English 1
VocabGrabber is a free service offered by the folks at Visual Thesaurus (a fee-based service). VocabGrabber makes it easy to generate vocabulary lists from any text that you can digitally copy. To use Vocab Grabber simply paste any chunk of text, up to 200,000 characters, into the Vocab Grabber. The VocabGrabber then sorts, and places in a word cloud, the most frequently used words in that text. Words are also sorted into academic categories like Social Studies, Math, Science, and Literature. Click on any of the words in the word cloud to see the definition displayed on the right side of the screen.
Helps you learn new words, play games that improve your vocabulary and explore language.
Visuwords, Online Graphical Dictionary
Look up words to find their meanings and associations with other words and concepts. Produce diagrams reminiscent of a neural net. Learn how words associate. Enter words into the search box to look them up or double-click a node to expand the tree. Click and drag the background to pan around and use the mouse wheel to zoom. Hover over nodes to see the definition and click and drag individual nodes to move them around to help clarify connections. It's a dictionary! It's a thesaurus! Great for writers, journalists, students, teachers, and artists. The online dictionary is available wherever there’s an internet connection. No membership required.
Interactive timeline that explores the evolution of English language and literature from the 11th century to present day.
National libraries and the U.N. education agency put some of humanity's earliest written works online. The antiquities range from ancient Chinese oracle bones that might be more than 3,000 years old to the first extant European map of the New World, dating back nearly 450 years. A web site in seven languages -- English, Arabic, Chinese, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Russian -- leads readers through a trove of rare finds from more than a dozen countries. The site also has early photographs, films, and audio tracks.
Google Arts & Culture, Life Tags
LIFE Tags organizes over 4 million images from the LIFE magazine archives into an interactive encyclopedia using machine learning. Published weekly between 1936 and 1972 and monthly from 1978 to 2000, LIFE magazine was the most popular photojournalism magazine in the United States.
How to Google Like a Pro, YouTube Video
Reading
Newsela, Online Reading
Newslea takes news articles from around the world and rewrites them at up to five different lexile levels and in Spanish.
Word Booster, Chrome Extension
Gives you a list of words you are likely to look up in the dictionary as far as the given text is concerned, guesses a good dictionary definition for the words along with example sentences. And finally, it also makes a quiz for the words using both the definitions and example sentences, plus answer key.
Zinc Learning Labs, Online Reading
Elevate learning with literacy.
Explore the Power of Language from Poetry Everywhere
Provides 10 videos, as well as essays and lessons, to help students explore the power of language and build reading and writing skills. The videos feature seminal voices of poetry, past and present, from Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson to Seamus Heaney, Marie Howe, and Yusef Komunyakaa.
Poetry 180 - Welcome to Poetry 180. A Poem a day for American High School students. Poetry can and should be an important part of our daily lives. Poems can inspire and make us think about what it means to be a member of the human race. By just spending a few minutes reading a poem each day, new worlds can be revealed.
Podcasts of novels, poetry, and much more. This site has things for sale and free. Just look for the free links.
Listen to people from across America reading their favorite poems.
Poetry from Read Print
Smithsonian Folkways, Music in Poetry
Students are introduced to the rhythms of poetry. The focus in on two poetic forms that originated as forms of song: the ballad stanza, found throughout British and American literature, and the blues stanzas of Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes. The exercises take poetry off the page and put it into terms of movement, physical space and, finally, music. At a special Web page, students can listen to musical ballads and blues from the catalog of Smithsonian Folkways Recordings. The ballads include early recordings of Bob Dylan and Suzanne Vega. The blues is heard in regional styles and as an element of early jazz.
PicLits.com is a creative writing site that matches beautiful images with carefully selected keywords in order to inspire you. The object is to put the right words in the right place and the right order to capture the essence, story, and meaning of the picture
Interesting site that will find rhyming words for students. Also will find words in Shakespeare's works, quizzes, Mother Goose, and famous documents.
Analogies Jeopardy from Quia
Very challenging analogies using 4 words.
Daily Root Puzzle from MyVocabulary.com
Word Roots from MyVocabulary.com
This site is a little hard to navigate. Scroll down through the exercises and click on the level. Click on the type of puzzle. Scroll down on the next page that opens. Some are interactive, some are printable. The context stories have audio.
Matching Interactive Games
Great Speeches from The History Place
American Rhetoric, Online Speech Bank
Wing Clips, Movie clips that illustrate and inspire
Writing
This website has a daily paragraph for editing. You may need to set your screen carefully as the answer is directly below.
Students make and play interactive stories with no programming required.
Great quick video to teach students how to choose the best search terms
Cite This For Me is a tool designed to help students correctly format reference lists or citation pages. To create a reference list using Cite This For Me students simply need to fill in the required information in each box, sort them alphabetically, and download the formatted reference page. Cite This For Me provides formatting not only printed materials and websites, but also for things like podcasts, online videos, and even email correspondence.
Copyright 101 Lesson Plans and Videos from CoolCatTeacher
refDot is a Google Chrome extension that could be very helpful for keeping track of and formatting references for use in bibliographies. Whenever you're viewing a website, an online book, an online journal, or a news article just click the refDot icon in your browser to open a window into which you enter all of information you need for a bibliography. For example if you were viewing a blog post on Free Technology for Teachers that you wanted to reference in a bibliography, click on refDot and the pop-up box will prompt you to enter the date of access, url, title, and year.
How to Create a Works Cited Using Google Docs
Basic Steps to Creating a Research Paper
This site does not have interactive activities, but has great tips for parents and students on research and creating a project.