classjump.com

http://classjump.com/news.php

ClassJump provides free websites to teachers for the benefit of schools, teachers, students, and parents. It is designed to give teachers the opportunity to post assignments, documents, and classroom related material online where students and parents can conveniently retrieve them. This non-for-profit website caters to 20,821 teachers, 9,544 schools, and 201,562 students. The basis of ClassJump is to make the communication, outside of the classroom, easier between the teacher and student.

ClassJump offers schools their own websites here at ClassJump.com. With that, it is designed to help provide information to teachers, students, and parents while they are visiting teacher sites while on ClassJump.com. With a school site at ClassJump, you will take total control over your teacher access for your specific school. In addition, ClassJump gives students and teachers permission to create and edit content on their site.

For the benefit of the teachers, ClassJump allows schools to create sites on the school website that is private and only accessible to teachers. The private area of the site can contain news, documents, a calendar, and blogs that only teachers can access.

For the benefit of teachers and students, ClassJump comes in handy when teachers need to send out emails immediately and can do so by the bulk by using his or her teacher/student email lists. It is also useful for sending out alerts and notices. In addition, students are allowed to send emails to his or her teachers just the same.

To gain the best understanding of ClassJump.com, it provides the same needs to teachers and students comparable to those of the University of Illinois’ “Compass” or “Moodle”.

readwritethink.org

Reading and Writing Through A Poetry Unit

Review provided by Joshua Weakly:

Poetry is often considered a difficult subject to teach at the high school and junior high school levels. However, readwritethink.org offers a great resource for developing a unit around poetry. The objective of the unit is to instill the students with a desire to explore the poems that they are required to read. The most impressive aspect of the proposed unit is that it incorporates an activity between the students and their family members. While this may be a difficult task in some settings, it may prove to be a very beneficial activity in a setting in which it will be successful. Rather than making it a mandatory part of the unit, I would personally suggest providing it as an opportunity for extra credit. Another interesting and beneficial tool offered through readwritethink.org is the student activity of “Construct-A-Word.” A link to this tool can be found under the “Extensions” section of the “Instructional Plan.” This tool can be an enjoyable way for students to experiment with technology while still participating in the larger unit of poetry. The words that are formed from the tool can then be used by the students to create their own poems. This website offers a range of additional activities and lesson plans that can be utilized outside the context of the proposed poetry unit. I think that this resource will be of assistance to any teacher that would like help in developing an enjoyable and meaningful learning experience through a poetry unit.

http://www.readwritethink.org/classroom-resources/lesson-plans/poetry-portfolios-using-poetry-152.html?tab=1#tabs

Learner .org

http://www.learner.org/

It not only has information for English and Literature, but also for Math, Science and History. One of the major things that I like about this resource is that it is easy to follow, and very well organized.

I especially liked the sections on Expanding the Cannon: Teaching multicultural literature. One of the biggest issues that I have as a future teacher, and current student, is the lack of diversity in the literature that we teach. We often stick to the usual greats without taking a second look at some of the multicultural literature coming from those same eras. I think that there is much that can be gained for reading the ‘not-so-greats’ as well.

The article lists 8 different workshops under this specific title. Each workshop has an itemized detailed explanation as to what each part of each workshop is meant to accomplish. Each workshop builds a different set of skills while incorporating 2 different authors whose works tie in similar themes. There are also links to resources that can be printed, purchase, and downloaded for use in the classroom.

Despite the organization of the resources, I do think that there is a lot of room for individual tweaking to fit your classroom and student abilities. The fact that the resources are so laid out will allow teachers to see clear opportunities to add some originality to the ideas presented.

