Instructify

BY KEVIN HODGSON

Jennifer Wagner’s Projects by Jen is a valuable resource for preschool through 6th grade teachers to engage in inquiry projects with other classrooms.  These projects are conducted through the use of high- and low-tech tools for sharing information among classrooms and teachers.

Wagner notes on her site that she has hosted about 60 different collaborative projects over the years and the topics run from counting Oreo cookies (a math project) to a community service venture. Her projects often cross over into several disciplines, but most involve sharing of data and then analysis of that data. A few years ago, my classroom was part of a greeting-card project, in which we sent out greeting cards to a handful of other classrooms and then received cards in return. We then tracked the cards we received on a classroom map.

Wagner also has a newsletter that features collaborative ideas (this costs a small fee), highlights classroom websites and teachers, and more. There is no cost for participation in Wagner’s various collaborative projects, so it provides a nice, easy way to expand learning beyond classroom walls. She also has a very neat ongoing venture called Guess the Wordle, which is a daily brain game using a word cloud and a question. Guess the Wordle is an interesting morning activity to get the day started. Some days, the answer might be a book. Other days, it might be a math problem. Or, as in the case of this one, it is the ingredients of a recipe — but for what?

Projects by Jen

Guess The Wordle

BY KEVIN HODGSON

I like to encourage writing every single day in my classroom, but sometimes, I struggle to find a good writing prompt that will engage the creative and critical thinking skills of my students. The CanTeach writing prompt website is an online list of possible writing prompts. Though they’re simple, I like that the prompts are open-ended and built around inquiry . And the simplicity of the site means that I don’t have to take time to learn how to find what I need. I can just scroll down, grab a prompt, and we’re ready to get writing. Once the writing is done, these prompts really open up the classroom for deep discussions, too.

Here are a few prompts from the site that I tucked away for a rainy day:

• If you could only take three people with you on a trip around the world, who would you take and why?
• What do you think makes a good friend?
• What four things are most important in your life?
• How would you describe your house to someone who has never visited there before?
• Who or what has had a strong influence in your life?
• What is your most indispensable possession and why?

CanTeach Writing Prompts

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BY KEVIN HODGSON

With the aim of “collecting a cross-section of everyday writing,” the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) is hosting the second annual National Day on Writing on October 20. Last year, thousands of pieces of writing were submitted to NCTE’s online archives, where anyone can set up a gallery for submissions along themes or classroom writing.

NCTE explains,

“through a National Gallery of Writing, we will better understand what matters to writers today — and when writing really counts. Understanding who writes, when, how, to whom, and for what purposes will lead to production of improved resources for writers, better strategies to nurture and celebrate writers, and improved policy to support writing.”

It’s fairly simple to set up and host a gallery at the main site. If you intend to use student writing, you will need to use the release form, and you should consider using the gallery “curator” option to submit multiple pieces of writing under one banner. Last year, some schools hosted writing marathons for students and staff. Others had students write letters to editors for newspapers, and still others posted poetry and short stories. At my school last year, I created a huge comic that asked students what they like to write, and the entire student population (500-plus) made the comic into a sort of graffiti wall of ideas.

National Gallery of Writing

National Day on Writing Website

National Day on Writing on Facebook

National Day on Writing on Twitter

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BY KEVIN HODGSON

What? You don’t have time to read an entire book? You’re too busy with your computer or your cell phone or your mobile device? DailyLit adds a little bit of literature to your day by sending you small, readable sections of ebooks. The site promises that the reading installments will take about five minutes, and the reader sets the time and method of delivery of the text (either email or RSS feed). Instead of you going to the books, the books are coming to you.

DailyLit has more than 1,000 classic books that mostly seem to be free ebooks you can find in other places, too. You won’t find The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, for example, but you will find a collection of humor stories from the 1920s, a book about architecture from Frank Lloyd Wright, and children’s stories ranging from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories. There are multiple ways to search the site, such as by category, by name, and even by word cloud.

In the classroom

If you have an interactive whiteboard, you could post the small daily excerpts of stories first thing in the morning and let students follow the tale day by day. Given the size of the text, that could last an entire year. If you do read-aloud activities with your students, the daily sections might make for a manageable reading to start off class. Or, if you have high school students, you could encourage them to sign up at the site to receive their own stories on their mobile devices, and get them reading in the environment they feel most comfortable with.

DailyLit

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BY KEVIN HODGSON

There’s a saying that if you want to understand the times, read the advertisements. What companies are selling, and how they are selling it, is an indication of the beliefs, values, and prejudices of a society. Certainly, this philosophy often forms the heart of many media studies classes. Adflip is a site with an abundant number of advertisements from various decades, ranging from back to the 1940s all the way up to the present.

Just a glance at the advertisment posters from the 1940s demonstrates a country still pulling out from the Great Depression, with smiling faces selling products designed to let you forget about your troubles. There are also plenty of car advertisements, and car parts, and it’s interesting to note how the ads change and stay same over time. The site has a free component, but it has its limitations, and the paid component lets you go deeper into the Adflip archives.

In the classroom

Adflip provides one avenue for examining the rhetoric of ads from across the last 50 to 60 years in the United States. This might be done by choosing a general topic, such as automobiles, and picking apart the use of image, word choices, and other advertising strategies that also connect to the zeitgeist of the times. In addition, one thing that popped out at me is how some ads are clearly targeted for men, while others, for women, and I imagine that is still very true today (such as in Car and Driver magazine as opposed to Glamour magazine, for example). Students who examine these rhetorical stances more closely may become better attuned to the times when their own demographic and gender are being targeted by companies.

