Group items tagged

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.

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.

"Confucius famously urged followers to heed the Golden Rule: do to others what you would have them do to you. However, he was also famous for another concept: jen. According to Confucius, a person of jen "brings the good things of others to completion and does not bring the bad things of others to completion." In other words, jen represents our ability to make the world a better place…but also a worse one. In this lesson we'll explore the concept of the jen ratio - the ratio of positive to negative observations in our daily lives - and discuss how it influences the way we experience the world. From violent video games to inspiring hip-hop lyrics, how does the Confucian concept of jen shape our lives?" This seems like a very engaging introduction to ratios. This is a paid resource, but the media for this lesson is free and available to all.

This could be a structure/concept that we could use as a word exploration/association possibility. There are a lot of possibilities and Alan Levine has been working on creating a generic WP theme for this.

I want to do something like this that students/teachers can provision with their own content/relationships.

Words taken from frameworks and released SOL items.

looked at the curriculum framework for the reading words

children's illustrated dictionary. Limited choice of words/

Worth thinking about how this works and the benefits of the structure.

Digital History is a database of primary sources from America's past. The website contains images, videos, and written word that are easily searchable by era. In addition, there are pre-made lesson plans and activities that could be used or modified in order to meet your specific instructional goals.

"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

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."

"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.

A Variety of Interactive Maps from the New York Times on various topics.