SERIES INTRODUCTION AND CONTENT

Introduction

This post in the first in a series of three, sharing useful resources.  The resources that will be shared are five content area (English Language Arts) curriculum resources, five websites on differentiated learning, and five technology tools in my content area.  I hope these will be useful in your classroom.  My focus is on providing tools for your students to create knowledge, providing lesson plan resources and perspectives on teaching, and providing resources that offer ways to tether multimedia curricular materials and plans with common core standards.  I hope the websites on differentiated instruction suggest new ways to you on how multimedia materials work effectively to differentiate presentation and assessment methods.

Five English Language Arts Curriculum Resources

Teach with Movies offers a good guideline for teachers who are wishing to align the films that they screen with Common Core Standards generally.  Reference to these do not help completely if you are working with State Common Core Standards, as we are in California. Still this is a good resource for teachers who are looking for ways to ground film screening in standards.  Their website includes links to printable material and detailed lesson plans.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS TEACHER RESOURCES

The Library of Congress maintains a website with a directory of their own educational resources.  The directory features a filter to refine the results to those that match certain ELA Common Core Standards, or state content standards, should that be desirable.  The resources that it publishes for teachers include materials for both students and teachers and are ideal for English Language Arts and Social Studies/History classrooms.  Also of interest to teachers whose students are creating knowledge through the application of research skills are their Primary Source Sets.





The American Storyboard Project is a great way to teach students about digital story-telling and production.  The California Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts & Literacy in History/Social Studies, Science, and Technical Subjects calls for the teaching of narrative storytelling, and this is an ideal way to integrate interpersonal communication/public speaking skills, not to mention a few ISTE standards into your lesson plan.  The stories may be considered for radio broadcast, but must be:
"-a true life experience-mindful of at least 3 senses-between 350 and 500 words (we will accept stories up to 600 words, which will be pared down to 500 or fewer during the editorial process)-written in first person-read by the writer "

This a great poetry teaching resource that includes lesson plans for teaching poetry (which is a difficult subject to teach, especially when time and resources are limited).  This is ideal also for teachers who would to hear other teachers perspectives on teaching poetry.  

The above video, a multimedia presentation of W.H. Auden's poem Night Mail, from the film of the same name, reminds us of an age when communications were first accelerated by coal power, which powered even the telegraphs of the lucky few.  It's pace and presentation suggest the original swarm of information that has ballooned to critical capacity today, and the very human need it fills.

The National Core Arts Standards offers an alternative perspective on how to evaluate the arts in your classroom.  The website features a PDF of the standards, that includes suggestions for assessing the standards; and on page 17, there is particularlly interesting segment on what it means to be artistically literate.  So much art, especially today, is a multimedia presentation.  Multimedia comprehension skills are necessary to interpret film and even theatre, not to mention, these are both valid mediums for addressing core standards in narrative writing.

WEBSITES FOR DIFFERENTIATED LEARNING

Howard Gardner's Theory of Multiple Intelligences is often misunderstood, thought of more as a call to teach to all eight forms of intelligence, eight different ways.  Here, in this video, Gardner explains his theory and its' implications for instruction and assessment.  As he explains, the operative idea for teachers, is to become a child-centered classroom, where student's individual intellectual strengths are at least considered.  One way is through presentation of interactive multimedia, or promoting self-assessment.

Edutopia has this resource for suggesting how to create groups.  This article is a sort of polemic editorial, supporting homogeneous groups.  It was insightful to me because I had previously thought that distributing strong academic students evenly throughout the groups in my class was a good strategy to hedge against disaster.  It is a simple point, but counter-intuitive, that this strategy holds strong academic students, GATE or otherwise, back.

Education Week ofters two essays espousing different perspectives on differentiated instruction.  In one, the author,  James R. Delisle, argues against the promotion of differentiation generally, arguing specifically in favor of homogeneous classrooms (i.e., tracking, as he states plainly, which is distinct in some ways from the homogeneous student grouping, used for projects and the like).  In the other, a response to Delisle's essay, author Carol Ann Tomlinson argues in favor differentiation, citing and summarizing research pointing to the ineffectivness of tracking.  These are worth reading perspectives.  I do not have the seasoned perspective of a long time teacher, and in practice (having none), I can not speak to effectivness of differentiation, nor do I want to be a cyncic.  However, as Delisle points out, according to the research that he cites, teachers are not differentiating often in classrooms.  I think to ask why, if that is indeed the case, is the start of a valid critique. 

Edutopia also has this resource on teaching Visual Literacy (VL), elements which naturally engages all students.  As they ask, "Ever heard kids debate the object salience and shot angles of a Ryan Gosling meme?" (I have not, thankfully.)  Though so-called "Spatial Learners" and their ilk are more adept or apt to gravitate toward visual presentation and assessment options, VL engages Mathematical/Logical Learners also through mediums like graphs.  VL is not the same exactly as media literacy, as understood in English Language Arts classrooms.  There are some great strategies, such as think aloud exercises and group descriptive discussions that are discussed here, as well as solid procedures for present and assessing VL.  Remember, visual media are a texts too.

Bluiding on the idea of promoting visual literacy, here is one last article from Edutopia, on using graphic novels in your class.  Whether to diffentiate instruction or to simply introduce your students to this fun genre, there are a few things new comers should learn about the style of art used in them and expectations we should have for students interperating them.  For example, the image above is from the Japanese manga master, Shigeru Mizuki.  It is a non-verbal action frame despicting creatures from Japanese folklore; still, there is more to the artistic style, which acts as a narrative device, than representing a scene.

TECHNOLOGY RESOURCES FOR ENGLISH LANGUAGE ARTS

 This website offters an easy to navigate digital anthology of major works in American liturature, likely more expansive than a text book, certainly not limited by phyisical volume, and free (consisting of works in the public domain).  This is a good tool for students or teachers who want to explore a certain period or author further.  Making relations between authors or accross movements by finding information to create knowledge and be digitally literate.

Of course there are ways to explore a period further, through exploring digitally transcribed obscrure or rare sources.  This would involve exploring digital data-bases, many of which offer access on a subscribtion basis.  However, there a few good free, though rather specific, ones availble to the general public.

For instance the the website Readex offers a wealth of digitally transcribed archival American newspapers.  You might use this to further explore the perspectives of people living the period that your class is reading about, or simpily find out if your hometown was as dull as it is now 100 years ago.  It is your choice, the idea is to use this tool to create knowledge that is original and draws from primary sources.

There are tools that I find just sort of fun and interesting that could serve useful purposes depending on how they are implimented.  For instance, if you were reading works dating even from the Old, Middle, or Early Modern English periods, as students in surveys of British Literature often are, the Online Etymology Dictionary is a fun way to understand more about language history and how word usages have changed overtime.  Print versions of these are extremely cumbersome (entries are much longer than in traditional dictionaries), so the online version is handy.  Often times archiac word usages or language serve to impede modern readers greatly.

Tools like the one above are ways to augment the reading expereince, though they just automate or digitize the functions of earlier technologies, they also accelerate thier use.  That alone justifies them, in my opinion.

In some ways, the internet simply offers tools to students that would be difficult or cumbersome on district budgets, if they exist at all.  Personally, I am interested in language histroy, and so I find resources like this on the history of the English language intrigueing.  I would share it with my students, so that they might further understand the origins and translated nature many early texts in a British Liturature course.

Other resources, like Writer's Digest, which provides a comunity of peer editors, and tools like writng prompts are broad, and allow students to explore the multiple functions available.  With supervision, this website could provide a supportive community or just more feedback to highschool creative writting students.