Heavy on the resources

HippoCampus is a project of the Monterey Institute for Technology and Education (MITE). The goal of HippoCampus is to provide high-quality, multimedia content on general education subjects to high school and college students free of charge.
HippoCampus was designed as part of Open Education Resources (OER), a worldwide effort to improve access to quality education for everyone. HippoCampus content has been developed by some of the finest colleges and universities in the world and contributed to the National Repository of Online Courses (NROC), another MITE project. NROC makes editorial and engineering investment in the content to prepare it for distribution by HippoCampus. Both HippoCampus and NROC are supported by The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. (from the HippoCampus website)

The above hyperlinked text explains, to some degree, what HippoCampus is. To really get a sense of HippoCampus, click here and then click on one of the content areas in the sidebar. After that, explore either textbooks or courses.  Enjoy!

Digital dossiers

Are students aware of their digital dossiers? Perhaps this short video could help them think about their online activity.

Report on student science knowledge

But one national "report card" on test scores, released Tuesday morning, paints a dismal picture of how well the country’s students have mastered science.

Just 34 percent of fourth-graders, 30 percent of eighth-graders, and 21 percent of 12th-graders are performing at or above “proficient” in the most recent snapshot from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), which gives science scores from 2009. A very small number – just 1 or 2 percent at each grade level – scored at the “advanced” level, and relatively large numbers of students didn’t even meet the most basic level. (Amanda Paulson at Yahoo news)

To read more, click the above hyperlinked text.  To see how North Dakota is doing, click here. (Across tested subject areas, ND is mostly above national averages.)

Extra! Extra! Read all about it.....across the world

Newspaper Map dubs itself as the World's Largest newspapersite.

The site includes a map with the familiar Google teardrop shapes on places all over the world. Click on one of those teardrops, and a box with a name of that newspaper comes up with a list of languages into which that the newspaper, if need be, can be translated.  In effect, a reader can look at newspapers from all over the world.

To visit and explore the site, click here. 

The world is here

Dead Vlei in Namibia in africa

360 Cities offers a host of panoramic pictures taken at places all over the world. Many of these can be embedded. And now, the site features the world largest panoramic picture. To view that picture, click here.

The importance of stories

During Friday's session of Literary Lunches, reader Dawn Botsford emphasized the importance of story.

And Botsford read from Growing Up on Cole Creek---Or Was It Just a Coulee? by Jeannette Roder Klevberg, Botsford's mother. Chronicled in this work are stories about Klevberg's youth, including that when Klevberg went to Grand Forks Central in 1948, her family got their first refrigerator. Klevberg rented a bedroom in Grand Forks, so she could attend high school in the "big town" of Grand Forks. During her time at GFC, she lived in a rented bedroom, ate at Black Cafe's in downtown Grand Forks and kept a diary of her boyfriends. And, in school, students participated in penmanship class and weekly spelling bees.

Klevberg finished her book six months before she died and turned it over to Botsford and her siblings for editing, proofreading, photos and formatting. Klevberg's family self-published the book and donated the proceeds to the American Cancer Society; the second printing proceeds were donated to Ethiopia Reads. Books from the third printing are left to sell, with a variety of organizations set to receive the profits.

Kleberg told Botsford that she had at least two more books to write, something that perhaps informs Botsford's belief in the power of story.

"I would encourage you to interview your grandparents and write those stories down. If you don't write those stories down, they will be lost and we need those stories, " Botsford said.

Botsford is an events coordinator in the office of ceremonies and special events at UND, located in the office of the vice president for student affairs. She grew up on a farm near Northwood and got both her bachelor's and master's degrees at UND. Her son, Tom, graduated from GFC in 2006.

Article of the week resources

Part of the reason my students have such a hard time reading is because they bring little prior knowledge and background to the written page. They can decode the words, but the words remain meaningless without a foundation of knowledge. To help build my students’ prior knowledge, I assign them an "Article of the Week" every Monday morning. By the end of the school year I want them to have read 35 to 40 articles about what is going on in the world. It is not enough to simply teach my students to recognize theme in a given novel; if my students are to become literate, they must broaden their reading experiences into real-world text . (from Kelly Gallagher's website) 


Click the above hyperlinked text for more, including actual "Articles of the Week" Gallagher has used.

Picturing America and more

Great art speaks powerfully, inspires fresh thinking, and connects us to our past.


Picturing America, an exciting new initiative from the National Endowment for the Humanities, brings masterpieces of American art into classrooms and libraries nationwide. Through this innovative program, students and citizens will gain a deeper appreciation of our country’s history and character through the study and understanding of its art. (from Picturing America)

It's hard to explain the resources at the Picturing America website. You really need to spend time exploring and reading to get a sense of what's available. To get started, click the above hyperlinked text.

To learn about resources like Picturing America, visit Larry Ferlazzo's Websites of the Day. Click here to visit his site.

A history of Wikipedia

Is Wikipedia a valid source for student research? Is Wikipedia accurate? There's some debate among teachers about this online encyclopedia. But how did Wikipedia come into being, and what's been going on in its ten years of existence? The above video might answers those last two questions.

Reading, writing and thinking

Here at ReadWriteThink, our mission is to provide educators, parents, and afterschool professionals with access to the highest quality practices in reading and language arts instruction by offering the very best in free materials.

To learn more about ReadWriteThink, click the hyperlinked text above.

