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The Library of Congress shares an exhibition of "Books that Shaped America." Librarian of Congress James H. Billington says that the list is "intended to spark a national conversation on books written by Americans that have influenced our lives, whether they appear on this initial list or not."

[DOC] Instructions for Classroom Dynamic Criteria Mapping Instructions for Classroom Dynamic Criteria Mapping © 2005 Bob Broad Dynamic Criteria Mapping (DCM) is a process by which you and your students can discover what you, the instructor, value in student work. DCM yields a more empirically grounded, more detailed, and more useful account of your values than traditional rubrics can. The process is a streamlined form of grounded theory (as summarized by Strauss and Corbin in Basics of Qualitative Research, Sage 1998). Here is a brief set of instructions by which you can try classroom DCM. Read What We Really Value: Beyond Rubrics in Teaching and Assessing Writing by Bob Broad (Utah State University Press, 2003). The book offers historical and theoretical background on DCM, a detailed example of DCM in action, and more specific instructions on how to undertake the process at both the classroom and programmatic levels. Collect data. Once you have handed back to your students two or three substantial sets of responses to their work, ask your students to gather together those responses and bring them to class on the appointed day. Ask students to prepare by noting specific comments you made, in response to specific aspects of their work, that show something(s) you value. Note: you show what you value both in those qualities whose presence you praise and in those qualities whose absence you lament. On the appointed day, ask students to work together to generate a long list of qualities, features, or elements of their work that you have shown you value. Ask for illustrations or quotations that demonstrate each value they identify. Ask for passages or excerpts from their work that demonstrate those values. Analyze the data. After you and your students have created a large "pile" of evaluative statements and indicators, it is time to analyze the data to create a representation ("map") of your values. The key is not to rush this

For a list of gamebooks, see List of gamebooks. A gamebook is a book that allows the reader to participate in the story by making choices that affect the course of the narrative

How do you select books to read? Do you use the jacket cover? Word of mouth? Reading lists? Which comes first, reading a book or watching a movie made from it?

Great list of books, poems, and audio books available for free on the web

History of English (Source: A History of English by Barbara A. Fennell) The English language is spoken by 750 million people in the world as either the official language of a nation, a second language, or in a mixture with other languages (such as pidgins and creoles.) English is the (or an) official language in England, Canada, Australia and New Zealand; however, the United States has no official language. Indo-European language and people English is classified genetically as a Low West Germanic language of the Indo-European family of languages. The early history of the Germanic languages is based on reconstruction of a Proto-Germanic language that evolved into German, English, Dutch, Afrikaans, Yiddish, and the Scandinavian languages. In 1786, Sir William Jones discovered that Sanskrit contained many cognates to Greek and Latin. He conjectured a Proto-Indo-European language had existed many years before. Although there is no concrete proof to support this one language had existed, it is believed that many languages spoken in Europe and Western Asia are all derived from a common language. A few languages that are not included in the Indo-European branch of languages include Basque, Finnish, Estonian and Hungarian; of which the last three belong to the Finno-Ugric language family. Speakers of Proto-Indo-European (PIE) lived in Southwest Russia around 4,000 to 5,000 BCE. They had words for animals such as bear or wolf (as evidenced in the similarity of the words for these animals in the modern I-E languages.) They also had domesticated animals, and used horse-drawn wheeled carts. They drank alcohol made from grain, and not wine, indicating they did not live in a warm climate. They belonged to a patriarchal society where the lineage was determined through males only (because of a lack of words referring to the female's side of the family.) They also made use of a decimal counting system by 10's, and formed words by compounding. This PIE language was also highly infl

I'm always looking for great self-help books and there tons of new ones getting released all the time. Sometimes we forget about all the great old self help books out there which a lot of the newer ones are philosophically based on. The cool thing is, many of them are old enough that they actually are in the public domain, so you can usually find them for free. This page compiles a list of some of the best and where to find them online in the public domain. Woo!

"One important form of digital reading is reading ebooks. There are actually several resources online which provide both premium and free ebooks to readers. I have dome some laborious search into these resources and come up with the list below. This list features only platforms that provide free ebooks or a mixture of free and premium (freemium) eBooks. The purpose behind this compilation is to provide teachers and eventually students with trusted resources where they can search for and read free ebooks."

It is, instead, a collection of timeless texts bound to radically improve your relationship with the written word, from whichever side of the equation you approach it.