Spelling Practice

Spelling is an important literacy skill for all subjects at every year in school. PowerPoint presentation animations can be a useful tool for getting students to practice saying and spelling new words when they are starting a new topic. Here is an example of an automated spelling PowerPoint presentation I’m using with my Year 9 Science class.     List 1_Spelling_Practice_Sound
We have just started a unit on sound and light. This presentation contains our first ten spelling words and I like using this style of automated spelling presentation at the beginning of a lesson to help familiarise students with new terms and how to spell them.

If you like this presentation and would like to use your own word list you could download it and change the words the animation will still work. If you’re interested in how to create the animation this page is helpful.

Skwirk – Interactive Teaching Resources

A teaching friend shared this interactive resource with me today. It looks great. She says it has C2C resources, games, lesson etc. and is especially helpful for primary teachers.

You can try it out here http://www.skwirk.com.au/trial_request_form.htm

Fonts to help dyslexic students

I recently attended a great professional development training titled “Using Technology to Support Literacy”. It was a great training I learnt alot, too much to share in one blog post. So watch this space for more strategies to support literacy using technology.

One of the great technology resources I learn about was Open Dyslexic

You can download the open dyslexic fonts at http://opendyslexic.org/

 

10 things ESL students can do with Evernote on their tablets

OUPELTGlobal

Mohamed El-Ashiry takes a look at how Evernote can be used in the classroom

Portfolio assessment in the ESL classroom offers many benefits. On the Prince George’s County Public Schools’ website, a portfolio is defined as ‘a purposeful collection of student work that exhibits the student’s efforts, progress, and achievements in one or more areas of the curriculum’. Brown & Hudson (1998) have also described portfolios as a ‘family of assessments’. Some of the benefits of using portfolios, as described by Brown & Hudson (1998) include: (1) focusing student attention on learning processes; and (2) increasing student involvement in the learning processes. I have always been a fan of such ‘alternatives in assessment‘ because of the fact that they focus a lot more on the ‘process of learning’ as opposed to the ‘product of learning’ (Brown & Hudson, 1998).

Now that iPads and tablets are spreading into many…

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Reading Strategies Simplified

Today I was sent some great free reading strategy posters to assist students with comprehension. Although they are mainly aimed at the primary level. I particularly liked this one.

Students of all ages struggle with comprehension particularly as the content they are required to read increases in complexity and the level of analysis required also increases in the pieces of work they need to produce. I believe it is very important to continue to help students with reading and comprehension strategies as I highlighted in one of my very first posts and podcast.

Here are the reading strategy posters I received my favourite is on page three.

Open Response Questions: Steps

Great page for teaching students how to go about answering a written question.

Open Response Questions: Steps.

 

Reading and Note Taking Strategies

A video lecture on reading and note taking I put together for secondary students. In this video I explain the jigsaw reading strategy. Then offer three methods for taking notes:

1. Cornell note taking

2. Main idea, sub idea’s, analyse

3. K.W. L.