Wonderopolis

Wonderopolis (http://wonderopolis.org) is a website created by the National Center for Family Literacy. It can help parents and teachers draw elementary-age children into literacy-strengthening conversations and activities. 

Yesterdays Wonder of the Day was "Why are they called deadlines?" Each wonder includes:

• an interesting video clip (the deadline one below with the cool post it stop motion animation)

• several paragraphs of fairly student-friendly text that introduces the topic and content related to the question
• learning activities that kids can do at home ("Once you have something in mind, grab a pencil and paper and do some planning. Break the task down into all its parts. Estimate how much time each part will take. Take a look at how much time you have left before your deadline, and decide how much work you will need to do each day until the deadline arrives.")
• vocabulary featured in the text
• a "still wondering" section that offers links to content on other sites
• a comment section for kids

Student Voices: What Makes a Great Teacher

If you're not using the NWP site for resources,  there are so many goodies that will confirm what you're doing, give you more insights, give you research that can back up your teaching, etc. 


Check it out. In the meantime, here's an interesting article from the website.

Summary: The latest report from The College Board's Student Voices series gives students the opportunity to be a part of the national dialogue on education and to provide input on what it takes for teachers to be effective in the classroom.

 

Read the full report (PDF)

In our national conversations about how to reform education, we sometimes overlook our best and most obvious resources: students. Policymakers and educators seldom seek their advice on how to improve our nation's classrooms. This is unfortunate. Without students' input, we have little chance of successfully improving the teaching and learning process.
In order to start reversing this trend, The College Board Advocacy & Policy Center , along with the National Writing Project and Youth Communication , has compiled an exciting new report that helps answer a critical question on school reform: What makes a great teacher?

Read the article, get a pdf of the 10 practices that students think are most important for effective reading, and get other resources to inspire you.

Join the English Companion Ning

If you're a secondary English teacher, this is a cheap way to get professional development advice (FREE) from other professionals (your colleagues).

Go to this ning now and join http://englishcompanion.ning.com
Why?
There are 19,476 members - mostly English teachers, some student teachers, some professors, some newbies.
There are 177 special interest groups to join: from new teachers, to teaching with technology, teaching 7th grade ELA, poetry, etc.

This discussion that I took a screen shot of is about how you will spend your first day, first week of the school year 2010. There are 336 replies to this question, and one of them is about creating an animoto of the things the students will do in class for the year and playing that as they come in and before the syllabi are handed out.

So did you join yet?

November Continuity 11/14/09 Technology in the Classroom

Stephanie Shepherd led us through a FABULOUS technology workshop on blogging and podcasting and had the teachers set up their own blogs. Yeah!

To check out all the resources Stephanie provided, here's a sharetab of her links as well as some of our own blogs.

http://sharetabs.com/?tahoeshepherds

So why should we use blogs and podcasts/vodcasts in our classrooms?

 

▪Offers another sense modality (aural) for students to express themselves and absorb or manipulate information

▪Increased student motivation

▪Teachers or students can record audio about homework assignments, assignments, feedback, announcements, etc. thus the classroom is extended and enriched

▪Many students already have audio players, so it taps into an existing technology.

▪Blogging is highly effective way to help students to become better writers. Research has long shown that students write more, write in greater detail, and take greater care with spelling, grammar, and punctuation, when they are writing to an authentic audience over the Internet.

▪Anecdotal evidence suggests that students' interest in, and quantity of, writing increases when their work is published online and -- perhaps even more importantly -- when it is subject to reader comments.

 

 

Resources for parents and educators: Adolescent Literacy.or

Adolescent literacy.org is a resource for parents and educators of kids in grades 4-12. It's a free e-newsletter and it's got a nice balance of writing and reading resources as well as blogs, multimedia videos with experts and YA authors as well as literacy strategies.

Right now I'm watching a video by Dr. Steve Graham of Vanderbilt University. It's long, so it would be a great shot of PD for spring break. Not only does he talk about why he was interested in writing, he also says that the best preparation for writing teachers is to go through writing project.

He also talks about self-regulated strategy development, peer revising, collaborative writing and grammar instruction.