English/ Language Arts

From Eric Curts. Click HERE for the blog post.

Write Right with Google Tools

Writing is a skill that crosses all subject areas and all grade levels. No matter what you teach, it is critical for your students to be able to express their ideas clearly when writing.

There are a multitude of ways for students to improve their writing, including many technology tools that come from Google or that work with G Suite. With these technology tools, the writing process can be improved at all stages from planning to writing to self editing to peer editing to assessment to revising to publishing.

Over the years I have done many blog posts on tech tools for the various stages of the writing process. To make it more convenient, I have pulled together all of those different resources into this one post. See below for an overview of Google tools that can be used to help students and teachers through the writing process.

For each portion of the writing process I have listed some key resources and ideas, but have also linked to my earlier blog posts for each. Be sure to click the links for the related blog posts in each section to get all of the directions, examples, and resources for each.

Click HERE to access Actively Learn

Click HERE to access the teacher overview video that will explain Actively Learn

Texts (and videos!) for ELA, Science, and Social Studies with scaffolds and higher-order questions

Find what you teach and great texts & videos to pair with it. Or add anything you like. Take whole class, small group, jigsaw, close reads, and more to the next level.

Text-to-Speech

Dictionary

Translation

Chunking

Scaffolding

Annotation

Discussion

Formative Assessment

Metacognition

Media

From Actively Learn's Blog:

Today’s English Language Arts teachers are tasked with creating a curriculum that not only meets Common Core and state standards but also engages students in class and prepares them for higher education and careers. They’re told that a curriculum should improve students’ foundational skills, teach close reading of complex texts, and include a volume of reading sufficient for vocabulary and knowledge building. All too often, though, teachers have little training or support in designing a high-quality curriculum, and many ask their students questions that don’t require close reading or citing examples from the text as evidence. Research shows that more than half of teachers spend five or more hours searching the internet, often outside of school hours, to plan lessons for their curriculum. Mandates, such as state standards, high-stakes tests, and prescribed curricula, may lead teachers to feel that they are not serving students in a satisfactory and effective way (Costigan, 2017).

A well-structured curriculum, however, can satisfy all these learning goals: engagement, skill building, knowledge building, deeper learning, and preparation for the kinds of rigorous work expected in higher education, careers, and life. Here are clear guidelines on how to build the best ELA curriculum for your students.‍

1. Create a unit that relates to students’ lives and explores complicated topics in a safe space. ‍

A good place to start is to explore a topic that is central to your students’ identities. A unit on immigrants who are finding their place in their new home, for example, can speak to not only immigrants in your classroom, but also to students whose family members are immigrants. Essential questions can create even more bridges into the content: by asking broad questions about the relationships between protagonists in these stories, students can connect the literature to their own family dynamics and friendships.

In addition, don’t be afraid to take risks with your topics. Exploring darker or more complex themes can resonate with your students in a deeply personal way. Students are drawn to the dark topics explored in contemporary young adult literature such as The Hate U Give, I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter, Walk Two Moons, and The Fault in Our Stars. Connecting with a character’s struggles can help students learn about themselves, other people, and the larger world, and discussing a character’s survival after a traumatic experience can help them discover and articulate how to best move forward in their own lives. Complex themes like conflict, love, and grief are the stuff that literature, and life, are made of. By treating these topics with sensitivity, you can create a safe space for students to better understand their own reactions, reflect on their own difficult experiences, and learn how to talk about sensitive topics with compassion and respect. ‍

2. Assemble a collection of related texts featuring a variety of genres, authors, and perspectives.‍

Curricular units provide a great opportunity to teach students how to connect diverse texts and perspectives. Not only is this a big push from the Common Core, but it’s also good practice to develop the sort of analytical, comparative thinking they will need to evaluate sources and understand diverse perspectives in a hyperconnected world. A thoughtful curricular unit on teen bullying, for example, can feature excerpts from The Outsiders and Black Boy, a short story by Stephen Crane, poems by Maya Angelou and D.H. Lawrence, a recent article analyzing research on the physiological and emotional effects of cyberbullying, and a video describing firsthand experiences of being bullied. Choosing an engaging, diverse collection of texts from authors of different backgrounds, and featuring a variety of protagonists, will draw students into the stories and resonate with them throughout the course. What’s more, asking students to integrate nonfiction texts in their reading, thinking, and writing about works of fiction encourages them to make sophisticated comparisons of how genres differ and builds background knowledge that leads to deeper understanding of the literary texts. ‍

