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This article answers a question I have had since 10th grade English - "Is it possible to make Jane Eyre interesting?" I watched the Hamlet video and was thoroughly entertained. I could see these videos being used in 8th grade and high school English classes, especially if you edited one or two short segments (he says a** and b****, but other curse words are bleeped out within the video). These clips could be really useful when discussing the topic of "audience." As a culmination to a unit/lesson on audience, I could see students making their own version of "Thug Notes" or "rewriting" a book to some extent and adapt the work for a specific culture/group of people.

"My students are really great at describing what things look like in their writing. They are not as skilled at putting smells, tastes, sounds and feelings into words. As a result, their narratives often feel flat, one-dimensional, and unreal. In an effort to get my students expanding on their descriptions, I decided to do a sensory walk using Instagram. *Check out my blog on using Instagram for scavenger hunt activities." Seems like a neat idea for English classes to teach various writing skills

"ou can only speak and write English so how do you converse with a person in China who writes Mandarin but doesn't understand a word of English? Google Translate is no doubt a good option but it is going to be tedious for you (and your Chinese friend) to translate each and every sentence manually before sending them through any messenger." Seems cool for communication/collaboration possibilities in foreign language. Could be an interesting way to work with pen pals in another country.

"Basically Rewordify takes a block of text or website and replaces difficult words and phrases with text that is easier to understand. The site claims that this helps students read more, understand difficult English faster, and learn words in new ways. I'd throw in that the site can help you and your students break down difficult primary documents." Rewordify tool as primary document decoder

Seems the blank out comic words and fill them with whatever you're reading so that it makes sense would be a pretty decent project for any English class.

Interesting article that I'm going to share with my English teachers. If they are interested, I'm going to look for/recommend similar functioning tools that they could use with their students. "Instructors at the New Jersey Institute of Technology have been using a program called E-Rater in this fashion since 2009, and they've observed a striking change in student behavior as a result. Andrew Klobucar, associate professor of humanities at NJIT, notes that students almost universally resist going back over material they've written. But, Klobucar told Inside Higher Ed reporter Scott Jaschik, his students are willing to revise their essays, even multiple times, when their work is being reviewed by a computer and not by a human teacher. They end up writing nearly three times as many words in the course of revising as students who are not offered the services of E-Rater, and the quality of their writing improves as a result. Crucially, says Klobucar, students who feel that handing in successive drafts to an instructor wielding a red pen is "corrective, even punitive" do not seem to feel rebuked by similar feedback from a computer."

Amazing how a remix can completely change your perception of a story. There's an English lesson here somewhere.

"While killing time in the airport last weekend, I watched a series of Jimmy Fallon Tonight Show clips. While watching Jimmy Fallon and Bryan Cranston playing "Word Sneak," I was inspired! I decided to use this game format for a vocabulary review in my class." This sounds like an interesting method to learn/review vocabulary. As an addition to the game, you could give students a specific discussion prompt to focus their talk, and then they could "sneak" the words into this particular conversation.

I actually did this with a class, a variation anyway. Remind me to share the videos with you the next time we are all together.

passed this on to a great English teacher - we both agree - it has great potential - focused collaboration is a great learning strategy - awesome if this help students become better readers!

Words taken from frameworks and released SOL items.

looked at the curriculum framework for the reading words

All the evil in the world or . . . a box of fun. This ought to open the door to all sorts of English opportunities. It was inspired by someone's standup comedy routine.

"Hemingway is a free tool designed to help you analyze your writing. Hemingway offers a bunch of information about the passage you've written or copied and pasted into the site. Hemingway highlights the parts of your writing that use passive voice, adverbs, and overly complex sentences. All of those factors are accounted for in generating a general readability score for your passage."

"Merriam-Webster's website has a neat feature called Trend Watch that highlights words that are trending in news and popular culture. Trend Watch includes an explanation of why each word is trending, a definition for the word, and a picture that is representative of either the word or the cause of the trend." Plenty of interesting applications for teaching new vocabulary.

Push for Journal Writing: James Britton Transactional Writing (80% of writing and how students are evaluated). Doing more does not make it better. If you don't know your topic, you won't be good at writing about it. Poetic Writing (10%) Expressive Writing (5%) Writing about thoughts, metacognitive. Increasing students doing this type of writing helps them write better.

Do you teach struggling readers? No matter the content area that you teach, student success is often defined by literacy. Reading comprehension and vocabulary frequently act as roadblocks that prevent students from grasping difficult concepts. Rewordify is a tool that will help you ignore this roadblock, and even teach reading comprehension and vocabulary when used appropriately. I initially read about the tool from this blog post (http://www.freetech4teachers.com/2013/08/rewordify-helps-students-read-complex.html#.UhuJ79KsiSp). If you don't have time to check out that entire post, here is a brief summary of the tool and a few possible uses for it: Tool Description: This online tool allows the user to input a chunk of text and replaces all the "hard words" with synonyms. This seems like a spectacular tool to promote reading comprehension across the content areas. Here a just a couple ways you could use this tool. * Have you found a website with incredible information, but the reading level is way too high for your students? Have the students use Rewordify and make the reading level more appropriate for your students. * This could be a great tool to teach new vocabulary and reading comprehension. Here's one idea on how to do this: o Have students read a passage and highlight/underline/annotate the passage, including making notes of the words that they don't understand. Then, have the students summarize what they have read. Input the same text into rewordify and have the students read and summarize what they have read a second time. Compare the two summaries and discuss any similarities/differences. Now, have the students create definitions for the words that were highlighted (Students cannot use the provided synonym when completing this portion of the activity). William Berry Dept. of Organizational Development, Quality and Innovation Moody Middle School ITRT - (804) 261-5015 http://blogs.henrico.k12.va.us/techtips/ http://blogs.henrico.k12.v

In mid-April, we went live with a half dozen articles which we call "stubs." The idea here is to plant a flag in a story right away with a short post--a "stub"--and then build the article as the story develops over time, rather than just cranking out short, discrete posts every time something new breaks. One of our writers refers to this aptly as a "slow live blog."

This the version that will accept any HTML element and render it as the variable.