Literacy


 * Literacy** toc

[|English Online ICT Strategies] includes a link to[| e-learning as Inquiry.] Very useful!

Reading Resources
[|10 Technology Enhanced Alternatives to Book Reports] The most dreaded word in school reading for students: book reports. Teachers assign them, viewing them as a necessary component of assessing reading comprehension. Book reports can be a contributing factor to ‘readicide’. “Read-i-cide n: The systematic killing of the love of reading, often exacerbated by the inane, mind-numbing practices found in schools.” http://stenhouse.com/html/readicide.htm. So, how can we as teachers continue to monitor our students understanding of reading material without killing the love of reading? Enter technology. Technology can help bring some excitement and creativity to the traditional book report while still displaying students understanding of reading. Welcome to [|Guys Read, a web-based literacy program for boys]. Our mission is to help boys become self-motivated, lifelong readers. Text based adventure stories on [|Adventure Island] - follow other adventures or write your own! [|Welcome to YUDU] Explore the YUDU library to read online magazines, free eBooks and other digital content. Browse thousands of free digital magazines or buy your favourite titles in the YUDU Store. Self publish your own digital magazines, eBooks, digital brochures and more with our free publisher software. Simply upload your PDFs and other documents to create search engine friendly page-turning publications that can be added to your website or sent out on email. Create your own personalised library to store and share your digital magazines and other content. [|Make books your way!] Share with the world. [] A fantastic site for Junior Team Teachers or for children with difficulties in reading. [|How does BookTalks work?] We help New Zealand Authors and Illustrators connect with their readers via Skype. [|Bookseer] Finished reading a book? Want suggestions as to your next book? Enter title and author and you will be provided with a list of suggested books! [|Storyplace] The Children's Digital Library [|Reading Rewards] Welcome to Reading Rewards! The fun, new reading incentive program for kids that can be used at home or as a teaching tool in the classroom! How does it work? It's simple. Kids accumulate 'RR' Miles on the site, which they can exchange for fun and sometimes silly things on the site: joke of the day, video of the day (always safe, kid-friendly videos our editors find), mini-games, and more. We even have an RR Store where kids can spend their miles and buy real stuff! Parents or other sponsors can contribute to the store and add their very own rewards for their kids. How do they accumulate RR Miles? By reading, and telling us what and how much they read! They'll get bonuses for reviewing their books, and making recommendations to friends. [|Smories.com] Smories are free original stories for kids, read by kids. 50 added every month. Submit yours! [|Story Online] The StoryLineOnline.net website is a project funded by Screen Actors Foundation which hosts online videos where children books read by professional actors and famous people. There are currently 22 videos featuring popular children books. Each video can be watched in full screen, includes subtitles and comes with additional activities. [|Storybook Web] Storybook Web is “based on popular children’s stories by authors Scoular Anderson, Debi Gliori, Mairi Hedderwick and Frank Rodgers.” There are a number of fun activities on this site including the ability to listen to the author’s reading excerpts from their stories and answering questions about how they came up with ideas for writing. Students can choose from one of eight stories, each story has a related game, word bank activity, and videos/audio for reading the story and interacting with the author. [|Skim Reading] Teaching children to skim read is a fantastic skill. This site will assist them in skimming to find key information from various texts. With leveled readings and different text types, this site will offer something to everyone of your students. It is great to interact with and has easy to read worksheets attached to all of the readings. [|Scanning] The aim of the 'Scanning' topic area is to help learners understand and practise the reading technique of scanning. This will help them find key information such as dates, names etc in texts quickly without having to read them in careful detail. [|Book Trailers For Readers] Creating book trailers is a great alternative to having students write boring book reports.This wiki features dozens of book previews and book reviews produced by students for students. There's also a section of book trailers featuring the books that teachers loved when they were growing-up. [|How to Make A Book Trailer.] [|Book Trailers - Movies for Literacy:]This page represents the beginning of a website of short movies (generally 30 to 45 seconds) designed to increase student motivation to READ [|Vook] A vook is a new innovation in reading that blends a well-written book, high-quality video and the power of the Internet into a single, complete story. You can read your book, watch videos that enhance the story and connect with authors and your friends through social media all on one screen, without switching between platforms. Vooks are available in two formats: As a web-based application you can read on your computer and an application for iPhone, iPod touch and iPad for reading on the go. [|The Best Places To Read & Write “Choose Your Own Adventure” Stories] In the early days of computers, text based adventure games were very common. Here's a resource site with many different links. "A key concept that’s important for students to learn is the importance of engaging with the text — not just being a passive reader. There are obviously many effective instructional strategies to help them practice that lesson. One pretty explicit way is for them to have access to reading “choose your own adventure” stories where they are periodically given choices of what they want characters to do, and then participate in the construction of the story itself. The Goosebumps series of books is a well-known example of this genre. In the world of English Language Learner teaching, these kinds of stories are also called Action Mazes." [|Suessville] —the official home of Dr. Seuss on the Web—is the place for children of all ages to play and learn with Dr. Seuss’s wonderfully whimsical books and classic characters. The Cat in the Hat, Green Eggs and Ham, Oh, the Places You’ll Go! and all of the Dr. Seuss books leap to life through interactive games and activities that will enrich each child’s reading experience. [|Tales from the Glovebox: The Magic Library]was created to foster a love of reading and an appreciation for stories and books. This initiative is aimed at pupils aged 7-11 and supports Art, Music, Literacy, and ICT. [|The Readability Test Tool]. The Readability Test Tool provides a quick and easy way to test the readability of your work. You can test all, or part of a web page, or simply type/paste in your text. Link directly from your page - it will compute the results for the referring page and provide a suggested reading age.
 * Book Trailers**

