Lee Kraus' Blog | Learning Online 62 Ideas, Lessons and Humor for English Teachers #engchat I start back to school today for my eleventh year of teaching next door to my own high school English teacher. Mrs. Caldwell taught me to write and love literature. She's a fantastic teacher who is always innovating. There is no wonder I admire and want to be more like her. An indexed list of Common Core English Language Arts standards and lessons aligned with those standards. Teachers' Expectations Can Influence How Students Perform : Shots - Health Blog hide captionTeachers interact differently with students expected to succeed. But they can be trained to change those classroom behaviors. iStockphoto.com Teachers interact differently with students expected to succeed. In my Morning Edition story today, I look at expectations — specifically, how teacher expectations can affect the performance of the children they teach. The first psychologist to systematically study this was a Harvard professor named Robert Rosenthal, who in 1964 did a wonderful experiment at an elementary school south of San Francisco. The idea was to figure out what would happen if teachers were told that certain kids in their class were destined to succeed, so Rosenthal took a normal IQ test and dressed it up as a different test. "It was a standardized IQ test, Flanagan's Test of General Ability," he says. After the kids took the test, he then chose from every class several children totally at random. But just how do expectations influence IQ? Still, people have tried.
NCTE High School Matters: Annotating text using Google Docs by Tara Seale Recently, I wrote an article for the Google Docs Blog titled Google Docs: the tool for the 21st century classroom. The focus was how to use Google Docs and folders in an English classroom. Besides the ideas in the Google post, my students are also using Google Docs to annotate articles, short passages, or poems. See the annotation doc for the poem "Ozymandias". To create this annotation doc go to Create New>Document. Under Alignment, use the drop down to select Horizontal: Left and Vertical: Top. Repeat the steps for the other cell. Share this document with students as a View Only document. Click on To View. and then insert email addresses in the Invite box. Some example annotations: Ozymandias The Sniper If you are new to Google Docs, and you need to learn more about how to use Google Docs in an English classroom, Google and the Writing Magazine teamed up to create a great Revision Lesson for Teens.
36 Things Every 21st Century Teacher Should Be Able To Do What should every teacher in the 21st century know and be able to do? That’s an interesting question. After just now seeing this excellent post on educatorstechnology.com, I thought I’d contribute to the conversation. I added the twist of ranking them from least complex to most complex, so novices can start at the bottom, and you veterans out there can skip right to 36. 36 Things Every 21st Century Teacher Should Be Able To Do 1. Whether you choose a text message, email, social media message, Skype session, or a Google+ Hangouts depends on who you need to communicate with and why—purpose and audience. 2. Email won’t always work. 3. Hit the Print Screen button near your number pad on a keyboard on Windows. 4. Know what it means to be Rick Roll’d, the difference between a fail and an epic fail, why Steve is a scumbag, and who sad Keannu is. 5. Not everyone loves technology. An RT as an olive branch. 6. 7. Tone is lost when you type. 8. This is dead-simple, but you never know. 9. 10. 11. 12.
ToonDoo - World's fastest way to create cartoons! RSS Feed Search Engine Instant RSS Search engine will help you discover RSS feeds on the web around your favorite topics. You may use the tool to search RSS feeds for blogs, news websites, podcasts and more. It is instant search and hence the search results display as you type. You may use any of the Google search operators - like allintitle, inurl, etc. - for more accurate results. You can subscribe to the feeds in your favorite RSS Reader (like Feedly) or use the Preview link to see the 10 most recently published articles from that feed.
Comic Books as Journalism: 10 Masterpieces of Graphic Nonfiction - Kirstin Butler An unusual summer reading roundup of books that blend meaty subject matter with engaging visual storytelling Who doesn't love comic books? While infographics may be trendy today (and photography perennially sexy), there's just something special about the work of the human hand. Good old-fashioned manual labor, literally, brings a unique richness to storytelling where words alone sometimes fall flat. I've put together a list of some of my favorite graphic non-fiction. These hybrid works combine the best elements of art, journalism, and scholarship, and provide the perfect way to mix some visual magic into your summer reading list. I've long loved authors Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. The Beats invokes the immediacy of 1940s and '50s art, music, and writing; even better, it provides political context and introduced us to an entire panoply of artists whose contributions to the era are lesser known. How do you make 500,000 declassified documents yield their stories?
21st-Century Learner The 21st-century learner is here–is your classroom ready? By Mark Stevens NEA members attending this year's RA got a look at technology that could transform teaching and learning in their classrooms.Photo by Calvin Knight No one sees more clearly than educators how the technologies we use in our daily lives influence how students learn. Students have changed, educators have changed, learning itself has changed. Yet the typical physical building where all that learning takes place has remained largely the same over the last 100 years. Learning environments aren’t revolutionized by installing a few cool gadgets here and there. NEA Executive Director John I. It’s up to educators to find the best ways to integrate technology in fulfilling curriculum requirements, but many useful technologies are available off the shelf, some even for free. What does this 21st-century classroom look like? Look around and you’re likely to see: Web-based applications that connect students, parents, and educators.
50 Education Technology Tools Every Teacher Should Know About Technology and education are pretty intertwined these days and nearly every teacher has a few favorite tech tools that make doing his or her job and connecting with students a little bit easier and more fun for all involved. Yet as with anything related to technology, new tools are hitting the market constantly and older ones rising to prominence, broadening their scope, or just adding new features that make them better matches for education, which can make it hard to keep up with the newest and most useful tools even for the most tech-savvy teachers. Here, we’ve compiled a list of some of the tech tools, including some that are becoming increasingly popular and widely used, that should be part of any teacher’s tech tool arsenal this year, whether for their own personal use or as educational aids in the classroom. Social Learning These tools use the power of social media to help students learn and teachers connect. Learning Lesson Planning and Tools Useful Tools
Using Social Media to Teach Visual Literacy in the 21st Century Classroom Increasingly, educators are acknowledging and welcoming the relative advantages of social media into the teaching and learning process. From creating school Facebook pages to connecting students with experts via Twitter, social media has taken root as a legitimate classroom learning and communication tool. The highly linguistic nature of social media allows us to create and consume ideas and information unlike ever before. Much attention has been given to composing an articulate blog post and condensing our messages to 140 characters or less. However, effective use of this 21st century technology requires that we not only become proficient in textual communication, but also in our ability to express ourselves and interpret others' ideas through visual literacy. Why Visual Literacy Matters Visual literacy is the ability to: Process and make meaning of information presented in an image. So, what does visual literacy in the classroom look like? 3 Modes of Visual Communication