Teaching and Learning with The New York Times

The Learning Network

The education blog extension of the New York Times website is a fantastic resource. To be honest, I haven't always been keen on the idea of using lessons plans off the internet or the scanner because of the usual inadequacy and formulaic nature of the activities. In order to be fair, there are amazing ideas to be found on the internet; the key is to use discretion when choosing which ones to use. Which is why I was thrilled to find that the Times offers daily activities and lesson plans which are stimulating and efficient as well as smart and sophisticated. Engaging with NY Times news and art content, the activities are wonderful at honing in on critical thinking skills and also encourage an interaction with culturally relevant material. The website offers a wide variety of lesson plans that are listed by categories ranging from Language Arts and Social Studies to Current Events, Fine Arts, and Media Studies. There is also a section which contains hand-picked journal articles with discussion forums for teachers to share and analyze their own methods and strategies with the theories and practices offered in the given articles. One of my favorite sections of the website is a student opinion forum which offers students the opportunity to deal with currently relevant issues and respond to them on a respectable and sophisticated platform. Everything about this website screams cultural relevance, and it is undeniable that it is 'hip.' There is a lesson plan that seeks to bring The Academy Awards into the classroom through an analysis of both film and culture. There is a lesson plan which engages in critical thinking about contemporary fashion. There is a lesson plan which drives students to personally respond to the issues related to global warming. Critical thinking and broad cultural analysis runs as a major current throughout this website. Another perk of using it on a regular basis is that it can ingrain into students the importance of keeping up-to-date with the news and, especially, the New York Times, which is, in my opinion, the pinnacle of newspaper excellence in the U.S.

A Way to Teach

Last semester I stumbled across a website called A Way to Teach that I have continued to find extremely informative and helpful.

Please visit the site by either clicking the above picture or clicking here.

This is an active, literature-specific site run and maintained by educators and students. It offers a wide variety of resources and materials, including reading and writing lesson plans, literature reviews, audio files, useful links, discussion forums, teacher groups, and annotated and illuminated texts. In particular, the discussion forums have a plethora of information, suggestions, and links that have helped me plan my own lessons.

While this site is free, certain resources are locked by a points-earned policy in order to promote continued activity and procure new content. Access to the forums, links, and literature reviews is open even to unregistered users. After a free registration, however, you can actively participate in all the aforementioned subsections through comments and reviews and thereby earn points towards 'unlocking' the remaining resources. Adding poignant quotes to relevant discussion boards, commenting on discussion threads or lesson plans, or submitting your own lesson plans will earn you 1, 2, or 50 points each, respectively. Once 50 points have been earned, you will gain access to all downloadable files, lessons, and texts.

To discourage a deluge of useless or plagiarized information, each lesson plan is carefully evaluated for original content, proper attributions, and completeness before being admitted to the site. If a lesson is deemed helpful but incomplete, it will instead be added as a forum post. Furthermore, there is a rating system (between 1 and 5 stars) for each resource provided to help organize the site's content.

Ultimately, the community atmosphere at A Way to Teach is strong. The interaction between students, new teachers, and veteran educators has created a unique dynamic in which literature is approached in new and innovative ways. While the literature discussed on the site is largely Eurocentric at this time, the resources provided are extremely useful, and the site will likely grow in scope in the future. I would highly recommend this site as a reference for those who are teaching or plan to teach literature-based lessons in the future.

LEARN NC

LEARN NC

http://www.learnnc.org/

LEARN NC, a program of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Education, finds new, innovative and successful practices in K–12 education and makes them available to the teachers around the world. It is a site with numerous different types of information on it. Some of the things include lesson plans, good strategies, classroom management and etc. For each grade level from kindergarten to grade twelve, there are numerous resources. In addition, it focuses on multiple subjects, not just English, but Science and Social Studies as well.

One of the useful parts of the website that I found useful is the multimedia section. It not only is an easy way to search for movie/video clips, but the clips are education and are appropriate to use in school. Moreover, since this is a website supported by university, it is a suitable website for usage in schools. Also one of my favorite parts is the section about conferences. Since I cannot afford to go to the conferences, the conferences that are held at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill are covered and give the outline of the conferences. It is very educational part of the website because you get to learn new or successful practices in teaching, but also what is new happening in the field of education.

One downside of the website is that in the field trips section of the website. The field trips focus on South Carolina and since most of us will not teach in South Carolina, this is not a useful part of the website.

