Kitty. Tron. Legit. All these words appeared in the 2011 edition of the yearbook I sponsor. Students used these as slang; all three were used to describe something cool. Aside from legit, which seems to have been around for a while, I'm not sure the other two stuck.  Continue reading...

Ed-tech guru Jamie McKenzie has published a fascinating new book entitled Lost and Found: A Guide to Discovery Learning through Purposeful Wandering. In this excerpt adapted from the chapter "Finding the Best Words," McKenzie explains how tools like the Visual Thesaurus can "expand our thinking palette."  Continue reading...

Shannon Reed writes: "Texting, Twitter, Facebook statuses, IMing... all of these take up more of teenagers' lives than reading, hand-writing or (I suspect) conversing these days. Thus, I wanted to find a way to incorporate this familiar way of communicating into my curriculum."  Continue reading...

The day after Halloween, my Facebook feed exploded with posts about numbers. "I've written 5,200 words!" one friend exclaimed. Another claimed to have written 2,300. Someone else only had 1,500. And so on.  Continue reading...

A great number of British people think that the way that the language is spoken on the British Isles is "proper" English and is the source language, the Holy Grail of English. In actual fact that is not true, and the way that the language has evolved in America leaves American English (AE) with correlates to the earlier form of English that existed when the Pilgrims hopped onto the Mayflower, many of which are not heard these days on Albion's crowded shores.  Continue reading...

November is a great month to steep your students in historical "primary" documents. You could have students read President Wilson’s 14 points in anticipation of Armistice Day (November 11th, now called Veteran’s Day) and the Gettysburg Address to commemorate Lincoln’s famous speech which was delivered on November 19th, 1863.  Continue reading...