Today’s video in a nutshell: All of my Prezi-based lessons have been updated to include a Google Drive and PDF version of each slide deck. If you’ve ever downloaded any Prezi from my shop (free or paid), go on back over to your TeachersPayTeachers.com account and re-download that item from your “My Purchases” area to […]
If you use the online version of Prezi slide decks (like this one), please check to make sure the links are working. This weekend, the folks over at Prezi.com changed some coding that inadvertently caused almost all of my Prezi links to malfunction. The Prezi links included in my TeachersPayTeachers.com products have now been updated, […]
Things were truckin’ along nicely during first period this morning when I realized I hadn’t yet sliced up my sonnet topic slips. I’d made the copies last week and left them on my desk, but, distracted by some juicy before-school gossip with my hallway teacher friends (we’re going to find out the name of our new principal at tomorrow night’s school board meeting – oh, the drama!), I hadn’t quite finished all of my prep work. Continue reading
If you teach Fahrenheit 451, you might be interested to know that I just posted three great tools that’ll make your job so much easier. Continue reading
Okay, so I had a crazy idea. I was set this week to introduce my freshmen to the Hero’s Journey, a lecture I’ve given dozens of times over the years, and I thought, What if I don’t actually deliver the lecture and, instead, just let them work through the slide content on their own? Continue reading
You want to look good. You have only a few minutes to make a great first impression. And you’re being compared to all of the other teachers a student has on his schedule. That’s right – it’s Back to School Night, also known as the l-o-n-g-e-s-t day of the year. Continue reading
Common Core is in love with argumentation. Thumb through the CCSS and you’ll see that wily little Argument knocked out Informative and Narrative to grab the writing top spot. Really, though, a case can be made that all writing is argumentative. Writers write because they want to prove that they’re right, right? Informative writing tries […]
We all know that teens love to argue. Give ‘em the right topic and the room’s temperature will rise as the debate quickly gets heated. The trick, though, is to help them clarify their thinking, move beyond emotion, and spot the difference between logical and illogical reasoning. In the world of rhetoric, speakers and writers […]
Micro Fiction – Flash Fiction – Two-Sentence Stories – Sudden Fiction – Twitter Tales Whatever you want to call them, super-short stories are a super-fun way to spend a single class period, as you introduce your teens to the idea that an entire story can exist within just a few lines. Micro fiction can pack […]
Before teaching the five major movements of American literature, it’s important to hook students’ attention with a visual summary of the important elements and philosophies that marked the distinct eras of Colonialism, Romanticism, Realism, and Modernism. (The hallmarks of Post-Modernism/Contemporary Lit. have proven to be a bit harder to nail down since experts can’t seem […]
Laura Randazzo – Solutions for the Secondary Classroom 