Word Clouds
Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends. [] [|Ultimate Guide to Wordle for Educators] [|Top Ten Ways to Use Wordle in the Classroom] [|Forty-seven Interesting Ways to Use Wordle] [|A really useful Wordle trick] [|Welcome to Tagxedo], tag cloud with styles (like Wordle but better?) [|Tagul is a free word cloud generator] that offers one clear difference compared to other word cloud generators like Wordle. The difference between Wordle and Tagul is when you create a word cloud with Tagul, every word in your word cloud is linked to a Google search. Click on any word in your word cloud to be taken directly to a Google search results page for that word. Tagul creates a word cloud from text you copy into your Tagul account. Tagul will also generate a word cloud from any url you specify. Just as you can with other word cloud generators, Tagul allows you to specify words to ignore in creating your word clouds. Once your word cloud is created Tagul provides you with an embed code to put your cloud on your blog or website. Once it has made your word cloud, [|WordSift invites you to sort your words in different ways.] Also, once you have your word cloud, you can click on the individual words and WordSift will show you Google images for that word and you can also see that word in a Visual Thesaurus. The Google images part works for text in other languages, but the Thesaurus does not. Simply enter some text and [|create your word cloud] - an attractive arrangement of randomly positioned words, where the most important words are bigger than the others. Some people use them to summarise documents, reports or even answers to questionnaires. Others simply think they look nice as pieces of art. Teachers can make lessons more fun with them too. It's up to you: the possibilities are endless..
 * Wordle**
 * Tagxedo**
 * Tagul**
 * WordSift**
 * WordItOut **

Concordle
From Innes Kennard: "You have used Wordle and heard of clouds. - they also use foggy. A different way to search blocks of text and it will analyse quite large blocks. Clicking on the concords (new word for the day) brings up the context." [|VocabGrabber] analyzes any text you're interested in, generating lists of the most useful vocabulary words and showing you how those words are used in context. Just copy text from a document and paste it into the box, and then click on the "Grab Vocabulary!" button. VocabGrabber will automatically create a list of vocabulary from your text, which you can then sort, filter, and save. Select any word on the list and you'll see a snapshot of the Visual Thesaurus map and definitions for that word, along with examples of the word in your text
 * VocabGrabber**

**Building stories**
You can develop your own online passages [|using this link]k. At this stage you can't save your work however if you use it and like it send an email to the author j.davis.mac.com and tell him how much you are looking forward to being able to author and save your stories. [|My StoryMaker:] Can a lion share a cupcake with an astronaut? What happens when a pirate meets a fox in the woods? You have the power to decide -- meeting new characters, going on great adventures and creating your very own story along the way. My StoryMaker lets you control characters and objects - and creates sentences for you! Once you are done with your story, you can print it out.

Synonyms & Antonym Finder
[|Speak and write with confidence] - to help you avoid using the same word too repetitively, redundantly, recurrently, incessantly, etc., etc. [|Visuwords™ online graphical dictionary] — Look up words to find their meanings and associations with other words and concepts. Produce diagrams reminiscent of a neural net. Learn how words associate. Enter words into the search box to look them up or double-click a node to expand the tree. Click and drag the background to pan around and use the mouse wheel to zoom. Hover over nodes to see the definition and click and drag individual nodes to move them around to help clarify connections. • It's a dictionary! It's a thesaurus! • Great for writers, journalists, students, teachers, and artists.

**Dorothy Burt - GoogleFest**
Dorothy's notes from the GoogleFest Breakout. This discusses the use of Google Documents and other tools in your learning programmes. Well worth exploring! [] **50+ Ways to Create Digital Stories with Students** [|Creating stories using web tools] is fun and engaging for student while also teaching them new skills. Best of all you can embed them in blog posts to grab readers; including something a bit different makes reading posts more interesting.

**Weboword**
Sometimes learning vocabulary can be tough for students who are more of a visual learner. [|Weboword] is a great tool for those students who prefer learning through images.

Save The Words
[|A very innovative site for older learners] - great for extending vocabulary. You need to check this out as it's impossible to describe!

