Writing Contest

Link to the JFK Essay Contest.

College Essay Videos

If you need another reason why visual literacy (both reading and writing non-print texts), here's one: colleges are moving towards video college essays. Here's a story on NPR: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=124628580&ft=1&f=1003

Here's a website that offers advice about "writing" (probably no scare quotes needed) college video essays.

I've also put a copy of a similar story from the Education Week story in my "Department Sharing" folder.

RRQ Fluency article

Reading Research Quarterly April/May/June 2010. "Aligning Theory and Assessment of Reading Fluency" offers a clarified definition of fluency, which includes both automaticity AND prosody.

EJ - summer reading in chat rooms

See English Journal May 2010 for "Computers, Coffee Shops, and Classrooms: Promoting Partnerships and Fostering Authentic Discussion". It's about assessing summer reading in discussions online. Good rubric

EJ Critical Literacy of Ads

See the Jan 2010 English Journal for ""The Story of Stuff: Reading Advertisements through Critical Eyes".

iPad and Education

From ASCD yesterday:

Could the iPad become a valuable tool to improve student learning?
Envision Schools founder Bob Lenz, fresh from a conference on innovation and technology in education, considers in this blog post the role the iPad and other new technology will play in the future of student learning. Lenz sees the iPad -- in perhaps its next generation -- as a low-cost way to expand student access to books, research and other media and envisions a time when teachers may create apps instead of paper handouts or assignments posted on the Web. Edutopia.org/Bob Lenz's blog (6/9)

Project based learning

Edutopia has a website devoted to project based learning:

http://www.edutopia.org/maine-project-learning-free-resources-and-tools

And this is a cool feature... what you can do in 5 minutes, 5 hours, 5 days, 5 years:

http://www.edutopia.org/maine-project-learning-replication-tips