Poets.org

http://www.poets.org/page.php/prmID/6

If you are at all like me, the idea of teaching poetry frightens you to your very core. Where do I start? How can I devise a unit plan or even a lesson plan based on a subject that I don't fully understand? With such a vast array of types of poetry and directions in which to take your curriculum, Poets.org helps to simplify the process by providing loads of resources for educators in their comprehensive site devoted to the study of the poetic form. The site is the central hub for the Academy of American Poets, so it provides teachers and students with a direct line to what is happening in poetry today and throughout history.

Among the many resources available are a plethora of lesson and unit plans, each with its own unique critical approach. From a section that highlights the achievements of women in poetry to an exploration of war through verse, poetry is used to ignite discussion not only about the nature of literature, but about the complexity of the human experience. The site also features many sample poems to be used in the classroom as well as critical and pedagogical essays and articles that correspond to the poems featured, providing an easy way to begin a unit on poetry criticism. I would encourage any teacher interested in teaching poetry to take a look at this site as well as anyone who simply has a love for the genre.

OneStopEnglish

http://www.onestopenglish.com/

I believe that teachers should constantly be on the lookout for new techniques and fresh ideas for their classroom, not only for their students, but for themselves as well. Not only is this site a great resource for teaching literature, but, to my pleasant surprise, provides a section for second language learners. It provides support for teachers, lesson plans, and even a decent FAQ section. I also found value in the little things, like a grammar section, that also includes references and lesson plans for vocabulary. I also found something else I thought was great, Dictionary Skills and resources to help students learn how to properly utilize a dictionary! The reason I think this is so great is because I don’t think dictionaries are dead at all, and that we should still use them. While the Internet does bring us instant gratification, this blog is a perfect example of the exact opposite of that. It believes in the power of a dictionary! Also, this website has an active network of teachers that not only participate in a forum if they choose, but also lesson plan contests! You can share your lesson plan ideas that have a new theme every week, and I can’t help but be intrigued with this week’s theme, “We'd especially like to hear from you if you have any lesson ideas based on religious, cultural, historical or just plain silly festivals that take place where you live”. It also provides suggestions as to how to start sharing lesson plans with your own colleagues. This site looks like a great resource because it also provides links to teaching blogs and even pod casts! All these factors that I have uncovered while exploring the website are the reasons why I chose it, because it seems like a truly useful resource for future teachers.

Thinkfinity

Thinkfinity is an amazing resource for teachers looking for creative lesson plan ideas. Trying to put a creative spin on an old lesson plan can sometimes be harder than it sounds. However, while using thinkfinity teachers have access to amazing lesson plans, ideas, resources and materials that will transform any boring lesson plan. Thinkfinity serves as a search engine for lesson plans and ideas. When using the site, educators just have to type is in a key word or phrase, select their area of study and they are immediately shown dozens of creative and interactive lesson plans. However, thinkfinity does not just show you just the lesson plan, it references you to further resources and websites that can further enhance your lesson plan.

I have often used thinkfinity when having to design unit plans for my various teaching classes. It is exceptionally effective to use for unit planning due to the wealth of resources it provides for one subject. Once I found a lesson plan that I really liked, I further used the resources provided to use in other lesson plans in my unit. Thinkfinity is also a very versatile tool for teachers of all grade levels as well. Whether a teacher seeks to challenge their students or to seek a more basic lesson plan, thinkfinity is an excellent resource for finding the perfect lesson plan.

Powered by the Verizon foundation, teachers have access to lesson plans, educational resources, videos and other multimedia materials for free. This foundation has dedicated themselves to providing educators with amazing resources and avenues for teachers to explore to create interactive and unique lesson plans for their students. In my experience, thinkfinity is an excellent place to start when creating a lesson plan or to further enhance the material you may already have. I would recommend this website as an excellent tool for both new and veteran teachers to use to create their own creative and engaging lesson plans for their students.

AWaytoTeach.net

AWaytoTeach.net

This website was created by my high school British Literature teacher. It started off as a small space on the web to share our hard work and fun we have in class with each other and our families. Since then, it has exploded to include so many resources! My teacher still updates it with pictures from the activities he does in class, but he is not the only contributor to the site. He has started a forum, and teachers from all over the country provide advice and effective lesson plans that they have used. Anyone can sign up for the forum and become a vibrant part of this community.

