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!