Opinion: We're living '1984' today It appears that the police now have a device that can read license plates and check if a car is unregistered, uninsured or stolen. We already know that the National Security Agency can dip into your Facebook page and Google searches. And it seems that almost every store we go into these days wants your home phone number and ZIP code as part of any transaction. So when Edward Snowden -- now cooling his heels in Russia -- revealed the extent to which the NSA is spying on Americans, collecting data on phone calls we make, it's not as if we should have been surprised. We live in a world that George Orwell predicted in "1984." Comparisons between Orwell's novel about a tightly controlled totalitarian future ruled by the ubiquitous Big Brother and today are, in fact, quite apt. Telescreens -- in the novel, nearly all public and private places have large TV screens that broadcast government propaganda, news and approved entertainment. So what's it all mean?
Make Your Students “Poetry Geniuses”! by Abi Frost I recently discovered a web resource called “rap genius”. This Brooklyn-based startup allows users to explore and understand the meaning behind song lyrics, poetry and literature. The long term vision is to annotate all text, including news stories and long-form works like War and Peace. Teachers have started using the platform to teach students critical reading skills, so I decided to try it out in my small seventh grade reading class for struggling readers. I saw this as one engaging way to address Common Core Standard RL.7.4: RL.7.4 Determine the meaning of words and phrases as they are used in a text, including figurative and connotative meanings; analyze the impact of rhymes and other repetitions of sounds (e.g., alliteration) on a specific verse or stanza of a poem or section of a story or drama. I designed a review lesson for my poetry analysis unit using the Poetry Genius tab on the Rap Genius website. -Abi Frost, Middle School Special Education Reading Specialist
The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets - Harvard University Press Centennial Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate: Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, And summer’s lease hath all too short a date; Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines, And often is his gold complexion dimmed; And every fair from fair sometime declines, By chance or nature’s changing course untrimmed: But thy eternal summer shall not fade, Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st, Nor shall Death brag thou wand’rest in his shade, When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st. So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, So long lives this, and this gives life to thee. To come, as a commentator, on this—the most familiar of the poems and the most indisputably Shakespearean, Elizabethan, and sonnetlike—is both a balm and a test: what remains to be said? Many of Shakespeare’s sonnets are constructed, like this one, on a very common cultural contrast (here, the temporality of physical existence and the eternity of verse).
Research: How SEL Classroom Management Techniques Build Academic Achievement Respect, responsibility, and a community-based learning atmosphere promote success at Mount Desert Elementary School, a K-8 public school in Northeast Harbor, Maine. An important aspect of the culture at Mount Desert is allowing students and teachers autonomy to determine what works best in their classrooms for promoting students' learning. Credit: Alyssa Fedele Mount Desert Elementary School is a small, K-8 public school in Northeast Harbor, Maine, that has successfully created a strong learning community that is the basis of the school's academic success. Responsive Classroom An Approach That Helps Build Positive Relationships The foundation for a community-based learning atmosphere at Mount Desert begins in the earliest grades, where a Responsive Classroom approach is used in all K-3 classrooms. Every morning, the entire class comes together as a community to greet one another, share news, and warm up for the day ahead. Using Discipline Challenges as Learning Opportunities Galantino, M.
k-8 Book ‘Teaching with Text Sets’ Capiello y now it’s old news that the Common Core State Standards have influenced a shift in the role of informational text in classroom instruction. It’s also clear that these standards don’t spell out how text should be taught; that important task has been left up to teachers and curriculum developers. Bridging this gap, Teaching with Text Sets (Shell Education, 2013), by Mary Ann Cappiello and Erika Thulin Dawes, offers a framework for developing content-rich, standards-based curriculum backed by the authors’ years of teaching experience and extensive knowledge of engaging, age-appropriate materials. First off, the authors clarify what they mean by a “multimodal, multigenre text set.” Simply put, it’s a group of resources—print, audio, and visual—on a particular topic or theme presented in a variety of genres. Text sets support the goals of a unit of study, can be used in elementary through high school, and are compiled, ideally, by a team of teachers and a librarian.