3. Guide students’ learning with a series of essential questions.‍

You can engage students from the beginning to the end of a unit with essential questions that are broad and universal, bring structure, and connect a variety of texts. In our unit on slavery, for example, we feature 21 fiction and nonfiction texts that we connect with a series of four guiding questions. We start our unit by asking one topical essential question: What were the relationships between enslavers and the enslaved like? This question—which is open-ended and engaging, invites higher-order thinking, and requires justification and explanation—guides the thinking and discussion for two short stories and a firsthand account by Frederick Douglass.

The unit’s next three sections feature a series of texts guided by more essential questions: Why is it important to read firsthand accounts of slavery? What did escaping slavery look like? What did culture and innovation look like to enslaved people? By answering these questions as they explore a series of texts, students build on their knowledge throughout the unit by reading, thinking, and writing about complex ideas and develop a deepening understanding of the effects of slavery on individuals and the larger world.‍

Use essential questions to engage your students, bring structure to your ELA curriculum unit, and connect a series of texts.

4. Choose rigorous content and use instruction that prompts students to look more deeply into the text.‍

Including a combination of complex literary texts, articles, and primary sources in your unit can better prepare students for the demands of higher education, careers, and life. Students will be expected to grapple with rigorous texts on their standardized tests, in their college courses, and in their future workplaces. Exposing them to complex syntax and structure, challenging vocabulary, and unfamiliar content will help them develop the reading and analytical skills they will need to grapple with legal documents, tax forms, and many other complex texts they will encounter as adults. Remember that challenging students with “frustration-level texts” (Morgan, Wilcox, and Eldredge, 2010) has been shown to increase reading gains, especially in poor readers. Texts that have more subtlety and depth inspire deeper thinking, analysis, and conversations—exactly the kind of activities students need to succeed in higher education, careers, and life.

For each unit, it’s important to ask students to dig deeply into their analysis. Helping them learn to carefully read, and reread, a poem or challenging text before answering your questions can lead them to access deeper layers of meaning. You can also ask them to compare and contrast two complex texts, analyze a chart that illustrates the unit’s theme, or describe how a related video illuminates or complicates an issue. To help struggling readers deeply understand complex text and participate more fully in group discussions, you can scaffold by providing definitions of key words and establishing context with brief background information. ‍

5. Ask text-dependent questions. ‍

The Common Core and state standards for ELA stress the importance of teaching students how to use evidence to support their thinking. In assigning writing assignments and research projects based on complex texts, ask questions that do more than require students to articulate their opinions and draw from their own personal experiences. Instead, ask them to answer a question using evidence from the assigned texts to make their points.

If you’re not sure whether your question is text-dependent, use this rule of thumb: if you can answer without having read the text, it’s not text-dependent. And if students answer the question without citing evidence to support their claims, challenge them to go back into the text to find examples. For example, let’s say that you’re reading “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.” If you ask students a generic question about how individuals experience reality differently, you’ll probably get a wide range of tangents and musings. But if you ask them a text-dependent question like, “How does Walter’s view of reality impact his actions and relationships?” you can expect students to refer back to the text and be challenged to find evidence to support their answers. Another approach is to give them a sentence starter, such as “When Walter Mitty ____, it shows ___because _____.” Continually asking them to write evidence-based answers in short-answer questions will pay off when they’re asked to create longer essays and research projects that require the use of evidence to support multiple claims. Asking text-dependent questions throughout your unit can also help your students focus as they read, build knowledge, and deepen their thinking on topics that they hear about or experience every day, such as the natural world, technology, and violence.

At the end of the unit, your students will walk away with new information that is closely connected to their lives and be more skilled in thinking and writing about complex ideas, analyzing rigorous content, making meaningful connections between a variety of texts, using evidence to support their claims, and discussing sensitive topics. Your thoughtfully constructed units will help your students become better consumers of information, make better judgments, and be stronger readers and thinkers as they take on the challenges of the future.

