Online course creation funded

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation announced Wednesday it was donating more than $20 million to create 24 online courses in 42 states.
The courses will be math and language-arts focused and will be provided freely to schools in states that have adopted Common Core Standards, which prepare students for college and careers. (Jason Koebler at US News Education)

To read more, click here.

Literacy coaches improve student reading scores

An innovative study of 17 schools across the country suggests that putting literacy coaches in schools can help boost students’ reading skills by as much as 32 percent over three years.
The study, headed by researchers at Stanford University, focused on the Literacy Collaborative, a program that trains teachers to become literacy coaches. The teacher-coaches then work one-on-one with their colleagues on a half-time basis to spread a set of teaching routines drawn from principles of cognitive science.( from Debra Viadero at Education Week)

To read more, click here.

Free educational resources at Open Culture

Open Culture brings together high-quality cultural & educational media for the worldwide lifelong learning community. Web 2.0 has given us great amounts of intelligent audio and video. It’s all free. It’s all enriching. But it’s also scattered across the web, and not easy to find. Our whole mission is to centralize this content, curate it, and give you access to this high quality content whenever and wherever you want it. Free audio books, free online courses, free movies, free language lessons, free ebooks and other enriching content — it’s all here. Open Culture was founded in 2006. (from Open Culture)

To learn more about Open Culture, click here. 

Argument and the Common-Core Standards

If we want record numbers of students to succeed in postsecondary studies and careers, an ancient, accessible concept needs to be restored to its rightful place at the center of schooling: argument. In its various forms, it includes the ability to analyze and assess our facts and evidence, support our solutions, and defend our interpretations and recommendations with clarity and precision in every subject area. Argument is the primary skill essential to our success as citizens, students, and workers.
The new common-core standards, which include the best English/language arts standards to date, fully acknowledge this. They affirm unequivocally that “argument is the soul of an education.” But, alas, unless adjustments are made, these new standards documents could drown out and obscure the welcome emphasis they put on argument. (Mike Schmoker and Gerald Graff at Education Week)

To read more, click the above hyperlinked text.

American Library Association's Great Web Sites for Kids

The American Library Association has a collection of Great Web Sites for Kids. To read the list, click here.

The following comes from one of the referenced sites, which features a US and world population clock.


Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) is the equivalent of Eastern Standard Time (EST) plus 5 hours or Eastern Daylight Saving Time (EDT) plus 4 hours.
Note: The U.S. POPClock is consistent with Census 2010 data and the most recent national population estimates.
Population clocks on the US Census Bureau's Web site will update continuously for one minute and then will update once per minute after the first minute a web page is displayed. 

For more, click the above hyperlinked text.

Mindmaps for learning

If you don't already use mind maps regularly, you should probably start. And if you are using mind maps as part of your daily productivity routine, chances are you've come to recognize that they're good for a whole lot more than just raw brainstorming. Here are five great uses for mind maps that go well beyond simple idea generation. ( Robert Strohmeyer at PC Business Center)

What's a mindmap?


A mind map is a diagram used to represent words, ideas, tasks, or other items linked to and arranged around a central key word or idea. Mind maps are used to generate, visualize, structure, and classifystudying and organizing information, solving problems ideas, and as an aid to , making decisions, and writing. (from Wikipedia)

To read the rest of the Wikipedia entry on mindmaps, click here

Marathon man

At yesterday's session of Literacy Lunches, Grand Forks Central math teacher Steve Paintner read about the origins of marathon. Why? For one, yesterday was the annual running of the Boston Marathon.

The first Marathon occurred in 490 BC when Pheidppides ran from the battled near Marathon to Athens (25 miles) to deliver the news that the Greeks had defeated the Persians in war. After doing so, he collapsed and died on the spot. In 1896 Olympics the Marathon was resurrected in Athens; runners went from the Marathon Bridge to Athens.

The Boston Marathon, held on Patriots' Day, the third Monday in April, is the world's oldest annual marathon and is one of the world's major marathons.

But there's more to Paintner's choice of reading about marathons. Paintner himself is a marathon runner, something he became some seven years ago when he and fellow GFC science teacher Eric Polries ran in a marathon to raise money to honor the late Markus Bryant, for whom the Markus Bryant Spirit Award is named. Bryant was a student at GFC who, despite being ill with cancer, worked hard and persevered, exemplifying courage to all who were around him.  Bryant died in 2002..

Paintner's now in training to run the half marathon, one of the events in the annual Fargo Marathon, an event he's never missed. He's also twice run in the Minneapolis Marathon.

Resource for learning about humanitarian law

War is a lot more complicated than a video game. Students need the skills to understand when conflict intersects with the rights and protections of people—at home and abroad.
Exploring Humanitarian Law (EHL) is an adaptable toolkit that gives educators easy-to-use materials to expose students to issues of international humanitarian law, the rules that ensure respect for life and human dignity in war. The toolkit offers educators primary source materials and strategies that reinforce and enrich existing curricula and educational programs. (from the American Red Cross)

To learn more, click the hyperlinked text above.

Teaching reading and IRA

It is eye-opening for teachers to realize how reading differs in other content area classrooms. For example, analyzing the causes and effects of historical processes differs from visualizing physical and chemical processes in science, which differs from interpreting character motives and figurative language in literature.

