Spelling and Grammar...how crucial are they?
Peter Elbow is currently a Professor of English Emeritus at the University of Massachusetts and is well-known for his composition theory and has written several books including Writing Without Teachers. Watch this two minute video to hear his take on spelling and grammar during the writing process.
How does technology impact how you learn and/or teach? How does it impact kids?
Watch this short, thought-provoking video!
This project was created to inspire teachers to use technology in engaging ways to help students develop higher level thinking skills. Equally important, it serves to motivate district level leaders to provide teachers with the tools and training to do so.
Compare/Contrast Handout and Links
University of North Carolina
This handout will help you first to determine whether a particular assignment is asking for comparison/contrast and then to generate a list of similarities and differences, decide which similarities and differences to focus on, and organize your paper so that it will be clear and effective. It will also explain how you can (and why you should) develop a thesis that goes beyond "Thing A and Thing B are similar in many ways but different in others."
Sample responses and a passage to practice plus examples of weak versus strong summaries according to MTEL.
The report said: "It can be concluded that the foetus cannot experience pain in any sense prior to this gestation."
Fontline January 22, 2008
In Growing Up Online, FRONTLINE takes viewers inside the very public private worlds that kids are creating online, raising important questions about how the Internet is transforming childhood. "The Internet and the digital world was something that belonged to adults, and now it's something that really is the province of teenagers, " says C.J. Pascoe, a postdoctoral scholar with the University of California, Berkeley's Digital Youth Research project.
In addition to the PBS film, visitors to this site will find other readings and links as well as teachers' guides.
By Steven Johnson
The Gauridian Feb. 7th 2008
According to a study for the National Endowment for the Arts, as our culture focuses more on electronic media, reading is dangerously on the decline. In this article, Steven Johnson, author of Everything Bad Is Good For You, challenges the NEA study by suggesting that on-screen literacy is not factored into the study. To Johnson, this omission is preposterous. He writes, "Odds are that you are reading these words on a computer monitor. Are you not exercising the same cognitive muscles because these words are made out of pixels and not little splotches of ink?... And of course we are writing more, and writing in public for strangers: novel readers may have declined by 10%, but the number of bloggers has gone from zero to 25 million."
From Pencils to Pixels: The Stages of Literacy Teachnology
by Dennis Baron
While many assume that our dependence on computers signifies a literacy revolution, Baron suggests that our relationship to computers is, "simply the latest step in a long line of writing technologies." He argues that many earlier forms of technology, including writing itself, were, "met with suspicion as well as enthusiasm."
In Baron's opinion, it is too early to speculate on how computers will change the way we use words, and on how literacy practices may be forever changed.
