Group items tagged

Really interesting information on being a better online reader. The author suggests the following: "Maybe the decline of deep reading isn't due to reading skill atrophy but to the need to develop a very different sort of skill, that of teaching yourself to focus your attention. (Interestingly, Coiro found that gamers were often better online readers: they were more comfortable in the medium and better able to stay on task.)"

"As expected, Google has flipped the switch on Google Keep, a dead-simple website and Android app for recording notes, checklists, images and audio. Also as expected, there's no shortage of tech pundits - still sore from Google's decision to shut down Google Reader - telling you to stay far, far away. As we witnessed with Reader, you can't trust Google to keep products around anymore, even popular ones, if they don't fit the company's long-term strategies. So maybe Google Keep won't exist in five years - it's still worth trying. "

How to use Google Reader - for educators

essential productivity skills: Creating labels in GmailCreating e-mail lists in ContactsInstall Google Notifier to set up web Gmail as your default email client (this has saved me hours of work)Creating collections in Google Docs and organizing your filesMaking a copy of a document & saving for yourself (to edit)Sharing a collection with a group (made in your Contacts list) or a colleagueMake a Google Doc public, for linking on your class blogCheck the revision history in a Google DocCreating events in Google Calendar and setting automatic reminders via e-mailCreating repeating events in Google CalendarImporting the school's calendar into your own Google CalendarCreating a Google Reader account and subscribing to feedsCreate a bundle of feeds in Reader for each class you teachAdding feeds to folders in ReaderRecording screencasts in QuickTime

includes information on how-to do reader's theatre with students, recommended books of scripts, and online websites where you can find readers' theatre scripts

"Technology is always upgrading, especially something popular like iPads with huge user base. Apple has the strong resource to make it better and better. After the upgrades of iOS6,  Lisa Nash - the author of Learning and Teaching with iPads, made a list of its impact in the use of schools. Readers will find these changes are thoughtful considerations for daily use practice."

"A striking assumption animates arguments on both sides, namely that nonfiction is seldom literary and certainly not literature. Even Mr. Coleman erects his case on largely dispiriting, utilitarian grounds: nonfiction may help you win the corner office but won't necessarily nourish the soul. As an English teacher and writer who traffics in factual prose, I'm with Mr. Coleman. In my experience, students need more exposure to nonfiction, less to help with reading skills, but as a model for their own essays and expository writing, what Mr. Gladwell sought by ingesting "Talk of the Town" stories. I love fiction and poetry as much as the next former English major and often despair over the quality of what passes for "informational texts," few of which amount to narrative much less literary narrative. What schools really need isn't more nonfiction but better nonfiction, especially that which provides good models for student writing. Most students could use greater familiarity with what newspaper, magazine and book editors call "narrative nonfiction": writing that tells a factual story, sometimes even a personal one, but also makes an argument and conveys information in vivid, effective ways."

"What schools really need isn't more nonfiction but better nonfiction, especially that which provides good models for student writing. "  Totally supports my belief that nonfiction longreads are out there on the internet and are not being taken advantage of by teachers -- enough.

Articles from newspapers around the world - Project Syndicate brings original, engaging, and thought-provoking commentaries by esteemed leaders and thinkers from around the world to readers everywhere. By offering incisive perspectives on our changing world from those who are shaping its economics, politics, science, and culture, Project Syndicate has created an unrivaled venue for informed public debate.

"The Stella Prize is a new major literary award for Australian women's writing. The Stella Prize celebrates Australian women's contribution to literature. Named after one of Australia's most important female authors, Stella Maria 'Miles' Franklin (1879-1954), the prize rewards one writer with a significant monetary prize of $50,000. The Stella Prize will also raise the profile of women's writing through the Stella Prize longlists and shortlists, encourage a future generation of women writers, and bring readers to the work of Australian women. The Stella Prize will be awarded for the first time in 2013, and both fiction and non-fiction books are eligible."

useful in switching from Google Reader to Feedly

Interesting blog post advocating for the use of analysing images in support of literacy skills.

The average reader of e-books says she has read 24 books (the mean number) in the past 12 months, compared with an average of 15 books by a non-e-book consumer

"A learning environment expert and education advocate, Elyse is dedicated to improving the teaching of writing by helping educators understand the changing nature of the discipline in a digital age."

"The most important thing is sitting and talking with your children," said Gabrielle Strouse, an adjunct assistant professor at Vanderbilt who has studied e-books. "Whether you're reading a book, whether you're reading an e-book, whether you're watching a video. Co-interacting, co-viewing, is the best way for them to learn."

What do Jeff Kinney's popular Diary of a Wimpy Kid and Ray Bradbury's classic Fahrenheit 451 have in common? What about Gossip Girl: A Novel, Cicely von Ziegesar's catty romance and The Great Gilly Hopkins, Katherine Paterson's 1979 Newbery Honor book? While clear distinctions exist between each book's literary merit, age appropriateness, and reader appeal, these titles possess one similarity--they sit within the same Lexile text complexity band.**

Good for Readers Theatre....  Listening to stories -- "The OTR.Network Library is a free resource for Old Time Radio (OTR) fans. We have over 12,000 OTR shows available for instant listening."

The Chicago Homer is a multilingual database that uses the search and display capabilities of electronic texts to make the distinctive features of Early Greek epic accessible to readers with and without Greek. Except for fragments, it contains all the texts of these poems in the original Greek. In addition, the Chicago Homer includes English and German translations, in particular Lattimore's Iliad, James Huddleston's Odyssey, Daryl Hine's translations of Hesiod and the Homeric Hymns, and the German translations of the Iliad and Odyssey by Johan Heinrich Voss. Through the associated web site Eumaios users of the Chicago Homer can also from each line of the poem access pertinent Iliad Scholia and papyrus readings. The data of the Chicago Homer have also been integrated into WordHoard, an application for the close reading and scholarly analysis of deeply tagged literary texts. WordHoard does not replicate all functionalities of the Chicago Homer but has some features of its own, notably the simultaneous display of all forms of a given lemma, a metrically parsed version of the text, and the display of the scholia adjacent to the text.