Red River Valley Writing Project

A collection of National Writing Project's CCSS resources

noreply@blogger.com (Red River Valley Writing Project) — Tue, 04 Dec 2012 11:46:00 +0000

The Literacy and the Common Core (LCC) community in NWP Connect is intended to provide a point of entry for members seeking to see what's happening with NWP sites, professional development in writing, and the CCSS.
Entries about the Common Core are being made all over the Connect communities, which is great! This community is not intended to supplant those entries, just to provide a landing spot yo find these interests. We encourage all members to help us achieve that goal through:

Developments in CCSS assessments

noreply@blogger.com (Red River Valley Writing Project) — Mon, 03 Dec 2012 11:41:00 +0000

A group that is developing tests for half the states in the nation has dramatically reduced the length of its assessment in a bid to balance the desire for a more meaningful and useful exam with concerns about the amount of time spent on testing.
The decision by the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium reflects months of conversation among its 25 state members and technical experts and carries heavy freight for millions of students, who will be taking it in two years. The group is one of two state consortia crafting tests for the Common Core State Standards with $360 million in federal Race to the Top money. (Catherine Gewertz at Education Week)

Want to thank a teacher?

noreply@blogger.com (Red River Valley Writing Project) — Fri, 30 Nov 2012 11:42:00 +0000

How to Thank a Teacher

Ideas and tips for thanking your favorite teachers, principals, coaches, librarians, and others helping to make your school shine.

What's Inside the PDF?

* Gift Ideas: From traditional to digital, some outside-the-box ways to say thanks
* Resources and Tools to Craft the Perfect Gift: Web apps and websites to help make gift giving a little easier
* Teachers Talk: What's the Most Surprising Gift You've Ever Received? We asked; teachers answered
* How to Write a Thank-You Note: Tips for penning a heartfelt note
(from Edutopia)

The estimated cost of standardized testing

noreply@blogger.com (Red River Valley Writing Project) — Thu, 29 Nov 2012 11:43:00 +0000

Standardized-testing regimens cost states some $1.7 billion a year overall, or a quarter of 1 percent of total K-12 spending in the United States, according to a new report on assessment finances.
The report released Nov. 29 by the Washington-based Brown Center on Education Policy, at the Brookings Institution, calculates that the test spending by 44 states and the District of Columbia amounted to $65 per student on average in grades 3-9 based on the most recent test-cost data the researchers could gather. (The Brown Center report was not able to gather that data from Iowa, Oklahoma, South Carolina, West Virginia, and Wyoming.) (Andrew Ujifusa at Education Week)

One of NWP's own

noreply@blogger.com (Red River Valley Writing Project) — Wed, 28 Nov 2012 11:43:00 +0000

JoBeth Allen, Red Clay Writing Project co-director and University of Georgia professor, has been named 2012 Outstanding Educator in the English Language Arts by the National Council of Teachers of English. (from the National Writing Project website)

To learn more, click the above hyperlinked text.

Review of Daniel Meier's book on writing

noreply@blogger.com (Red River Valley Writing Project) — Tue, 27 Nov 2012 11:33:00 +0000

In his latest book, Daniel Meier highlights the critical importance of integrating content and mechanics for successful and engaged writing at the K–4 level. Featuring the teaching philosophies and strategies of seven exemplary teachers, and a discussion of relevant research and theory, Meier provides a fresh, practical, and much-needed perspective on making writing meaningful and effective in the current standards-based era.
Written by an experienced teacher and researcher, Teaching Children to Write will be of interest to both new and veteran teachers, as well as curriculum coordinators, literacy coaches, and researchers on writing. (from the National Writing Project website)

Texts reflect the Common Core

noreply@blogger.com (Red River Valley Writing Project) — Mon, 26 Nov 2012 12:06:00 +0000

The two 5th grade volumes of McGraw-Hill's Treasures reading series at first glance look remarkably similar.
Both include, for instance, a nonfiction selection about a scientific mission to Antarctica, coupled with snippets from a researcher's journal. But there are subtle differences in what they ask students to think about as they read. The older edition, from 2008, merely asks them to explain the value of keeping a journal. The newer one, from 2011, asks the students to explain how "sensory details and other language" differ between a primary source, such as the journal, and a secondary source, such as the narrative. (Stephen Sawchuk at Education Week)

Learning and emotions

noreply@blogger.com (Red River Valley Writing Project) — Wed, 21 Nov 2012 11:55:00 +0000

Numerous research reports show that social and emotional learning (SEL) can have a positive impact on students' academic performance. Edutopia's SEL research review explores those reports and helps make sense of the results. In this series of four articles, learn how researchers define social and emotional learning, review some of the possible learning outcomes, get our recommendations of evidence-based programs, find tips for avoiding pitfalls when implementing SEL programs, and dig in to a comprehensive annotated bibliography with links to all the studies and reports cited in these pages. (Vanessa Vega at Edutopia)

To learn more, click the above hyperlinked text.

