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What do you think of this?

Danielle, That's precisely the question I want everyone thinking about. We truly focus so much of our energies on getting the format down and getting the "i's" dotted and "t's" crossed, and for many of the students we teach, that is completely necessary; however, as we begin to look at the next phase of what we'd like to do in the district which includes more than just being "proficient" on some state test, can we blend some of the thinking in this post into what we are doing. And as for making people angry, my advice is that you don't get the results you really want without making a few people angry along the way. Not that you try to, but when you know that what you are doing will make your students better, you just go with it.

Pat - I'd love to share this post with the kids or incorporate parts of it. I have to say that the best writing that the kids have done is usually the writing they do when we're in class and they just write. One of the hardest parts of teaching English is having to read 130 well constructed essays that follow the rubric but are so dry and boring that I have to restrain myself from stabbing my eyes out with my pen. It all goes back to the fact that in our H.S. the kids can write a great 5 paragraph essay or write persuasively but they have NO VOICE and I feel that the stress on structure and grammar could be why they have no voice. Interesting - we should discuss this a bit at our next Connections meeting!

Make your own books.

A wonderful post from 2003 by Chris Lehmann.

An outstanding take on Google Forms by David Wees. Great use of the format of creating multiple pages to make a choose-your-own-ending story. Will be sharing this one.

Great site to help students understand the election process. Requires a subscription, but the gaming aspect of it makes it fun.

Lots of great data to expose our students to here. Let them go nuts with the graphs and write their explanation and rationalie.

I like this one for its simple use of polling data to make projections. As John Becker said, they take a baseball stats approach to the election.

Can we take something like this and make it a writing assignment, only sans words?

Here are some ways to make researching online available to your students. Also, my favorite part, to eliminate the notecard.

Thanks to Garr Reynolds at Presentation Zen for this one. Outsanding visuals and impactful message. This makes sense.

Love the idea, love the design, and really want to see us get involvded here.

IDEA's debate topic wiki. Great resource for helping students make arguments and form their own opinions.

list of DBQ's by grade level and some resources for helping students make sense of documents.

This is great for all students, but pay particular attention to the section on learning. I am going to highlight the section on "Thinking like a genius."

Great small lessons in how to make yourself a better learner.

Like to show video? This list is amazing.

Find ways to make your space much more livable and student friendly through Feng Shui.

Google books makes downloading books in the public domain possible through their site.

no more offensive wordles

Very interesting one.

Read this. Now.

How we view online content is fundamentally changing what is important to us as readers. This method really makes sense to me.