Tag Archives: lesson plans

Writing about Theme with iWrite

Posted on August 7, 2011 by Scott

Continuing with our exploration of the Common Core, this week I’ve discovered a useful website for the second standard under “Key Ideas and Details.” Standard 2: Determine a theme or central idea of a text and analyze in detail its development over the course of the text, including how it emerges and is shaped and refined by specific details; provide an objective summary of the text. This standard is a broad one but also a very important one as it focuses on analysis which is among those higher order thinking skills so important to students becoming independent learners.  It is unlikely you could (or should) cover this standard with one lesson.  Students need multiple opportunities to learn about and meet this standard. iwrite from Great Source (Haughton, Mifflin, Harcourt) offers a lot of useful material online for both teachers and students exploring not only central ideas with writing but also … Continue reading →

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What if Your Textbooks Were Free and Customizable?

Posted on May 31, 2011 by Scott

As the school year winds down, you might be thinking about what new or different books you hope to use in the fall.  If you are, I encourage you to check out Open Educational Resources (OER) textbooks.  OER or “Open Source” textbooks are digital, often customizable, textbooks published and available on the web.  Many of them are quite comprehensive and are written by highly-qualified professionals with advanced degrees.  These books also often include interactive elements and multimedia such as sound and video.   Best of all, they’re free. In the Classroom Here are some OER sources you can explore.  Since these are open and free, you’ll see that you can pick and choose from multiple sources for your students instead of having to commit to one textbook from one publisher. Many of them are also available in PDF format for download and to print either for free or for a … Continue reading →

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Shmoop Promises to “Vanquish” Dread Over Writing

Posted on May 24, 2011 by Scott

For teachers and students, Shmoop.com, a popular online study guide website, recently released a new feature called “Shmoop Essay Lab” and it’s a powerful teaching/learning tool, especially for students who struggle with developing ideas and organizing their essays.  Students can choose to write about literature or to develop a college entrance essay and Shmoop’s interactive tutorial walks them through the process from topic selection to final edit.  What’s really interesting is that the literature essay tutorials are custom designed and paired with any one of dozens of books.  So, for example, if a student is writing about To Kill a Mockingbird, she can select that book from the menu and follow the step-by-step tutorial for developing an essay about a theme or a topic related to that particular book.  The tutorial even offers specific quotes from the text that students can use to support their ideas in  the body of … Continue reading →

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What if Hamlet Had a Facebook Page and Tweeted?

Posted on April 26, 2011 by Scott

Ok, so the days are finally getting longer here in New England and the end of the school year is within sight…but I still feel like there simply aren’t enough hours in the day to get everything done and the students are growing restless by the day.  So, as usual, I’ve been digging about on the web, looking for resources to keep my students busy and learning as the weather grows warmer and  their attention spans shrink.  While digging, I came across a site from the UK that is an impressive social network for teachers called TES Connect. TES Connect call themselves the world’s largest “social network that allows teachers to network, share resources and search for jobs.”  Once you sign up for a free account, you will gain access to a very large collection of shared ideas from teachers.  It’s very well organized by subjects and grade levels.  The … Continue reading →

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Lesson Plans

Posted on January 23, 2011 by Scott

Interactive Language Arts now has a lesson plans section (see main site menu above)  I’m just starting out with this section, so check back frequently to see what new lessons have been added.  I will soon make lesson plan templates available as well so that you can share your own lesson plans based on the technology resources written about here at ILA.  All the lesson plans are simple, practical, and are aligned to at least one of the Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts.  My goal is to provide simple, easy-to-use lessons to equip teachers with resources and opportunities to integrate technology in the Language Arts classroom.  Please visit the Lesson Plans page and share it with your colleagues and friends via Facebook and other social networks. Scott

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Prezi.com Makes Presentations Fun

