Best of 2022 So Far - Improve Your Typing While Reading Classic Literature

I'm taking the rest of the week off. While I'm gone I'll be republishing some of the most popular posts of the year so far. 

There is not a shortage of typing games available on the web (find 700 of them right here). Most of those games are based on rote practice and patterns. That's why I was intrigued when the Support Real Teachers Twitter account tagged me in a post about a new typing practice site that wasn't just a big collection of animated games. That site is called TypeLit.io. 

On TypeLit.io you can develop your typing skills while reading classic literature. The way it works is that you pick a classic work in TypeLit's library and then start typing the text that you see on the screen. TypeLit provides you with feedback about the accuracy and speed of your typing. 

As you can see in my demo video, TypeLit will let you pick a chapter of a book to type or you can type through the whole thing. You can use TypeLit without an account. But if you do create an account you can save and resume your progress. 

Applications for Education
TypeLit.io isn't going to replace "traditional" typing instruction. That said, it could be a place for middle school and high school students to practice their typing skills while reading some classic literature.

Why Should You Read Moby Dick - A New TED-Ed Lesson

A couple of years ago TED-Ed started producing a series of video lessons titled Why Should You Read... The videos in the series feature classic works of literature explained in about five minutes. The videos are more high level overviews of the books than they are book trailers. What I like best about the videos in the series is that they explain the historical context of the when the books were written. Case in point, in the latest installment in the series, Why Should You Read Moby Dick, viewers learn that the book was written during the height of the whaling industry in New England.

You can find the entire Why Should You Read Moby Dick TED-Ed lesson here or watch the video as embedded below.


Here are a few other Why Should You Read... TED-Ed lessons.

Why Should You Read Hamlet?


Why Should You Read Crime and Punishment?


Why Should You Read Fahrenheit 451?


Feature Image by David Mark from Pixabay

Why Should You Read Hamlet - A New TED-Ed Lesson

Last year TED-Ed started publishing a series of video lessons titled Why Should You Read...? Each lesson is about a classic work of literature that many of us have read and have made our students read. When making our students read those classics we've all been asked, "why do we have to read this?" This TED-Ed series attempts to address that question by explaining the historical significance of classic works.

The latest lesson added to TED-Ed's Why Should You Read...? series is Why Should You Read Hamlet? With this lesson the list of Why Should You Read...? lessons is up to eleven titles. All of the videos from those lessons are embedded below.

Why Should You Read Hamlet?


Why Should You Read Crime and Punishment?


Why Should You Read Fahrenheit 451?


Why Should You Read Flannery O'Connor?


Why Should You Read MacBeth?


Why Should You Read A Midsummer's Night Dream?


Why Should You Read Kurt Vonnegut?



Why Should You Read "Waiting for Godot?"



Why Should You Read "Don Quixote?"



Everything You Need to Know to Read "The Canterbury Tales."



Why Should You Read Edgar Allan Poe?

Interactive Versions of Aesop's Fables - And Dozens of Other Classic Works

The Library of Congress has tons of fantastic resources available for teachers and students, if you know where to find them. One of those great resources is an interactive version of Aesop's Fables.

Aesop's Fables interactive book from the Library of Congress is available to read on the Web, on an iPad, and on an Android device. The book contains more than 140 of Aesop's Fables for children. The level of interactivity varies widely depending upon which story you're reading. Some of the stories have truly interactive animations while other just have a small moving picture accompanying the fable.

Aesop's Fables isn't the only classic work available to read for free on the LOC's website. Head to the classic books section and you will find dozens of children's classics that you can read for free. In the collection you'll find books like A Apple Pie, Baseball ABC, and Peter Rabbit. It should be noted that Aesop's Fables is the only one available in an interactive version.

A Fun Literature Game

A couple of years ago Terri Eichholz wrote a short blog post about an activity that she had found on the New Times Learning Network. I was recently scrolling through some old bookmarks and found Terri's post again. So I went to see if it's still available and it is. The activity is called Literature Quote Bingo.

In the version of Literature Quote Bingo that Terri shared (available here as a PDF) students have a grid that contains nine quotes from famous pieces of literature. Students have to pick three consecutive quotes in the grid and connect them to examples of current news stories.

