Donalyn Miller’s Reading in the Wild is a great workshop-focused resource for any ELA teacher who wants to cultivate lifelong reading habits and is “looking for a viable alternative to traditional instruction,” says teacher-reviewer Tyler McBride.
Education consultant Mike Fisher invites readers to be active participants in a Curriculum Brainstorm, using popular music and a song’s associated music video as a way to engage close reading of text, comparative analysis & use of digital tools.
The First-Year Teacher’s Survival Guide: Ready-to-Use Strategies, Tools & Activities for Meeting the Challenges of Each School Day functions as a ‘teacher’s encyclopedia’ but an unfriendly index is a challenge, says reviewer Lena Welch.
In Part 2 of her article on conferencing with student writers, teacher-author Marilyn Pryle tells how she manages multiple conferences with each student during a class period. The key: give students small manageable tasks they can do on their own.
Mark Gerl, a school-based technology coordinator in Atlanta GA, reflects on the key role of language arts & storytelling in successful video games — something he & his students have learned in chats with a team of Canadian adventure game designers.
Working Draft / Writing and Coding
by Kevin Hodgson · Published 01/05/2014 · Last modified 11/24/2019
If our English Language Arts students don’t learn the basics of reading and writing computer code, asks middle grades teacher Kevin Hodgson, how can we be sure they will grow up to be creators of ideas and not just users of information created and managed by others?
The Best-Kept Teaching Secret “will be a book that I’ll refer to often,” says MiddleWeb reviewer Sandy Wisneski. Smokey and Elaine Daniels offer ideas that are both powerful and simple to implement, she writes, showing teachers how to bring life to “written conversations.”
For the 2013 EduBlog Awards we’re defining “best” as among the “especially interesting & attention-worthy.”
Working Draft / Writing with Students
by Kevin Hodgson · Published 11/03/2013 · Last modified 11/17/2019
ELA teacher Kevin Hodgson often joins his students during freewriting time and sometimes shares his own messy work, as a way to model what writers do.
Teachers working to build complex texts into classes will welcome the framework for teaching comprehension in Laura Robb’s book, says reviewer Linda Biondi.
