Tag Archives: online english

Flipping your Classroom

Posted on June 3, 2012 by Scott

I have been hearing a lot lately about the “flipped” classroom.  If you haven’t heard about it yet, Holly Epstein Ojalvo and Shannon Doyne of the New York Times provide a succinct definition: “an ‘inverted’ teaching structure in which instructional content is delivered outside class, and engagement with the content – skill development and practice, projects and the like – is done in class, under teacher guidance and in collaboration with peers.” It all started when a couple of teachers started recording their lectures and posting them as Power Points on the net for students who were absent.   And that is the essence of it really.  You provide content for the students to access outside the classroom and structured exploratory activities and lessons based on that content in the classroom.  This “flips” the teacher’s role from class lecturer (information provider) to class guide through activities based on the pre-assigned content. … Continue reading →

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Blending Art, Literature, and Problem Solving at the J. Paul Getty Museum

Posted on November 11, 2011 by Scott

Common Core Standard 7 for Reading presents teachers with many possibilities for mixing all kinds of art forms with literature.  Music, photography, painting, sculpture, and many other media are easily brought into the classroom today because of the internet…the important thing is to use these resources heuristically. 7. Analyze the representation of a subject or a key scene in two different artistic mediums, including what is emphasized or absent in each treatment (e.g., Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts” and Breughel’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus). Teaching students to analyze subjects or scenes in comparative forms gives us an opportunity to explore with them the traditions of storytelling—the many and various ways stories can be told and have been told throughout history.  Poetry, short stories, plays, and even novels and epic tales have important connections to art and present new, thoughtful ways to analyze and evaluate themes. To start, you … Continue reading →

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Common Core Reading Standard #4—Vocabulary in Context

Posted on August 24, 2011 by Scott

This week is my last one before returning to the classroom on Monday.  I have to be honest, thinking about the first day of school still makes me really queasy even after eleven years.  Of course, I do plan to continue this series of posts about the Common Core through the fall.  This week we begin with “Craft and Structure.” 4. Determine the meaning of words and phrases as they are used in a text, including figurative, connotative, and technical meanings; analyze the cumulative impact of specific word choices on meaning and tone (e.g., how the language of a court opinion differs from that of a newspaper). So this standard is all about vocabulary and author word choice, teaching students how to understand meanings in context and how to analyze diction. Usually for this blog I focus only on free resources for integrating technology, but Academic Merit’s Literary Companion is … Continue reading →

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Online Resources for Analyzing Character

Posted on August 15, 2011 by Scott

This week we look at the last of three standards under “Key Ideas and Details” in the “Reading” section of the Common Core: Standard 3:  Analyze how complex characters (e.g., those with multiple or conflicting motivations) develop over the course of a text, interact with other characters, and advance the plot or develop the theme. For students to understand how a character develops over the course of a text and how his or her interactions impact plot and theme, they first need to know where to begin.  A good place to start is to help them get into the mind of the character.  The idea is to help students take a character and, to borrow a quote from Atticus Finch, “climb into his skin and walk around in it.”  The internet offers many ways to facilitate this creatively with technology.  Here are a few ideas and sites that might work … Continue reading →

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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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Resources for Meeting the Common Core, Part I: Interactive Informational Texts

Posted on July 30, 2011 by Scott

After a long and much needed hiatus, I am back… I found I needed some complete down time very much, hence the brief silence at Interactive LA.  I hope you too are able to find this for yourself…time to repair and to recuperate. This week, I begin a weekly series focusing on using technology to meet specific Common Core State Standards beginning with “Reading,” “Key Ideas and Details,” standard 1.  For these posts, I will be looking at the standards for grades 9 & 10 because I teach high school, but I think you’ll see that adapting the standards among the grades is easy. Standard 1: Cite strong and thorough textual evidence to support analysis of what the text says explicitly as well as inferences drawn from the text. Holt, Rinehart, & Winston’s Interactive Informational Texts Looking over my syllabus recently, I noticed it is heavy with fiction–short stories, novels, … Continue reading →

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Animoto: Another Great Tool for Adding Music and Video to Your Lit Plans

Posted on June 21, 2011 by Scott

Summer has finally arrived here in Maine.  I hope many of you, like me, have finished up the school year and can now take some time to recuperate.  Looking forward to a productive summer, I am planning a series of blog posts focusing on the Common Core State Standards Initiative.  My plan is to post regular articles with a simple goal: each blog post will take one specific CCSS outcome and demonstrate a resource and/or method for utilizing technology to meet that standard.  Essentially, I envision a CCSS curriculum map for Language Arts, based completely on technology integration.  I’m hoping to begin this series the first or second week of July. Meanwhile, I have found a website I think will be fun to use with students in the fall…Animoto.  Animoto is a basic online tool that allows you to create “video slideshows” or montages with music and text.  The basic … 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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Free Audio and Video Files of Famous Speeches at American Rhetoric.com

Posted on May 9, 2011 by Scott

With so much literature, grammar, writing, and vocabulary to cover in our curriculum these days, it’s easy to overlook the importance of oral language in our classrooms.  Consider also how reluctant many students already are about “getting up in front of the class,” and it’s easy to put off teaching about speeches and oral presentations.   But with evermore rapid advancements of technology and the internet, listening and speaking skills are becoming increasingly important.  The authors of the Common Core State Standards put it this way: “New technologies have broadened and expanded the role that speaking and listening play in acquiring and sharing knowledge and have tightened their link to other forms of communication. The Internet has accelerated the speed at which connections between speaking, listening, reading, and writing can be made, requiring that students be ready to use these modalities nearly simultaneously.” Looking for tools useful in focusing on verbal … Continue reading →

Posted in American Literature, Audio, Classical Literature, Lesson Plans, Listening, Presenting, Speaking, Video | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Quizlet can be a Simple Way to Get Students Collaborating Online

Posted on March 20, 2011 by Scott

The Partnership for 21st Century Skills cites the ability to work collaboratively among some very important skills students will need in order to be ready for the careers of the 21st century.  However, as school district budgets shrink and as our classroom rosters grow, finding opportunities to have our students collaborate can be difficult.  Sometimes, when a class is quite large, setting kids to work in groups creates an exhausting job for the teacher keeping them all productive and on task. So here’s a simple way to include some collaborative studying while at the same time integrating a basic media literacy element with your next vocabulary unit: Have students create vocabulary note-cards at Quizlet.com and then share them using the “Create a Group” function.  All you have to do is create an account, choose the “My Groups” tab, and “create your own” group.  Once your group is complete, you can … Continue reading →

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