Group items tagged

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

Free Kindle for Mac to access Kindle books: requires OS 10.5 or above.

other collaborative writing tools

creativity inspired from art.

With Digication, students can easily publish their work online. A Digication e-Portfolio can be created in less than 5 minutes. Instead of spending time building and managing complex websites, students (and their teachers!) can focus on learning and reflection.

English Skills Worksheets for Grades 5-8

The problem with 40 students is that there is no way to read (much less comment upon) every post if every student is posting every week. I am toying then with a rotation model (inspired by Randy Bass), in which students are divided into five groups of eight students, cycling through these five roles: * Role 1 - Students are "first readers," posting initial questions and insights about the reading to the class blog by Monday morning * Role 2 - Students are "respondents," building upon, disagreeing with, or clarifying the first readers' posts by class time on Tuesday * Role 3 - Students are "synthesizers," mediating and synthesizing the dialogue between first readers and respondents by Thursday * Role 4 - Students are responsible for the week's class notes (see next section on Wikis) * Role 5 - Students have this week "off" in terms of blogging and the wiki I like the rotation model because each group of students is reading for and reacting to something different. The shifting positionality affords them greater traction, offers greater variety, and guarantees a dialogue without comments from myself.

Avoiding ambiguous and meaningless grades ("quiz 5") and replacing with skills-based assessment. Heavy PBL focus.

Golf

This article on infographics would make a great visual literacy activity

6 Traits Writing

A comic with lots of attitude.

Useful tools for uploading and storing students' files on DropBox

"Welcome to the online text analysis tool, the detailed statistics of your text, perfect for translators (quoting), for webmasters (ranking) or for normal users, to know the subject of a text. Now with new features as the anlysis of words groups, finding out the keyword density, analyse the prominence of word or expressions. Webmasters can analyse the links on their pages. More instructions are about to be written, please send us your feedback !"