Related:

Quick Guide to Topical Essential Questions

Latest Research Recommends Changes to ELA Instruction

5 Ways to Make Rigorous Content Motivating to Students

Looking for ways to encourage reading without having the students do book reports or book logs? Click HERE for 10 great new ideas!

From Richard Byrne - Free Technology for Teachers.

For many people the hardest part of starting a writing assignment is thinking of things to write about. Here are some tools for creating story starters and favorite sites for finding story starters:

Click HERE for the entire article.

The most dangerous writing prompt generator. Click HERE

Writing Sparks. Click HERE

Flippity. Click HERE

How to create a Flippity. Click HERE

Emoji prompts. Click HERE

Story Starters. Click HERE

CHECK THIS ONE OUT! AWESOME IDEAS!

From Eric Curts:

Click HERE for the latest resources, news, blog posts, links, and other helpful technology integration items. New resources will be added to the top, grouped by month, so you can scroll down to view previously added information.

Free BookCreator with WriteReader! Easy to use guides, inspiration, and tutorial videos on how to get started and get the most out of WriteReader. Sign up and get your students started in 3 minutes. Create your class, add your students, and share the code and user names with the students.

Alice Keeler shares how to make grading essays easier if you first put them in Google Slides. This is especially helpful so that you can help students as they go instead of waiting until the end.

When you use Google Slides each slide has a unique URL. Have students do their rough draft of their paper in Google Slides. Each paragraph on a separate slide. Assign students to turn in the link to the slide that contains their conclusions, this allows you to jump straight to the conclusions to provide feedback. If a student is stuck on a particular spot, they can link you to the slide that they are seeking feedback on.

Click HERE for the entire article and step by step directions.

English teachers - are you looking for a way to spice up your writing lessons? 826Digital might be able to help.

826 is divided into the following areas:

• SPARKS- Sparks are innovative, adaptable mini-lessons and activities. They help hone a specific skill or inspire big ideas.
• LESSONS - Lessons are highly engaging and ready to use. They’re built around a topic and genre and focused on an educational outcome.
• PROJECTS- Projects are multi-session units on a topic or theme. They help teach process and revision while producing a polished piece.
• WRITING - The Writing gallery features pieces produced by students over the course of Lessons and Projects featured on the site, as well as from our collection of student publications. These may be used to help envision what your students will produce, or as representative, relatable example texts to use in class.
• BOOKSTORE - The Bookstore features collections of student work from 826 Young Authors’ Book Projects and other publishing projects with curricula on 826 Digital, as well as collections of 826 educator resources. These publications offer the opportunity for students to read entire books written by their peers, independently or in connection with 826 Digital Lessons and Projects.

826 Digital champions student writing. By providing engaging, adaptable, standards-based resources—designed to captivate young writers and empower their educators—826 Digital aims to reach students everywhere, whether they be aspiring authors or reluctant writers.

It’s a part of 826 National, a nonprofit organization that also supports eight writing and tutoring centers across the US. ​Our mission is to encourage the exploration of endless possibility through the power of writing.​ We are committed to empowering students with the skills to write their own paths forward, undefined by circumstance.

​We work with teachers to support new approaches to teaching writing and inspire student engagement, and we work in partnership with our communities to foster generations of creative writers and thinkers, who together will define a better future.

A couple of ideas to spice of your reading.

The first one comes from We Are Teachers. It shows you how to create some excitement for students to read books they normally wouldn't choose. By using clues and playing detective, the students get interested in the book. This will also serve as a plot and setting background for when the students read.

The second idea is also from We Are Teachers and it is a how-to on read dating (like speed dating). This article leads you step by step on how to set up your classroom and encourage this event.

Newsmap.com is a global news coverage service that provides you with real-time news from sources around the world.

The futuristic/modern “newspaper”

The idea of Newsmap is to bring your daily interests closer, allowing you to browse through a wide variety of worldwide news. Because in this era of technology everything is moving fast, including us, maybe you don’t have the necessary time to go outside, buy a paper, and read the news. Let’s face it, we are seeking for things that make our everyday lives easier and we are always looking to improve the things around us. That was also the main reason why we have developed this platform where people all over the world can read the news in their living areas or maybe “track” the necessary information on the countries of their interest. This will help you stay in touch with all the subjects in your area or you can easily filter only the domains you are concerned about.