The impact of the Internet on student research

noreply@blogger.com (Red River Valley Writing Project) — Tue, 20 Nov 2012 11:47:00 +0000

The teachers who instruct the most advanced American secondary school students render mixed verdicts about students’ research habits and the impact of technology on their studies.

Some 77% of advanced placement (AP) and National Writing Project (NWP) teachers surveyed say that the internet and digital search tools have had a “mostly positive” impact on their students’ research work. But 87% say these technologies are creating an “easily distracted generation with short attention spans” and 64% say today’s digital technologies “do more to distract students than to help them academically. (from Pew Internet)

Duncan on next term

noreply@blogger.com (Red River Valley Writing Project) — Mon, 19 Nov 2012 11:50:00 +0000

In his first major postelection remarks, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said that he will use his second term to continue to leverage education improvement at the state and local levels, with a new emphasis on principal preparation and evaluation. And, he made clear that if Congress isn't serious about reauthorizing the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, of which the No Child Left Behind Act is the current version, then his department won't devote a lot of energy to it. (Michele McNeil at Education Week)

A break and why

noreply@blogger.com (Red River Valley Writing Project) — Tue, 13 Nov 2012 11:58:00 +0000

NWP's 2012 Annual Meeting is held in conjunction with the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) Convention . The meeting is designed to facilitate strategic thinking and planning opportunities for NWP sites, create time for sites to learn from each other and work together on behalf of the network, and provide a chance for the NWP office to be in conversation with site leaders and to share updates on funding, grant opportunities, and other planning. (from the National Writing Project website)

This will be the only post this week because of the National Writing Project annual meeting November 15, 2012.

Free resources from Stenhouse

noreply@blogger.com (Red River Valley Writing Project) — Fri, 09 Nov 2012 11:22:00 +0000

Yes, Stenhouse Publishers sells books and makes money doing so. But Stenhouse offers an email subscription service that not only alerts readers about Stenhouse titles but that also includes interesting free resources. To learn more, click the hyperlinked text below.

Newslinks is the FREE e-mail newsletter from Stenhouse Publishers, which is sent out twice a month. Each issue features news about Stenhouse titles and authors, as well as links to professional development resources available on the Stenhouse website or elsewhere around the Web.

Our brains and learning

noreply@blogger.com (Red River Valley Writing Project) — Thu, 08 Nov 2012 12:03:00 +0000

In our brains, upwards of one hundred billion neurons form a vast network of information pathways, intersecting at nearly one hundred trillion unique synapses. To put that number into context, consider New York City and its thousands of street crossings: the estimated number of intersections in this U.S. megalopolis still represent less than one millionth of the number of a brain's neural intersections.

As students learn something new, electric or chemical signals move from neuron to neuron, traversing a route between locations in the brain. Like a tourist turning on unfamiliar city streets, these signals cross synapses to form a path that eventually connects the source to its destination. While identifying a route is slow going at first, students' brains eventually make these connections, and learning begins. (Tony Borash at Edutopia)

Graduation rates and NCLB

noreply@blogger.com (Red River Valley Writing Project) — Wed, 07 Nov 2012 11:32:00 +0000

A growing chorus of education policy advocates is urging the U.S. Department of Education to strengthen graduation-rate accountability in states that have earned waivers under the No Child Left Behind Act.
In separate letters last month to U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, a group of 36 civil rights, business, and education policy groups, along with U.S. Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., say they are concerned that many states' approved flexibility plans violate the spirit—if not the letter—of 2008 regulations that require all states to calculate the graduation rate in the same way and make those rates an important factor in high school accountability. (Michele McNeil at Education Week)

Resources from Scholastic

noreply@blogger.com (Red River Valley Writing Project) — Tue, 06 Nov 2012 11:30:00 +0000

Scholastic has myriad resources for teachers, including a collection of student resources. You can access these resources, using either content area or grade level as a filter. To learn more and explore the resources, click here.

To explore all of Scholastic, click here. (Do keep in mind that not everything at featured at Scholastic is free.)

The importance of writing

noreply@blogger.com (Red River Valley Writing Project) — Mon, 05 Nov 2012 11:40:00 +0000

In this video interview, NWP Executive Director Dr. Sharon J. Washington gives insight as to why developing student writing skills in conjunction with the Common Core State Standards initiative is so crucial today. Dr. Washington visited the service area of the Red Mountain Writing Project, based at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. (from the National Writing Project website)

To learn more and view the video, click the above hyperlinked text.