There are full lesson plans, project ideas, and tips for Shakespeare, American Literature, British Literature, World Literature, AP Literature, Classical Literature, Literary Criticism, Journalism, writing lessons, movie lessons, and more. It is an ever-growing, ever-changing, adapting database of resources. The really nice thing about it is that it incorporates technology into many lesson plans and projects – very relevant tools to make the content come alive for students. Get real feedback from real teachers on the forum, and with your participation, your access to more resources on the site opens up.

Librivox.org

Freshman year, when I was taking a British novels course, I often found that I had little time to read but that I spent a lot of time walking/biking around campus. If only I could somehow read the novels while I was in transit without becoming a hazard to those around me. That's when I found www.librivox.org , an online database of audio recordings for tons of novels/literature in the public domain. I thought it was an incredible find: downloadable audio versions of all the novels I was reading in class and because they were in the public domain, they were completely free (and still are!).

All you have to do is type in the name of your text and a list of matches will pop up. For the most part, texts are divided into chapters or sections which you can download individually. Then, you can listen on your computer or better yet, upload them to your ipod or mp3 player and listen on the go! Suddenly it became much easier for me to keep up with the readings while still doing everything else I had to do.

Now before I go any further, I can practically hear the gasps of horror that may be coming from some of you: "You cheater, you lazy bum! I'd rather you crash into quad bound pedestrians while reading on your bike than have you stoop to such a degrading form of consuming literature! And I certainly hope you're not about to suggest we use this cheater's paradise as a teaching tool!"

Maybe your reaction wasn't that dramatic, but hear me out. I really think this could be a useful tool if one day (either by choice or by force) we are teaching a "classic" to students. Having an audio recording on hand would be great for those texts that just make more sense when they are read out loud. I'm not saying you should replace reading with listening, but if the assigned text is particularly lengthy or difficult, librivox recordings can be used to help students along the way.

Of course there are some pitfalls to librivox. Every now and then you get a volunteer with a less than pleasant reading voice, and the site only provides audio versions of books in the public domain (so it couldn't be used for any contemporary novels or literature).

I made the choice to listen to audio books so I could keep up with my coursework and I don't really see why students shouldn't be able to make the same choice. If you want to provide students with free audio of public domain literature, librivox.org is the place to go!

Google for Educators

Google is literally everywhere—from Google Docs and Gmail to various mobile applications. Being a Google fanatic, I can definitely appreciate the fact that Google has an entire section of its web site devoted to teachers! One aspect of teaching that many teachers struggle with is incorporating internet search engines into research. There are resources available on this site such as informational printable posters and full lesson plans devoted to teaching students how to use search engines and how to distinguish between sources that are credible or not credible. I was pleasantly surprised to see numerous full lesson plans available on the site. If you are looking for a great way to incorporate technology in your classroom, this site will definitely give you some great ideas. Other resources include Google Lit Trips and a discussion board. Google Lit Trips is a tool which allows you to use Google Earth in order to explore places mentioned in popular literature. Another nice feature of this site is that it categorizes all resources by age group.

Although there are not that many features to the web site now, there is an option to sign up for notifications to receive site updates. I’m sure over time many more features and tools will be added.

Google for Educators:
http://www.google.com/educators/index.html

Google Lit Trips:
http://www.googlelittrips.com/GoogleLit/Home.html

Poetry 180 (http://www.loc.gov/poetry/180/) is a site that has an interesting goal. This site is part of the Library of Congress’ website, and its goal is to provide teachers with a poem a day for the 180 days of the school year. There is a list of links to 180 different poems. These vary from short to long, serious to funny, and come from an array of different authors. Each poem has the author written right next to it, and a place to click for information about what each poem was first published in. The creator of this program emphasizes that these poems are meant to be read aloud in the classroom, as a sort of starter or attention getter for each class. This site makes it easy to find poems that are appropriate for school, and makes them easily accessible to students.

I chose this site because I feel that poetry is often hard subject to teach. This site is a great resource for teachers, and it allows teacher to incorporate poetry into the everyday lives of their students. It brings poetry down to the students level, and these poems cover topics that kids can relate to. This is a site that I hope to be able to use myself in my own classroom.

