Dia de los Muertos

From VOA News, "Thousands of people took to the streets of Mexico City, Sunday, October 27, to dance beside giant skulls and skeletons, rolled out for the fourth edition of the Day of the Dead parade.
👉 Sunday's show featured enormous, brightly painted puppets in shapes like the Xoloitzcuintli, a hairless dog venerated by pre-Hispanic societies, and dancers decked out like skeletons moving to the sounds of marching bands.
Americans will celebrate Halloween on October 31, a tradition that dates back to an ancient Celtic festival in which it was believed the dead would return to haunt the living. Chances are, many of today’s trick-or-treaters will paint their faces like skulls, borrowing from an ancient Aztec tradition celebrated around the same time: Dia de los Muertos — the Day of the Dead. (VOA/AP)"

The Write Center

According to their website, "The WRITE Center, funded by ​the US Department of Education, Institute of Education Sciences, is a national center focused on researching and sharing best writing practices in secondary ELA and history classrooms.  The WRITE Center will pursue its goal of improving secondary students' source-based argument writing."

To see their website click here.

Actively Learn

According to Actively Learn "Texts (and videos!) for ELA, Science, and Social Studies with scaffolds and higher-order questions.  Find what you teach and great texts & videos to pair with it. Or add anything you like."

According to Edsurge.com, "Actively Learn is an online tool with a library of thousands of texts and Common Core-aligned lessons that both teachers and students can interact with in real-time. Teachers assign pre-existing Actively Learn materials to students or upload their own content, then track student responses and activity using the company’s data tools. Students can interact with a text by digitally highlighting and annotating, responding to embedded questions and content, and leaving feedback and comments for peers."

 To see the website click here.

Poetry Knowledge Organizer

If you are teaching poetry here is a nice handout (thanks Stuart Pryke) for your students or you can use as slide in class.  To see the organizer click here.

Is it down?

If you have students in the library commons computer lab and a student says that the webpage is not working you can easily check by copying the URL of the webpage by highlighting it and hit "Ctrl c" and then pasting it in ( use "Ctrl v") in the website "Down For Everyone or Just Me" by clicking here.  Hopefully the website is working.

200 Word Creative Writing Challenges

If you would like some creative writing challenges for your students then we have some for you.  There is a folder with 9 of them.  Thanks to Matt Lynch for pointing this out on twitter.  To see the folder click here.

Mr Barton Maths

Mr Barton Maths is a website that has many useful resources, podcasts, links and more.  If you are teaching math you might want to click here.

English-Spanish Vocabulary Quizzes

This site has quizzes to help you learn and review vocabulary in your Spanish class.  To see the website click here.

What causes an economic recession?

If you are teaching a course in economics, business or similar you might want to use this Ted Ed lesson on recession.  According to their website, "For millennia, the people of Britain had been using bronze to make tools and jewelry, and as a currency for trade. But around 800 BCE, that began to change: the value of bronze declined, causing social upheaval and an economic crisis— what we would call a recession today. So what causes recessions? Richard Coffin digs into the economic fluctuations that affect our modern markets."  To see the website click here.

Fishbowl

Fishbowl is a discussion forum that teachers can anonymously chat about educational issues.  Too see their website click here.

SmartHistory and Art

Smarthistory believes that:

art has the power to transform lives and build understanding across cultures. We believe that the brilliant histories of art belong to everyone, no matter their background.

Art connects us to the world; it allows us to imagine, to create, to build and to inspire, and it shouldn’t be locked up in a textbook. Smarthistory takes you inside museums and outside to ancient temples and brings you into conversations about how to interpret and understand the images you’re seeing.

Now more than ever we need understanding, rigorous analysis, and nuance, and art teaches the critical thinking needed to better comprehend current events and their cultural and historical context.

Smarthistory is the window through which to learn about today’s biggest clash points: we interrogate faith, class, race, gender, and power through a study of art and objects from ancient times until the present. We help learners navigate their world by teaching the skills of interpretation and judgement to help them make meaning of the world around them.

To see the website click here.

Inquiry-Based Teaching

According to Education Week, "Introducing math and science through inquiry and problem-based instruction can pay off throughout elementary school, according to a massive international series of studies."  To read the article click here.

8 Ways to Help ELL Read and Write

Larry Ferlazzo writes about the conditions needed  to promote reading and writing for ELL students.  To see the article click here.

How Much Warmer is Your City

This website will graphically show you some historical data of a major city near you and then some different scenarios of the future.  To see the website, click here.

Flippity

If you use google spreadsheets you can easily turn them into flashcards, crossword puzzles,  Jeopardy, scavenger hunt and many more.  If you don't use google spreadsheet there is still away to do all this just look near the bottom of their website.  To see the website click here.

Animal Endangerment Map

From their website, "Click on a country to see the species that are currently extinct, endangered and vulnerable, as well as a breakdown split by taxonomic class. Each country is shaded to reflect the current level of endangerment, highlighting the locations which have experienced the largest population decline over the past ten years and identifying the current most endangered species in select countries."

To see the website click here.

Edgar Allan Poe, The Raven, The Simpson and Halloween

With Halloween coming up, I always think of E.A.P. and The Raven.  To see what I posted previously about him click here.  I also love to look at Homer's version of The Raven.  See below.

TED ED has a video on E.A.P. see below 

Essay for hire

If you talk about plagiarism in your classroom, you might want to read this article about essay writing for hire.  To read the article click here.

Read Works Student Library

Read Works is a great educational site.  Recently students have now been allowed to choose what they wanted to read as opposed to teachers assigning them.  To see the website click here.

Edpuzzle

According to Common Sense Education, "EdPuzzle is the perfect tool for allowing students to watch and engage with videos while the teacher gathers data throughout the lesson. As teachers dabble into the flipped classroom philosophy, EdPuzzle is the perfect enhancement tool for videos to be watched at home instead of eating up valuable class time. EdPuzzle allows you to take a video from Youtube, Kahn Academy, Learn Zillion, Crash Course or you can upload your own video and manipulate the portion that you need. Once you have uploaded the video you can crop the video to remove or shorten the video to be an appropriate length for the lesson you are teaching. The teacher then has the capability to record their voice on top of the video, allowing the teacher to maintain a voice in the lesson. The quiz feature allows you to embed questions as students are watching the video. On the teacher account you can see the progress that the student has made on the questions and the amount of time the student has taken to complete the lesson. Teachers can also place restrictions on the video, so students can not fast forward through the video. Videos can be easily embedded onto learning management systems such as Edmodo, Schoology, Moodle, etc. From the start to finish EdPuzzle is extremely user-friendly. Once the video is uploaded the features are simple and very easy to use. You can enhance your videos with just a few simple touches or embed many questions and voiceovers throughout the video. I would suggest using the audio voiceover at least once because students respond positively to hearing your voice in the video. The company is very responsive and if you have questions they do respond very quickly through email and Twitter."

To see the website click here.

Most Popular Tourist Destination

If you are teaching a Travel and Tourism class maybe this video might be of some use to you.

Timeline JS

This is a repost from the last school year but I thought you might want to use Timeline JS.  In your Social Studies class (or others), you might want to make a timeline.  Timeline JS is an excellent tool that you might want to use.  See the  embedded video below.   To see the website click here.

How to Use TimelineJS from Northwestern U. Knight Lab on Vimeo.

snackvids - transcribe a youtube video

From this website you can type in a key word and the url of the video and it will search for that key word in the video for you.  You can also have it make a searchable transcript of the whole video too.  To see the site click here.  See the video below from Richard Byrne about using this site.