Teaching Speaking

One aspect of teaching Language Arts is teaching speech writing and rhetoric skills. When you're doing that, why not have your students learn from the best? This site has the audio to 100 of the most famous and popular speeches in American history, including Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech, and JFK's Cuban Missle Crisis Address. Most speeches include the audio for the full speech- you can play these in your classroom to teach writing to elicit emotion, pace, inflection, and overall how to deliver a powerful speech. This can be a great way to merge history and language arts curriculum as well.

Organizing blogs/news feeds

This is really helpful, especially if you have your students create their own blogs that you would like to monitor and view conveniently and quickly. You can set up your own RSS feed. RSS stands for "Really Simply Syndication", and it basically involves you creating your own news feed of your favorite websites and blogs. Blogs easily work into the RSS feed, but any website that has an "RSS" button on the page can be incorporated into your feed as well. (To see an example of what the button would look like, go to this site for the New Yorker. The main page has a link on the right-hand column for "RSS feeds" and then after clicking on that link, you simply select which articles you'd like to include in your feed and what service you use.)

If you have your own blog through Gmail's Blogger , you can create your own newsfeed right on the Dashboard or main page of your account. Otherwise, here are some free options that you have for creating an RSS feed:
Google Reader
BlogLines
NewsGator

Teachers have enough going on, anything that can save some time is worth it! This can definitely save you time in viewing your students' blogs, or even just keeping yourself up-to-date with news.

Creative Writing

Here is a really cool website that I learned about from my colleagues: www.wordle.net.... you attach a document or link to a blog and it creates a visual representation of the words you use in your writing, adding emphasis to the words you use most commonly. Here's a "Wordle" of my blog:



This would be a great way to teach your students about different ways to create visuals with their writing, and to get their creative writing juices showing. Also, if your students link to a blog that acts as a journal to create their wordle, this might give them surprising insight into what's really important to them!

Social Networking Sites

I came across a very interesting article by Stephanie Vie about social networking sites and their implications on the writing classroom. The article discusses the concept of the "Digital Divide" and how the technological gap between teachers and students is widening. While we as teachers are not and should not be required to participate in such social networking sites as www.Facebook.com and www.MySpace.com, we need to understand how they work, and how students are using these almost exclusively at times to write and communicate outside the classroom, at times changing the concept of "literacy" in the classroom. The article also mentions several larger social issues that can be discussed through using these social networking sites.

The article brings up some very interesting points. Students may complain about writing in the classroom, but they are writing constantly through text messaging, online instant messaging, through their own personal blogs, and on social networking sites. Teachers shouldn't ignore this- they should understand and embrace it!