Almost a year ago I highlighted the very cool Grammar Ninja, a web based game where you play a cartoonish ninja that throws his stars at various parts of speech in sentences displayed on your screen.

I’ve tried the program with my students and they love it. There are however, two problems with it:

1. Some filters will block it since it’s a game.
2. It’s not customizable. You can’t put your own sentences into it.

This has been solved with the desktop version. It’s freely downloadable and allows you to create your own sentences so you can adjust the program to whatever level of grammar you’re working with.

If you didn’t like Grammar Ninja before, you’ll love it now.

Ramsey Brothers Productions has some serious short films and most of them have a lesson to teach. However, I’m really not sure if this video is more appropriate for a film studies class or for an English class. Whichever way you want to look at it, students having an appreciation for older movie styles will find this clip far more enjoyable. As you watch it, pay close attention to the dialogue and improve your grammar as you go.

I just stumbled across a New York Times article that examined the speeches that Democrats and Republican delivered at their respective conventions and then analyzed them to see what words occurred most frequently. This should, in theory, point out what is most important to these parties (at least in their rhetoric if not in fact).

Here in Canada, National Post did the same thing using Wordle and compared Barack Obama’s acceptance speech with Martin Luther King’s “I had a dream” speech. This kind of activity is instructive in its own right for history and Social Studies or Civics classes, but is also useful in an English course.

Just imagine if you had the most recent speech of your mayor or (if you dare) your principal. Run it through a program like Wordle. What are these people advocating? What’s important to them?

If you’re working on making speeches in class, have the students run their own speeches through Wordle. Are the ideas they’re emphasizing really the ones they want to bring across? It could be a great moment in self reflection.

I just stumbled across a site by PBS TV. On their kids website, PBS Kids (okay, it’s not a really original name), they have a section called Word Girl.

Word Girl is a young heroine fighting all sorts of nasty villians who shoot goop and throw sausages at people. Those villians seem a bit odd, but they’re all done in an over the top Saturday-morning-style cartoon that makes the campiness seem fun. In order to fight villians, there are all sorts of activities where you have to pick the word to describe Word Girl’s next action. If you pick the incorrect one, something goes wrong (usually something silly) and you get another chance. If you pick the right one, Word Girl defeats the nasty villian.

This site would probably work well with mid to upper elementary. It has some great and really unusual words that kids at that age likely won’t know, but could easily use. It’s just silly enough to be fun, and just serious enough to educationally useful.

(Cross posted from Befuddled.)

You can never have too much technology or too much teaching in your classroom. Why not combine them in your English classroom in the form of a podcast?

I just discovered a really wonderful site, Grammar Girl, where Mignon Fogarty holds forth in her podcast on all sorts of interesting and often obscure points of grammar. The episode for May 1 is on Yoda’s grammar and sentence construction, while some other episodes have dealt with topics like spoonerisms or the more mundane run-on sentences.

Fogarty is easy to listen to and pretty clear in her explanations. If you’re not clear in your own mind on a point of grammar, she seem to me to be an excellent resource. She’s also easy enough to understand that you should be able to download an mp3 of her podcast and play it for most high school classes.

The topics also seem to be mixed enough - the mundane and the offbeat together - that I’m likely to become a regular listener of Grammar Girl.

I spent a class last week working with some English students. I tried to get them playing with palindromes, to little avail. Some how most Grade 8 students don’t seem to find palindromes interesting, or at least they don’t like the way I present them.

These unique words or phrases, such as radar or racecar, can be read forwards or backwards and they spell the same thing. I think they’re fascinating, but most of the kids tuned out and started playing other language games. While it was encouraging that they still played grammar games and wrote stories, I was a bit discouraged that no one was playing with palindromes.

Well, no one seemed to be until I saw two girls watching a YouTube video of Weird Al Yankovic’s song “Bob.” I almost told those two to stop wasting time until I realized what they were watching. Weird Al would make an intriguing English teacher.

(Cross posted from Befuddled.)

I found this great little lesson idea while surfing the Net looking for, well, um, great little lesson ideas.The Grade 8 teacher I’m working with is trying to get her students to write creatively. How do you do that? Well, this particular lesson idea suggested re-writing a fairy tale from the point of view of the antagonist. This little twist on the normal fairy tale got the kids thinking since, not surprisingly, not many of them have ever considered how a familiar story works from the bad guy’s point of view.

While the website where I borrowed this idea suggested fairy tales mainly, I suppose, to use the lesson with younger children, it was useful for my junior high kids because it meant I could steer them to a number of different stories that are in good taste and fairly well known.The students really did seem to like this lesson and came up with some really pretty good material that they shared with each other on a blog.Fair warning: Not all the Grade 8s seemed familiar with basic fairy tales, so I provided them with links to the stories. Generally I found these tales on Wikipedia.

I’ve been given the task of working with a Grade 8 English teacher and trying to inject a little computer tech into her class. The topic she was currently working through in class was grammar. Naturally, I thought this was incredibly dull. I was pleased to discover that computers could actually make it more interesting.

Grammar Ninja (found in various places on the Net) was an immediate hit with these Grade 8s. In the game you are a cartoonish looking ninja. You are given sentences and told to toss throwing stars at the various parts of the sentences, such as the nouns, verbs, or adjectives. If you hit the write parts of the sentences you go on to the next one. If you the wrong parts, you get little explosions.

Within minutes, all 25 kids had mastered the game. Within a few minutes more, several had figured out that if they intentionally aimed at the wrong parts of the sentences, they could get lots more of the explosion sound effects than if they hit the sentence parts they were supposed to. I have to admit that this frustrated me for a moment since the kids were obviously getting the game to do what it wasn’t supposed to. Yet by hitting every part of the sentences except, for example, the nouns, they were also showing they knew exactly where the nouns were in those sentences.

Even when the kids did the wrong thing, they were learning. That’s my kind of game.