Think about the analogy of mental workouts: Many students have not given their brains the types of vigorous thinking workouts—cross training, if you will—that teachers want them to have in different types of reading and learning. Once teachers see how different the comprehension process is in different subjects, then they can also recognize the comprehension similarities from subject to subject. (Jeff Zwiers at the International Reading Association Website)

To read more, click here.

The IRA website includes some full text articles from its journals The Reading Teacher. Above is an excerpt from one of those full text articles.

Rigorous classes lead to achievement

"Students who take more rigorous courses in high school are more likely to perform well on achievement tests, according to a study released today that shows more students are doing just that.
The 2009 National Assessment of Educational Progress High School Transcript Study reveals that the percentage of high school graduates completing a “rigorous” curriculum, with higher-level mathematics and science curricula, jumped from 5 percent in 1990 to 13 percent in 2009. Those who took a “midlevel” curriculum increased from 26 percent to 46 percent in the same period." (Caralee J. Adams at Education Week)

To read more, click here.

National Library Week April 10-16, 2011

Share your love of libraries with the world by composing a library themed twaiku for National Library Week! You might win a $50 gift certificate to Amazon.
What’s a twaiku, you ask? Simply put, a twaiku is haiku sent via Twitter. Twaiku use the same basic structure of 3 lines with 5-7-5 syllables respectively. Unlike a true haiku, a twaiku can only be 140 characters, or 130 with our #nlwtwaiku tag.
The National Library Week twaiku contest kicks off at the beginning of School Library Month (April), and continues through Wednesday of National Library Week (April 13). All submissions must be tagged #nlwtwaiku.
The staff of atyourlibrary.org will post a selection of the best twaiku here on atyourlibrary.org, where everyone will have the opportunity to vote for their favorite through the end of National Library Week (Saturday, April 16).
The most highly rated twaiku will receive an Amazon gift certificate! (directly from The Campaign for America's Libraries)

To learn more, click here.

Around the world

Damage in Miyako, Iwate Pref. (12) in Japan

360 Cities offers spectacular 360 degree pictures from around the world. The above comes from Japan.
The panoramic pictures could be used for writing prompts and/or introductions to places around the world that figure in the texts students read.

Why tweet?

Twitter might seem ridiculous.....updating the quotidian of your life in 140 characters. Who cares if you're brushing your teeth or watching TV? True.

But Twitter doesn't have to be about the mundane and the banal. Many people on Twitter tweet links to interesting resources. Below is an example of a different kind of tweeting: Artwiculate.

The twitter-based Word of the Day competition that helps clever people look clever and helps the rest of us learn new words.

To play, just use today’s word in context in one of your tweets. That’s it. Your tweet will appear here where people can tell you if they like it. You’ll get points if they like it or retweet it.

Points mean kudos. Oh, and if you follow @artwiculate, we’ll tweet you with today’s word and store your profile here so you can see your vocabulary improve over time.

In effect, Artwiculate is a way to learn vocabulary by tweeting.

Favorite Poem Project.

Poetry, deeply rooted in human culture, is intricately connected to many disciplines, such as visual art, music, history and religious and social studies. The Favorite Poem Project shows a great deal in particular about American culture at the end of the twentieth century—through the poems people choose, which span ages and cultures, and through the stories they tell, which are often connected to other art forms, social and cultural questions, politics and war and other aspects of contemporary life. (from the Favorite Poem Project website)

Click on the above hyperlinked text to find resources for teaching poems across content areas.

24 hours in pictures

A selection of the best images from around the world. (from the guardian.co.uk) This is how the guardian.co.uk describes its 24 hours in pictures feature. The description doesn't even begin to get at how interesting and compelling these images are.

To look at the images from yesterday, click here. They, or any of the pictures, would work well as writing prompts as well as for discussion of current events.

These slideshows can be shared via Twitter and Facebook; they are, unfortunately, not embeddable. That means you'll have to visit the site, to look at the pictures.

Sources and resources

Welcome to HistoryBuff.com, a nonprofit organization devoted to providing FREE primary source material for students, teachers, and historybuffs. This site focuses primarily on HOW news of major, and not so major, events in American history were reported in newspapers of the time. In addition, there is information about the technology used to produce newspapers over the past 400 years. Our latest addition is panoramas of historic sites in America.(from HistoryBuff)

The above comes from the HistoryBuff website. To learn more, click here.


To keep up with Internet resources for education, check out Free Technology for Teachers.

Poetry across the curriculum

Poetry offers so many varieties for expressing information and emotions. There are forms and types for every classroom setting, and none have to concern love. Poetry doesn’t even have to rhyme if you choose. Just because poems are not essays, does not mean students don’t have to think when they write. Poems are concise through the best words available for an explanation, they are vivid with imagery, and they challenge the writer to think, plan, create, and analyze. Place poems in a classroom setting every day and you develop student minds so that they become intellectual, descriptive scholars. There are worlds of possibilities for engaging students when you learn how to use poetry across the curriculum. (Pamela Rice-Linn at Bright Hub)

To learn more, click the above hyperlinked text.

April is National Poetry Month

National Poetry Month is a month-long, national celebration of poetry established by the Academy of American Poets. The concept is to widen the attention of individuals and the media—to the art of poetry, to living poets, to our complex poetic heritage, and to poetry books and journals of wide aesthetic range and concern. We hope to increase the visibility and availability of poetry in popular culture while acknowledging and celebrating poetry’s ability to sustain itself in the many places where it is practiced and appreciated. (from the Academy of American Poets' FAQ page)

The Academy of American Poets' website if teeming with poetry resources. To take a look, click here.