Adflip

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BY KEVIN HODGSON

It’s probably fair to say that “grammar” and “comics” are not often words spoken together in a typical classroom. Comics still get a pretty bum rap these days, even though more and more educators are seeing the value in alternative literacies such as graphic novels and comics. To understand the wealth of thinking that goes into a comic (both as a writer and as a reader), Blambot has created a chart of “Comics Grammar.”

While the site frames the discussion around fonts and design,  there is plenty to learn from here about how to read comics. You learn about balloon tails, double dashes, emanating dialogue, and more. What emerges is the use of the visual in connection with the written word, and the combination of these forms almost a literacy of its own when it comes to comics and graphic novels.

In the Classroom

Do you let your students make comics? How about read comics? This site could be a valuable resource around reading skills that are not traditionally taught, and I bet that your students would have fun with it, too. Keep an eye out for the annual Free Comic Day each May, and head down to the local comic book shop to grab free comics that you can use in the classroom. Analyzing comics as text and visual information can be a way to engage non-traditional readers and learners in a new way, and making literacy visible is always a rewarding experience.

Comic Book Grammar and Tradition via Blambot Comic Fonts and Lettering

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BY KEVIN HODGSON

Juxio bills itself as a site to “create new meaning.” That’s a bit much, but Juxio is an interesting platform for gathering images and writing together in a nicely designed format, which can then be shared easily with other websites or networks.

The finished product looks like a web 2.0 postcard, with images and text laid out in a style that you choose. You can also bundle multiple Juxios together to create a slideshow. I liked that there was an entire page devoted to hints around creating new work, as well as things to consider when it comes to design.

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BY CHRISTOPHER PANNA

Often when we ask students to read, we want them to pick out key words or organize the text into categories. VocabGrabber is a powerful tool that helps do just that: organize, analyze, and understand a reading.

Simply paste the text and click the button marked (you guessed it) “Grab Vocabulary!” This generates a word cloud of the most frequently used terms. Clicking a word shows its definition and an example of how it’s used in the passage.

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BY KEVIN HODGSON

My StoryMaker is the perfect tool for younger students just learning about plot design and character development for short stories. Hosted by the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, My StoryMaker walks students through the process of story creation using a variety of online tools.

My StoryMaker requires no login other than a first name. Kids choose a main character from a limited menu of possibilities, pick what they want that character to be doing (on a rescue mission? Finding love?) and then designate which secondary character is also involved in the story. These steps are laid out in a very basic, easy-to-use method. The story editor then launches and, in a nice touch, there is an audio tutorial matching up with the text tutorial on the next steps.

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BY KEVIN HODGSON

The origins of words and phrases from the English Language gets a nice twist with Etymologic, a fun online quiz that can be difficult to master. The site consists of a series of questions with two to four possible answers, most of which seems plausible. You have to show an uncanny knowledge of English (or be incredibly lucky with your educated guesses) to get all the questions correct.

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BY REBECCAH HAINES

At Interactives at Learner.org, you will find interactive activities in the content areas of math, science, language arts, history, and the arts. Within each activity there is a combination of text, animations, pictures, and interactive material. I used this one on the rock cycle with my students last year.

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BY JACKIE REGALES

I’m no fiction writer, but if I had created characters as legendary as Long John Silver or Mr. Hyde, I’d be pretty satisfied with myself. Of course, I would also be Robert Louis Stevenson, the namesake of robert-louis-stevenson.org, who wrote Treasure Island and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde as well as Kidnapped and A Child’s Garden of Verses, making me a prolific (and dead) Scotch poet, essayist, novelist, and composer of pieces for the flageolet. Now that you have learned what a flageolet is, consider yourself smarter than you were yesterday.

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BY KEVIN HODGSON

I often have to remind myself not to put all of my digital eggs in one basket. I think about this just about every time I open up Gmail, then check Google Reader before moving over to my Google Docs to write something. That’s a lot of Google in my life. If Google falls apart, so do I. So I am often on the lookout for sites that could supplement my Google-rich writing environment, either for my personal use or for school use. Crocodoc is an alternative to Google Docs that seems to have a lot of the same features, particularly around collaboration and storing of documents online that can be easily accessible from just about any computer.

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BY KEVIN HODGSON

The “I Write Like” website is an interesting diversion that could lead to some interesting conversations around text analysis. And it is sort of fun to see which famous writer will pop up when your own piece of writing is put into its analysis engine.

“I Write Like” takes your text and looks for similarities to professional writers. When it has finished its comparison, the site gives you a “badge” that you can embed in other websites. When I inserted some text for an article I was writing around bullying and technology for a local newspaper, the site informed me that I was writing like Cory Doctorow. I haven’t ready quite enough of Cory Doctorow to know if this parallel writing style is true, but I did follow the link to Doctorow’s book site and began perusing some of his work.

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BY JACKIE REGALES

If your students are anything like mine, then they will always salivate (figuratively, I hope) at the chance to make something, whether on poster board or a program like Photostory. In today’s classrooms, though, whipping out scissors and glue sticks can seem a little old-fashioned. Enter Smilebox, which offers slide-show and scrapbook-creation options, as well as the ability to make invitations, collages and greeting cards. Fair warning: on some of these pages, music will begin playing automatically, and it’s exactly the kind of digitized music you think it is.

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