Posted on January 4, 2011 by Scott

As an English teacher, I am always using metaphors or other imagery to explain the concepts I want students to grasp.  For example, when telling students about building a good paragraph or essay, it can be helpful to use the analogy of a good essay being like a sandwich or a hamburger with bread slices as the introduction and conclusion and the meat and other stuff as the body of the essay.  If you like using visuals when you teach (does anyone teach without visuals?!?), I have found a great online application called Prezi that you should try.  Prezi.com is a fun and effective tool for creating presentations that are media rich.  Sure you can use the old fashioned Power Points but Prezis are way more fun and engaging and they can be manipulated to create animation. The best part about designing with Prezi is that you don’t have to … Continue reading →

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Learn and Teach Out Loud: Add Some Audio or Video Flare to Your Lit Units

Posted on January 2, 2011 by Scott

When recently looking for electronic resources to add to my short story unit, I came across LearnOutLoud.com where hundreds of recorded works are available free for download.  Learn Out Loud doesn’t just have audio recordings of books and stories (though there are plenty of those); they also have podcasts and videos. Some of the resources cost money, but there are plenty of free downloads (hundreds across all content areas.  And, for those ambitious teachers among us, you can even upload your own teaching content (lectures, etc.) and try to sell it through Teach Out Loud.  Next time you do a particularly good job of dynamically introducing Romeo and Juliet, maybe you can turn your introduction into some cash.  In the Teach Out Loud section, you can also browse content already published from other teachers.  Teach Out Loud has hundreds of downloads available including readings from Shakespeare’s Sonnets for $1.99 and … Continue reading →

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The Shakespeare Pages

Posted on December 19, 2010 by Scott

In my last post I mentioned a project I have been working on.  It’s more-or-less done now so I thought I would write briefly about it here.  I hope to develop it more, but as they say, it’s never done, just due.  I developed this project for a Visual Literacies class I just finished at Northern Arizona University (online).  The Shakespeare Pages Project is a website designed for high school or middle school English students.  Its purpose is first to convince students that Shakespeare is not as boring or as hard to understand as they might think.  The pages of the site are designed to not only persuade but also to engage teenagers’ curiosity.  The project’s purpose is also to teach students about Shakespeare’s time, Elizabethan culture, the Globe Theater, and about the social class differences that divided citizens of 17th Century England.  The site is designed to integrate technology … Continue reading →

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Interactive Salem Witch Trials

Posted on December 10, 2010 by Scott

If you teach Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, Elizabeth George Speare’s The Witch of Blackbird Pond, or any other Witch Trials literature, you must check out the Salem Witchcraft Hysteria interactive website at National Geographic.  It is an outstanding example of the interactive learning opportunities found on the Internet.  If you are a history teacher looking for a great activity that explores the Salem Witch trials, this is an invaluable bookmark for you as well.  Using a “choose your own adventure” approach, the multimedia activity draws students into history by having them “virtually” face many of the impossible situations and decisions that people faced during the 17th century when witchcraft hysteria had a grip on the New England colonies, particularly Salem, Massachusetts.  Click here to see a quick demonstration. A short narrative introduces the visitor to the event that served as the catalyst: a young girl mysteriously falling sick.  At this … Continue reading →

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Interactive “A Jury of Her Peers”

Posted on December 4, 2010 by Scott

Hello fellow teachers and tech integration enthusiasts.  I’m back from a short break.  A major project in my graduate class has kept me away from blogging for nearly two weeks.  The good news is I’ve been developing an interactive Shakespeare website I’ll soon be able to introduce here.  For now, I’ve got another interactive text to tell you about.  It is part of “Interactives” by Annenberg Media—a collection of lessons which span across the curriculum and that are meant to “enhance and improve students’ skills in a variety of curricular areas.”  These activities range from 3D Geometry and History to the subject of this blog—Language Arts.   Only four Language Arts “Interactives” are available at this time, but it is easy to imagine connections between Language Arts and some of the activities in other subjects such as history.  For example, anyone teaching Marlowe or Shakespeare might find the Renaissance Interactives in … Continue reading →

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