This is a book about LEARNING!Technology is not a magic solution for education. It is an opportunity! An opportunity to shake things up, to connect and grow, and to create dynamic learning experiences for our students! In this three-part book, you will explore WHY it's time to Shake Up Learning, WHAT changes we can make in our classrooms to support dynamic learning experiences, and HOW to plan meaningful lessons for your classroom.Rapidly evolving technology and the demands of the digital age are transforming not only the way we live but also the way we learn. The tools students are using are newer, sleeker, and faster than ever before. In some cases, the medium is even changing the message. One thing is certain: Educators cannot continue the status quo if they expect to equip young people for the world to come. Here's the good news: With digital tools that are available 24/7, learning doesn't have to stop when the bell rings. Learning can take on a life of its own! Even better, technology can help you connect with students and empower them to grow and develop a lifelong love for learning--and it doesn't have to be scary or complicated. Shake Up Learning is a powerful guide and planning tool to help educators at all grade levels make the most of technology. Educator and blogger Kasey Bell guides you through the process of using technology and proven techniques to make learning dynamic. You'll discover . . . Practical strategies to help move from static teaching to dynamic learningStraightforward and easy-to-use templates for crafting engaging learning opportunitiesTips and tricks for fearless implementation of powerful lesson plansAdvice for moving from one-and-done activities to learning that evolves and inspires throughout the school year--and beyond!This is MORE than just a book! This is a full LEARNING EXPERIENCE!This book is jammed packed with ideas, lessons, and resources, but you can bring it all to life with the companion website, ShakeUpLearningBook.com, and the companion online course, The Dynamic Learning Workshop!Be dynamic! Shake up learning in your classroom this year.

    She shows us how to teach students to manage all the thinking and questioning that precedes their putting pen to paper. More than that, she offers us smarter ways to have students write about their reading that can last them a lifetime. She demonstrates how students' responses to reading canstart in a notebook, in conversation, or in a read aloud lead to thinking guided by literary criticism reflect deeper text analysis and honest writing processes result in a variety of popular genres--book reviews, author profiles, commentaries, editorials, and the literary essay. She even includes tools for teaching-day-by-day units of study, teaching points, a sample minilesson, and lots of student examples-plus chapters on yearlong planning and assessment. Ensure that your students will be readers and writers long after they leave you. Get them enthused and empowered to use whatever they read-facts, statistics, the latest book--as fuel for writing in school and in their working lives. Read Angelillo.

    But sometimes it's better to be unconventional. In Rethinking Rubrics in Writing Assessment, Maja Wilson offers a new perspective on rubrics and argues for a better, more responsive way to think about assessing writers' progress.Though you may sense a disconnect between student-centered teaching and rubric-based assessment, you may still use rubrics for convenience or for want of better alternatives. Rethinking Rubrics in Writing Assessment gives you the impetus to make a change, demonstrating how rubrics can hurt kids and replace professional decision making with an inauthentic pigeonholing that stamps standardization onto a notably nonstandard process. With an emphasis on thoughtful planning and teaching, Wilson shows you how to reconsider writing assessment so that it aligns more closely with high-quality instruction and avoids the potentially damaging effects of rubrics.Stop listening to the conventional wisdom, and turn instead to a compelling new voice to find out why rubrics are often replaceable. Open Rethinking Rubrics in Writing Assessment and let Maja Wilson start you down the path to more sensitive, authentic style of writing assessment.

    . . frequently and across the grades! The biggest issue? Most of our grades 4-12 students continue to make the same old errors year after year. Grammar Keepers to the rescue, with 101 lessons that help students internalize the conventions of correctness once and for all. Bernabei’s key ingredients include Daily journal writing to increase practice and provide an authentic context Minilessons and Interactive Dialogues that model how to make grammatical choices A “Keepers 101” sheet to track teaching and “Parts of Speech Sheet” for student reference

    This complex, contested intersection has led to censorship and worse-alarm, irrationality, and a failure to examine our ways of teaching, particularly teaching literacy to boys. In this book Tom Newkirk takes an up-close and personal look at elementary boys and their relationship to sports, movies, video games, and other venues of popular culture. Unlike the alarmists, he sees these media not as enemies of literacy, but as resources for literacy.Through a series of extraordinary interviews, Newkirk listens to young boys, and girls, who describe the pleasure they take in popular culture. They explain the ways in which they use visual narratives in their writing. They even defend their use of violence in their work. Newkirk disproves the simplistic stereotype of boys who are primed to imitate the violence they see. He shows that, rather than mimic, boys most often transform, recombine, and participate in story lines, and resist, mock, and discern the unreality of icons of popular culture.Using a mixture of memoir, research project, cultural analysis, and critique of published findings, Newkirk encourages schools to ask questions about what counts as literacy in boys and what doesn't, to allow in their literacy programs boys' diverse tastes, values, and learning styles. In other words, if we want boys to join the literacy club, then we have to invite them in with genres of their own choosing.

    Troy Hicks explores the questions of how to teach digital writing by examining author's craft, demonstrating how intentional thinking about author's craft in digital texts engages students in writing that is grounded in their digital lives. Troy draws on his experience as a teacher, professor, and National Writing Project site director to show how the heart of digital composition is strong writing, whether it results in a presentation, a paper, or a video. Throughout the book, Troy offers: in-depth guidance for helping students to compose web texts (such as blogs and wikis), presentations, audio, video, and social media mentor texts that give you a snapshot into what professionals and students are doing right now to craft digital writing suggestions for using each type of digital text to address the narrative, informational, and argument text types identified in the Common Core State Standards a wealth of student-composed web texts for each digital media covered, along with links to them on the web technology tips and connections, as well as numerous tools for creating a digital writing assignment. To preview a sample of Crafting Digital Writing click here.

