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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

"Since demolishing 78 traffic signals and installing 80 roundabouts, the northern Indiana city of Carmel has reduced the number of accidents by 40 percent and the number of accidents with injuries by 78 percent." There's a great lesson in here somewhere. I'm not sure of the exact structure for it, but here are some of my random thoughts. Let me know if you have others: Use Googlemaps and GoogleEarth in order to determine how many traffic lights are in a specific location in a county/city. Using the calculations in this article/video, how much could the county/city that you researched in Google maps have saved if they installed traffic circles rather than traffic lights. Extension - Research the number of accidents and injury/fatality stats for the area that you've researched. Using the calculations in this video/article, how many lives would traffic circles save in this area?

Lesson objective: In this lesson, students use coordinates to compute perimeters of polygons and areas of triangles and rectangles, e.g., using the distance formula. Pretty much all the steps to this lesson are on the website, which also includes a download link with all the materials that you will need. Something to think about if you plan on completing this lesson: When you first pose the problem to the students - Have the students discuss how they could represent the location of the different vertices for the Bermuda triangle. Give the students time to research/explore and find the latitude/longitude on their own rather than giving it to them directly. There are plenty of tools out there that can help the students complete this task, the most common being Google Earth and Google Maps

Variety of applications for perimeter, area, measurement, etc.

Wiki designed to connect TPACK with curriculum based learning activities. Aligned to specific content areas. Will be interested to see how this wiki develops over time.

"Tables charting the chemical elements have been around since the 19th century - but this modern version has a short video about each one. We've done all 118 - but our job's not finished. Now we're updating all the videos with new stories, better samples and bigger experiments. Plus we're making films about other areas of chemistry, latest news and occasional adventures away from the lab." Interesting video resources for each element on the periodic table. This type of thing might be cool for students to produce/create. They could design an experiment around an element, videotape it, and put up the videos as a class/school.

"Set up your own private area for creating and playing interactive stories and text-based games. Find out more"

"goREACT is a free iPad and Android app from the Museum of Science and Industry, Chicago. This free iPad app allows students to virtually create chemical reactions. To create the reactions students simply drag elements from the periodic table to the "reaction area." The app features suggested reactions to help students get started. In all there are nearly 300 chemical reactions supported on the app. The app includes pictures and videos related to the reactions that students can virtually create on goREACT."

Wow. Just wow. A lot of potential application here for a variety of topics. - My World History teachers are about to do a Socratic seminar on Rome. The topic is "Haves vs. Have Nots." This map fits perfectly into this discussion. - Use as a tool to discuss reasons for immigration/emigration - Locate the most/least poor areas of the US? Why do you believe this is the case? -Does geography impact poverty? How/Why? - Compare this map to other poverty maps from the past, specifically during the period of industrialization. Discuss how/why things have changed.

"Set up a surprise, such that resolution of that becomes the lesson that you intended. Anything that makes students ask the question that you plan to answer in the lesson is good, because answering questions that haven't been asked is inherently uninteresting." This article discusses how to create lessons that provoke student interest and prime them for your lesson. We all know that it is important to have a good introduction or a "hook" for a lesson, but this concept goes one step further. A hook that provides too much information leads to waning engagement. The goal is not just to get the student interested, but to make them curious and ask questions that we plan to answer on that day. Although this particular blog post and the examples within are math related, this technique can be implented in any content area.