My Place Interactive Site for Teachers and Students

My Place by Nadia Wheatley is a very popular Australian children's book that follows the lives, technology and cultural events that changed the way Australians live for for 20,000 years.

there is now a brilliant interactive site specifically designed for teachers and students that really brings the book to life. I contains interactive timelines, video from the television series and loads of teaching and learning resources to support the book and television series.

I cannot recommend this strongly enough for those that are exploring Australian history and really want some quality content to support it.

Access it here.

A Great Online Dictionary and Thesaurus for Students

Wordsmyth and Lexipedia are a couple of great dictionary and thesaurus tools for students. Wordsmyth offers a picture dictionary for younger students along with a full dictionary that will meet the needs of high school and tertiary students, Lexipedia makes using a thesaurus fun by providing a visual network of words, their base words, prefixes and suffixes.

Reading and Responding: Holding Writing Workshops

By ANNISSA HAMBOUZ and HOLLY EPSTEIN OJALVO

Grace Rubenstein for The Bay CitizenJoe Imwalle reading a chapter of his book to his class.Go to related article »

LANGUAGE ARTS

Teaching ideas based on New York Times content.

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Overview | How can a teacher’s artistic vulnerability inspire students to share their own work? In this lesson, students do a free-writing and sharing exercise, with the teacher providing a model. They then consider the roles of teacher as writer and student as responder, and take part in a writing workshop in which they provide the teacher with feedback and suggestions on his or her original written work.

Materials | Student journals

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Create a choose your own adventure story in PowerPoint

I got sent this PowerPoint which is from the Victorian Department of Education and it contains a great little activity using PowerPoint to create a choose your own adventure story based around Halloween. 

The idea is simple and can be altered to suit any style of narrative.  Simply create a story with multiple endings or directions depending on how complex you want to get and then simply add hyperlink within the PowerPoint in which the reader clicks to choose their own adventure.

The Halloween template can be accessed here and it would be great to see what others come up with.



Educational Freeware for Improving Reading

Here is a a collection of literacy based web 2.0 applications that support literacy education from early years onwards.  Teach your kids to read and write using these great free software down loads for Windows and free web sites. Starfall.com is of course the most famous, but there are other good literacy sites as well. Access it here.