Teachers, are you wary of using social media and other online tools to foster student communication? Follow these tips from Michele Dunaway, who teaches English and journalism at Francis Howell High School in St. Charles, Missouri (when she's not writing best-selling romance novels).  Continue reading...

If you are in the ed world, chances are you have heard the acronym RTI being batted around but you may not be able to explain its rationale or be able to envision how this model of "intervention" could play out in your classroom.  Continue reading...

The New York Times Learning Network is offering students an alternative to the run-of-the-mill summer reading lists that are being stuffed into backpacks across the nation this time of year. The Learning Network's "Student Challenge" asks students to read The New York Times over the course of the summer and to identify something that either piques their interest or catches their eye. Bonus: the Learning Network plans on featuring the best student submissions on their blog!

Read more about the Student Challenge here.

Lately the Northern Californian slang word hella has been in the news, thanks to a well-publicized Facebook petition to make it the official prefix for 10 to the 27th power. Here we present a first-hand account of the cultural significance of hella from Samantha Strimling, a young journalist about to graduate from Piedmont High School in the San Francisco Bay area. We were pleased to make Samantha's acquaintance at a recent Visual Thesaurus presentation to the Columbia Scholastic Press Association.  Continue reading...

After the first day of competition at the 2010 Scripps National Spelling Bee, the field of 273 contestants has been winnowed down to 48, who will move on to Friday's semifinal round. They'll all be looking to follow in the path of last year's winner, Kavya Shivashankar. As usual, the preliminary rounds featured some fascinatingly obscure words, from famulus (a close attendant, as to a scholar) to nullipara (a woman who has never given birth to a child).  Continue reading...

How can you say you know a word if you have never spoken it aloud? How can you "own" a word if you have never used it? These are some of the questions that Heidi Hayes Jacobs prompts us to consider in her widely acclaimed book for educators Active Literacy Across the Curriculum.  Continue reading...