Instructify

BY JASON DON FORSYTHE

I’ve been a big Edgar Allan Poe fan ever since he was an option for bedtime stories (before that it was Yeats or Lawrence, both highly effective at inducing sleep). Besides the well-known pieces Poe wrote, there are many works that are lesser-known but just as enjoyable. You can find an excellent online repository of his work at Poestories.com, which hosts many of his complete stories, poetry, and a link network to locate works not hosted.

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BY BILL FERRIS

One of the best moments of my day is reading a bedtime story to my boys. We get quality bonding time, they’re fostering what I hope is a life-long love of books, and I get to work on my list of character voices, which consists of “Gruff Adult Male,” “All-purpose Female,” “Little Kid,” and “Carnival Barker.” But little do they know that instead of putting up with Daddy’s lack of dramatic range, they could instead listen to James Earl Jones. The Screen Actors Guild Foundation has produced Storyline Online, a streaming video site where SAG members read a wide selection of children’s books.

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BY LESLEY RICHARDSON

The McCormick Freedom Project is committed to helping American citizens understand their First Amendment rights. The Libraries and the First Amendment exhibit has been created to make us think critically about our freedom of speech and it shows how the library is one of the first lines of defense in making sure that materials, however controversial, should be available to the American public. (more…)

BY BILL FERRIS

Everyone needs help wrapping their heads around a book from time to time. If you teach literature, that time occurs every day. You can outsource some of the necessary explanation by sending your students to 60 Second Recap, a site that summarizes the plot, characters, and themes of a book in 60-second episodes for each.

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BY BILL FERRIS

Do something subversive this week — read a book.

It’s time once again for the American Library Association’s Banned Books Week (September 26 through October 3). Every year, hundreds of books are banned or challenged by people or groups who try to restrict others’ access to certain books.

You can help raise awareness of these censorship attempts by celebrating BBW. The ALA has lots of ideas, including some creative display ideas, sending a letter to the editor, and spreading public service announcements.

Of course, it’s also a good occasion to pick up one of these oft-challenged books to see what all the fuss is about. It may provide good discussion fodder for your class, as well as prompt a debate about who should decide what books are available to whom.

Banned Books Week

BY BILL FERRIS

Web app ReadSpeeder can help you improve your reading speed. Much like Spreeder, ReadSpeeder works by letting you copy and paste text into the app. It then breaks the text down into tiny chunks displayed in rapid succession, as fast as you’re comfortable with.

Where ReadSpeeder differs is that it automatically divides passages of text into natural two-to-four-word phrases. Further, by registering for an account, you can save text for later reading. This is perfect for electronic books, and ReadSpeeder comes prepackaged with dozens of literary classics like Great Expectations and Alice in Wonderland.

If you have students who groan about slogging through heavy reading, tell them about ReadSpeeder. It may also be ideal if you’re working on your master’s degree and have a bunch of reading to catch up on. And if you’re a true glutton for punishment, you can always take a crack at James Joyce’s Ulysses, one of the books in the ReadSpeeder catalog.

ReadSpeeder

Related stuff:

Speed up your reading with Spreeder

Put books on your phone with Google Book Search Mobile

BY MELISSA THIBAULT

Picture this. You just finished teaching your third lesson on prime factors, photosynthesis or fractions, and there are some students who need more visuals and more practice. Wouldn’t it be great if you had free, quality-assured courseware in math, science, health, reading and keyboarding you could use to reinforce hard-to-grasp topics?

e-Learning for Kids, a global, nonprofit foundation, provides free courses for children ages 5 – 12, and is working to build a community for parents and educators to volunteer their expertise and share innovations and insights in childhood education. (more…)

BY BILL FERRIS

This week’s MBTN features an express flight to Mars, Web 2.0 project ideas, alternatives to book reports, and online sites where you can learn a new language. Read about all of it after the jump.

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BY BILL FERRIS

Keep your lit students reading this summer with The Book Seer, a handy online book-recommendation tool. The interface is simplicity itself — students enter the title and author of the last book they’ve read (or for better results, the last book they liked), and the heavily bearded, titular Book Seer suggests books by similar writers or pertaining to similar subjects. The recommendations come via Amazon and LibraryThing. Not that it matters, but as a fun bonus, the site’s favicon is a stylish handlebar mustache.

