Students learn about the life and music of John Lennon, write a short story from their lives integrating lyrics from some of their favorite songs, and create a class book of stories.
Songs of Our Lives: Using Lyrics to Write Stories
Grades
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Exploring The Prologue to The Canterbury Tales using Wikis
9 - 12
Lesson Plan
| Standard Lesson
Students study Chaucer's Canterbury Tales not just for its rich language, but also for the insights it provides into the Middle Ages. Using wikis, students collaborate to study both literature and history on their own terms. They create meaning and build information networks using tools Chaucer himself would have loved.
Grades
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Using Microblogging and Social Networking to Explore Characterization and Style
9 - 12
Lesson Plan
| Standard Lesson
Students use social networking sites to trace the development of characters by assuming the persona of a character on the class Ning and sending a set number of tweets, or status updates.
Grades
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There Are No Small Parts: Minor Characters in David Copperfield
9 - 12
Lesson Plan
| Standard Lesson
This lesson capitalizes on students' interest in social networking by asking students to build an online profile for a minor character in Charles Dickens' David Copperfield.
Grades
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Blogtopia: Blogging about Your Own Utopia
9 - 12
Lesson Plan
| Standard Lesson
Students work together to create their own utopias, using blogs as the primary source of publication.
Grades
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Defining Literacy in a Digital World
9 - 12
Lesson Plan
| Standard Lesson
Through listing and observation, students identify the many texts that they read and composeincluding books and magazines, television shows, movies, audio broadcasts, hypertexts, and animations.
Grades
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Audio Broadcasts and Podcasts: Oral Storytelling and Dramatization
9 - 12
Lesson Plan
| Unit
After exploring Orson Welles' 1938 broadcast of H. G. Wells' War of the Worlds, students create their own audio dramatization of a text they have read.
Grades
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Star-Crossed Lovers Online: Romeo and Juliet for a Digital Age
9 - 12
Lesson Plan
| Standard Lesson
Explore the modern significance of an older text, such as Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, by asking students to create their own modern interpretation of specific events from the drama.
Grades
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Copyright Infringement or Not? The Debate over Downloading Music
9 - 12
Lesson Plan
| Unit
This lesson takes advantage of students' interest in music and audio sharing. Students investigate multiple perspectives in the music downloading debate and develop a persuasive argument for a classroom debate.
Grades
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Naming in a Digital World: Creating a Safe Persona on the Internet
9 - 12
Lesson Plan
| Standard Lesson
Students explore naming conventions in digital and non-digital settings then choose and explain specific names and profiles to represent themselves online.
Grades
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Building Vietnam War Scavenger Hunts through Web-Based Inquiry
9 - 12
Lesson Plan
| Standard Lesson
Students research the effects of the Vietnam war on a specific group of people who were involved. They then create Internet scavenger hunts to share with the class.
Grades
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Literary Scrapbooks Online: An Electronic Reader-Response Project
9 - 12
Lesson Plan
| Unit
Students capture scraps of information from a variety of Web resources and use them to create an electronic scrapbook. Emphasis is placed on evaluating and citing resources.
Grades
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Paying Attention to Technology: Writing Technology Autobiographies
9 - 12
Lesson Plan
| Standard Lesson
This lesson plan asks students to pay attention to the technologies they use. They graphically map their interactions with technology and compose narratives of their most significant interactions with technology.
Grades
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Weaving the Multigenre Web
9 - 12
Lesson Plan
| Unit
Students analyze the elements of a novel in many different genres and then hyperlink these pieces together on student-constructed Websites.
Grades
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Picture This: Student Created Online Vocabulary Flashcards
7 - 12
Lesson Plan
| Standard Lesson
Let the students be the vocabulary experts! Prior to whole class instruction, students create online flashcards and teach the class the new vocabulary.
Grades
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Blending the Past with Today's Technology: Using Prezi to Prepare for Historical Fiction
6 - 10
Lesson Plan
| Standard Lesson
To prepare for literature circles featuring historical novels, students research the decades of the 1930s to the 1990s and share their information using Prezi, a web application for creating multimedia presentations.
Grades
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Vote for Me! Making Presidential Commercials Using Avatars
6 - 12
Lesson Plan
| Standard Lesson
After researching political platforms of past presidents through primary sources and other resources, students create commercials for these presidents using Voki, an online web tool that produces speaking avatars.
Grades
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Book Report Alternative: Getting Acquainted with Farcebook
7 - 12
Lesson Plan
| Standard Lesson
In this alternative to the traditional book report, students report on their novel choices using Facebook-like pages.
Grades
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A Tale of a Few Text Messages: A Character Study of A Tale of Two Cities
9 - 12
Lesson Plan
| Standard Lesson
Students use A Tale of Two Cities to explore relationships, plot points, character traits, and background by writing text messages between characters within the novel.
Grades
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The Passion of Punctuation
9 - 12
Lesson Plan
| Unit
Using published writers' texts and students' own writing, this unit explores emotions that are associated with the artful and deliberate use of commas, semicolons, colons, and exclamation points (end-stop marks of punctuation).