Literature Quote Bingo could easily be modified. You could create a bigger grid with more quotes. You could have quotes that don't have authors' names attached and then ask students to identify the author and work. You could put authors' names in the grid then have students find quotes to match to the authors.

TED-Ed Adds More Videos to the "Why Should You Read..." Series

About six weeks ago I published a post about TED-Ed's series of videos that explain why students should read the classics. When I published that post there were five videos in the series. The series is now up to seven videos. Those videos are listed and embedded below.

Why Should You Read MacBeth?


Why Should You Read A Midsummer's Night Dream?


Why Should You Read Kurt Vonnegut?



Why Should You Read "Waiting for Godot?"



Why Should You Read "Don Quixote?"



Everything You Need to Know to Read "The Canterbury Tales."



Why Should You Read Edgar Allan Poe?

TED-Ed Explains Why Students Should Read Classics

A few weeks ago TED-Ed published a lesson titled Why Should You Read Edgar Allan Poe? It now appears that lesson was the first in a series of lessons designed to explain and encourage students to read some classics. Since the Poe lesson was published TED-Ed has published similar lessons about Don Quixote, Waiting for Godot, and The Canterbury Tales. All of those video lessons plus the Poe lesson are embedded below.

Why Should You Read "Waiting for Godot?"


Why Should You Read "Don Quixote?"


Everything You Need to Know to Read "The Canterbury Tales."


Why Should You Read Edgar Allan Poe?

Borrow, Read, and Listen - The Open Library

The Open Library is a part of the Internet Archive. The Open Library is a collection of more than one million free ebook titles. The collection is cataloged by a community of volunteer online librarians. The ebooks in the Open Library can be read online, downloaded to your computer, read on Kindle and other ereader devices, and embedded into other sites. Some of the ebooks, like Treasure Island, can also be listened to through the Open Library.



Applications for Education
Much like Google Books, the Open Library can be a great place to find free copies of classic literature that you want to use in your classroom. The Open Library could also be a good place for students to find books that they want to read on their own. The audio option, while very electronic sounding, could be helpful if you cannot locate any other audio copies of the book you desire.

Owl Eyes - Guide Students Through Classic Literature

Owl Eyes is a free tool that provides teachers with a good way to provide students with guidance while they are reading classic literature. Owl Eyes provides teachers with tools to insert annotations and questions into classic literature. Students can see the annotations and questions that their teachers add to the digital text. Teachers have the option to create online classrooms through which they can monitor their students' progress through a text and view their students' annotations and answers to questions. The texts available through Owl Eyes are mostly classic works that are in the public domain.

The short videos embedded below will help you get started with Owl Eyes. I highly recommend watching them in order to save yourself from some frustrating clicking without results.





Applications for Education
Owl Eyes could be a good tool for guiding students through some difficult classic literature. I would like to see its library expanded to include more texts that are accessible to younger students.

I couldn't find an option to upload my own texts on Owl Eyes. Until then, I will probably continue to use Google Docs to help students as they read difficult primary source documents. That process is outlined here.

Two Crash Courses on Classic Literature

A few years ago John Green started a Crash Course series on classic literature. The early episodes featured Hamlet, The Great Gatsby, and The Odyssey amongst about a dozen other works. That series is embedded below.


This summer John Green began publishing a new set of Crash Course literature videos. The new series includes videos about Huckleberry Finn, Lord of the Flies, and 100 Years of Solitude. The new series is included in an oddly constructed playlist that for some unclear reason includes videos about physics, the Olympics, and gaming. Sort through the playlist and you'll find the literature lessons.


All of these videos include Green's commentary on the stories along with the summaries of key points in the plots. Much like Cliff Notes, watching these videos is not a replacement for actually reading the stories. You may also want to remind your students that Green's opinions about the stories are just that, opinions.

Owl Eyes Offers a Good Way to Guide Students Through Classic Literature

Owl Eyes is a relatively new tool that provides teachers with a good way to provide students with guidance while they are reading classic literature. Owl Eyes provides teachers with tools to insert annotations and questions into classic literature. Students can see the annotations and questions that their teachers add to the digital text. Teachers have the option to create online classrooms through which they can monitor their students' progress through a text and view their students' annotations and answers to questions. The texts available through Owl Eyes are mostly classic works that are in the public domain.

