Final Project: Content Standards

Content Standards
CA ELA Content Standards Grades Nine and Ten

The class literary blog project will, over the course of the year, satisfy the following content ELA content standards for grades nine and ten.

• Literary Criticism: Students will post at least brief essays that analyze a specific literary feature of a novel, short story, or poem which we are reading in class on the class literary blog.
• Writing Applications: The literary response essays and the comments the students post to the class blog and other blogs must demonstrate a comprehensive grasp of the literary works, include references to the text, demonstrate and awareness of stylistic devices, and identify nuances in the text.
• Written Language Conventions: All blog posts and comments must be written in proper, error-free English.
  

The ISTE standard that applies to this lesson is the following:

• Design and Develop Digital-Age Learning Experiences and Assessments: This project requires that students incorporate digital tools, such as blogger or livejournal, and resources, such as literary blogs, websites, and ezines, which promote learning and creativity.
  
  

Brainstorm for Ninth Grade Reading Project with Tech

In my reading development class, we are teaching the students to become more proficient at reading non-fiction sources. As part of our upcoming thematic unit on New York, students will be using the web to research details about immigrants to Ellis Island and the New York neighborhoods where they might have settled based on their country and year of origin. As part of the final project, students will create a powerpoint presentation that includes images, text, and possibly even embedded first person video journals abou the Ellis Island/NY immigrant experience. The technology components of this lesson will come during the research phase of this project, as well as in the final assessment. While students are comfortable with creating powerpoint presentations with images, they are not as familiar with using the web to research information and with embedding video in their powerpoint presentations.

Some possible websites students might use for this project include this Ellis Island Foundation site, this Youtube clip from an Ellis Island documentary, or this private archive site with detailed first-hand accounts of what it was like to travel and arrive at Ellis Island.

What have you been reading lately?

I'll be using this blog as journal to share my thoughts about what I'm reading.