A Twenty Day Blogging Challenge for Teachers via @kellyhines

Last week on the Free Technology for Teachers Facebook page I shared the twenty day blogging challenge created by Kelly Hines. I decided to share it here as well to give the challenge a little more attention. The challenge, which does not have to be completed in twenty consecutive days, contains twenty blog post prompts for teachers. To help teachers support each other in this challenge, Kelly created this form through which teachers can submit and share their blogs and Twitter IDs.

Applications for Education
As I've written in the past, most recently on my new blog Worms In the Fridge, the act of sitting down to write a blog post is a good exercise in thinking and reflecting on your practice. One of the obstacles to blogging that some people express to me is, "I don't know what to write about." Kelly's twenty day blogging challenge gives you plenty of ideas to run with.

Character Scrapbook - A Tool for Student Reflections on Stories

Scholastic's Character Scrapbook provides a nice template that elementary school students can use to write about and reflect on the characters in their favorite stories. The template is quite simple to use. Students enter the name of a story and the name of their favorite character on the first page. On the next pages students list ten attributes of the character. The Character Scrapbook also allows students to create pictures of their favorite characters.

As you can see in the image above, Scholastic's Character Scrapbook doesn't limit students to human characters. Students can write about and create images of animal characters too.

Applications for Education
Scholastic's Character Scrapbook could be a great tool for getting students to think about their favorite stories. The Character Scrapbook has an easy print option so that you can print and display all of your students' works in your classroom.

Teachers Interviewing Teachers - Reflective Practice

Image Credit: Rusty Sheriff

In the last week I've been interviewed for two different blogs, Hack Education and Against the Wind. Last month I did two live web interviews, Higher Ed Live and Classroom 2.0 Live. One of the reasons that I like to do both text and live interviews is that it gives me the opportunity to reflect on my practices both as a blogger and as a teacher. I was thinking about this this morning when it hit me, "more teachers should interview each other."

Applications for Education
Teachers interviewing teachers would provide a forum that stimulates reflection on our classroom practices. This could be done as an exercise in a staff meeting or department meeting. Develop a set a interview questions, but feel free to go off-script as necessary, and have teachers actually conduct interviews with each other. The interview doesn't necessarily have to appear on the web to be a meaningful exercise. In fact, in some cases it might be best to not have it appear on the web because some teachers may be reluctant to share their true thoughts on the web.

Contribute to the National Gallery of Writing

Through the Google Docs Blog I have learned that the National Council of Teacher of English is looking for contributions to the National Gallery of Writing. The accepted submissions will be displayed on October 20 as a part of the National Day on Writing. Submissions to the National Gallery of Writing can be made individually or as a part of local gallery. Local galleries can be created by groups to organize their writing around a particular theme or topic. Any group can create a local gallery as long as there is one "point" person to curate the gallery.

Applications for Education
Creating a local gallery for your class to contribute to the National Gallery of Writing could be a good way provide your students with an authentic audience for their work.

Here are some related items that may be of interest to you:
Essay Map - Step by Step Help Constructing Essays
Writing Den - Writing Tips
Animated and Narrated Grammar Glossary

Guess the Wordle and Summer Vacation Wordles

Wordle is a good tool for creating visual representations of the most commonly used words in a document or on a website. I've featured Wordle on this blog twice in the past. You can read those previous posts about Wordle here and here.

This morning I came across a new wiki called Guess the Wordle. Three times a week Guess the Wordle will post a new Wordle. Then based on the Wordle students can guess what the topic of the Wordle is. Guess the Wordle could be a fun warm-up activity to use with students.

While looking over Guess the Wordle I had a new (to me) thought about using Wordle in the classroom. Writing stories about summer vacation is an assignment that teachers commonly give at the beginning of the school year. This year, when you give that assignment have students create a Wordle when they are done writing their stories. The Wordles created from the stories could be used as a reflection tool by students and yourself to see what things from the summer vacation really stand out in a student's mind.

Language Arts Links You Might Have Missed

This is the sixth installment of my "Links You Might Have Missed" series. This set of links features Language Arts resources. The previous installments of this series featured links to resources in the areas of Math, Science, Geography, Digital Presentations, and Google Earth.

Two Sources of Writing Prompts

Three Reflective Journal Forms

The Imagination Prompt Generator

Writing Fix - Writing Prompts

Creative Writing Help

Hemingway Animated

The Grapes of Wrath - Free Full Length Movie

Save the Words, Adopt a Word

Ten Resources for Preventing and Detecting Plagiarism

Save 20% on all books & DVDs from National Geographic!

Three Reflective Journal Forms Found on Docstoc

Today, Twitterer gwoodill posted a link to a reflective journal form on Docstoc. Docstoc is like YouTube for documents. After looking at the reflective journal form posted by gwoodill, I did a little searching for other reflective journal forms appropriate for student use and found a couple. You can view all three forms here, here, and here. I have embedded one of the forms below.


Reflective journal - Get more College Essays

Applications for Education
These forms vary in complexity with the one above being appropriate for elementary school and middle school use and the others being suited for older students.

Docstoc, as well as the similar Scribd service, is a good place to find a wide variety of outline and flow chart forms to be used as teaching materials.