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Flash cards, vocabulary memorization, and study games | Quizlet
My students told me about this site where they make study guides and flash cards for themselves. It’s free, and it would be particularly good for studying information that you have to memorize.
Category Archives: Delicious and Diigo
Diigo Links (weekly)
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Glenda Funk shares some performance pedagogy techniques designed to get students out of their desk and on their feet.
Diigo Links (weekly)
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Fakebook: Create a fake profile!
Fakebook allows you to create Facebook profiles for school projects.
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Your English Class » Blog Archive » Joseph Conrad – Heart of Darkness
Great introduction and resources for teaching Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.
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Anglotopia examines the UNESCO World Heritage Sites in the UK. Gorgeous pictures and descriptions of each site.
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Importing Flip video into iMovie for iOS | Video | Creative Notes | Macworld
Macworld gives instructions for importing a Flip video into iMovie for iOS, which is particularly good for iPad 2.
Diigo Links (weekly)
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Dickens daren’t tell the truth about the real Oliver Twist workhouses | Mail Online
This article describes conditions in workhouses for the poor in Victorian England. It would be great to pair with Oliver Twist or with Blake’s two “Chimney Sweep” poems.
Diigo Links (weekly)
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Teaching ‘The Great Gatsby’ With The New York Times – NYTimes.com
The New York Times’ collection of resources for teaching F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby.
Diigo Links (weekly)
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Cool Cat Teacher Blog: Can’t we just “integrate it everywhere?”
Vicki discusses how technology should be integrated, what China is doing with technology, and why removing technology classes is a bad idea.
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Langwitches Blog » Becoming Good Tutorial Designers
Silvia discusses how to help students learn to design tutorials.
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Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” with explanatory notes and references.
What I’ve “Drawn” Up
In a previous post, I discussed some trouble I had teaching a lesson, and basically, it all hinged on the vocabulary my students had. One mistake I made, I think, was assuming I needed to get in the middle of the learning. When my other class reads “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” today, they are going to use a remixed version of Joe Scotese’s group work lesson on the poem. Changes I made to the lesson:
- I took out references to the Milton poem and “The Rape of the Lock.” (Essentially removed questions 1-3 on Joe’s lesson).
- I tweaked the other questions
- I removed references to Uncle Remus, Song of the South, etc. from question 4.4.
- I added the word “pastoral” to terms to look up and discuss along with the image of The Shepherdess by Jean Honoré Fragonard (which I put on the back of my revised questions).
- I removed question 4.9 because I removed the Pope excerpt.
- I altered question 4.17 to remove reference to Uncle Remus.
Joe’s work is copyrighted, rather than licensed under a Creative Commons license, but you are free to join his site and download the lesson. I am not able to publish my altered version because I respect Joe’s wishes regarding the publication of his work.
One critical component of Joe’s work is that in the groups, students read the poem and do not go on until they understand what is being said. I think students might need to read with dictionaries in hand, and I will be able to facilitate as they discuss in groups, but putting more of the work on them and making them more active is a positive change. I’ll leave a comment here after the lesson and let you know how it went.
I have also recently come upon Dawn Hogue’s text for Hawthorne’s short story “Rappaccini’s Daughter” (PDF). Dawn has created a great text that invites students to annotate and think about the story. A lot of the fat literature anthologies don’t include this story, and I like it better than some of the more commonly anthologized stories, so I am grateful to Dawn for sharing.
I was also pleased to discover Romantic Circles as I prepare to teach Romanticism in British Lit. and Comp. Romantic circles has electronic texts, audio, literary criticism, and teaching ideas.
On an unrelated note, I discovered that my Diigo account wasn’t updating with a links post each Sunday, and I have fixed the problem. My Diigo links should now publish each Sunday for those of you who follow the RSS feed and don’t see them in the sidebar to the left.
photo credit: Mark van Laere
Diigo Links (weekly)
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“I just heard a great idea for a year-end book group meeting. Book Swap.
Encourage everyone to come to the next discussion with a favorite book they are willing to part with. Readers do book talks, giving a summary of the plot and characters, and then ask them to talk about the most appealing aspects of the book and compare it to something else.
How to fairly distribute? After the book talks, put all the books on the table in the middle, have attendees pull numbers out of a hat and choose in order. Or hearken back to your elementary school days, put all the books in a big, colorful bag, and have each person pull one out without looking. Book Grab Bag.”
Diigo Links (weekly)
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How to Use QR Codes in Student Projects – SimpleK12
Scannable bar codes may be just what you need to spark some student interest in your classroom – read on to learn how to use them to showcase your student work and give some life to your classroom’s infographics.
Delicious: What Went Wrong?
In the last few days, you’ve probably been hearing a lot about Delicious as a slide leaked from a Yahoo company meeting declared Delicious was one of the companies Yahoo planned to “sunset” or shut down. Now Delicious’s blog declares that Delicious will not shut down, but it will find a new home somewhere else. Delicious could be great, but it languished on Yahoo’s back burner. I know a lot of educators who used it to great effect, and even when I switched to Diigo, I didn’t close my Delicious account—I just set up Diigo so that it published my bookmarks to Delicious, too. I knew some folks subscribed to my bookmarks’ RSS feed in Delicious.
I started using Delicious in 2005 because at that time, I was having difficulty with Firefox randomly losing my bookmarks. I liked the idea that I could save my bookmarks somewhere else where Firefox couldn’t lose them. It has since become more stable in that regard, but I was hooked on social bookmarking by that time, and I still rarely use my browser bookmarking tool. I totally understand the irony of switching to Delicious so I didn’t keep losing my bookmarks, in case you were wondering. I switched to Diigo in 2009 largely because of a few more features it had that I liked. What makes both Delicious and Diigo great is the ability to share bookmarks. Silvia Tolisano uses Delicious. Until she started having trouble with the RSS feed updating multiple times when she posted bookmarks to her blog, she was sharing her finds by posting links saved in Delicious to her blog automatically (which is something you can also do with Diigo—I do it). Silvia shares some really amazing stuff, and I hate to think of that vast resource of hers disappearing into the ether. I really hope she switches to Diigo, so I can follow her there.
I think what went wrong with Yahoo and Delicious is that Yahoo didn’t understand Delicious’s potential. I told my husband when we were talking about it that the only Yahoo service that would generate a larger outcry if it were shut down is Flickr. I think it’s sad that Yahoo never “got” Delicious. I think Yahoo’s problem for years has been that they don’t understand the potential of the products they acquire and develop, and they focus on the wrong things. They’ve just laid off a large number of employees. This article notes that “This marks the fourth time in three years that Yahoo has resorted to mass firings to boost its earnings.” I think that strategy speaks for itself.
So what would I do if I still used Delicious? I’d switch to Diigo, but I would also try to figure out a way to prevent losing my bookmarks in the future should anything happen to Diigo. ReadWriteWeb has some good articles about the loss of Delicious: