Middle School English and Reading

Thanks to Larry Ferlazzo for sharing this resource! ImageQuiz is a fantastic new website that lets users create image-based quizzes with ease. Just upload your image, choose a title, and begin tagg...

Step by step instructions on how to read for meaning using Robert Newton's 'Runner' as an example. With thanks to Lisa McNeice.

From Khan Academy to Haiku Deck, there's more than a dozen apps and tools you should give a whirl this year. The post The 16 Apps And Tools Worth Trying This Year appeared first on Edudemic.

"How To Do Research" game is presented by Kentucky Virtual Library. It's designed for kids to learn how to do research independently with kids-friendly user experience. Did you know that you can ac...

AwesomeStories is a gathering place of primary-source information. Its purpose - since the site was first launched in 1999 - is to help educators and individuals find original sources, located at national archives, libraries, universities, museums, historical societies and government-created web sites.

Sources held in archives, which document so much important first-hand information, are often not searchable by popular search engines. One needs to search within those institutional sites directly, using specific search phrases not readily discernible to non-scholars. The experience can be frustrating, resulting in researchers leaving key sites without finding needed information.

AwesomeStories is about primary sources. The stories exist as a way to place original materials in context and to hold those links together in an interesting, cohesive way (thereby encouraging people to look at them). It is a totally different kind of web site in that its purpose is to place primary sources at the forefront - not the opinions of a writer. Its objective is to take the site's users to places where those primary sources are located. 

"Good assessment is frequent assessment.

Any assessment is designed to provide a snapshot of student understand—the more snapshots, the more complete the full picture of knowledge.

On its best day, an assessment will be 100% effective, telling you exactly what a student understands. More commonly, the return will be significantly lower as the wording of questions, the student’s sense of self-efficacy, or other factors diminish their assessment performance. It sounds obvious, but a student is a human being with an entire universe of personal problems, distraction, and related challenges in recalling the information in the form the assessment demands.

This makes a strong argument for frequent assessment, as it can be too easy to over-react and “remediate” students who may be banging against the limits of the assessment’s design rather than their own understanding. Rather than re-teaching, sometimes all that is necessary is re-measuring."