Grammar and Comprehension: Scaffolding Student Interpretation of Complex Sentences I'm a fourth grade special education teacher in NYC. Our school has acquired a new reading/writing program and has discontinued a grammar program we've used for several years. In the new program the grammar component is virtually non-existent. On a gut level I feel that students are struggling with test questions, even math ones, due to lack of practice/knowledge of grammar. They simply don't understand what the questions are asking. Great question. Also, readability measures are able to predict how well students will comprehend particular texts on the basis of only two variables: vocabulary sophistication and grammatical complexity. There are also experimental studies that show that there are ways that grammar can be taught formally that improve reading comprehension. That doesn’t necessarily justify a lot of grammar worksheets and the like, but it does argue for teaching students about sentences as they meet them. Let’s slice the sentence at the first “that” and the first “or:”
Make. Write. Remix. Share. (Paul Oh) What do programmable books, multimedia poetry and DIY clubs have in common? They're all examples of ways that a growing number of educators -- in school and out, at libraries, museums and other cultural institutions, at home and at community gatherings -- are engaging in making things and leveraging the learning associated with that very human impulse to create. This summer, the National Writing Project, the place where I work, in partnership with the MacArthur Foundation, is leading an effort called Educator Innovator. It's an initiative in which a constellation of organizations (including Edutopia) are providing dozens of opportunities for educators to do things like joining webinars on innovative practice, or building a game register for a MOOC focused on making and learning. It's all free and all open to anyone. The Summer of Making and Connecting Undergirding these opportunities is a set of design and learning principles called Connected Learning. A Community of Creators
Webb's Depth of Knowledge Rigor. Text Complexity. Difficulty. What do these words all mean in the world of thinking? Teaching? Learning? I learned about Webb’s Depth of Knowledge just last year when I was at a Larry Ainsworth Professional Development workshop about unwrapping Common Core State Standards and aligning our instructional sequences to those standards. So, what is Webb’s Depth of Knowledge and what’s the big deal? Branching off of a “flipped classroom approach” and because I don’t pretend to be an expert on Webb’s Depth of Knowledge, click here to review (or learn about) the four levels of Webb’s Depth of Knowledge continuum: DoK1. DoK3. DoK4. I believe that each unit needs a mixture, or a balance, of all of the levels above. How do we apply Webb's Depth of Knowledge into our classrooms? If we are asking students to research, for example, here are some ways that we might be able to integrate DoK into a research unit sequentially: DoK1. DoK2. DoK3. DoK4. How does that look in Writing Workshop? DoK2.
Breaking Bad as a 1995 Dramedy and 14 Other Recut Trailers Ever wonder what Breaking Bad would look like if it had been created 20 years ago? Or have a sneaking suspicion that Up and Gran Torino are secretly the same movie? Since these seem like the perfect issues to tackle on the Friday before a long weekend, we found 15 movie and TV trailers reworked into completely different genres. I'm surprised at how many of them I would watch. You might be too. 1. 2. I would watch the crap out of this movie. 3. 4. 5. 6. Another nicely-done AMC promotion for “ Forrest Gump Week.” 7. This... might actually be scarier than the original. 8. 9. 10. 11. Let’s be honest—this one isn’t too much of a stretch, is it? 12. 13. 14. 15.
Books That Tweak (Not Twerk!) Great Classics Originally posted on Kirkus Writers are always borrowing from one another, across centuries and continents. It’s the writers who aren’t just borrowing but building on what previous writers have created who we’re interested in. For more from Kirkus, click here! "Havisham" by Ronald Frame "An intelligently imagined Dickens prequel." "Hardly a false note in an extraordinary carrying on of a true greatness that doubted itself."
Showroom Models Navigate text complexity with a text roadmap, a tool that brings together the quantitative measures, qualitative measures, and reader and task considerations of a text in one format. Interested in creating units of instruction? These text sets provide examples of how to organize texts around a clear line of inquiry to help students build knowledge about the world. The accompanying Guide to Creating Text Sets walks you through the process so you can create sets of your own. GUYS READ