about and think with pictures."
Group items tagged 
