EDSITEment offers a treasure
trove for teachers, students, and parents searching for high-quality
material on the Internet. All websites linked to EDSITEment have been
reviewed for content, design, and educational impact in the classroom.
EDSITEment is a partnership among the National Endowment for the Humanities,
the Council of the Great City Schools, MarcoPolo Foundation and the
National Trust for the Humanities.
PBS
Teacher Source: Arts & Literature
Go to the PBS Teacher
Source for lessons and activities -- arranged by topic and grade
level. PBS lessons and activities are carefully constructed and
integrate their many fine web sites and videos. Most lessons are
designed as video companions, but many do not require that you watch
the video to complete the lessons.
- Elie
Wiesel: First Person Singular: Listening
Students read Wiesel's book "Night" and learn how listening
is important to Jews and how it is a recurrent theme. They take
this information, and use it to discuss ways that the Holocaust
has been remembered and explained.
- Reclaiming
the Self: The Legacy of Slavery
Compare Twain's portrayal of slave life to the accounts in slave
narratives, and explore the meaning of freedom to African-Americans
through primary sources and poetry.
- Describing
the Real
How are historic, actual events or facts reconceived and recontextualized
through point of view, interpretation, and opinion? The non-fiction
essay, memoir, and epic will be explored through their visual
counterparts.
- Adapting
Shakespeare’s Classic
Research the era when Shakespeare lived, write and respond to
letters from the characters in ROMEO & JULIET, and write a
script for an opera.
- Oedipus
the King: Ancient Greek Drama
Read Sophocles' famous work and explore what it reveals about
ancient Greek culture.
- Comparing
Film Adaptations
View clips of the same Shakespeare scene in different film versions
in order to engage in close critical analysis and to compare interpretations
and visual styles.
- Images
of Othello: A Shakespearean WebQuest
Go on a WebQuest that includes textual references and on-line
searches for images of Othello in various forms. Have students
write an essay about the casting of Othello.
- Tolstoy:
Anna Karenina
Explore Russian society in the second half of the 19th century,
literary comparisons, the value of art, and the ideal of family.
- Allen
Ginsberg: Poetry and Politics
Read Ginsberg's poems, read about the work of other writers in
the Beat movement, and investigate the larger social and political
climate in which they lived.
- Truman
Capote: Other Voices, Other Rooms
Use Capote's autobiographical short story, "A Christmas Memory",
to teach a lesson on characterization in writing.
Yale-New
Haven Teacher's Institute: Curriculum Units
The Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute is an educational partnership
between Yale University and the New Haven Public Schools designed
to strengthen teaching and learning in local schools and, by example,
in schools across the country. Each participating teacher prepares
a curriculum unit and provide examples of ways in which teachers
have drawn material from Institute seminars for use in their own
school courses. ommendations of the school courses and grade levels
where the units may best apply.
Some units of interest:
Blue
Web'n: English
Blue Web'n is an online
library of 1800 + outstanding Internet sites categorized by subject,
grade level, and format (tools, references, lessons, hotlists, resources,
tutorials, activities, projects). You can search by grade level
(Refined Search), broad subject area (Content Areas), or specific
sub-categories (Subject Area).
TeachersFirst.com
Go
to Classroom Resources and click Content Matrix to find dozens of
quality lesson ideas for elementary, middle school, and high school
English courses. Many incorporate technology.
Creating
Poetry Videos
Students
make poetry come alive by creating a poetry video creates enjoyment
and an interest in poetry.
Creating
a Web Site with Resources for Teaching Shakespeare's Julius Caesar
"On
a Shakespeare message board, teachers discussed the difficulty of
helping today's high school students understand and enjoy Julius
Caesar. Because she's an avid Shakespeare enthusiast, Sheryl Hinman
decided that she could help. She and a few colleagues entered ThinkQuest
for Tomorrow's Teachers, a competition for educators to collaborate
in building academic sites. They worked for ten months to create
the site of their dreams. Sheryl describes what they did and how
they did it."
Virtual
Tour Teaching Guide: Black Like Me
This
Virtual Museum teacher's guide for grade 9-10 is designed as background
for Black Like Me by John Howard Griffin. It was developed
as part of the Schools of California Online Resources for Educators
(SCORE) Project, funded by the California Technology Assistance
Program (CTAP).
The
Biography Maker
Jamie
McKenzie has developed a WebQuest that takes students through the
stages of writing interesting biographies from Questioning through
to Presentation.
Figurative
Language
This
lesson focuses on identifying and creating similes, metaphors, and
personification in literature and in students' own writing. Included
are Notes on Figurative Language, Worksheet: Creating Figurative
Language, and Model of Homework Poem all in PDF format.
Emotion
or Reason
As
a result of this activity, students will be able to use persuasive
devices to construct an oral or written argument. Students discuss
the different types of persuasive devices that can be used in oral
and written arguments (e.g., appeal to logic, appeal to emotion,
personal anecdote, reference to commonly accepted beliefs, reference
to expert opinion, cause-and-effect reasoning, comparison-contrast
reasoning). Featured are online speeches by Martin Luther King and
Frederick Douglass.
Education
World: Revisiting Walden Pond in 2003
Educator
Kathleen Modenbach reflects on a list-making activity that helped
her students grasp Thoreau's sacrifices and appreciate his writing.
Included are cross-curricular activities to extend the lessons of
Walden Pond.
Every
Punctuation Mark Matters: A Mini-Lesson on Semicolons
This
lesson, designed for grades 6-8, uses "Letter from Birmingham
Jail" and online resources to explore to use of the semicolon.
Grammar
Review Using "Jabberwocky"
An
innovative activity to have students identify parts of speech. The
teacher will read the poem out loud from the web site http://www.jabberwocky.com/carroll/jabber/jabberwocky.html
while the students follow along on their computers.
Five
Quick Tips for Better Searching with Google
These
tips feature Google's
Advanced Search option:
1.
Use "Find Results" and avoid searching
for unwanted terms. For instance, if you are searching for materials
on Martin Luther, not Martin Luther King, add "king" to
the "without the words" text box.
2.
Search .edu and .org domains. Avoid extraneous
commercial sites and hone in on the educations materials you are
looking for quickly. To do so type .edu (or .org) in the "Domain"
text box and select "only". Note: You can also search
a specific web site exclusively by typing its URL in the domain
text box.
3.
View only web pages that have been updated recently.
Tired of running into web pages that are full of broken links because
they haven't been updated in years? Use the "Date" feature
on Google's Advanced Search to select web pages that have been updated
in the past three months, six months, or year. The more recently
a web page has been updated the less likely its links will be broken.
4.
Use the "File Format" option to find,
say, a PowerPoint on your topic. Use the File Format pull-down menus
and select "only" and "Microsoft PowerPoint."
5.
Find more relevant sites by searching within titles of web
page. If your keyword(s) is buried deep in a web page chances
are that page has little to do with your topic. Use the "Occurrences"
option and select "in the title of the page."
