English IV
Online Resources and Tools
Interactive timeline that explores the evolution of English language and literature from the 11th century to present day.
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.
Wordsmyth, Online Dictionary
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.
Here is where you will find practically any ad you have seen on TV. You can vote on it, comment on it, discuss the underlying innuendoes, and hopefully even get your comments read by some of the leading advertising agencies in the world. Caution, preview ads and comments before showing in class.
Concentrating on five main subject areas (Radio, Television, Transportation, Beauty and Hygiene, and World War II), this site presents images and database information for over 7,000 advertisements printed in U.S. and Canadian newspapers and magazines between 1911 and 1955.
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.
Reading
The Periodic Table of StoryTelling
Story Elements Questioning Cards
Great for independent work after reading a book
Analogies Jeopardy from Quia
Plays by Read Print
Free Drama Audio and Video from Learn out Loud
Drama - The Mercury Theatre on the Air, Audio Radio Shows"The finest radio drama of the 1930's was The Mercury Theatre on the Air, a show featuring the acclaimed New York drama company founded by Orson Welles and John Houseman. In its brief run, it featured an impressive array of talents, including Agnes Moorehead, Bernard Herrmann, and George Coulouris. The show is famous for its notorious War of the Worlds broadcast, but the other shows in the series are relatively unknown. This site has many of the surviving shows, and will eventually have all of them."
Newsela, Online Reading
Newslea takes news articles from around the world and rewrites them at up to five different lexile levels and in Spanish.
Zinc Learning Labs, Online Reading
Elevate learning with literacy.
Collection of Compare and Contrast Graphic Organizers from Education Oasis
Go For the Gold, Greek Roots Game
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.
Writing
Persuasion Map from Read, Write, Think
Collection of Compare and Contrast Graphic Organizers from Education Oasis
Great quick video to teach students how to choose the best search terms
How to Google Like a Pro, YouTube Video
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.
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.
Copyright 101 Lesson Plans and Videos from CoolCatTeacher
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.
Students make and play interactive stories with no programming required.