Secrets for Getting Students Excited About Writing.
Good article that shows the usefulness of blogs, wikis etc. Source: [|The Innovative Educator] media type="custom" key="6778995"

Recreational Writing
[|Thoughtful blog post from Luke Sumich, Summerland School.] media type="custom" key="6950123"

Interactive Web Activities.
Engage your students in online literacy learning with these[| interactive tools that help them accomplish a variety of goals]—from organizing their thoughts to learning about language—all while having fun.

**Writing For The Web:**
[|Tips & Common Mistakes We Make]

[|Using text organisers] to assist children with the writing process

Grammar Rock
This one is about Adjectives but there are a number of other choices - good items to embed in blogs. media type="youtube" key="mYzGLzFuwxI" height="385" width="480"

Pic-Lits
[|Pic-Lits is a very simple site] that has a bank of images for teachers to use to stimulate different styles of writing as well as a drag and drop bank of words you can select with with your students to describe what is happening in the pictur,e or just associate basic text related to the image. How can I use this in the Classroom? Pic-Lits would be great for snapshot writing sessions when you want your students to extend their vocabulary by using nuns, verbs, adverbs and adjectives. Simply show them a picture then as a group select words you would like to see included with a related writing task and let them go to it. Students could work through this process about 4 times in an hour depending upon their enthusiasm and ability.

Online Diaries and Journals
[|Daileez] Write your diary in a new way and express your life with icons, short summaries and status reports.

English Parts of Speech
[|Great site that provides cloze exercises] focussing on selected parts of speech, e.g., verbs, adjectives, etc. [|Virtual Language Centre] - wide range of online activities.

Notapipe
[|notapipe.net is a web service] that allows you to edit text files in a realtime collaborative environment, from everywhere multiple users can edit the same document simultaneously and changes are near instantly dispatched to every connected user. Enjoy a new productive way of working together on the same text.

Cloze Test Creator
[|Paste in text, select options and hey presto, there's your cloze exercise!]

Online Games
[|Language Arts Games]

Telescopic Text
[|Innovative way to expand a simple sentence into a complex paragraph.]

Create Your Own Newspaper/Magazine
Try [|this] and [|this]. [|Youblisher] This is a real goodie! Upload a selection of pdf files and Youblisher publishes them as a booklet on screen. Well worth investigating. [|Openzine] OpenZine is a publishing platform with web browser based tools that provides an easy way for anyone to make their own magazine, for free.

Comics
[|Strategies for using comics in the classroom] The comic making process offer many learning opportunities and can provide an effective learning and teaching tool.

21st Century Literacies
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Digital Storytelling
[|Digital Storytelling is the practice of telling stories w/ computer tools]. Wikipedia explains teachers use digital storytelling for several reasons such as,"1) to incorporate multimedia into their curriculum and 2) Teachers can also introduce storytelling in combination with social networking in order to increase global participation, collaboration, and communication skills. Moreover, digital storytelling is a way to incorporate and teach the twenty-first century student the twenty-first century technology skills such as information literacy, visual literacy, global awareness, communication and technology literacy." [|Digitales - The Art of Telling Digital Stories] Digital Storytelling takes the ancient art of oral storytelling and engages a palette of technical tools to weave personal tales using images, graphics, music and sound mixed together with the author's own story voice. Digital storytelling is an emerging art form of personal, heartful expression that enables individuals and communities to reclaim their personal cultures while exploring their artistic creativity. While the heart and power of the digital story is shaping a personal digital story about self, family, ideas, or experiences, the technology tools also invite writers and artists to think and invent new types of communication outside the realm of traditional linear narratives. [|Kerpoof].The Kerpoof website is owned and operated by the Walt Disney Company. What is Kerpoof? The answer to that is not so simple. Kerpoof is all about having fun, discovering things, and being creative. Here are just a few ways that you can use Kerpoof: Check out our What's New and How-To pages to learn more about what you can do with Kerpoof. Kerpoof doesn't come with a manual or a directory or a map. If we've done our job right, then finding your way to the various nooks and crannies of Kerpoof will be half the fun. In addition to being a lot of fun, Kerpoof has many educational uses. Visit our educator page (with ideas and lesson plans for how to use Kerpoof) or read our flyer for educators if you are in a hurry but want to learn more. [|Myths and Legends.] "Myths and Legends is an awesome, free, online digital story telling website. The story creator lets students combine pictures that they compose with clip art or images that they upload, sound, and words to create a digital story. The stories can be saved, printed, and shared. Students can record themselves reading the story aloud and even add video. " Read more here:[| ilearntechnology] [|Shidonni:] " Shidonni is an imaginary world that kids create. It provides a virtual universe where kids can create their own imaginary world, play, and share games and interact with each other in a safe environment online. Kids can create their own animals or characters online and make them interactive." This looks rather interesting! Much more detail here:[| ilearntechnology]
 * Make artwork (even if you aren't good at drawing!)
 * Make an animated movie (really! it's easy!)
 * Earn Koins which you can trade for fun things in the Kerpoof Store
 * Make a printed card, t-shirt, or mug
 * Tell a story
 * Make a drawing
 * Vote on the movies, stories, and drawings that other people have made

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