BY BILL FERRIS
Everyone needs help wrapping their heads around a book from time to time. If you teach literature, that time occurs every day. You can outsource some of the necessary explanation by sending your students to 60 Second Recap, a site that summarizes the plot, characters, and themes of a book in 60-second episodes for each.
BY BILL FERRIS
Do something subversive this week — read a book.
It’s time once again for the American Library Association’s Banned Books Week (September 26 through October 3). Every year, hundreds of books are banned or challenged by people or groups who try to restrict others’ access to certain books.
You can help raise awareness of these censorship attempts by celebrating BBW. The ALA has lots of ideas, including some creative display ideas, sending a letter to the editor, and spreading public service announcements.
Of course, it’s also a good occasion to pick up one of these oft-challenged books to see what all the fuss is about. It may provide good discussion fodder for your class, as well as prompt a debate about who should decide what books are available to whom.
BY BILL FERRIS
Web app ReadSpeeder can help you improve your reading speed. Much like Spreeder, ReadSpeeder works by letting you copy and paste text into the app. It then breaks the text down into tiny chunks displayed in rapid succession, as fast as you’re comfortable with.
Where ReadSpeeder differs is that it automatically divides passages of text into natural two-to-four-word phrases. Further, by registering for an account, you can save text for later reading. This is perfect for electronic books, and ReadSpeeder comes prepackaged with dozens of literary classics like Great Expectations and Alice in Wonderland.
If you have students who groan about slogging through heavy reading, tell them about ReadSpeeder. It may also be ideal if you’re working on your master’s degree and have a bunch of reading to catch up on. And if you’re a true glutton for punishment, you can always take a crack at James Joyce’s Ulysses, one of the books in the ReadSpeeder catalog.
BY MELISSA THIBAULT
Picture this. You just finished teaching your third lesson on prime factors, photosynthesis or fractions, and there are some students who need more visuals and more practice. Wouldn’t it be great if you had free, quality-assured courseware in math, science, health, reading and keyboarding you could use to reinforce hard-to-grasp topics?
e-Learning for Kids, a global, nonprofit foundation, provides free courses for children ages 5 – 12, and is working to build a community for parents and educators to volunteer their expertise and share innovations and insights in childhood education. (more…)
BY BILL FERRIS
This week’s MBTN features an express flight to Mars, Web 2.0 project ideas, alternatives to book reports, and online sites where you can learn a new language. Read about all of it after the jump.
BY BILL FERRIS
Keep your lit students reading this summer with The Book Seer, a handy online book-recommendation tool. The interface is simplicity itself — students enter the title and author of the last book they’ve read (or for better results, the last book they liked), and the heavily bearded, titular Book Seer suggests books by similar writers or pertaining to similar subjects. The recommendations come via Amazon and LibraryThing. Not that it matters, but as a fun bonus, the site’s favicon is a stylish handlebar mustache.
BY BILL FERRIS
For this month’s random roundup, we’ve selected the Library of Congress, our nation’s storehouse of pretty much everything worth knowing. As you’d expect, a lot of great resources for teachers have been derived from the Library. See your tax dollars at work by reading the articles linked after the jump.
BY BILL FERRIS
This week’s MBTN features the art of persuasion, common literary references, and $125,000-a-year teachers. More after the jump.
Here at Instructify, we’ve done our best to provide you with a reading experience that is easy on the eyes. Unfortunately, not all sites share our dedication to keeping you headache-free. If you spend any measurable amount of time on ad-ridden, font-challenged, or kaleidoscope-colored sites, you may be interested in Readability — a browser bookmarklet that reformats the web. (The creators at the arc90 lab define this newfangled term as “a bookmark on steroids.”)
It’s the closeout sale! Only a few days left! Rock-bottom prices! Okay, just kidding. Poetry will still be available May 1, all year even. It’s timeless and often available for free. But hey, who doesn’t work better on a deadline? So let’s just pretend, as of May 1, poems are off the market and you need a quick, quality poetry resource to share with your students NOW. Enter: Poems Out Loud. This site is a new project by ex-laureate Robert Pinsky. I guess the good ones never quit — it’s been over a decade since Pinsky started work on the Favorite Poem Project, and he continues the mission admirably.
At poemsoutloud.net you will find, no surprise here, audio recordings of well-regarded contemporary poets reading their own and others’ work. Pinsky has always posited that love for a poem has to come before analysis, and the commentary and interviews on the site’s blog seem to be driven by that theory — focusing on the emotions surrounding reading (or writing) certain poems. I’m sure Pinsky would be tickled to see blog comments coming from students with their own reactions. But remember…this offer ends soon! -MARIELLE PRINCE
PaperBackSwap lets you exchange any book you own for one of the millions of books other users are offering. Swapping is simple. Take any book (paperback, hardback, or audio) you’re ready to part with and post it to your virtual library. Any time another user requests a book from your library, simply send it using labels printable from the website and pay only postage (about $2.40 via media mail).
Once the book is received, you earn a credit. Use your credits to request new books and receive them in the mail about two weeks later, at NO CHARGE TO YOU! It’s a fun and cheap way to replace old books you’ve read with new ones. -JASON DON FORSYTHE
Maybe I’m weird, but I think words are a lot of fun. Whether it’s the fun of unearthing an arcane term, or the satisfaction I get from cleaning clunky words out of a sentence, I enjoy the fun possibilities the written word provides. This also explains why I’m so boring.