The upcoming election and education

noreply@blogger.com (Red River Valley Writing Project) — Fri, 02 Nov 2012 11:01:00 +0000

Education policy and funding—from common standards and college access to the prospect of "doomsday" budget cuts—have been a steady theme in this year's presidential campaign, even as more specific K-12 debates lighted the political landscape in various states.
And with the strategic balance in Congress in play, along with the makeup of 44 state legislatures and the fate of numerous education-related ballot measures, the Nov. 6 elections could have a lasting impact on the direction of precollegiate policy. (Andrew Ujifusa and Alyson Klein at Education Week)

Practice for the Common Core

noreply@blogger.com (Red River Valley Writing Project) — Thu, 01 Nov 2012 10:47:00 +0000

Last year we took some baby steps in thinking about how the new Common Core State Standards will affect the work we do on this blog.
Two things were obvious: The standards emphasize the reading of “informational text,” and we work for a newspaper that produces a daily geyser of it. (Katherine Schulten at The New York Times)

A mind to view and more

noreply@blogger.com (Red River Valley Writing Project) — Wed, 31 Oct 2012 10:19:00 +0000

Brain Pickings is the brain child of Maria Popova , an interestingness hunter-gatherer and curious mind at large, who also writes for Wired UK and The Atlantic, among others, and is an MIT Futures of Entertainment Fellow. She gets occasional help from a handful of guest contributors.

Brain Pickings is a human-powered discovery engine for interestingness, culling and curating cross-disciplinary curiosity-quenchers, and separating the signal from the noise to bring you things you didn’t know you were interested in until you are.

Brain Pickings is better viewed than explained. To begin viewing, click the above hyperlinked text.

Want to learn another language?

noreply@blogger.com (Red River Valley Writing Project) — Tue, 30 Oct 2012 11:05:00 +0000

Digital Dialects has a large selection of educational games and activities for learning sixty different languages. Most of the games are designed to learn and practice the basics of each of the sixty languages listed on the Digital Dialects homepage. The more commonly spoken languages have more activities than the less commonly spoken languages. Audio files have recently been added to some of the languages too. (from Free Technology for Teachers)

Learning with the blues

noreply@blogger.com (Red River Valley Writing Project) — Mon, 29 Oct 2012 10:52:00 +0000

When I started playing blues songs for my first grade students, I never imagined I was introducing a fantastic launching point for thematic, standards-based teaching. We soon formed The Kids Like Blues Band, and since last March we've used blues songs as a springboard for teaching academic content standards in reading, writing, listening, speech, social studies, technology, and the visual and performing arts. So far we've played at a street fair, for staff and students at the Cal State San Marcos College of Education, and even live on local TV news and KPBS TV. We're a real band, and the students are fully engaged, learning and rocking! (Jon Schwartz at Edutopia)

Participate in TED-Ed

noreply@blogger.com (Red River Valley Writing Project) — Fri, 26 Oct 2012 10:53:00 +0000

Get Involved

The most meaningful TED-Ed videos are collaborations between the TED-Ed team and at least one of the following: a curious learner, an exceptional educator, or a talented visualization artist. If you are one of these types of people, or if you know someone who is, please help guide our effort to create a library of lessons worth sharing by acting on one of the options below.

Another way to search

noreply@blogger.com (Red River Valley Writing Project) — Thu, 25 Oct 2012 11:00:00 +0000

Symbolab is a new search engine designed for mathematicians and scientists. The search engine is a semantic search engine which means that rather than just searching the text of your query Symabolab attempts to interpret and search for the meaning of your query. What this means is that when you type in an equation you will get results as links and get results as graphs when appropriate. Think of it Symbolab as a cross between Google and Wolfram Alpha. (from Free Technology for Teachers)

Placement tests and community colleges

noreply@blogger.com (Red River Valley Writing Project) — Wed, 24 Oct 2012 10:46:00 +0000

College-placement tests can make or break a student's career. Yet few students prepare for them, and there's little evidence to suggest the tests even do what they're designed to do.
Now, some community colleges are looking for alternatives. Some are switching to high school grades or revamping assessments, while others are working with high schools to figure out students' college readiness early so they have time to catch up if necessary. (Caralee J. Adams at Education Week)

Writing with students

noreply@blogger.com (Red River Valley Writing Project) — Tue, 23 Oct 2012 10:56:00 +0000

The term “workshop model” is one used in my school district at the moment to denote a classroom where something innovative is being piloted. My neighbor’s classroom is a place where new ideas are being shaped and tinkered with each day; I like the idea that there are little pedagogical laboratories being run all around me.
Particularly, the “workshop” classrooms are “writers’ workshops” geared toward increasing awareness of and exposure to the power of writing for students. One of the core ideas at play in these workshops is the idea of the teacher as a writer, as a model for students in a professional context. When they write, she writes. What they write, she attempts too. (Steve J Moor at Edutopia)