We take only the real sources quoted from the specific publications of that area in the country. We load the articles from the online publications in the area and we update them daily to keep you up-to-date with the news in real time. This platform will offer you a permanent engagement with the outside world, all over the world and the endless possibility to stay connected whenever you want and wherever you want. Browse through the Map of News, select the country you are interested in, choose the domain of interest and open the map of information.

A simple click connects you with the whole world, are you ready? Inform yourself smartly from anywhere!

Create classes and assignments

Quickly create classes, assign work, set goals, and monitor progress. Each class has its own leaderboard so that students can compete amongst themselves, encouraging participation and achievement.

Monitor student progress

Your teacher dashboard makes it easy to follow each student’s performance. See their practice time, the words they are mastering, and those tricky trouble words. Utilize performance data to inform student practice, your instruction, or both.

Create custom quizzes

Conjure a quiz for either pre- or post- assessment in seconds — we'll even suggest words and questions based on the past performance of your students. Easily customize which words and meanings to test — choose any question from our library of over 180,000 questions.

Easy administration and roll-out

Vocabulary.com requires no installation, and can be implemented across a classroom or a whole district in minutes. District subscribers can integrate with most single-sign-on providers and use our tiered access policies to delegate control to school power users.

School & district-wide reporting

School and district subscribers get reports that detail how students and teachers are using Vocabulary.com, allowing you to gain insight to support each student’s individual needs, and know when and where effective vocabulary learning is taking hold.

Stellar support & training

Our U.S. based support team solves 99% of support requests within one school day and 50% of requests within 1 hour. Attend a free webinar, or schedule an on-site training session at your school.

Vocabulary.com teaches words by systematically challenging students with a wide array of question types, activities and assessments. We identify the words students are having the most trouble learning, and work with them until they achieve mastery.How Vocabulary.com Teaches Words

Your students are all different — the way they learn vocabulary should be too.

Vocabulary.com uses adaptive technology to offer differentiated vocabulary instruction to students at all levels. Each student gets a personalized learning program that is tailored to their unique needs.A Peek Behind the Science of Vocabulary.com

Welcome to the Vocabulary.com Educator Edition! Below are a few links that you can use as a cheat sheet to help you get started:

Set up your classes. Create a class for each period you teach and invite your students to join. Easily assign work to your classes, then monitor student progress on your private teacher dashboard. See who did the homework and what words your students are struggling with.

What are you teaching? Let us help. Whether you’re teaching Hamlet, The Hunger Games or a historical document, we have ready-made vocabulary lists for your students to learn. Search our vast library of lists, or use our VocabGrabber™ to create and assign your own vocabulary exercises based on any text in just seconds.

Join the Vocabulary Bowl. Get your students playing for your school. See your school rise to the top of our leaderboards, earn school achievements, or even win the national competition. We also award a nifty banner to each month's winning school.

Attend a webinar. Join us for a 45-minute Educator Bootcamp where we'll get you in shape to become a Vocabulary.com expert. We offer multiple sessions per week to fit your busy schedule. No push-ups required, we promise.

Stay in touch. Read our blog for great ideas about how to use Vocabulary.com in your classroom, or follow us on Facebook and Twitter to get the latest scoop on all things Vocabulary.

Get help. Have questions? Check out our Help Center. You'll find articles that answer many common questions such as:

• How do I get started as a Teacher?
• What does it take to master a word?
• How do I add students to my class?

Or watch one of our many help videos:

How to Get Started as a Teacher

How to Monitor Class Activity and Progress

Can't find the answer to your question? Respond to this email (or any email we send you), or email support@vocabulary.com for help, and we'll do our best to help you.

https://www.vocabulary.com

Both are FREE!

Dupli-Checker will allow you to check a document of up to 1000 words for duplication. Copy and paste the wording or upload the document.

WebPageFX Readable will check the reading level of a website or you can copy and paste the wording into the checker.