Clippings: 1.21.10

New research is shedding light on Broca's area, a center of reading activity in the brain.

Braille is being replaced by technology that many consider far superior.

Grow Up With Books offers Netflix-style children's book rentals.

Researchers in the UK argue that "textisms" such as LOL might bolster phonemic awareness, and thus general reading ability.

Numerous studies are decrying the death of recess in American primary schools.

Babelhut discusses the literacy benefits of learning to cook.

And Free.edu lists their 100 Best Education Blogs of 2009.

(Illustration by Flickr user Labguest. Thanks!)

Clippings: 1.14.10

A National Literacy Trust (UK) survey showed that students' online technology use "drives their enthusiasm" for other kinds of writing.

Literacy Toolbox is a great place to find literacy games and activities. For example, here's a list of online literacy games for pre-readers.

ProProfs provides a free online flashcard-maker. Not perfect, but pretty cool.

The Economist reports that the Harry Potter books have been an economic stimulus package all by themselves. (Hat tip to Jen Robinson's Book Page and Omnivoracious.)

SEDL provides an interactive Cognitive Framework for learning to read. This is a stellar graphic - it would be perfect if people could embed it (hint).

And finally, the video of the week: Everything's Amazing And Nobody's Happy by comedian Louis C K.

(Picture courtesy of Flickr user Archigeek. Thanks!)

Notes: Dr. Ginger Campbell Interviews Dr. Maryanne Wolf

As I mentioned the other day, I'm immersed (now in my second reading) in Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain. The author, Dr. Maryanne Wolf is the director of The Center for Reading and Language Research at Tufts University.

Anyone who loves reading or is passionate about helping others learn to read will find this book riveting. Among other things, Wolf sets out to tell us about the development of different writing systems over time, how the human brain "rearranges itself" to make reading possible, and what happens in the brains of those who have difficulty learning to read.

A search for interviews of Dr. Wolf led me to the Brain Science Podcast, which is conducted by Dr. Ginger Campbell, an emergency physician who has been blogging about brain science since 2006. I first listened to Podcast #24 which, over the course of about an hour, concentrates on some of the main ideas of Proust and the Squid. I would recommend it for those who do not intend to read the book or who need a refresher.

This morning, I listened to Campbell's interview of Wolf. Both are quite engaging (Wolf's voice reminds me, in a way that reveals how much of a geek I am, of Barbara Kingsolver's voice).

As I said, if you have any interest in reading, you will find this compelling. Here are a few of my favorite quotes from the interview. All are from Dr. Wolf.

“Language is what prepares a child to read.”

“Nothing is better in the very beginning than the simple act of reading and speaking to your child. That does not take money; it simply takes time and love.”

“Reading is a long, beautiful process that has many parts and can be arrested in many phases of development" "…it begins literally on the lap of the beloved who is first reading to us and we’re catching by hook and by crook all kinds of information from that loved one’s voice…”

Regarding children experiencing "word poverty," who upon arrival at Kindergarten have heard millions fewer words than their peers: “… that means their brain is literally processing language at a different level with a different level of sophistication and we who are determined to educate all our children to reach their potential have to be so serious about what those differences are at the Kindergarten door.”

Regarding the ever-more-common attempts to make children learn to read at early ages (3-5, say): “On the backs of three-year-olds are being visited the anxieties of parents.” These attempts are “pedagogically and physiologically premature and unnecessary.”

Dr. Wolf also refers to this article by Niel Swinney in the Boston Globe of October 28, 2007. The article, called "Rush, Little Baby" is about the aforementioned attempts by parents to hurry up the process of learning to read.

Also, Dr. Wolf makes reference to the book Leisure: The Basis of Culture, by Josef Pieper. She mentioned it in the context of her fears that the Digital Age is robbing us of the experience of deep, meaningful, enjoyable reading.

That's all for now, though I will certainly write about and refer to this fantastic book more in the future. I wholeheartedly recommend the summary and the interview by Dr. Ginger Campbell. In fact, a perusal of the Brain Science Podcast site is likely to yield something of interest to nearly "anyone with a brain," as she puts it.

Photograb Letter Recognition Game - Medium Difficulty

A month ago, I posted a game that I created using Photograb, a very cool game-design tool available for free from ShuffleBrain. It's intended to let people make games using pictures on their Facebook or Flickr pages, but I thought it might be a good way to teach letters and words.

