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Website of Jim Burke, a high school English teacher who has published widely on how to be an effective high school English teacher.

Community for English teachers on Ning

Site of Tamara Doehring, about and for secondary English teachers.

Video on wikis in plain English by Common Craft at YouTube

Produced by commoncraft, Aug 6 2007. This video describes social bookmarking in a fun and decidedly low-tech fashion. Runtime is just over 3 minutes. Please note that this video is for sale, though it is possible to watch an evaluation copy, for free, from this URL.

Fascinating must read on how "attention blindness" prevents us from seeing the bigger world and how unstructured charges to students on finding academic uses of iPods they had been given as Duke first year students led to interconnected learning, innovation, etc. Excerpt: But it got me thinking: What if bad writing is a product of the form of writing required in college-the term paper-and not necessarily intrinsic to a student's natural writing style or thought process? I hadn't thought of that until I read my students' lengthy, weekly blogs and saw the difference in quality. If students are trying to figure out what kind of writing we want in order to get a good grade, communication is secondary. What if "research paper" is a category that invites, even requires, linguistic and syntactic gobbledygook? Research indicates that, at every age level, people take their writing more seriously when it will be evaluated by peers than when it is to be judged by teachers. Online blogs directed at peers exhibit fewer typographical and factual errors, less plagiarism, and generally better, more elegant and persuasive prose than classroom assignments by the same writers. Longitudinal studies of student writers conducted by Stanford University's Andrea Lunsford, a professor of English, assessed student writing at Stanford year after year. Lunsford surprised everyone with her findings that students were becoming more literate, rhetorically dexterous, and fluent-not less, as many feared. The Internet, she discovered, had allowed them to develop their writing.

College Board ACCUPLACER tests provide students with useful information about academic skills in math, English, and reading. Resource for students from The College Board

Schools are using Accuplacer as early as 9th grade to better prepare their students for meaningful high school work that will get them ready for college.

The Alice Project--a 10th grade honors English tour of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland with students reading the Annotated Alice and publishing their questions and reflections in real-time online.