Group items tagged

"While preparing for the upcoming school year, Twisted Sister's epic protest song began playing as I read the Declaration of Independence. Obviously my mind drifted to imagined Thomas Jefferson and John Adams letting their hair down and dancing around the streets of Philadelphia during a break from drafting the epic document. I realized then that I serendipitously uncovered something that I could use in the classroom - pairing music to primary documents to demonstrate understanding!" Taylor - I read this and immediately thought of you. Assignment for student - Remix the text of a primary document or famous historical speech with a song or multiple songs that add to the theme of the document/speech. Example included in the post.

"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

"Welcome to the Documentation site for Voyant Tools, a web-based text analysis and reading environment. Here you will find some help for getting started, more complete documentation for tools (including a collection of screencasts), useful resources (tutorials, workshops, examples), and general information about Voyant Tools." Amazing textual analysis tool. View word frequency, word relationships and more. H/T Tom

Although some of the lesson plans are relatively vague, this a pretty solid site overall. There are a number of lesson plans here that could be adapted to fit your specific unit/essential questions. The best thing about these lessons is that the lesson documents (PDFs) contain a wide variety of primary and secondary sources that you can use in a variety of ways. The Zinn Education Project is free to sign up for and use.

Many administrators want teachers to engage students in the learning - as such student engagement is pretty vague. Although this document is dated 1999, the indicators have value. Seems like a good place to start.

This is a list of teachers, coaches, and educators involved in the Math Twitter Blogosphere. The MTBOS is an extremely active and rich community of individuals looking to improve and refine their own math instruction. This document contains an excellent collection of blogs and twitter handles worth sharing with your math teachers.

Share with graduating/leaving students. Directions to transfer emails, contacts, calendars, documents to personal gmail account.

"We're following the Civil War, chapter by chapter. Click on the boxes below for installments in our series, view videos and photo galleries, find a Civil War battlefield, and much more. " Washington Post series that focuses on the Civil War. Contains a variety of primary documents, videos, and interactives.

"Like his teammate Ray Rice, the Ravens linebacker was accused of beating up his wife. But in his case, there was no video." This really makes me think about how we could use this article, plus a variety of other documents, to discuss how various forms of media affect public/individual perception, feelings, emotions, decisions, etc. This is obviously a serious topic, and shouldn't be treated lightly, but feel like it could lead into some particularly deep discussion in a high school AP class, like AP language.

"Google News is already an awesome tool for finding resources for current events around the world. But if you know where to look, Google News is also great for finding old newspapers for use in your instruction."

Crowd sourced (by math teachers) list of iPad Apps for math.

Student Sample - https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1irmtPploYBF8MBC1X9T1Pnis1JrMKN1h8gQdcHbSgB8/edit#slide=id.p