One aspect that I think is lacking from this is information about each poet. If a student really connects with a poem, I think that it would be great if they could simply click the authors name and have access to more poems by the same author. This site is limited with the information that it provides.

Reading one thing, knowing another

The news!

When it comes to browsing websites, looking for helpful techniques to improve one's teaching ability is important, but there are other things a healthy teacher should try to engage in. I think it's limiting fro a future educator to be only learning material that pertains solely to his/her instruction (inside a classroom). It is well known that every successful teacher is expected to have an arsenal of interesting and innovative tricks in his/her bag since it is only with them that one ultimately teaches. A lot of pressure arises to research and spend numerous hours trying to master every bit of advise floating on that endless Net of ours. There are plenty of sites on the web that offer a variety of suggestions and strategies to improve ones practice, so to say; they are as plentiful as the fishes in the sea. Although by now however (i hope), i bet that many of us have already acquired a formidable arsenal of tricks-at least for amateur beginning instruction- and are ready to embark on our teaching journey. But how round are we with only subject material in our knapsacks? Thats where the power of liberal media comes in! The education news website proves to be a great source of knowledge about what is going on in the "system", by that i mean the man in pretty suits with briefcases. It is very helpful to know what legislations are being passed, since you never know that the next one might just as well lower our pay or introduce another of the many idiotic acts that we teachers hate so much. Maybe if we pay attention to the current reforms, we can also participate in them. Therefore i think it is pivotal for any teacher to keep a sharp eye on what is going on around them in the education land because the decisions that are made "up there" will affect us, the ones who are "down here", and most importantly they will affect the kids who are "in here" with us. So while literary strategies and free lesson plans sites are all "good game", keep your head on you shoulders and don't forget the "real world" too.

Teacher Tube

Website: http://www.teachertube.com/

So much is being said about incorporating technology in the classroom, so I asked myself what websites are most popular to students. The answer is the fairly obvious list of facebook, myspace, youtube, etc. So I searched for a youtube for education and sure enough I stumbled upon TeacherTube.com. The website was created by teachers, for teachers, and survives because of the input from members of the teaching community. The website functions similarly to Youtube, but has a screening process ensuring all videos are appropriate to the teaching cause. Also, written documents, photographs, and audio sound bytes are available through TeacherTube.

The website can be utilized by students and teachers alike. For teachers it can provide countless different methods to teaching a given subject. I searched “The Great Gatsby” and yielded hundreds of results through different mediums. If a teacher needs a long amount of lecture time to convey a lesson, using videos can be effective in breaking up the monotony. Also, for technologically savvy teachers, these videos can serve as inspiration to create new videos, upload to them website, and use them in the classroom. If the teacher is unsure about the video or lesson, he/she can upload the video and receive feedback from other TeachTube members. Personally, I would like to use this website to create a video for the purpose of modeling. After viewing my creation, I would like to assign a project in which students make a video of their own and are able to upload it to the website (assuming I am teaching in a school in which the students have access to such technology).

Overall, I would recommend people give this site a try. It has some flaws; for instance, when I searched “The Great Gatsby” in a video only search it yielded many videos that had nothing to do with the novel. Nevertheless, most of what I saw when exploring this site was positive. It is almost always find it beneficial to engage teachers in technology.

Today in Literature

The website I chose, todayinliterature.com, provides a daily calendar of stories about literary history. In addition to the story of the day, visitors to the site can delve into the online archives and/or subscribe to a daily newsletter (delivered by email each morning) in order to read about hundreds of authors and literary works from many different time periods. Teachers could make use of this site as a research tool or as a sort of fact-of-the-day introduction to any class period.

I chose this site because I think people tend to take interest in "this day in history" types of things, and I imagine that teachers and students would come across some fascinating stories. Teachers could use information found on this site simply for conveying fun facts or even as the basis of an entire lesson, especially while studying a specific author or literary period. I think that this resource would lead students to attain a broader knowledge of literature, which could aid them as they read and write in the future.

One less attractive aspect of todayinliterature.com is that one must pay $25 per year in order to view all of the contents of the site and receive the newsletter. However, I think that the price is relatively low when you consider the amount of information that the site provides. From what I've seen, I would recommend the site for use in a classroom.