    Now in a fourth edition, this remarkably successful book features a newchapter by Daniel Anderson on teaching with computers and adds updated material on invention, intellectual development, and responding to students' writing. Describing in straightforward terms the cross-disciplinary scholarship that underlies composition teaching, it opens with chapters onprewriting techniques, organizing material, paragraphing, sentence structure, words, and revising that show teachers how to lead students through composing. Sections on writing workshops, collaborative learning, and instructional technology reflect current views of writing as a social interaction.Chapters on rhetoric, cognition, and linguistics explain theoretical principles that support classroom practices and make teachers' performances more effective. Treating both the theory and practice of writing, this classic book encourages teachers to adopt the methods that best meet their students' needs and to develop a style of teaching based on informed decisions. It provides an extensive updated bibliography--including useful Web sites as well asimportant books and articles--and an updated table of important dates in the history of composition. A Rhetoric for Writing Teachers, 4/e, offers both prospective and seasoned writing teachers convenient access to influential scholarship in the field and inspires them to examine what it means toteach well.

    D. Hirsch, Jr. offers a masterful analysis of how American ideas about education have veered off course, what we must do to right them, and most importantly why. He argues that the core problem with American education is that educational theorists, especially in the early grades, have for the past sixty years rejected academic content in favor of “child-centered” and “how-to” learning theories that are at odds with how children really learn.  The result is failing schools and widening inequality, as only children from content-rich (usually better-off) homes can take advantage of the schools’ educational methods.Hirsch unabashedly confronts the education establishment, arguing that a content-based curriculum is essential to addressing social and economic inequality. A nationwide, specific, grade-by-grade curriculum established in the early school grades can help fulfill one of America’s oldest and most compelling dreams: to give all children, regardless of language, religion, or origins, the opportunity to participate as equals and become competent citizens. Hirsch not only reminds us of these inspiring ideals, he offers an ambitious and specific plan for achieving them.

    

    It is a multilayered, multivoiced literary experience. Genres of narrative thinking require writers to make an imaginative leap, melding the factual with the imaginative. Writers cant just tell. They must show. They must make their topics palpable. They must penetrate experience. Multigenre papers enable their authors to do that. Blending Genre, Altering Style is the first book to address the practicalities of helping students compose multigenre papers. Romano discusses genres, subgenres, writing strategies, and stylistic maneuvers that students can use in their own multigenre papers. Each idea is supported with actual student writing, including five full-length multigenre papers that demonstrate the possibilities of a multigenre approach to writing. There are also discussions of writing poetry, fiction, and dialogue, in which readers will discover how students can create genres out of indelible moments, crucial processes, and important matters in the lives of the subject under inquiry. One chapter alone is devoted to helping writers create unity and coherence in their papers.Imbued with Romanos passion for teaching, Blending Genre, Altering Style is an invaluable reference for any inservice or preservice English language arts teacher. The only prerequisite is a desire to help students write.

    

    A contemporary companion to City Kids, City Teachers: Reports from the Front Row, this new and timely collection has been compiled by four of the country's most prominent urban educators. Contributors including Sandra Cisneros, Jonathan Kozol, Sapphire, and Patricia J. Williams provide some of the best writing on life in city schools and neighborhoods. Young people and practicing teachers, poets and scholars, social critics and journalists offer unique takes on topics ranging from culturally relevant teaching and scripted curricula to the criminalization of youth, gentrification, and the inequities of school funding.In the words of Sonia Nieto, City Kids, City Schools "challenge[s] the conventional wisdom of what it means to teach in urban schools."

    In The Four O'Clock Faculty, Rich identifies ways to make PD meaningful, efficient, and, above all, personally relevant. This book is a practical guide that reveals why some PD is so awful and what you can do to change the model for the betterment of you and your colleagues.

    In addition to step-by-step coverage of documentation, the book includes an overview of the research-writing process entitled "Writing Scholarly Papers" and three useful appendices. Thorough and practical, this convenient reference guide is also less expensive and easier for undergraduates to use than the APA Manual. The Second Edition features expanded coverage of electronic sources to keep students up-to-date on using and evaluating Internet references in their research. In addition, this new edition provides more guidance on avoiding plagiarism. The two sample APA-style papers--one argumentative and one experimental--are carefully annotated to give students extra support as they master the elements of manuscript preparation and documentation principles.

    Real hard. In The Unstoppable Writing Teacher she takes on the common concerns, struggles, and roadblocks that we all face in writing instruction and helps us engage in the process of problem solving each one.From dealing with writing workshop skeptics to working with students both gifted and challenged, and of course combating that eternal barrier-lack of time-Colleen offers tried-and-true strategies to address and overcome obstacles.For the struggles unique to you, she includes a "Name Your Monster" section that helps you identify your own individual roadblocks and even offers sustainable support through her blog, colleencruz.com. "We can't solve all the problems we're faced with in writing instruction," Colleen promises, "but we can choose how to respond to them. And our responses will make all the difference."What makes you unstoppable, or what's stopping you? Connect with Colleen on her blog at www.colleencruz.com/blog.htm or on Twitter, #unstoppablewritingteacher.