I set out this morning to create a very easy Alphabet game. As I mentioned the other day, I've been reading Proust and the Squid by Maryanne Wolf. She tells me that the ability to recognize and name a letter is a very good predictor of future reading success. I thought a game like this might help burn these letter images into the brains of my young students.

As I said, this was supposed to be easy, but it is even moderately difficult to me. I'll try a very basic one later. For now, enjoy! (And a BIG thank you to ShuffleBrain for allowing me to embed this game!!)

PhotoGrab High Frequency Word Game

I watched a TED.com video by Scott Kim, a master puzzle designer. At the end of the video, he discusses Shufflebrain, an online tool that combines social networking with puzzles. It allows you to make your own puzzles out of pictures that you have on Facebook or Flickr.

I will include Kim's TED talk below, but I want to show you the puzzle I created first. (I am very excited about this!!)

How cool is that? I made pictures of some of the 100 most frequently-used words using Wordle.net, I uploaded them to Flickr, and I created the puzzle using Shufflebrain. The entire process took about a half hour, and this was just the first time.

I think this game could have tons of value for students. Anything that compels them to recall part of letters and words is useful. I will definitely be refining my technique and posting more puzzles in the future.

Here is Kim's TED talk:

Kindersite: Kid-Friendly Educational Links

Nick Peachey recommended Kindersite.org yesterday on his fantastic blog, so I thought I'd poke around a little bit. I did something similar with Curriki.org a month ago.

Kindersite's stated mission is twofold: first, the proprietors want to provide a portal to safe, educational content for children ages 2-8; second, they want to provide data to facilitate research on how children use such online content and how it affects their learning.

The first thing I find is a growing database of nursery rhymes in various languages. They have lyrics in the original language and in English. You can listen to some of them in mp3 form, and some of them have videos. I found myself a bit mesmerized by this Greek lullaby:






After a couple of dead ends, I find "Pictures as Words," a game from PBS's Sagwa the Chinese Siamese Cat page. This is a PBS series based on Amy Tan's childrens book of the same name. The game is very simple and would be a good way to introduce students to the idea that other alphabets are quite different (and perhaps more intuitive) than ours. Here's what it looks like:


Finally, I browse through Kindersite's treasure trove of story links. I end up having a story read to me about Mr. Happy and Mr. Stubborn, two characters created by Roger Hargreaves. This is a pretty exciting moment for me, as I had completely forgotten these books. Turns out there is now an animated Mr. Men series on Cartoon Network with a fun, kid-friendly website.


As you can see, my time on Kindersite led me to a lot of other places. Although I think their interface is a bit clunky, the proprietors of Kindersite are living up to the first part of their mission. Parents can feel completely secure turning their kids loose on this site. They will find a few time-wasters, to be sure, but they will be kid-friendly. A little more digging will turn up some serious educational gems. Happy hunting!

Spreading The Word With Twitter

If you are wondering about the utility of Twitter, take a look at The Friday Project's Twitter feed here. The Friday Project is "the only publishing company that specialises (sic-Brits) in sourcing the brightest talent from the web and developing it into great books."

The started a Twitter account yesterday, offering a free book to their first ten followers. They had ten in less than an hour and now, fifteen hours later, they have 74.

What implications might this have for educators, you ask? Well, imagine a world where all of your students and their parents were hooked up to something like Twitter. This would be helpful in my native South Dakota where school cancellation is just a mid-April blizzard away. It makes phone trees look like smoke signals.

Or, let's say you are hooked up with hundreds of other teachers from all over the world. You need a good attention-getter for your second hour language class; first hour never really got on board with your lesson about how speakers of other languages make sounds we've never even thought of. Within minutes, you have found the perfect thing:

Watch Amazing Beat Box Girl on CollegeHumor

Pretty cool, eh? And The Friday Project has five more followers than it did when I started this post.

Oh, and you can follow Literacy Log on Twitter here.

Web Resource: Using Twitter to Aid Disussion.

Below, you'll find a video that may confuse, intrigue, excite, or anger you. Most people are unimpressed by the idea of Twitter at first, but it is clear that people are coming around. Twitter's popularity has exploded. I'm sure it is blocked in many schools, but I am of the opinion that this technology, like instant messaging and YouTube, has something to offer us.

This post by Marshall Kirckpatrick at ReadWriteWeb goes into more detail about how this teacher uses Twitter. Enjoy!

Exploring Curriki

Anna at Literacy is Priceless is urging her readers to try out the Curriki Scavenger Hunt.
That's a little too structured for me, but I have been meaning for some time to check this site out, so I thought I'd poke around the site for a few minutes and share what I found.

