NARRABLE
Online tool for story creation
HOW TO USE SEMICOLON BY OATMEAL
INTERNATIONAL CHILDREN ONLINE LIBRARY
Provides free access to high-quality children’s books from around the world in different languages, including Arabic, Afrikaans, Danish, English, Farsi and beyond. Hosts books for kids 3-5, 6-9, and 10-13.
REACH OUT AND READ
Reach Out and Read is an evidence-based nonprofit organization that promotes early literacy and school readiness in pediatric exam rooms nationwide by giving new books to children and advice to parents about the importance of reading aloud. Resurces on audio books.
AIC LESSONS - primary resources
America in Class (AIC) Lessons, from the National Humanities Center, are tailored to meet the Common Core State Standards. The lessons present challenging primary resources in a classroom-ready format, with background information and analytical strategies that enable teachers and students to subject texts and images to the close reading called for in the standards. Each AIC lesson is built around a framing question, an essential understanding and a single primary resource or a small manageable set of resources. A background note illuminates and contextualizes the material, and another note offers teaching advice. Each lesson culminates with key passages and analytical questions through which teachers can lead students to the essential understanding, and each concludes with a follow-up assessment. AIC lessons are web based and optimized for mobile devices.
MEDIA LITERACY CLEARINGHOUSE
MLC's mission is to assist K-12 educators who want to:
- teach standards that include non-print, media texts
- learn more about media literacy
- integrate it into classroom instruction
- help students read the media
- help students become more media aware
- locate appropriate resources
- teach standards that include non-print, media texts
- learn more about media literacy
- integrate it into classroom instruction
- help students read the media
- help students become more media aware
- locate appropriate resources
BRAINY VISUAL DICTIONARY
Got Brainy is a visual dictionary that features two sections: Brainy Pics and Brainy Flix. Brainy Pics is comprised of images that demonstrate the meaning of a word; most of the pictures are submitted by students. Brainy Flix is comprised of short videos that illustrate the meaning of words. Like Brainy Pics, most of the videos are submitted by students.
BRAINY EXAMPLE
zealous
Clearly, little Webster is overly zealous about coloring.
Clearly, little Webster is overly zealous about coloring.
BOOM WRITER
BoomWriter is a supremely engaging creative writing website that has students reading, writing and assessing content in ways they’ve never done before! It's easy & it's free.Teacher register classes and use the tool totally free.
- The teacher selects or produces his or her own story start, and the students let their imagination and writing skills take over.
- One chapter at a time, the students write, read, and then vote on the submissions they like the most. The winning chapter is then added to the story and the process continues.
- The teacher determines the total number of chapters to be completed, and when the competition is over a new book is ready to be published.
Lit2Go
Lit2Go is a free online collection of stories and poems in Mp3 (audiobook) format. An abstract, citation, playing time, and word count are given for each of the passages. Many of the passages also have a related reading strategy identified. Each reading passage can also be downloaded as a PDF and printed for use as a read-along or as supplemental reading material for your classroom
STORYLINE ONLINE
Storyline Online is a collection of video recordings of children’s stories being read by notable actors and actresses. Each video has a short introduction by the actor and then transitions to the reading of the story. Students can follow along with the pictures and words of the story. Along with each video, you’ll find a set of online and offline activities to support use of the story in your classroom. Storyline Online is a production of the Screen Actors Guild Foundation.
STORYBIRD
Art inspired stories that can be printed out.
WHAT MAKES A GREAT SPEECH
President Ronald Reagan was known as the Great Communicator. But what goes on behind the scenes in making a great speech? In the Great Communicator Files, students can explore the primary sources from the speech files from three of President Reagan’s most famous speeches: Pointe du Hoc and Remarks at Omaha Beach, both World War II commemorative speeches, and his address to the nation after the Space Shuttle Challenger explosion. Free, downloadable Teacher Resources and Documents focus on the speech-making and speech-writing process. Hard copies of the speeches, along with a DVD of President Reagan giving the speeches, are available on request.
WORD SIFT
WordSift was created to help teachers manage the demands of vocabulary and academic language in their text materials.Creative teachers will find an endless variety of uses for WordSift, but here are some ways:
Lesson preparation: A teacher can use WordSift to review assigned text to identify challenging words or concepts prior to a lesson, and identify images and videos to use in class. The videos (hidden but displayed by hitting “>Video”) can be especially useful in the preview function since many schools do not allow access to YouTube, but a teacher can download useful videos (such as a science lab demonstration) onto his or her laptop computer from home.
Previewing text: In whole class or individually, students can preview text. Reading comprehension research suggests that previewing text is a useful strategy for improving comprehension. Using WordSift to identify the key vocabulary, and playing with the images and to use the example source sentence feature to “skim” the text can help students who might otherwise struggle with the complexity of the text.
Group activities: Teachers have found simple activities using small portions of WordSift useful. For example, one teacher has developed a simple routine in which she gives students the TagCloud, and has them working in small groups to write or draw a page using the words in the cloud. Another possibility would be to take the Visual Thesaurus® display of a word web and have students identify and discuss related words.
Literacy support: Individual students can use WordSift as they read text, or as they write a response or summary. Adult users of WordSift have reported using WordSift for their own purposes to skim text (as one teacher said, “I don’t skim, I sift”) and also to review their own writing drafts. The creator of WordSift, Kenji Hakuta, uses it to preview and scout around documents that promise to be boring, such as long education policy documents, clicking on key words.
Assessment: Whole-class vocabulary assessment can be done on-the-fly by showing the images from selected words, having them identify unfamiliar words, and having students talk about which picture is the best representation of a given word. Teachers can also tailor their own assessments by copying and pasting the images, words, and sentences identified by WordSift into a separate file (such as in Word or Powerpoint) and printing it out for student work.
ANIMAL ALPHABET
Alphabetimals is an interactive online flipbook featuring animal sounds and the pronunciations of animal names. The Alphabetimals characters can spell out any word that you would like. Just type the word in the word box, and it will appear as alphabet animals, which you can print out and use as flashcards. Also, on the Alphabetimals Facebook page, you’ll find free cutout flashcards and an alphabet poster, which you can download and print. HAS APP
ZOOBURST 3D STORIES
ZooBurst is a digital storytelling tool that lets anyone easily create his or her own 3-D pop-up books. Using ZooBurst, storytellers of any age can create their own rich worlds in which their stories come to life. ZooBurst books “live” online and can be experienced using nothing more than a web browser running the Adobe Flash plug-in. Authors can arrange characters and props within a 3-D world that can be customized using uploaded artwork or items found in a built-in database of more than 10,000 free images and materials. Once constructed, books can be inspected from any angle from within a 3-D space. In addition, authors can choose to make items “clickable,” allowing readers to learn more about individual characters within a story. Each character can have its own “chat bubble” that pops up when that character is clicked. Authors can also record their own voices using the ZooBurst audio recorder to have their characters really speak when clicked. A classroom management feature lets teachers set up protected, safe spaces for their students. Teachers can assign usernames and passwords to their students without having to input any sensitive or personal information and can manage and moderate student work in a protected environment.