CSU_TLship

You may have read, or privately suspected, that curling up with a good book can make you a better person. Over the past two years, several major news sources-including Scientific American and The New York Times-have confirmed the relationship between literature and virtue, placing fiction, in particular, in the limelight. The reason? Empathy.

Storytelling in any format is about making meaning. While the essence of the stories we tell may remain the same, the ways in which we can now share these stories have changed dramatically with the development of digital communication technologies. Access to simple, easy to use media production tools and resources in conjunction with the potential for immediate and universal online publication has significant implications for literacy thinking and practice.

Literature Circles involve a small group of students exploring a piece of literature in depth. Although you'll find lots of books and articles on the Literature Circles, there are many ways to implement the strategies across grade levels and subject areas. Think of literature circles as one element of a balanced literacy program rather than "the solution." In most cases, the application of literature circles evolves over time as students and teachers become more experienced readers.

Dialogic reading works. Children who have been read to dialogically are substantially ahead of children who have been read to traditionally on tests of language development. Children can jump ahead by several months in just a few weeks of dialogic reading.

A great resource for teaching literature in the classroom. Includes a literature circle resource centre, middle grade teachers blog and themed literature units

The world's largest searchable directory of Webquest reviews with a subscriber option for more benefits. Includes information and articles about webquests as well as hosting them.

A Digital Novel (2012) ... set in a technology saturated near future, Inanimate Alice tells the story of a girl called Alice, merging text with animation, videos, music and games to explore what it means to conduct your life online. Requires user action to drive the story forward.Uses text, images, music, sound effects, puzzles and games to illustrate and enhance the narrative. Each a self-contained story, the chapters become more complex as the narrative unfolds reflecting Alice's age and competency as she develops towards her calling as a game animator and designer. See the Teacher's Notes for information on using this title with students.

High concpet digital alphabet book by de Vicq de Cumpitch. Interactive, animated and very clever!

This website was designed to teach about the educational implications of hypertext fiction in education. On this site, you can explore current research in the area of hypertext and education. In addition, you can try out a sample of hypertext fiction created based on research by Hayes-Roth (1998)

This is a collection of reviews of great books for kids, ideas of ways to use them in the classroom and collections of books and activities about particular subjects, curriculum areas, themes and professional topics. Focus on US material

Book review site focusing on younger readers

Welcome to this special exhibit of books that have been the objects of censorship or censorship attempts. The books featured here, ranging from Ulysses to Little Red Riding Hood, have been selected from the indexes of The Online Books Page. (See that page for more than 2 million more online books!) This page is a work in progress, and more works may be added to this page over time. Please inform onlinebooks@pobox.upenn.edu of any new material that can be included here. Note that the listings are meant to be representative rather than exhaustive. Also, many recent books that have been banned or challenged have not been included here, because they have not been made freely readable online

Briefly annotated list of reading related online resources including Book trailers

Learning with the Internet - Learning Focus: How might one of these three integration models (Author Study, Internet Project, Progressive Stories) fit with your curriculum so that it impacts student literacy learning. US focus on authors and links but projects can be applied and adapted to meet local needs.

This is a predominantly US based directory of lesson plan sites for teaching literature in the library and classroom. It covers general lessons, book reports, literature circle and book talks, non-fiction and using technology.

Book trailers are a fairly recent phenomenon in the publishing industry. They originated less than ten years ago, based on the venerable institution of the movie trailer, but have only really taken off since the development of video sharing sites such as Youtube.

Louis Sachar is an award-winning author of twenty-five books for children and young adults. His book, Holes, won the prestigious National Book Award and the Newbery Medal. Discover more about Louis and his books on this site.

Annotated links to a range of online reading resources for all ages.