Through Voki, a Web 2.0 tool, students create customizable avatars for class presentations for various purposes, such as presenting biographical information, expressing an opinion, or reading a poem.
Speak to Me: Teaching with Voki
Shared Reading Opportunities for Direct Literacy Instruction
Shared reading affords teachers the opportunity to teach reading strategies in larger groups. The shared text and teacher support offer unique opportunities for instruction.
Supporting Students As They Read Independently
This guide includes basic theory and practice for supporting students reading independently, which is the last instructional context along the gradual release of responsibility.
Using Guided Reading to Develop Student Reading Independence
This guide presents basic structures for implementing guided reading, which involves working with small groups of children possessing similar strategies and challenges when encountering new text.
Teacher Read-Aloud That Models Reading for Deep Understanding
This guide describes the basic elements for reading aloud to students in ways that demonstrate thoughtful and deep interactions with the text.
Inquiry Charts (I-Charts)
This guide introduces I-Charts, a strategy that enables students to generate meaningful questions about a topic and organize their writing.
Question the Author (QtA)
In this guide, you'll be introduced to a strategy that requires students to challenge their understanding and solidify their knowledge while reading a text.
Exit Slips
This strategy guide introduces the concept of using Exit Slips in the classroom to help students reflect on what they have learned and express what or how they are thinking about the new information. Exit Slips easily incorporate writing into the content area classroom and require students to think critically.
Power Notes
The strategy examined in this Strategy Guide teaches students an outlining technique to help them differentiate between main ideas and details in their reading and writing.
The (Un)Making of a Reader
Through looking critically at the underpinnings of "story mapping, a teacher uncovers a contradiction between the author's definition of reading as a constructive process and the reductionist nature of story mapping, which she shows inhibits students' potential to explore a diverse range of personal responses by promoting comprehension over response, uniformity over diversity, and control over freedom.
The Literature Circle: Reading Like a Writer
Reading internalizes every aspect of good writing—if you're reading good writing, which most middle school textbooks aren't. Here are criteria and suggestions for good content-area articles and trade nonfiction books.
Sound and Sense in Children's Picturebooks
Explores (from the point of view of the writer, a children's author) one aspect of learning about language that is present in the picture books he writes: the relation between sound and sense.
Joyful Noises: Creating Poems for Voices and Ears
This article discusses the efforts of a fifth-grade teacher and a visiting poet to rekindle students' sense of poetic passion and pleasure and describes how the authors introduced students to poems for two voices.
Professional Knowledge for the Teaching of Writing
With full recognition that writing is an increasingly multifaceted activity, we offer several principles that should guide effective teaching practice.
Resolution on Composing with Nonprint Media
This resolution explains what educators can do to work with young people composing nonprint media that can include any combination of visual art, motion (video and film), graphics, text, and sound -- all of which are frequently written and read in nonlinear fashion.
Resolution on Promoting Media Literacy
This resolution discusses that understanding the new media and using them constructively and creatively actually requires developing a new form of literacy and new critical abilities "in reading, listening, viewing, and thinking."
A Call to Action: What We Know About Adolescent Literacy and Ways to Support Teachers in Meeting Students' Needs
This document provides a research-based resource that acknowledges the complexities of reading as a developmental process and addresses the needs of secondary readers and their teachers.
Guideline on The Students' Right to Read
The current edition of The Students' Right to Read is an adaptation and updating of the original Council statement, including "Citizen's Request for Reconsideration of a Work."
Planning for Inquiry: It's Not an Oxymoron!
Planning for Inquiry shows you how to get an inquiry-based curriculum started, how to keep it going, and how to do so while remaining accountable to mandated curricula, standards, and programs.
Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Media Literacy Education
This document is a code of best practices that helps educators using media literacy concepts and techniques to interpret the copyright doctrine of fair use.