Dianne Krause's List: English Resources

"Booktrack is transforming reading the way sound transformed silent film.  

Booktrack is delivering an innovative and engaging experience for today's generation of digital-savvy students, providing new ways for students to study and enjoy reading and writing. Booktrack Classroom is an exciting new technology that synchronizes audio with text to create an immersive reading experience. Stories and essays published with Booktrack include a customized, movie-style soundtrack that complements the story. Students can create Booktracks for their own writing and create a soundtrack from over 20,000 professional-quality audio files and share it with their classmates to read.

Funded by investors including Peter Thiel (co-founder and former CEO of PayPal), Booktrack will change the way people read, write, and publish their stories."

Thanks to the Wizengamot, the British and American Ministry of Magics and a handful of tech-friendly professors from Hogwarts School of Witchcraft & Wizardry , a Hogwarts education has now become available online to all aspiring witches and wizards.
You are now able to enroll at Hogwarts, collect your textbooks and begin taking our 9-week courses online. You can now progress through all seven years of schooling and be assigned a professor, homework assignments, quizzes and more.

This is a tutorial on properly formatting an MLA document in Google Docs.

"Let's consider some activities that allow a student to show understanding of a
book and that might be enjoyable. This selection of activities is also intended
to meet the needs of different kinds of learners -- or to contribute to the
development of skills beyond writing. I often allowed students choice in
deciding how they wanted to respond to a book -- they could choose from a list
like the one below."

Nice collection of LA rubrics

Nice collection of free audiobooks.

Word Tamer is a neat site for learning the process of developing characters, settings, and plots in creative writing. Word Tamer is set up as an interactive journey through a carnival of literary devices. As students move through the carnival they develop characters, develop a setting, and develop a plot for their stories. At each stop in the Word Tamer carnival students can print out the words they have written. Along the way there are videos to help students understand the roles of characters, settings, and plot development in crafting a good story.

A great wiki chocked full of resources for literacy in education including:  Brain based learning, comprehension strategies & lessons, independent reading, lesson design, videos, word study, writing lessons, written response lessons, vocabulary and more!

64 Interesting Ideas* for Class Blog Posts

Buzzwords are frequently used in news media. These are words that do not typically occur in everyday speech, but are common among newscasters, talking heads, and pundits on cable news.

The Visual Thesaurus is an interactive dictionary and thesaurus which creates word maps that blossom with meanings and branch to related words. Its innovative display encourages exploration and learning. You'll understand language in a powerful new way.

The Biography Maker is like those homework machines we have been hearing about for many years. It is designed to help you convert facts into insights, dull and boring information into fascination and magic. It will help you do a good job, but you must provide some of the "steam" to make it work well.

The Biography Maker is meant to inspire lively story telling and vivid writing which will make your readers want to know more about your subject.

Instant Poetry forms.. enter your own information and a poem is formed. A lot of different options!

"With Myfakewall.com you can easily create fake profile pages just for fun. This fake facebook wall generator allows you to create a funny profile to entertain your friends. Create it, and share it on Facebook !"

"Whether you’re writing a paper or studying for a test, odds are you spend more time gathering the pieces than actually working. In my experience, getting all of my notes together, hunting for quotes, and tracking down bibliographical information takes at least as long, if not longer, as writing the paper itself.

In a group situation, sharing research and collaborating on the production of one document is even more difficult without the proper tools.

Enter Evernote. For students, it’s an invaluable way to organize research and streamline the collaboration process. Here are some examples of how Evernote simplifies the student research process."

This is the front page of the Simple English Wikipedia. Wikipedias are places where people work together to write encyclopedias in different languages. We use Simple English words and grammar here. The Simple English Wikipedia is for everyone! That includes children and adults who are learning English.
There are 67,234 articles on the Simple English Wikipedia. All of the pages are free to use. They have all been published under both the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License 3.0 and the GNU Free Documentation License. You can help here! You may change these pages and make new pages. Read the help pages and other good pages to learn how to write pages here. If you need help, you may ask questions at Simple talk.

Through the great folks in the Google Certified Teachers community I've learned that you can now sort your search results by readability. The readability index is a bit coarse, but it is helpful none-the-less. The index use a simple ranking of "basic," "intermediate," and "advanced." In order to sort by readability you have to open the advanced search tools then select "reading level" from the drop-down menus.

"Figment is a community where you can share your writing, connect with other readers, and discover new stories and authors. Whatever you're into, from sonnets to mysteries, from sci-fi stories to cell phone novels, you can find it all here."

"Welcome to whichbook.net - a completely
new way of choosing what to read"

"The report found that the use of Web 2.0 tools such as blogs, podcasts, wikis, and comics-creating software can heighten students’ engagement and enhance their writing and thinking skills in all grade levels and across all subjects."