Build up your book muscle

Are you thinking about having your students read more, but you're not sure where to begin to find books from them? Check out the following Slideshare presentation from Donalyn Miller, author of The Book Whisperer.

Build up your book muscle

View more presentations from Donalynm.

Writing works

Performance anxiety can be crippling. Entertainers who suffer from it come up with creative defenses. Bono has his purple shades. The indie rock singer Cat Power faces away from the audience. Others turn to more standard solutions like Xanax.


But there might be a healthier quick fix: writing. Because new research reveals that writing about your specific worries just before a performance can reduce the risk of blowing it due to anxiety. The work appears in the journal Science. [Gerardo Ramirez and Sian Beilock, Writing About Testing Worries Boosts Exam Performance in the Classroom] (from Scientific American)

To read the entire Scientific American piece, click the above hyperlinked text.

Quality Counts report 2011

Each year, Quality Counts provides new results for a portion of the policy-and-performance areas that constitute the framework for the report’s State of the States analysis. The 2011 edition presents updated scores and letter grades in four critical areas, for the states and the nation as a whole. The Chance for Success, K-12 Achievement, and School Finance grades, respectively, capture significant aspects of the broader educational environment, school performance, and the level and equitability of school funding. The fourth updated category focuses on policies related to transitions and alignment across the various segments of the educational pipeline. The grades are based on more than 50 indicators from original survey data and analysis by the EPE Research Center. (Amy Hightower at Education Week)

To read Education Week's press release on the report, click here. To read the state by state report card, click here and go to page 8.

To look at an interactive map, which includes states' ranking on the achievement index, click here.

AP to change

Next month, the board, the nonprofit organization that owns the A.P. exams as well as the SAT, will release a wholesale revamping of A.P. biology as well as United States history — with 387,000 test-takers the most popular A.P. subject. A preview of the changes shows that the board will slash the amount of material students need to know for the tests and provide, for the first time, a curriculum framework for what courses should look like. The goal is to clear students’ minds to focus on bigger concepts and stimulate more analytic thinking. In biology, a host of more creative, hands-on experiments are intended to help students think more like scientists. (Christopher Drew at NYT)

To read more, click the hyperlinked text above.

Reading to connect with others

Goodreads is a free website for book lovers. Imagine it as a large library that you can wander through and see everyone's bookshelves, their reviews, and their ratings. You can also post your own reviews and catalog what you have read, are currently reading, and plan to read in the future. Don’t stop there – join a discussion group, start a book club, contact an author, and even post your own writing.

Our mission is to help you find new and interesting books by letting you see what your friends are reading. Whenever you view a book, we always show you your friends' reviews first. When you log in, the homepage will show all the latest reviews from your friends. You can also compare your book list to that of another Goodreads member to see if you share the same taste! Click the "explore" tab to browse our top shelves, find popular and unpopular books.

Goodreads is an online way for people to connect over books. Click the above hyperlinked text to learn more. 

Common Core and online learning

The widespread pledge by states to adopt “common core” academic standards could allow online education to truly break down state boundaries for teachers and students for the first time, and reduce the cost of online-course creation, experts in virtual education say.
“Now, for the first time ever, online-learning programs in different states and different programs have a common framework,” said Susan D. Patrick, the president and chief executive officer of the Vienna, Va.-based International Association for K-12 Online Learning, or iNACOL. “Now we can start sharing, collaborating, and really refining what we’re doing.” (Katie Ash at Education Week)

To read more about the Common Core Standards and online learning, click the hyperlinked text above.

National Research Council on inquiry in science

The National Research Council has a new embeddable book on inquiry in science. To read the book, click on the book icon below.

Making educational changes in small steps

There have been many conversations about transforming classrooms and in fact just one this week on transforming the entire educational system in #edchat. Change can be overwhelming for anyone, whether you are a new teacher or if you are a year away from retirement, but what is a good pace for change in our classrooms? Do we really need to overhaul the entire system overnight or simply take a micro approach and create small, incremental steps within our own classroom?(Andrew Marcinek at Edutopia)

Click on the above text to read what Marcinek suggests for changing schools.

Recommended reading

A reading list with a twist! Children themselves evaluate the books and write reviews of their favorites. Since 1974, Children’s Choices have been a trusted source of book recommendations used by teachers, librarians, parents—and children themselves. 

Finding books to recommend to students--books at a comfortable reading level that are engaging--can be difficult.  Check out the Children's Choices, a nice resource for books for kids, by clicking on the hyperlinked text above. Yes, some of the books at Children's Choices are for very young readers, but there are also books at the fifth and sixth grade level.

Revamping vocabulary instruction

Copying definitions from the dictionary we would probably all agree is not an effective way to learn vocabulary. Passive learning hardly ever is. It's just often the way we learned, and as teachers, we sometimes fall back on using these ways when teaching rather than taking a good look at student data, the latest research, and then trying something new.
The truth is, and the research shows, students need multiple and various exposures to a word before they fully understand that word and can apply it. They need also to learn words in context, not stand alone lists that come and go each week. Of course the way we learn words in context, or implicitly, is by reading, then reading some more. (This is why every classroom should have a killer classroom library stocked full of high-interest, age appropriate books.) (Rebecca Alber at Edutopia)

Click the above hyperlinked text to learn more.

Want to get some style?

Is MLA style getting you down? What about APA? Chicago Manual of Style?

Never fear and click here for the ultimate guide to style.