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One of the biggest things you can do for kids/teachers is help them to understand how to make sense of online text. Excellent article.

Adolescent readers vary tremendously in their ability to locate, understand, and use information online. 

Excerpt re literacy:  "While English classes will still include healthy amounts of fiction, the standards say that students should be reading more nonfiction texts as they get older, to prepare them for the kinds of material they will read in college and careers. In the fourth grade, students should be reading about the same amount from "literary" and "informational" texts, according to the standards; in the eighth grade, 45 percent should be literary and 55 percent informational, and by 12th grade, the split should be 30/70."

Good visual arrangement for infographics is putting together graphic and visual elements in a manner that draws your reader's attention. The key to achieving simple, elegant and attractive content are ample whitespace and a well arranged layout. What is whitespace? White space is as its name defined-space that is unmarked in a piece of infographic or visual representation. It could be margins, padding or the space between columns, text and icons and design elements. Whitespace matters to create visually engaging content A page crammed full of text and images will appear busy. This makes the content difficult to read. It makes you unable to focus on the important stuff too. On the other hand, too much of white space can make your page look incomplete. It is always crucial to remember visually engaging content is usually clean and simple.

list of exemplar texts K-12 being recommended by the US Common Core Standards

"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."

Very interesting statistics on American teens' use of social media and technology.

Great for people with dyslexia, this tool adds gradient to words/lines of text to help with the issue of accidentally skipping a line.

A Visual Representation ofBloom's Taxonomic Hierarchywith a 21st Century Skills Frame.

ClassParrot is the 100% safe, and simple tool that lets teachers reach students the way their friends do. Remind your students of upcoming examsSend homework updates & event remindersLet parents opt-in to receive texts, too

Ideas for how to curate mentor texts 

Using speech-to-text takes time to practice. Great article explaining the impact it had on one young learner.

Great connections between classic texts and the world today suggested by teenagers.

"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.

This could be kinda cool to play with.

As an instructor of undergraduate and graduate students at University of California, Berkeley, and Stanford University, I created a syllabus for the benefit of other college/university level instructors. I created a copy of the original syllabus for modification to use with high school students (probably juniors or seniors). I will rely on actual high school teachers to help me modify this source document. Please feel free to use, modify, and share this syllabus in your own way. Reorder the modules, add or subtract required or recommended texts and learning activities. Use your own assessment methods. If you wish to help improve this seed document, contact howard@rheingold.com and I will add you as a commenter and/or editor. 

A introductory film for the new digital edition of The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank, a classic book that has played a key role in the world's understanding of the Holocaust. The app takes the original text, published 65 years ago, and adds video interviews and other background material. The Diary of a Young Girl app, made by Beyond the Story, is available on iPad via Apple's AppStore

online etiquette, privacy and safety, permanence, digital citizenship, texting and messaging basics, tech isn't everything, addiction, when mistakes are made, tech as a teaching tool, the value of tech

a blog post that contains some interesting book-related writing prompts - I particularly like the idea of having students read some forewords to books and think how they would introduce a text that they love. Relevant to both primary and middle/high school teachers.