What to Expect Your First Year of Teaching

Often times, students in teacher education programs wish they would learn more about practical matters of teaching. Learning about theory is great; however, a first year teacher can often encounter a number of challenges, and practical advice would help ease these challenges. This website provides a great deal of information on what teachers can expect in their first year of teaching. One of the sections in the site’s table of contents is labeled “Challenges.” This section lists several of the challenges first year teachers usually encounter. I think it is great to be able to know what to expect the first year of teaching. There is also a section where first-year teachers offer several different tips and strategies. While teachers eventually create their own strategies, it is really great to have the option of using some of these strategies that first year of teaching. The site also provides information on how principals and administrators can help first-year teachers. Again, I think this is something of great value. In addition to offering advice from first-year teachers, the site also provides suggestions from veteran teachers. It is too often the case where first-year teachers feel that they lack a mentor or support from veteran teachers. This site does something to try and help bridge that connection between veteran and first-year teachers.

Website: http://www2.ed.gov/pubs/FirstYear/index.html

Web Community for Teachers

I started my search by just looking for sites with free lesson plans, and I stumbled upon teachers.net. It does have a bank of over four thousand lessons across the content areas for grades preschool through adult, but it has a wealth of other resources for teachers as well…

I looked through a number of the lesson plans on the site, and I would rate them as: decent. They’ve been submitted by teachers all over the United States (and some even internationally), so they don’t follow a consistent format. Not all of them are incredibly detailed, but they do provide ideas that could definitely serve as jumping off points for original lesson plans. Also you cannot search for lessons based on subject AND grade level, but rather one OR the other. It’s a little annoying to have to read through a long list to find what you’re looking for however, I would say this collection is still worth browsing through.

A more impressive part of this website is the chatboards. You can sift through the topics based on content area, grade level, or issue, and you can ask questions or provide advice to fellow teachers. I thought this section of the sight was organized really well, and I was surprised to see how active the conversations were. I read through one topic entitled “Extreme Behavior Problems;” it begged for help coping with five violent first grade students. The message was posted on Tuesday (3/2/10), and there are already six helpful answers available to the poster now (3/4/10). I thought this was pretty exciting – clearly educators are legitimately using this site to connect with and help one another.

In addition to these two resources, teachers.net also has a search engine for open education positions, Teacher.net Gazette (full of interesting articles and columns), project ideas, and fundraising opportunities. The website itself isn’t flashy or very professional looking, but I think that it offers some extremely valuable tools – most of which being the active teacher community.

The Purdue Owl

The webpage I would like to recommend to English teachers and all teachers in general is the Purdue OWL: http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/ The mission of this website is to assist people in developing their writing, no matter what skill level they are at. This tool is free for anyone to use and it is very thorough and concise. The toolbar on the left side of the webpage displays many of the types of service the website offers, for example,: “General Writing, Research and Citation, Teacher and Tutor Resources, Subject Specific Writing, Job Search Writing, and English as a Second Language”. I also frequently use this webpage for information on citations for different kinds of materials. Clearly, this website has a lot of offer. Because of this, I recommend this to both teachers AND students. Teachers can use this webpage to refresh themselves on some writing rules, and more importantly, by clicking on the teacher resource tab, they can even plan lessons and find new media to use in their classrooms. There is a great new toolbar that pops up with all sorts of resources for the teachers to pull from to format creative lessons that teach writing. There are multiple “How To” pod casts that teachers can also integrate into the classroom. Students can use this webpage to also brush up on rules of grammar and writing. As I previously mentioned, it is also a great tool for formatting citations for papers. They can also use it learn how to research and also to learn how to write for different situations and formats. This goes for students in high school as well as middle school.

I really recommend this website to anyone involved in the field of English in any way. Many of my teachers have even referred me to this website when I have had questions about writing. The University of Illinois English librarians have even referred me to the OWL.  Purdue has come up with a brilliant resource and I want to get this information out to everyone who could find it useful. 