About Curriki
Curriki derives its name from the words "curriculum" and "wiki," the latter being the software that is changing the way the internet is used by allowing more "readers" to become "writers." Wikipedia is perhaps the archetypal wiki site. Curriki is a non-profit corporation started by Sun Microsystems with a stated goal of supporting "the development and free distribution of world-class educational materials to anyone who needs them."

My Mission
My goal is to find an activity I can use during my next lesson with Alexi, a strikingly bright and entirely uninterested student that I work with two days a week. I've been working with him on recognizing main ideas in pieces of writing. He will talk to me without end about how little he cares for school; I figure he might as well be able to construct a proper argument for it. (Alexi is pseudonym).

Results
It takes me less than five minutes to create a free account. I click the "Find" link on the left sidebar and choose the Advanced Search option, which allows you to specify the subject, grade level, language, etc. I type in "main idea" and check a few boxes and, within seconds, I am looking at this big unit on persuasive writing contributed by Andrea Chen.

On her profile page, I learn that Ms. Chen is a High School English teacher at the New Orleans Charter for Science and Math High School. This looks like a well-thought out unit plan. The massive block of text is a little daunting, though that isn't Ms. Chen's fault. Curriki ought to allow contributors to split these up into smaller segments.

But I have already found plenty of things I can use, such the "Vocabulary: Discussing the Art of Persuasion" lesson plan, which you can find by scrolling down about two screens into the unit. I can download the whole document and use it as I see fit. Thanks, Andrea!

Featured Resources
Curriki submissions can be rated and commented on by users, and some of the top rated materials are featured here. Just glancing at these, I find the following:

• A great little poem to help students remember subtraction rules. By April Eckert
• Mr. Harpine's Article Reaction Assignment. This looks like a good way to get students used to the process of writing about what they read. I might change a few things, so I download it to modify later.
• A very thoughtfully-designed unit on Teaching Satire in High School designed by Sarah Lorntson from Mahtomedi, Minnesota.

Conclusion
I get the feeling I could get delightfully lost looking through Curriki lesson plans and units. This is already a phenomenal resource, and I am very hopeful about what sites like this will do for education as they evolve. Not long ago, lesson plans were shared only in books and seminars and by word of mouth. Curriki allows teachers to conduct searches for resources, keep and modify them, discuss them with others, and add their own. Hallelujah!

I will keep you posted on my use of Curriki as I learn more. Please let me know if you have had success with Curriki or another site of its kind.

If you like this, check out Read Write Think, another great online lesson plan finder.

Clippings:5.26.09

The New York Times says the economic downturn is putting new stress on libraries.

Class sets of the comic book, "Barack the Barbarian: Quest for the Treasure of Stimuli #1" are available for pre-order.

Writing on the I.N.K. blog, children's writer David Elliott calls into question the line between fiction and nonfiction in this amusing memoir.

At the MacMillan Dictionary Blog, Gwyenth Fox says maybe we should just do away with apostrophes.

The English Business Letter Generator exemplifies the Internet's capacity for automation.

And David Warlick discusses The 21st Century Skills Incentive Fund Act.

(Picture: "Ann Arbor Library: Pittsfield Branch" by jhoweaa - CC.)

Web Resource: Word Ahead Vocabulary Videos

"Vocabulary" is a term that can cause students to tune out immediately. My memories of vocabulary building in school involve worksheets, flashcards, and bold words with definitions at the end of the chapter. Most students fail to see the intrinsic value of new words, and building vocabulary becomes an exercise in failure for students and teachers alike.

Word Ahead Vocabulary Videos is a site that might be able to help. Opened to the public in January of 2009, the site features short videos with definitions, illustrations, and context for some six hundred words. You can use the widget above to see some examples of what the site offers.

Most of the videos seem to be aimed at high school-aged students, such as those trying to bone up for the SAT. (Click here for a complete word list.) Most videos are made by the folks at Word Ahead, though they also allow users to contribute by uploading their own videos.

Putting vocabulary words into videos will not make learning new words exciting for all students, but it might help, and it certainly beats worksheets. Word Ahead is a relatively new site, and thus should be expanding the ways teachers and students can interact with the videos. Stay tuned!

