Robin Talkowski’s Blog: Reading & Technology

Last year in the middle of teaching my poetry unit, I needed to be absent very frequently. Teaching a subject without textbooks presents a unique dilemma for educators. How do you keep students learning and motivated? One of the resources that I used was Symbaloo. Symbaloo allowed me to put many of my resources in [...]

[Read more →]

This morning I read about about the web site, I Write Like, on Dean Mantz’ post on the National DEN blog. The idea was intriguing … and easy enough. Paste in a couple of paragraphs of your writing, press submit, and presto! You will have an analysis of your writing telling you what published author [...]

[Read more →]

A friend of mine, Paula Marini, recently posted this on the Massachusetts DEN blog. I liked it so much I wanted to share it as well.

[Read more →]

A great vocabulary positively impacts reading comprehension. I enjoy having students develop and film skits that illustrate the meaning of vocabulary words and how they are used. However, there is just not enough time in the day or year to develop skits for many vocabulary terms. Drawing pictures or finding pictures to illustrate words and [...]

[Read more →]

Cinderella Fake Facebook Profile – MyFakeWall.com. Recently I blogged about a Facebook template that I used with my students as part of a project on characterization in a work of fiction.  Thanks to Richard Byrne’s blog, Free Technology for Teachers,  I found another way to accomplish this project. My Fakewall is a free site that [...]

[Read more →]

“Go back into the text” are words my students often hear. I want them to find evidence for their ideas, position, or answers. Most of the time, they grudgingly comply … until, one day they were finding evidence that would turn into the dialogue their Voki would say. All of a sudden, the students were [...]

[Read more →]

Imagine a classroom with everyone speaking at once. Chaos? Poor classroom management? No, it is music to my ears! Most of my students do not like to read; consequently, they don’t choose to read, and it is difficult for them to improve their reading skills and fluency.  One technique to improve reading fluency is repeated [...]

[Read more →]

MarthaFacebookWallSample Would you like to write a report, write a poem, or make a Facebook page? Providing students different ways to show what they know is important to maintain interest and promote creativity. More importantly, using assignments that encourage students to understand information, synthesize it, and then transform it into a new form shows real [...]

[Read more →]