I’m not alone, though — some guy who calls himself Forthright apparently thinks the way I do. His website The Phrontistery (meaning a place devoted to studying or thinking) has lots of great antique words for your lexiconic pleasure. Like at Save the Words, The Phrontistery features lots of words that have fallen out of common usage. However, this site has several other nifty features, too. For example, read some of the pronunciation polls. Take the word “basil” — do you say it so it rhymes with “hazel,” or do you pronounce it like the Brits (rhymes with “dazzle”)? Your spice rack is rife with pronunciation controversy, as many folks can’t seem to agree how to say “cumin” or “oregano,” either. It would make good fodder for any linguistics discussion.
You can also find a section devoted to lipograms — words, sentences, or paragraphs that don’t include a certain letter. Sure, you could take the easy way out and write a sentence without an “x.” But it takes a real pro (or, at least, someone with some spare time) to write a lipogram that shuns the letter “e.” See if any of your students can handle that one.
My favorite section is The Phrontistery’s compendium of two- and three-letter Scrabble words. I have terrible luck in Scrabble in that I always end up with five or six vowels at once. This list will help get out of those vowel-laden jams, and also help you if you need a word, any word, just to get that triple word score. Hey, anything that gets your students to play with words is a good thing. -BILL FERRIS
Old words make a comeback at Save the Words
What if the OED cared about your feelings?
Photo credit: jovike on Flickr.
Reading is an essential skill that every kid should get excited about. Unfortunately, reading is often seen as a chore and busy work by students everywhere. If only we could find a way to harness tools on the web to get kids excited about reading. If only. BookWink is ahead of the curve, fortunately. BookWink is a site that uses podcasts and videos to present reading materials for students in 3rd to 8th grade. Search for books based on subject, grade level, title or author, where you can read reviews of hundreds of books.
You can subscribe to the video or audio podcasts, and for those of you who are new to podcasting, there is a handy and explanatory guide to setting up your iTunes so you can listen to and view all the info you can hope for. If you just want to check out some of the videos without subscribing, you can also look through the archives of previous subjects. The videos feel like a modern day Reading Rainbow, as books are reviewed and explained in groups of various themes such as popularity, Sea Adventures, and Museum Mysteries. Not only does BookWink harness the availability of internet video and audio applications, it’s a great way for students and teachers alike to discover new books that might not fall into the required summer reading lists. -JEREMY S. GRIFFIN
Book choices for early adolescents: the good, the bad, and the ugly
First of all, thank you for your faithful readership. Nothing pleases me more than knowing that you continue to devour every word that I write. I think its time that you and I took things to the next level. Aw, yeah. Time for a change of pace! I’m going to write faster and insert more strange links for no discernible purpose. Your job is to just keep reading.
But wait, you’re worried that you won’t be able to match my pace and keep up. That’s understandable. I can prattle on about any subject and type for miles, while you only have two eyes and a life outside of reading blogs. Spreeder is just the solution.
Spreeder helps you to train your eyes and brain for speed reading. Essentially, you copy and paste text to the site and it flashes each word in that body of text one-at-a-time for you to read. You can slow things down and speed things up by changing the settings, allowing you to make incremental gains. After you’ve got a pretty good clip going with the words per minute, you can change the chunk size. Now, instead of individual words, you can view small blocks of text all at once.
Even better is that there is a bookmarklet available for you to place in your browser’s toolbar. So the next time you want to read something, simply highlight that text on the page and click the Spreed! bookmarklet. A new page will open up with that text ready to go.
This flashcard-type method helps you eliminate subvocalization, which is when you read words with your internal speech. Pronouns and complex ideas can be stumbling blocks, however. Spreeder’s visualized delivery somewhat glances over punctuation and structure — road signs intentionally put there by the text’s author to clarify meaning, so use caution when showing Spreeder to your students. Spreeder is perfect for reading those blogs about celebs without make-up, not so much on those Bertrand Russell fan-fiction blogs. -NICK YINGLING
Big surprise: boys and girls are different. They have different tastes in pretty much everything — food, games, even books. As such, the boy in your class who says he doesn’t like reading may simply have not found the right book yet. Boys Read (not to be confused with Guys Read) aims to transform boys into lifelong readers by putting them in touch with books that appeal to them, and I don’t just mean war and sports. Courage and honor are common themes in the Boys Read reading list, which features authors like Jack London, Orson Scott Card, Shel Silverstein, Dr. Seuss, J.K. Rowling, and lots more. Further, the site recommends books about writing, in case any boys in your class would like to write a few good books themselves.
The past few years have seen a sort of mini-celebration of the literary young male with the advent of sites like Boys Read and Guys Read, as well as books such as The Dangerous Book for Boys. Boys Read contends that fostering childhood literacy in boys will lead to richer lives, as well as fewer dropouts and less violent behavior. I don’t have any statistics to back that up, but it sounds reasonable enough, and I can’t imagine anyone thinking it’s a bad idea for boys to pick up a book instead of Wii controller once in a while. -BILL FERRIS
Find Good Books for Boys with Guys Read
The New Children’s Laureate Stinks Like Cheese, and I Mean That as a Compliment
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