Words I Learned While Exploring Word Ahead:
Heterodoxy
Zoophagous
Lumen
Acidulous

Web Resource: Word Sift

Word Sift (wordsift.com) is a web resource designed to help students interact with texts. In the words of its creators, Kenji Hakuta and Greg Wientjes, it is "a toy in a linguistic playground that is available to instantly capture and display the vocabulary structure of texts, and to help create an opportunity to talk and play with language."

The folks at Word Sift have combined the magic of word clouds with search engines and an online thesaurus. A student can enter a piece of text and instantly see the most frequently used words in a word cloud. Then, they can use an interactive dictionary/thesaurus (from Visual Thesaurus) to explore the meaning of those words. They can also see pictures generated by Google's image search engine and find out where the words are located in their text.

For example, let's say we want our students to analyze President Obama's Inaugural Address. We paste the text into Word Sift and we see a word cloud like this:



As in most word clouds, the bigger the word, the more times it was used in the text. We can click on any word to explore it further. Let's try "people." Below the word cloud, we see Google image search results like this:



To the right, we see an interactive thesaurus/dictionary with connections to related concepts:



And finally, we see our word in the context of our original text. We can click on any of these sentences to see where they are located in the text.



This site could be useful to teachers in lots of ways. I will let you know how it works when I try it out. For the time being, Word Sift's demo page has some ideas. Let me know if you do too!

Web Resource: Storyline Online

In my "Jumping Off" post featuring Jen Robinson's Book Page, I mentioned Storyline Online, where you can watch videos of SAG members reading children's books. SAG is The Screen Actors Guild, which runs the site in conjunction with its Book Pals program.

I don't know if watching Bradley Whitford (of West Wing fame) read a story would be as inspiring to a young reader as it was to me, but I got chills. Because of the site's layout, I can't provide links to individual stories. But I can list a few of the highlights for you. The URL is storylineonline.net. Here are some highlights:

• James Earl Jones reading To Be A Drum, by Evelyn Coleman
• Al Gore reading Brave Irene, by William Steig
• Sean Astin reading A Bad Case of Stripes, by David Shannon
• Elijah Wood reading Me And My Cat?, by Satoshi Kitamura
• Camryn Manheim reading Enemy Pie, by Derek Munson
• And.... Hillary Duff reading Romeow & Drooliet, by Nina Laden

Each video is accompanied by a long list of activities that can accompany reading/listening. You can also download a PDF "Activity Guide" with information about the book, a biography of the reader, and related internet resources.

Jumping Off: Jen Robinson's Book Page

Here we begin what will become a regular feature of Literacy Log. We'll start with a website or blog about literacy and follow their featured links to see what we find.

Today's featured site is Jen Robinson's Book Page. Jen focuses on children's books. She explores ways to get books into the hands of children and increase adult interest in childrens' books. Her blog is packed with book reviews and children's literacy news. This "Reviews That Made Me Want To Read The Book" entry is a good example of what Jen's up to.

Jen Robinson's Book Page - Graphic created at Wordle.com.

A few minutes exploring Jen's "Other Children's Literacy Links" section led me to the following places:

• Beginning With Books - Best Books for Babies Archive. Nine years' worth of young children's book recommendations from children's lit experts Dr. Joan Brest Friedberg and Elizabeth Segel.
• Book Pals. - Started in L.A. in 1993, this program aims to foster a love of reading in young children by having trained actors read to them. Their Storyline site is a fabulous resource. At the moment, it features a video of Evelyn Coleman's To Be A Drum being read by James Earl Jones. (BookPals has a Minnesota chapter, too!)
• Inside Out Writers - A Los Angeles-based nonprofit that conducts writing classes withing the Los Angeles Country Juvenile Hall System. Their Writing From The Inside feature gives you a chance to read some amazing student work.
• Literacy Launchpad - A blog run by Amy, an emerging literacy teacher and mother in Nashville, TN. Here, Amy and her readers discuss pre-reading skills that parents can teach their children from birth.
  
• Mission: Making a Love of Reading Happen - In this his article, featured on Amy's blog, New York Times columnist Michael Winerip discusses the various methods he has used to foster a love of reading in his sometimes-resistent children.

That's it for today! A big thank you to Jen Robinson, who has no idea we're using her blog as a jumping off point. And, as always, tell us what you think about these links and others you stumble upon!

Web Resource: A Twist on Word Clouds by NYT

A couple of months ago, we featured Word Clouds as a web resource. These are easy-to-create graphic representations of the main themes in a piece of text.

Take a look at this interactive graphic from The New York Times. It solicits input about how people are feeling about the economy and displays it in a form similar to a word cloud.

