Ronnie Burt, Sue Waters and Kathleen Morris write: "Enthusiasm is typically high when student blogs are first set up. Students often can’t wait to unleash their creativity and publish for an authentic audience on their own online space.

Sometimes when the initial excitement wears off, students start facing ‘bloggers’ block’ or get in a rut of writing the same style of post over and over (eg. ‘My favourite…’).

With a little guidance and encouragement, you can ensure your students reach their full potential as a writer, while extending themselves by exploring various genres and mediums.

This post aims to provide prompts to inspire you and your students for a whole year of blogging." 

Donalyn Miller writes: "I have no issue with assessing students' reading levels and identifying text complexity. As a teacher, I find such information helpful when determining my students' reading ability and what books might fit them. What concerns me is that in many situations, Lexile measures become the sole factor in book selection and recommendation.

While identifying readability can be useful when evaluating textbooks, guided reading texts, or other teaching materials, selecting books for classroom instruction and recommending books for independent reading are two different processes."

Jennifer Gonzalez writes: "Plagiarism can be a real pain. Most teachers have had to deal with it in some form or another, and a whole lot of you still haven’t quite figured out the best way to combat it. Many of us issue stern warnings and threaten serious, soul-crushing consequences. Others also use software to detect plagiarism.

While these methods can deter students from plagiarizing and catch them if they do, they operate on the assumption that all plagiarism is devious, that all students who plagiarize know exactly what they’re doing, and our mission is to catch and punish. Now because I don’t believe that assumption is true, I think we could be handling the problem with a lot more finesse."

From the CommonLit website: CommonLit delivers high-quality, free instructional materials to support literacy development for students in grades 5-12. Our resources are:

• Flexible;

• Research-Based;

• Aligned to the Common Core State Standards;

• Created by teachers, for teachers.

We believe in the transformative power of a great text, and a great question. That’s why we are committed to keeping CommonLit completely free, forever.

In this lesson, students will create an infographic to share knowledge and data about an issue or science topic they are studying.

The staff at TeachThought writes: "Critical thinking isn’t a skill, nor is it content knowledge or even evidence of understanding. While it involves and requires these ideas, critical thinking is also very much a state of mind — a willingness and tendency to sit with an idea and ‘struggle wonderfully’ with it." Photo by Tachina Lee on Unsplash

From DocsTeach: "We’re very excited about our first new activity tool since we launched DocsTeach almost seven years ago!

Create activities with the Analyzing Documents tool to teach students the process of document analysis:

• Meet the document.
• Observe its parts.
• Try to make sense of it.
• Use it as historical evidence."

One of the major goals of a language arts class is to help students communicate effectively. Educators often report wanting to help students develop voice in order to communicate verbally what they have learned. Unfortunately, many educators have trouble finding ways to incorporate this type of instruction into their lessons. Flipgrid is designed to do just that -- give students a fun and creative avenue to develop voice and provide educators with a simple way to integrate it in their classroom.

Photo: Avi Richards on unsplash.com