Using Animoto, a free Web 2.0 tool, students can develop short digital videos that include music, photos, video clips, and text as well as share their creations electronically.
Bringing Lessons to Life with Animoto
Speak to Me: Teaching with Voki
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.
Promoting Student-Directed Inquiry with the I-Search Paper
The sense of curiosity behind research writing gets lost in some school-based assignments. This Strategy Guide provides the foundation for cultivating interest and authority through I-Search writing, including publishing online.
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.
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.
Building Literacy Connections with Graphic Novels: Page by Page, Panel by Panel
This collection of essays by classroom teachers demonstrates how to pair graphic novels with classic literature (including both canonical and YA lit).
Lesson Plans for Teaching Writing
This collection of lesson plans will help prepare high school and college students for college-level writing.
The Writing Workshop: Working through the Hard Parts (And They're All Hard Parts)
A practical, comprehensive, and illuminating guide for both new and experienced teachers that confronts the challenges of the writing workshop head-on.
Swish! Pow! Whack! Teaching Onomatopoeia Through Sports Poetry
Students explore poetry about sports, looking closely at the use of onomatopoeia. After viewing a segment of a sporting event, students create their own onomatopoeic sports poems.
Color of Silence: Sensory Imagery in Pat Mora's Poem "Echoes"
Pat Mora's poem "Echoes" demonstrates that our senses are powerful tools for literary analysis and comprehension as students use their senses to discover new ways to read and write.
Polishing Preposition Skills through Poetry and Publication
Students deepen and refine their understanding of prepositions by reading Ruth Heller's Behind the Mask. They write preposition poetry and create a study guide using an online tool.
Exploring Change through Allegory and Poetry
Students read an example of allegory, review literary concepts, complete literary elements maps and plot diagrams, create a pictorial allegory, and write diamante poems related to the theme of change.
Technology and Copyright Law: A "Futurespective"
Students research and report on instances of how copyright laws have adapted to encompass new technologies. They write articles predicting copyright issues that may arise with new and future technologies.
Copyright Law: From Digital Reprints to Downloads
Students investigate how and why copyright law has changed over time, and apply this information to recent copyright issues, creating persuasive arguments based on the perspective of a particular group.
Creating a Persuasive Podcast
Students learn how to get their voice out on the web when they research issues important to them and compose a persuasive podcast to post online.
Exploring Careers Using the Internet
Doctors, astrophysicists, and daycare providers are only some of the careers that will be explored in this lesson in which students research careers and publish occupational summaries about them.
Persuading the Principal: Writing Persuasive Letters About School Issues
Students learn that you don't have to raise your voice to raise a point. Writing a persuasive letter to your principal is a great way to get your opinions heard.
ABC Bookmaking Builds Vocabulary in the Content Areas
V is for vocabulary. A content area unit provides the theme for a specialized ABC book, as students select, research, define, and illustrate a word for each alphabet letter.
Everyone Loves a Mystery: A Genre Study
Students track the elements of mystery stories through Directed Learning-Thinking Activities, story maps, and puzzles. Then they offer clues for other readers as they plan and write original mystery stories.
Writing Free Verse in the "Voice" of Cesar Chavez
Poetry and politics combine in this lesson where students write a free verse poem in the voice of Cesar Chavez.