This is a pretty amazing tool. It allows you to sort by respondents' employment information and time of entry. And, it is constantly updated, even allowing the viewer to contribute.

Here's another one from the presidential election last fall.

When it comes to teaching literacy, this graphic would be very useful if you are working with adjectives, as all of the responses are of that part of speech. It would also be useful if you are talking about finding the mood or tone of a piece of writing.

Tongue Twisters As Phonemic Awareness Tools

Kids love tongue twisters. They are catchy and giggle-inducing. Most importantly, they present a challenge. As a result, tongue twisters can be an easy way to help children learn various literacy skills.

Here, we'll talk about phonemic awareness. Any activity that encourages students to isolate or repeat small sound units can help with phonemic awareness. Tongue twisters, especially alliterative ones, can be an easy way to accomplish this.

For example, here's one I hadn't heard before from The Tongue Twister Database. Imagine using this to reinforce a student's concept of the "b" sound:

Betty Botter had some butter,
"But," she said. "this butter's bitter.
If I bake this bitter butter,
it would make my batter bitter.
But a bit of better butter--
that would make my batter better."

So she bought a bit of butter,
better than her bitter butter,
and she baked it in her batter,
and the batter was not bitter.
So 'twas better Betty Botter
bought a bit of better butter.

Tongue Twister Collections:

• The Tongue Twister Database
• Here's one from Hello Circle with audio recordings.
• Spanish Tongue Twisters!

Here's a set of lesson plans from a group of elementary school teachers in West Virginia. Tongue twisters are only a small part of this unit; there's a lot to like here.

And I can't resist; here's Steve Martin showing off for Bernadette Peters.

Clay Burell: Literacy Redefined

Clay Burell writes a great education blog on the Change.org network. A couple of his recent posts urge us to change how we think about literacy.

First, take a look at Burell's thoughts on an interview with Muhammad Ali. If you've ever heard Ali speak, you know of his brilliance with language. After you watch the video, think about the questions Burell poses here:

And teachers - English teachers, especially, but any teacher using writing to assess understanding and merit in your classrooms - ask yourself, in this age of user-created video and audio, if it makes any sense to keep giving the Muhammed Ali's of our classrooms a D- because they can't write well, when they can speak well enough to be honored, like Ali was, at Harvard and Oxford. The English teacher in me is uncomfortable with this question, but the history teacher in me thinks it's justified: Writing is no longer supreme since the Digital Revolution. It's now on equal footing with Speaking and Graphic Communication. Isn't it?

In another post, Burell features the work of an AP Literature teacher from Pomona, CA. During a unit on The Great Gatsby, he realized the questions that the book posed about the nature of the American Dream might have relavence to his students, whose families have been hit hard by the current economic crisis. The result moved me to tears and earned the students a visit from President Obama.

Take a few minutes to read Burell's reaction to this video. In it, he posits that only anonymous writing can lead to authentic, moving results such as these. he also points out that the Internet, and YouTube specifically, ought to change the way we think about "language arts."

Schott's Vocab Blog - New York Times

Lovers of words, especially newly-coined words, will love Schott's Vocab on the New York Times website. Ben Schott is an author living in London. He calls his blog a "repository of unconsidered lexicographical trifles. "

Schott's entry on the word "amortality" is a good example. Think about what it might mean before you check.

If you like this kind of thing, you'll enjoy Erin McKean's TED talk about the future of dictionaries.

If you're talking about dictionaries to students and getting blank stares in return, try talking about some of the word that are being added to dictionaries. People tend to find this stuff interesting. Here's a link to a good search for "added to the dictionary." Bling bling: in or out? Pick a side!

Strategy and Web Resource: Construct A Word

Read Write Think offers a free, online game called Construct A Word. It is intended to bolster phonemic awareness by giving students practice with onset and rime. I found myself playing this game for about 15 minutes after I discovered it. Try it out!

This game could be adapted for environments where Internet access is not available. A teacher would simply need to write the onsets and rimes on 3x5 cards and ask students to match them up and say the words they have created.

Web Resource: Big Ideas in Beginning Reading

Associated with the University of Oregon, Big Ideas in Beginning Reading is a great site for those who would teach young readers.

These are the Big Ideas:

• Phonemic Awareness
• Alphabetic Principle
• Fluency With Text
• Vocabulary
• Comprehension

For each of these, the site provides definitions, teaching strategies, and videos of the strategies being used with young children.