Through Prezi, a web application, students create "zooming" presentations for various purposes, such as presenting research, defending an opinion, or sharing a digital story.
Teaching with Zooming Slideshows through Prezi
Bringing Lessons to Life with Animoto
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.
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.
Roots and Branches: A Resource of Native American Literature
This valuable resource book offers teachers an opportunity to learn and to teach about Native American literatures in context. Susag examines the historical and literary contexts that frame the literary work of Native peoples.
Tracking the Ways Writers Develop Heroes and Villains
Everyone knows that Star Wars character Darth Vader is a villain. This lesson asks students to explore how they know such things about heroes and villains they encounter in texts.
All's Well that Sells Well: A Creative Introduction to Shakespeare
Students compare attending a performance at The Globe Theater with attending a modern theater production or movie. They then create a commercial for an Elizabethan audience promoting a modern product.
The Ten-Minute Play: Encouraging Original Response to Challenging Texts
Students use both analytical and creative skills to adapt passages from a novel with significant internal dialogue and conflict, such as Toni Morrison's Beloved, into a ten-minute play.
The Importance of Titles: From Big Blank Space to Small Good Thing
After examining two sets of stories that author Raymond Carver renamed in revision, students write a reflective essay in which they defend their choice of a title for one them.
Rummaging for Fiction: Using Found Photographs and Notes to Spark Story Ideas
In this lesson, students use found notes and found photographs as inspiration to help them identify subjects, settings, characters, and conflicts for pieces of creative writing.
Having My Say: A Multigenre Autobiography Project
Students compose a multigenre paper, modeled after the Delany sister's autobiography, Having Our Say, that includes the autobiographical narrative essay as well as an informational nonfiction piece.
Cover to Cover: Comparing Books to Movies
Students compare and analyze novels and the movies adapted from them. They design new DVD covers and a related insert for the movies, reflecting their response to the movie version.
Exploring Setting: Constructing Character, Point of View, Atmosphere, and Theme
Students read texts by Dybek, Dickens, Poe, and Morrison to explore how authors use language to create setting and, in turn, how setting constructs other elements in a literary work.
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.
Creative Outlining-From Freewriting to Formalizing
After reading a short story, students use freewriting as a catalyst for a literary analysis essay.
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.
Gaining Background for the Graphic Novel Persepolis: A WebQuest on Iran
To prepare students for reading the graphic novel Persepolis, this lesson uses a WebQuest to focus students' research on finding reliable information about Iran before and during the Islamic Revolution.