The short videos embedded below will help you get started with Owl Eyes. I highly recommend watching them in order to save yourself from some frustrating clicking without results.



Applications for Education
Owl Eyes could be a good tool for guiding students through some difficult classic literature. I would like to see its library expanded to include more texts that are accessible to younger students.

I couldn't find an option to upload my own texts on Owl Eyes. Until then, I will probably continue to use Google Docs to help students as they read difficult primary source documents. That process is outlined here.

Access LitCharts on Your iPhone or Android Phone

Last week I published a blog post about LitCharts. Shortly after that post went live my friend Denise texted me to say how much she loves the LitCharts iPhone app. Until then I wasn't aware that LitCharts offered an iOS app. It turns out that LitCharts is also available as a free Android app.

The LitCharts iOS and Android apps offer the same great literature guides that are found on the LitCharts website. The apps are free and advertisement-free. Besides the guides themselves, the best aspect of the apps is that they can be used offline. Students can choose which guides that they want to use offline.

LitCharts features background information on a book's author, a color-coded list of themes in the book, a plot summary, a character list and summary, and a theme-tracker. The theme-tracker helps students keep track of literary themes with examples throughout a book.

LitCharts Offers Guides to Popular & Classic Literature

LitCharts is a relatively new service that provides teachers and students with guides and summaries of classic and popular literature. The service currently offers more than 300 titles.

LitCharts guides can be viewed online or you can download the guides as PDFs. To download a PDF you do have to enter your email address. The online version of the guides available on LitCharts feature background information on a book's author, a color-coded list of themes in the book, a plot summary, a character list and summary, and an interactive chart board of themes in the book.

The interactive chart boards on LitCharts offer a way to explore the entire guide from one place. The chart board is a wheel of chapters of a book. The wheel is color-coded with themes from the book. When you click on a chapter and color in the chart board you will be shown a short summary of that section of the book followed by a link to read more. Color-coding makes it fairly easy to follow a theme through the book.

Applications for Education
I learned about LitCharts from Terri Eichholz who pointed out that some teachers will find LitCharts to be just another cheat sheet. But other teachers will put LitCharts to use by taking advantage of the color-coded theme tracker in LitCharts. One thing that I might do with the color-coded theme tracker is pick sections from two or more themes and ask my students how the author connects the themes throughout the book.

Storyboard That Releases New Teacher Guides for Classic Literature

Disclosure: Storyboard That is an advertiser on FreeTech4Teachers.com

For the last couple of years Storyboard That has offered great guides to using storyboards in the classroom. The latest update to their Teacher Guides section includes new guides for using storyboards to help students understand classic works including Lord of the Flies, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Oedipus, The Tell Tale Heart, and Animal Farm. The guides include plot diagrams, character diagrams, and vocabulary diagrams. Each guide also includes references to Common Core standards.

In February I hosted a webinar all about the features of Storyboard That and ideas for using it in your classroom. The recording of that webinar is embedded below.


Applications for Education
Storyboard That provides a great way for students to visually organize their thoughts about a topic, to plan a story, or to illustrate their understanding of a story. As you can see in the teacher guides, Storyboard That also provides great visual tools for teachers to use to help students understand big concepts.

CommonLit - Thematic Discussion Questions Paired With Interesting Texts

The other day I received an email from Michelle Brown at Harvard University. Her email was about a new organization called Commonlit. Commonlit is an organization that is building sets of thematic discussion questions to use in conjunction with upper elementary school and middle school students.

Here's how Commonlit works. As a teacher I select a theme such as love, social change & revolution, or friendship & loyalty. Then within my chosen theme I select a discussion question. The choice of a discussion question will lead me to a set of passages for my students to read to support classroom discussion. For example, when I selected the question, "what drives a person to betray?" in the friendship & loyalty theme I was then able to choose the text of The Donkey, the Fox, and the Lion from Aesop's Fables. Commonlit provided me with a PDF of the text to download for free.

Applications for Education
Commonlit's thematic questions could be quite helpful in getting students interested in reading. I've always found that if I can get students engrossed in a conversation around a big question, I then have a much easier time getting them to read materials related to the conversation. My students tend to want to read so that they can find more ideas to bring into their arguments in the classroom conversation.

