Jennifer's+First+Page

=Teaching Secondary English Learners to Understand, Analyze, and Write Interpretive Essays About Theme. =

Olson, C., Land, R., Anselmi, T. & AuBchon, C. (2010).[| Teaching Secondary English Learners to Understand, Analyze, and Write Interpretive Essays about Theme.] Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, 54(4), 245-256.

This article is mainly about ways to help secondary English learners learn about and interpret theme. It states that English Learners are more successful when their teachers engage the students and keep high expectations and keep them on a rigorous schedule. The article also says that it is important to use formative assessments as a way to tell if the students are actually doing better or not. It also gives examples of what the teachers in the study were doing to help their students. It brought up some interesting points about English Learners. I myself have never thought that much about teaching those students before. The article brought up some interesting points about what would be the best way to teach them. The examples also were very informative as well. This was very helpful for me, it made me think more about what I would do as a teacher to help English Learners. Being a social study teacher though I don’t believe I would have a problem with getting English Learners to know theme because that is more something that the students would deal with in an English class. Although I could still use some of the examples for social studies, I would just have to tweak it a bit.

=Exploring Social Studies Through Multicultural Literature: Legend of the St Ann's Flood = Fry, Sara Winstead. [|Exploring Social Studies through Multicultural Literature: Legend of the St Ann's Flood.]Social Studies. (2009): 85-91. This article talks about how a teacher uses the book the __Legend of the St Ann's Flood__ to develop literacy skills, as well as examining Trinidad and Tobago's culture, global connections and character education. The article then goes on to tell about the different activities the teachers had the students do to learn about the different aspects of the book. First is called sitting in the hot seat; in the hot seat one student is sitting at the front of the class, and the rest of the class asks them questions about the and talks from the character’s perspective. To prepare students for the hot seat, the students will have already read the book and researched examples of the culture in the book. After the students finished their research, they come up with question for the students with the other topics. If the students are unsure how to answer one of the the questions that was asked of them, they would be able to ask the other students that researched the same topic that they did. Second is having the students choose their favorite and most powerful lines from the book and in a group of students they would have to put those lines into a poem. That poem is a good way to examine people, places, and environments. This, or something similar to this would be very useful for teachers, especially history teachers, who want to make their topic more interesting for students. These are all good ideas that could be adapted to use with any book.

= I thought This Was Social Studies, Not English, Miss! Improving Students' Attitudes to Reading and Writing in Year 9 and 10 Social Studies = Parker-Corney, Kate, Ken Kilpin, and Rowena Taylor. "[|I thought This Was Social Studies, Not English, Miss! Improving Students' Attitudes to Reading and Writing in Year 9 and 10 Social Studies]."Kairaranga. (2012): 13-19. This article is about reading in Social Studies classes. Many people, both students and teachers alike think that reading is most likely done in the English class, but what people dont realize is that reading can actually help students in Social Studies as well. This article is about one teacher Kate, and how she tries to improve her students attitudes about reading and writing in the classroom. Kate goes about this is different ways, one way that she mentions is if the students think that the readings are too hard then she would do worksheets that helped outline the important information of the reading. She also sets a number of focused questions that help the students locate and organize the important information, record that information and the questions help make sure that the students understand what they are reading. By changing how the teacher looks at reading and writing and by changing the way that she goes about teaching with reading and writing, the teacher found that it is rather easy to do and to make it better for the students as well.

=Worth It? Findings from a Study of How Academics Assess Students' Web 2.0 Activities =

Gray, Kathleen, et al., "[|Worth It? Findings from a Study of How Academics Assess Students' Web 2.0 Activities.]" Research in Learning Technology. (2012): 1-15.

This article talks about Web 2.0 activities, and if they are really helping students or not. Web 2.0 is different content on the web that different people can create, manipulate or propagate. Anyone can do this through commenting, editing, rating and tagging. The writers of this article conducted interviews of people who use Web 2.0, and from those interviews the writers found that Web 2.0 was mostly used in courses of the Social Sciences. This article found that overall, using Web 2.0 for student assignments holds value for some academic courses but a low level of risk for others. Many of the interviewees said that they believed that Web 2.0 supported the fact that you could monitor progress, reinforce academic integrity and protect the students moral rights as well. This study raised many important points that teachers should take under consideration when using Web 2.0.

=Web 2.0 Tool =

The tool from Web 2.0 that I chose to talk about is called Kidblog. Kidblog is a website where the students could have their own blog and write about any topic. I choose this site specifically because first off it is free to use, but also because it is safe, the teacher has control over all of the blogs and the accounts, the students blogs are private by default and the teacher could allow parent and guest accounts if he or she chooses to. Another reason why i chose this one was because it is simple to use. there is no advertising, no memorizing usernames, the design is simple so that students do not get distracted by adding fun stuff to their page, and it is easy to navigate as well.

=Resources =

@http://npsgnmped.wordpress.com/ I choose this resource because it gave me a lot of good ideas for activities to do in the classroom. This is a website is made up of teachers who have posted different activities that they found to be successful in their classroom. The activities that are posted are for all different aspects of the Civil War that the students have to learn about in the lesson. From here I found the Civil War Slang words that I transformed into an activity for the students to do to get them interested in the subject,

http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/cwphtml/tl1861.html This website is a timeline of everything that happened in the Civil War. It is useful because it uses pictures to help connect to the specific dates and times as well.

@http://www.civilwar.org/battlefields/gettysburg.html This is the official website of the Battle of Gettysburg. This has alot of information about the battle, including facts, resources, pictures, maps and videos. These are all useful for teachers because they are visual sources to show students so that they see what was going on in that battle and how the lay of the land affected the battle as well.

@https://w.taskstream.com/Lesson/View/0EB47C377625835C0C642CB3B77BEB1F This is a copy of the Lesson plan that was for our lesson on the Battle of Gettysburg. It was done on Taskstream.