Animals Quoting Shakespeare. A tumblr featuring memes that pair quotes from Shakespearean plays with a variety of emotive animals.
Connecting With Nature education guide. The David Suzuki Foundation has put together this very useful and engaging set of lessons for grades four to six (many of the activities could easily be adapted to other age groups). The lessons focus on issues of sustainability, biodiversity, and how human actions impact the environment.
ArtsEdge: This is the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts' free digital resource for teaching and learning in, through, and about the arts.
Teaching Film in English Language Arts Classes. This website has plenty of resources for teachers interested in teaching "film as film" in an ELA classroom, rather than film as an adapted extension of a novel. The site provides information on film analysis, as well as resources for specific films that have proven successful in high school English classes.
Vancouver Biennale's BIG IDEAS Learning Resources
Online tools for classroom use:
Wordle: a tool for creating "word clouds" out of any text. Word clouds are visual representations of a text that display its most frequently used words. Just copy and paste your text into the box, then play around with the features to personalize (or randomize) your text's word cloud. This is a great tool to use in discussing the tone or thematic elements of a text.
Tagxedo: this a word cloud tool similar to Wordle but with some additional features. Here's an example of a Tagxedo I made using the lyrics to The Weakerthans' song "Plea From A Cat Named Virtute." As you can see from this example, one of the additional features is that you can change the shape of the word cloud -- in this case, rather fittingly into a cat.
Google Ngram Viewer: a graphing tool which uses Google's massive database of digitized books to graph the frequency of words or phrases chronologically from as early as the 16th century. You can compare the trends and frequencies of multiple words (antonyms and synonyms make especially interesting comparisons).
Poll Everywhere: a real-time polling website. Students can use their phones to text responses to a question on a poll. You can make graphs from closed response polls, or display real-time responses to open response polls. You can also change the settings so that responses must be approved before being displayed.
Connecting With Nature education guide. The David Suzuki Foundation has put together this very useful and engaging set of lessons for grades four to six (many of the activities could easily be adapted to other age groups). The lessons focus on issues of sustainability, biodiversity, and how human actions impact the environment.
ArtsEdge: This is the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts' free digital resource for teaching and learning in, through, and about the arts.
Teaching Film in English Language Arts Classes. This website has plenty of resources for teachers interested in teaching "film as film" in an ELA classroom, rather than film as an adapted extension of a novel. The site provides information on film analysis, as well as resources for specific films that have proven successful in high school English classes.
Vancouver Biennale's BIG IDEAS Learning Resources
Online tools for classroom use:
Wordle: a tool for creating "word clouds" out of any text. Word clouds are visual representations of a text that display its most frequently used words. Just copy and paste your text into the box, then play around with the features to personalize (or randomize) your text's word cloud. This is a great tool to use in discussing the tone or thematic elements of a text.
Tagxedo: this a word cloud tool similar to Wordle but with some additional features. Here's an example of a Tagxedo I made using the lyrics to The Weakerthans' song "Plea From A Cat Named Virtute." As you can see from this example, one of the additional features is that you can change the shape of the word cloud -- in this case, rather fittingly into a cat.
Google Ngram Viewer: a graphing tool which uses Google's massive database of digitized books to graph the frequency of words or phrases chronologically from as early as the 16th century. You can compare the trends and frequencies of multiple words (antonyms and synonyms make especially interesting comparisons).
Poll Everywhere: a real-time polling website. Students can use their phones to text responses to a question on a poll. You can make graphs from closed response polls, or display real-time responses to open response polls. You can also change the settings so that responses must be approved before being displayed.