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BY BILL FERRIS

For this month’s random roundup, we’ve selected the Library of Congress, our nation’s storehouse of pretty much everything worth knowing. As you’d expect, a lot of great resources for teachers have been derived from the Library. See your tax dollars at work by reading the articles linked after the jump.

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BY BILL FERRIS

This week’s MBTN features the art of persuasion, common literary references, and $125,000-a-year teachers. More after the jump.

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Here at Instructify, we’ve done our best to provide you with a reading experience that is easy on the eyes.  Unfortunately, not all sites share our dedication to keeping you headache-free.  If you spend any measurable amount of time on ad-ridden, font-challenged, or kaleidoscope-colored sites, you may be interested in Readability — a browser bookmarklet that reformats the web. (The creators at the arc90 lab define this newfangled term as “a bookmark on steroids.”)

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It’s the closeout sale! Only a few days left! Rock-bottom prices! Okay, just kidding. Poetry will still be available May 1, all year even. It’s timeless and often available for free. But hey, who doesn’t work better on a deadline? So let’s just pretend, as of May 1, poems are off the market and you need a quick, quality poetry resource to share with your students NOW. Enter: Poems Out Loud. This site is a new project by ex-laureate Robert Pinsky. I guess the good ones never quit — it’s been over a decade since Pinsky started work on the Favorite Poem Project, and he continues the mission admirably.

At poemsoutloud.net you will find, no surprise here, audio recordings of well-regarded contemporary poets reading their own and others’ work. Pinsky has always posited that love for a poem has to come before analysis, and the commentary and interviews on the site’s blog seem to be driven by that theory — focusing on the emotions surrounding reading (or writing) certain poems. I’m sure Pinsky would be tickled to see blog comments coming from students with their own reactions. But remember…this offer ends soon! -MARIELLE PRINCE

Poems Out Loud

Related stuff:

April is National Poetry Month

An old favorite: The Favorite Poem Project

PaperBackSwap lets you exchange any book you own for one of the millions of books other users are offering. Swapping is simple. Take any book (paperback, hardback, or audio) you’re ready to part with and post it to your virtual library. Any time another user requests a book from your library, simply send it using labels printable from the website and pay only postage (about $2.40 via media mail).

Once the book is received, you earn a credit. Use your credits to request new books and receive them in the mail about two weeks later, at NO CHARGE TO YOU! It’s a fun and cheap way to replace old books you’ve read with new ones. -JASON DON FORSYTHE

PaperBackSwap

Maybe I’m weird, but I think words are a lot of fun. Whether it’s the fun of unearthing an arcane term, or the satisfaction I get from cleaning clunky words out of a sentence, I enjoy the fun possibilities the written word provides. This also explains why I’m so boring.

I’m not alone, though — some guy who calls himself Forthright apparently thinks the way I do. His website The Phrontistery (meaning a place devoted to studying or thinking) has lots of great antique words for your lexiconic pleasure. Like at Save the Words, The Phrontistery features lots of words that have fallen out of common usage. However, this site has several other nifty features, too. For example, read some of the pronunciation polls. Take the word “basil” — do you say it so it rhymes with “hazel,” or do you pronounce it like the Brits (rhymes with “dazzle”)? Your spice rack is rife with pronunciation controversy, as many folks can’t seem to agree how to say “cumin” or “oregano,” either. It would make good fodder for any linguistics discussion.

You can also find a section devoted to lipograms — words, sentences, or paragraphs that don’t include a certain letter. Sure, you could take the easy way out and write a sentence without an “x.” But it takes a real pro (or, at least, someone with some spare time) to write a lipogram that shuns the letter “e.” See if any of your students can handle that one.

My favorite section is The Phrontistery’s compendium of two- and three-letter Scrabble words. I have terrible luck in Scrabble in that I always end up with five or six vowels at once. This list will help get out of those vowel-laden jams, and also help you if you need a word, any word, just to get that triple word score. Hey, anything that gets your students to play with words is a good thing. -BILL FERRIS

The Phrontistery

Related stuff:

Old words make a comeback at Save the Words

What if the OED cared about your feelings?

Photo credit: jovike on Flickr.