By the time I was in the 11th grade, I was done with powerpoints. By that I mean that they were old news. The reason for this is because my teachers would use them to fill our notebooks with information that we would feverishly transcribe as our hands contorted from cramps.

So often students are just fed slide after slide of facts. So, what can we do about this? I would like to know about your methods of breaking up the monotany of powerpoints.

My Monotony Breaker: One technique I use is to make it into a dialogue as if it were a play. It does not take long for you to switch out the names to adapt each period. Also, it is pretty easy to slip in inside jokes from period to period. The key is to sit and wait for the student to read his/her part and to sometimes have all of the students read at once. Even 11th graders get into it.

Leave your techniques in the comments below.

In planning for this year I found a great site that gives a timeline for the literary movements as well as an explanation on each movement. Beneath the timeline you will find “literary movements.” If you click that link, you will be able to access a list of literary movements. Just thought I’d share.

Her are some more links I found useful:
Mr. Juster’s Virtual Classroom AND Literary Periods in American Literature- though rather archaic in design, these both have useful lists.

Here is another one titled Early American Literature Movements 1600-1900, Resources K-12.

Yesterday I wrote about using writing in math, but the post primarily focused on secondary math. Therefore I thought I would throw in a few sites focusing on lower level grades I found when poking around the net.

MATHWIRE: Seems to be a great website! It focuses on all kinds of strategies that we consider best practices. There is everything from math journals to word webs dealing with math. I highly recommend this one.

THIS is a seemingly simple website with a lot of useful ideas. I particularly like the ideas at the very bottom of the page because they deal with various learning styles.

This handout (Writing to Learn) is another resource I found helpful. It has various math writing assignments along with student writing samples.

Donald Leu, author of Teaching with the Internet K-12: New Literacies for New Times, give a wide range of websites that lend themselves to writing opportunities in all subject areas. I thought I would showcase a few of them this week. Leu has at least 100, if not more, links throughout the book. I would suggest checking it out.

THE FRUIT GAME: Is an online game that involves math (obviously). The interesting catch to this game is that it has a mathematical technique to it. Donald Leu suggests having your students map out the procedure in writing. This would be beneficial because the logical sequence of events is where students trip up; to have them write it out forces them to slow down. And, as we all know, writing is thinking.

MATHEMATICS AS A LANGUAGE: This page discusses the linguistic nature of mathematics. I found it rather interesting. Students might find it valuable to use this kind of thinking to deal with difficult formulas. As an English major, I know that I always had to write out the logic of the formulas in order to learn them. You too might find this to be a valuable method of teaching students like me.

THE HISTORY OF MATH: As the title suggests, this site focuses on this history of mathematics. For students who are history lovers, or who seek to find other means to attach it to their lives, this may be the ticket. And, of course, you always have the option of writing in response to this. I always enjoyed the method of one of my college math professors’ technique of talking about the history behind the formulas.

Well, I hope you find these useful. If I get feedback on these, I will add more. Let me know what you think by commenting.

Second life blew our minds with the creation of its 3D world because of its potential for changing online shopping experiences, international business, and online education. With its virtual classrooms, boardrooms, and malls, Second Life has even been the subject of investigations by the FBI because of places where users could actually go and make money via gambling.

I considered buying space on Second Life for my classroom, but then I was strolling through one of its malls and found a store with a sundry of items that one wouldn’t want students to stumble upon.

However, recently I discovered Google’s Lively. This is a new, seemingly safer alternative to Second Life. The good thing about it is how user friendly it is. The bad thing about it is that it does have an Atari/Zelda feel to it in the way you move from room to room. No matter, though, it will still create an interesting way to create class projects.

Lesson ideas:
*Have students create group web quests through which all of the info can be found in their particular room. They can then connect to another group’s room.

*Have a scavenger hunt kind of lesson where they move from room to room solving some problem with global warming or something of that nature.

*Have student create an art gallery that best depicts the vocabulary words for that week.

Anyway…here is a video from youtube about it.

While sitting in a workshop presented by Donald Leu, who *wrote Teaching with the Internet K-12: New Literacies for New Times, woman in the audience asked if it was true that one could use quotation marks and other symbols to limit search results. I was surprised by thew question because I thought this was common knowledge. However, the crowd gasped with amazement when he demonstrated how to do this.
Since this is a common feature to most search engines I decided it would be a good idea to post the list below. You can use most of these on any major search engine. (I even tried them out on Yahoo’s search engine.)

Therefore, when you are doing research with your students, help them limit their results by using these techniques. Who knows? They might even think you are cool when you tell them you can even use these techniques on facebook.com.

*Joining Donald Leu in authorship of this book is his wife, Deborah Diadium Leu, and Julie Coiro.
**This cheat sheet was found in THIS article at About.com.

Vocabulary Unit 6

Done by T. U. 1st

By S.J.D. 1st

By S.W. 7th

By A.F. 7th

Here are just a few of the blogs I really enjoy reading. These are not all blogs about education. In fact, most of them are about random topics.

I would love to know about blogs you like. Leave a list in the comments to share with others.

Kevin’s Meandering Mind (Education) http://dogtrax.edublogs.org

Radiohead Concerts (bootlegs from In Rainbows tour) http://www.radiohead-notforprofit.com/

Ten out of Ten (E.R. stories) http://trismus1.wordpress.com/

Neat0rama (random goofy stories) http://www.neatorama.com/

Lifehack (tips on improving life) http://lifehack.org

Nothing to do with Arbroath (more random goofy stories) http://arbroath.blogspot.com/

Lifehacker (tips on how to do everything better) http://lifehacker.com/

To be continued…

Wordle is an interesting application that takes whatever text you feed it and turns it into a variety of different kind of word clouds. It can also resort your tags if you use Delicious or even the tag words from a weblog. The results are interesting and Wordle allows you to resort the cloud or change the format and/or color of the words and the background to a number of possibilities.

I took Ben’s last post about VisuWords and put his text into Wordle. Here is what came out:

Then, I took this blog site and gave the RSS feed to Wordle and it spit out:

I love how the word “students” dominates everything. And this identification of words and themes is one way that a teacher might use Wordle with students. Perhaps a student could take one of their pieces of writing, put it into Wordle and analyze what comes out. Or, as someone showed me recently, you can take a famous poem, add the text to Wordle, and then have students guess which poem it is by looking at the words in the visual rearrangement.

And now, the hack tip: You can save your Wordles to the gallery at their site but if you want to share it on a blog, or save it as a file, you need to do a screen save. On a PC, you can use the “print-screen” key, go into MS Paint, paste it and then save as a .jpeg file. Then, you can upload it into your blog or photo sharing site (such as Flickr) I’m not sure about Mac — maybe someone could share that hack via the comment on this post.

In an event, Wordle is a fun and interesting way to re-organize your words.

– Kevin