Teaching Strategies

This website is a wonderful resource. Basically, it is just a site with numerous different types of information on it. And for each specific topic there are approximately 10-15 resources that directly relate. These include brief summaries of ideas, articles that demonstrate the different subcategories, as well as detailed descriptions of how to deal with certain scenarios.

The main page begins with multiple categories including: academic integrity and incivility in the classroom, approaches/teaching methods, evaluation of teaching, evaluation of student learning (testing, grading, feedback), instructional technology and online teaching, learning styles and theories, multiculturalism/diversity in teaching, scholarship of teaching and learning, & syllabus and course design. Furthermore, under these categories are a variety of different subcategories, and even some of the subcategories have categories under them. For instance, "evaluation of student learning" has assessment of learning, classroom assessment techniques, feedback on student writing, & testing and grading issues under it. Each of these categories then has the 10-15 very specific resources I discussed earlier.

These resources are very beneficial not only for aspiring teachers or even beginning teachers, but also for people who have been teaching for a longer period of time. While it is largely intended for college professors, and would not work for much younger ages, it would definitely be useful for high school teachers. As well, since this is a college website there are going to be updates relatively often so there won’t be any worries about the information being dated. Rather, the information will actually be quite new and innovative since new articles will be added to the subcategories and new subcategories can get updated as well.

Just about any questions or ideas you may be interested in having to do with teaching strategies are available on this website. Some pieces may need to be modified to fit a younger group, but there are definitely numerous ideas that can be taken from here and utilized within a high school or more mature middle school classroom. I would highly recommend this site to everyone, not only English teachers.

Click here to visit the site.

Essay Punch

Visit Essay Punch at http://www.essaypunch.com/

Essay Punch: An Interactive online essay writing tutorial would be a very useful website for lessons that pertain to writing; namely, essays. Essay Punch is here to cater to students who need to improve or advance in his or her writing skills. This website would be useful to students who may need any extra guidance in writing an essay and cannot claim enough of the teacher’s time. Essay Punch punches in when the teacher cannot.

I chose this website because it is a direct place where a teacher can send his or her students when they have questions that time does not allow for them to be answered personally. It is a trustworthy website that will take them through the intricate steps of writing an essay. Not to mention, Essay Punch will fill in any blanks a teacher may have forgotten during an essay writing lesson. In addition, using this website, students will “get in-depth support in guiding them through organizing their thoughts and learn to communicate their ideas clearly in writing” (www.essaypunch.com). Essay Punch covers and provides tutorials for the most difficult styles of writing such as compare and contrast essays to writing business correspondence letters.

It doesn’t stop at essays though! Essay Punch provides resources for Paragraph Punch and Book Punch which will “help your pupils write clear responses to literature” (www.essaypunch.com).

ReadWriteThink's Comic Creator

I chose NCTE's Comic Creator as a useful resource in response to my recent studies (in my Children’s Literature in the Curriculum class) on the benefits of using graphic novels in the classroom. Graphic novels are a great way to involve more reluctant readers as well as students who are very visually oriented. In today’s media-flooded society, our students are used to having stimulating images and videos accompanying language; in comparison, plain text on a page can seem boring at first. That’s where graphic novels come in. Students are still reading and comprehending and making sense of a text, but they have the added reward and challenge of interpreting images as well and making sense of the interplay between words and images. For a long time now, comics have been treated as inferior—a form of media that should be hidden in backpacks or under pillows. This taboo nature of comics can be used to further arouse student interest in reading by allowing and encouraging them to read graphic novels in class. Comics aren’t banned? You actually want us to read them?? Graphic novels can also be helpful in working with ELL’s; they allow students whose native language is one other than English to see words and dialogue in the context of images—the images support the words, and vice versa.

As an extension activity, students will enjoy working with a comic creator like this one supported by NCTE’s readwritethink.org. They can use their knowledge of comics and graphic novels, based on their studies and reading in class, to help them create their own original comic! There are several tools like this on the web, but this one is especially user-friendly. I do wish they had more images to choose from, both for characters, backgrounds, and props, but it’s a good starting point. You could even have your students use the comic creator to insert the text and bubbles they wanted, and then have them print these skeletal comic strips and add their own original artwork. I tried making one myself, and the process is very easy and very fun!