Get Free eCopies of Class Books on Forgotten Books

There are plenty of good places to find free ebooks online, here's another worth taking a look at. Forgotten Books republishes thousands of classic works that are in the public domain. Forgotten Books offers all of their titles as free PDF downloads and provides links to ePub versions of the titles. If you desire a higher quality resolution for your PDFs, Forgotten Books offers those to their paying members.

Applications for Education
When my students and I read Red Badge of Courage together I was one copy short of what I needed so I jumped on Google Books and found a copy that I could print chapter-by-chapter to use in my classroom. I used Google Books to find a copy of that public domain work, but I could have just as easily used Forgotten Books to get an ecopy of the Red Badge of Courage.

An Interactive Comic and Video Versions of The Pit and the Pendulum

Halloween is just a week away and a lot of teachers may use this occasion to introduce their students to Edgar Allan Poe's classic The Pit and the Pendulum. Here are a couple of resources that can be used to introduce the story to your students.

The Pit and the Pendulum is available as an interactive comic book created by Poe in the Pit. If you view the comic book online you can click symbols within it to open videos, additional images, and additional background and analysis of Poe's work. If you choose to print the comic book you can us the QR codes embedded within it to access the videos, images, and additional info on your mobile device.


I was sick, sick unto death with that long agony... from Into ThePit on Vimeo.

Another way that you might introduce The Pit and the Pendulum to students is through Flocabulary's rap of the story. That video is embedded below.

Storyboard That Releases New Teacher Guides

Disclosure: Storyboard That is an advertiser on this blog.

Storyboard That provides templates in which you can create your stories in a comic strip style. To help you create your story Storyboard That provides dozens of scenes, characters, and text bubbles to fill your storyboard's frames. Each element that you drag into your storyboard's frames can be re-sized, rotated, and re-positioned to your heart's content. Your completed storyboard can be saved as a comic strip, saved as a set of images (one image for each frame), or saved as a set of PPTX slides.

This week Storyboard That added three new guides for teaching classic literature with storyboards. The new guides provide great ideas for teaching Macbeth, Romeo & Juliet, and The Great Gatsby with storyboards. Each of the guides include a set of essential questions, alignment to Common Core standards, and templates for character analysis. The templates also include ideas for using comics in which students analyze the elements of plot in each story.

Seven Resources for Learning About Shakespeare

Last week I shared John Green's latest Crash Course videos about Hamlet. If you're looking for some other resources to help your students understand the works of Shakespeare, take a look at the materials below.


Shakespeare's Globe offers a four part virtual tour of the Globe Theater. The tour is built on the work of graphic designers who built a model of the original theater. You can find the tour here. You will need to install the Quicktime browser plug-in in order to experience the tour.

Shakespeare Animated is a YouTube channel containing twelve playlists ten of which are animated adaptations of Shakespeare's most famous plays. Some of the animated plays that appear in the Shakespeare Animated playlist are Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, MacBeth, and The Taming of the Shrew.

John Green's Crash Course videos about English literature includes two videos about Romeo & Juliet. I've embedded the videos below.




TED-Ed hosts a lesson titled Insults by Shakespeare. In addition to explaining the insults used by Shakespeare the lesson also explores some of Shakespeare's other uses of dialogue.



L.A. Paun used LiveBinders to create and share a nice collection of Shakespeare resources. The LiveBinder has a section for Shakespeare in general and sections devoted to Romeo & Juliet, MacBeth, Hamlet, and Twelfth Night.

Shakespeare's Original Pronunciations could be a good resource to support classroom readings of some of Shakespeare's works. Take the guess work out of the pronunciations by hearing them.

A Crash Course on Hamlet

Last month John Green started a new Crash Course series on classic literature. The first installment was about The Odyssey. The latest installment tackles the first half of Shakespeare's Hamlet. Ghosts, Murder, and More Murder, embedded below, follows the same format as all Crash Course videos in which Green opens with a fast introduction to the whole work then uses a mix of analogies to modern terms to explain the story's key points. Just like reading CliffsNotes isn't a replacement for reading the story, watching a Crash Course video is not a replacement for reading.