Welcome to Five for Friday for January 25, 2008
Rubrics provide an easy way for students and teachers to assess their projects and presentations. But, they take time to make. Rubistar (http://rubistar.4teachers.org/index.php) makes them much easier to create. Rubrics can be created for ten different categories. The categories include: oral projects, reading, multimedia, art, math, work skills, writing, science, products and music. If you register you can save and edit your rubrics online as well. Registration is free. Creating a rubric is as simple as choosing from drop down menus for your categories. For example: Capitalization and Punctuation. When you do that it fills in the descriptors on a four point scale. If you don’t want to create your own rubric, you can search for one from their vast collection.
Voice Thread (http://voicethread.com/#home) is a an powerful online presentation tool that allows viewers to leave comments on each slide. Here’s an example created by a second grade class about Martin Luther King Jr. http://voicethread.com/#u18557.b39698.i214141 In this example the students are commenting on a quote from Martin Luther King.
Here is an amazing classroom website Mr. Coley.com (http://www2.murrieta.k12.ca.us/tovashal/bcoley/index.htm) It has everything from a student written log of the school day to studycasts, which are podcasts of study guides for upcoming tests. Student work is featured throughout, with parental permission of course. Handouts for different subject areas are available online. Check out the literature circle job handouts (http://www2.murrieta.k12.ca.us/tovashal/bcoley/litcircles.htm) for some excellent ideas to use with cooperative groups.
Read Write Think is brought to you by a partnership between the International Reading Association (http://www.reading.org) and the National Council of Teachers of English (http://www.ncte.org/) and bring to you resources of the highest quality for teaching reading and language arts. There are lessons, web resources and student materials. The student materials are a collection of online activities such as a book cover creator which allows a student to type and design a book cover. The web gallery is a list of selected resources from the web. It is searchable by grade band.
The last resource for the week is the blog “Teaching in the 408” . This blog is the work of reading and writing teacher who works with ELL and Special Education students. Recently he has been posting some excellent strategies regarding before, during and after reading. Here’s a link to the first post in the series. http://roomd2.blogspot.com/2008/01/be-molotov-cocktail-before-strategies.html