Beginning in the fall of 2012, teachers and students of Mountain Lakes (grades 8-12) will have access to the services and tools provided by Turnitin.com.  Writing across disciplines is essential to sharpening critical thinking skills, but it can be difficult to help students guard against misuse of Web resources.  Turnitin provides a means of verifying the originality of student writing, ensuring that students are employing original thinking and writing skills.  In addition, teachers can use the variety of response and assessment tools available to provide students with timely and helpful feedback. Students can also receive feedback from peers during the writing process.  Turnitin also represents a convenient way for students to archive their work and to reflect upon growth over time.  For more information about Turnitin and how this resource can help students grow as writers and thinkers, click HERE.

Exit Slips

Several teachers in the English Department have already used Prezi, a dynamic presentation tool.  Prezi is especially good for showing relationships among ideas and for providing a more interesting way of arranging information than is usually possible with PowerPoint or Keynote.  Students would enjoy creating presentations with Prezi, too.  Click HERE for a “Quickstart Guide” to Prezi that could be distributed to students who need a bit of help.  Prezi also has a “Prezi Academy” that takes the learner through the basics quickly and on to more advanced features.  Chances are, with a few minutes of tooling around, students will pick it up fairly quickly.  Prezi also provides its own tips and tricks in Prezi format (of course!).  Prezis can be saved, downloaded, and shared. Any teachers out there want to include their students in a student Prezi challenge?  Who can capture classroom content in the most coherent, cohesive, engaging, and most educational Prezi?   Students could also tell original visual stories by using their own pictures and images.  Any takers?

The Council of Writing Program Administrators has produced a “Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing” which they believe “describes the rhetorical and twenty-first-century skills as well as habits of mind and experiences that are critical for college success.”  Sometimes I want to fight against the idea that we are always preparing our students for what comes next, this idea that middle school prepares students for high school; high school prepares students for college; college prepares students for graduate school….  Aren’t we providing students with the skills, tools, and habits of mind they need to be successful today? That being said, I think the “Framework for Success” is broad enough to provide some guiding principles for writing instruction at every level to help students to be successful writers and learners right where they are.  You can read the executive summary here and the full version here.  One of the things I like about the framework is that the skills and habits of mind addressed are the primary focus and technology has its role in developing those skills and habits.  This is not a document top-heavy with technology skills and Web 2.0 applications.  Technology is a tool used carefully to  support and enhance the power and reach of  effective writing.

Students may not benefit from the PaperGrader 3000, but they would benefit from careful use of the Purdue University Online Writing Lab. This comprehensive site includes all the information students need regarding MLA formatting and style. In addition, the site is an excellent resource for all stages of the writing process. In light of the rising cost of purchasing MLA Handbooks every time a new edition arrives, the Purdue University OWL represents a sensible, sustainable resource for middle and high school students.

]]> http://blogs.mtlakes.org/english/2011/02/02/huh/feed/ 0 http://blogs.mtlakes.org/english/2011/01/17/tools-for-the-21st-century-teacher/ http://blogs.mtlakes.org/english/2011/01/17/tools-for-the-21st-century-teacher/#comments Mon, 17 Jan 2011 13:36:24 +0000 phenry http://blogs.mtlakes.org/english/?p=170

I’m not sure when exactly we’ll stop talking about the 21st century as something we have just entered (another decade maybe?), but for now I’m happy to take advantage of new tools and ideas that will help me become a better educator. Tools for the 21st-Century Teacher provides a simple introduction to some potentially powerful classroom learning tools including including Prezi, Diigo, Skype, and Wallwisher.  Also note two other publications available from this site: “A New Way to Lecture” and “Dos and Don’ts of Powerpoint” (which might be a good guide for students making presentations in class).

TED Talks is an online collection of “riveting talks by remarkable people, free to the world.”  These very short talks cover a suprising range of topics and issues, everything from eating insects to achieving world peace.  The talk I’d like to feature here, “How to learn: from mistakes”, given by a History/Social Studies Teacher from Pennsylvania, touches on how we teach students who have immediate access to all the information they could ever need if, in fact, learning is just about gathering facts and repeating them on a test.  We must face the reality that students are always a couple clicks away from answers and information.  What teachers and schools can offer, however, is experiential learning and authentic opportunities to put information to work to make a difference.  The speaker, Diana Laufenberg speaks of the kind of teaching and learning that must take place if students no longer have to come to school and sit in a classroom to find out the answers.

Many of you know about Freerice.com, a nonprofit Website managed by the United Nations World Food Programme.  For each right answer on Freerice.com’s vocabulary quiz game, 10 grains of rice are donated by the site’s advertisers to the Programme.  I just realized recently that Freerice.com has a variety of quiz subjects including foreign languages, geography, math, chemistry, art and (most exciting of all) English Grammar and Usage!  Using Freerice.com in the classroom for a few minutes every once in a while can offer a great change of pace, and the students really enjoy it.  The quizzes get progressively more difficult as the students rack up more right answers and more rice.  Did I mention that there’s a Grammar and Usage quiz?

Each year, The Edublog Awards are presented, which made me wonder what that gala presentation is like.  Do they get dressed in their finest and walk the red carpet?  Somehow I didn’t see any coverage on Access Hollywood.  Then again, I don’t watch a lot of Access Hollywood.  At any rate, according to Edublog, “the Awards is a community based incentive started in 2004 that aims to:

1. Promote and demonstrate the educational values of social media.
2. Creates a fabulous resource for educators to use for ideas on how social media is used in different contexts, with a range of different learners.
3. Introduces us to new sites that we might not have found if not for the awards process.”

This year’s winners in 23 categories can be found HERE.  If you’ve got some time (for example, that thirty minute time frame in which you are tempted to watch Access Hollywood), it’s worth a browse.  You may find some inspiring blogs to follow.